Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  During the ride back to Bangkok I felt waves of euphoria that were superior to anything I had experienced on opium. Now that I was free from its grip, the alarmist vocabulary from the Victorian-era books—words such as “shackled” and “enslaved”—seemed so apt. I remembered reading about Christian missionaries who used opium detox to make new converts among the Chinese, and I could now see how recently cured addicts might convert out of sheer gratitude. I thought about the number of Western monks at Wat Tham Krabok and wondered if any of them had even pondered Buddhism before their arrival at the monastery for treatment. Of course, a big difference between nineteenth-century China and twenty-first-century Thailand was that Wat Tham Krabok made no attempts to proselytize. I guessed that the former addicts who did decide to join the wat were probably not ready to go home and face their past, knowing that running into dealers and drug buddies had been the downfall of many.

  When I arrived back at my apartment, I went straight to the refrigerator, got out my little dropper bottle of chandu, and unceremoniously flushed its contents down the toilet. I didn’t need to do anything else—I had done a thorough job of throwing away anything incriminating before leaving for the monastery. My apartment was a mess, however. For months I had not bothered to do much more than the lightest of cleaning. Blankets were still hung over the windows, keeping the tropical sunlight at bay. I took the blankets down and, detecting the smell of opium on them, made a pile by the door to send to the laundry. With the room brightly illuminated, the true extent of my complete failure to keep up any semblance of order or cleanliness was shockingly apparent. There was several days’ worth of cleaning to do, so I divided the work into projects to tackle a day at a time.

  When I had turned on my mobile phone during the ride back to Bangkok, there was not a single message waiting for me. After showering and changing, I got online and checked email—and again was surprised to see how few messages I’d gotten during the week I was away. Of course, it was a testament to how few people I had been in close contact with during the month before my detox. Except for one friend in San Francisco, I hadn’t told anyone where I was going. Roxanna thought I was in Cambodia. I had used the “going to Cambodia” story with Jake Burton, too, but other than those two, there was nobody in Bangkok with whom I was in regular contact. I thought about calling Roxanna but wasn’t yet sure how to phrase things. Instead, I called Jake and told him what I had done.

  “Ah, welcome back to the land of the living,” he said in his ever-cheerful, Australian way. “I was beginning to get worried.”

  Jake then admitted that he was sorry he hadn’t come over for one last smoke. When I told him what I had done with the chandu, he gasped.

  Jake’s reaction gave me a hint of what Roxanna’s might be. I was sure everyone would be supportive to my face, but if a dabbler like Jake was shocked at how I had flushed my chandu, what would a confirmed smoker like Roxanna think? I decided not to risk telling her the truth. When I finally did call her, a couple days after my arrival back in Bangkok, I said that I had been through some ugly withdrawal symptoms while on the road in Cambodia, and that this had made me decide to take a break from opium. That was how I put it—I hadn’t quit; I was merely letting my lungs clear out for a while. Despite my lie, I had no doubt that I could resist the pull of opium. I was finished with it. Roxanna, however, was my closest friend and I didn’t want to say anything that might hurt our friendship. “Well, that sounds like a good idea to me,” she said when I told her I was taking a break. “Maybe I should do the same.”

  Could she? I wondered to myself. Roxanna and I rarely talked frankly about her opium use. Did she really believe she could take a break from it? Or was this just something she told herself was possible? I remembered that Emily Hahn wrote how she was so sure that she could stop smoking at any time—until she tried. Surely Roxanna had attempted to quit at some point. But if her smoking never got out of hand as mine did, maybe she never saw any reason to quit. Perhaps she really was in control and could stop whenever she wished. It was all so frustratingly unclear. I had come so far on the opium trail, and yet I still knew so little about it.

  About a week after arriving back in Bangkok, I got a call from David the Israeli. “I’m staying at Khao San Road. When do we eat the crab curry? Are you free?”

  I was. I had spent the previous week getting my apartment back in order and using the Internet to update as much of the Rough Guide to Cambodia as possible. My submission was way overdue, but I didn’t have enough time or money to make the trip to Cambodia. Just a few years before it would have been impossible to get reliable information solely from the Net, but coverage of Cambodia had expanded and it was no longer absolutely necessary to visit in person. Of course, this wasn’t something I’d be telling my editors—but at this point I had no choice. I passed twelve-hour days doing Internet searches and poring over websites, and then followed up with phone calls and email queries. It was eye-crossing work, and when David called I was very much ready for a break.

  David didn’t know the name of the restaurant, but from his description of the location I knew where we were going—one of those Chinese-oriented seafood emporiums with tanks of crustaceans waiting to be thrown into the pot. The place was crowded with families, and we were shown to a table on an upper floor. David had already decided what we would eat so I let him order. He asked me how I was faring without opium, and I told him that if things stayed as easy as they had been the past week, I would have no problem staying off the mat. Personally, I felt there was no chance of a relapse, but I didn’t want to sound overly confident. I knew David had been to rehab many times in the past, and he surely knew much more about these things than I did.

  “Do you remember Clark?” David asked. “I shared a ride with him to Bangkok.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Not cool,” David replied.

  Clark’s father had come to pick him up at Wat Tham Krabok on the day of his release. Clark, however, had other plans. The day before, he had approached David and Jerry and asked if they wanted to share a ride back to Bangkok. The driver was to be a Thai who had been undergoing treatment and was also checking out. He had his own vehicle—a pickup truck—parked and waiting at the monastery.

  David and Jerry agreed, and David told me about how, after checking out of the monastery, they had watched as Clark told his pleading father in no uncertain terms that he would not be needing a ride from him. The pickup with David, Jerry, Clark, and the Thai driver left with Clark’s father following close behind in a sedan. Then, as David and Jerry looked on incredulously, Clark began urging the driver to speed up and lose his father.

  “Me and Jerry are just looking at each other. We cannot believe it. Clark is speaking in Thai but we know what he’s telling the one driving. And Clark was many times looking behind to see if his father’s car is still there.”

  Once Clark’s father had been ditched, the driver found a gas station and Clark asked David if he could borrow money to fill up the tank. Clark had not previously mentioned anything about gas, but David complied.

  “I gave one thousand two hundred baht. If I hire a car and driver I will pay at least two thousand baht. So I don’t mind.”

  But then, on the outskirts of Bangkok, David and Jerry found themselves being evicted from the vehicle. David described the scene while shaking his head in disgust. “Clark asked us to get out and wait for him there at some place where we stopped on the road. He says they will come back and get us after they go to their friend’s house. But I know it’s all bullshit so I tell Jerry that we will take a taxi the rest of the way.”

  Obviously, the Wat Tham Krabok cure didn’t take with everybody. If you don’t want to quit something, nobody can make you quit. I thought about the way Clark had laughed while relating his tale of overdosing on his girlfriend’s birthday. Some of us are simply hell-bent on self-destruction and there’s absolutely nothing anyone else can do about it. Upon hearing David’s story I was sure that Clark
would succeed in carrying out his death wish. The heroin in Southeast Asia is said to be much purer than in the West—certainly much stronger than what Clark was getting in New York. Perhaps as David and I were tucking into our steaming plates of crab curry, Clark was already dead.

  Having a second chance at life kept me buoyed for weeks—I felt as though I had been cured of cancer. But the era of good feeling did not last.

  I had read that the psychological symptoms of withdrawal would continue long after the physical ones had abated. Some of my symptoms seemed physical but were probably psychological—such as the loud ringing in my ears that came and went. I noticed this mainly at night when things were quiet, and I took to running the air-conditioning at its highest setting to drown out the noise in my ears. During the day the ringing didn’t bother me so much. As long as I kept busy and there was some ambient noise to mask it, I found I could tune it out.

  Opium smokers were once commonly described as “indifferent,” and during the time that I was smoking quite heavily, I was often aloof to what was happening beyond the glow of the opium lamp. But once the narcotic was out of my system, it seemed as though the ability to feel indifference also left me. This might seem like a good thing, but living in a city of ten million people, a certain amount of aloofness is needed in order to get through each day emotionally unscathed.

  Suddenly, it was very difficult to ignore life’s brutality. Before I began using opium heavily, I was able to deal with day-to-day sad realities just like anyone else—by ignoring them. Before opium, if I were walking down the street and saw a scrawny kitten poking around a pile of trash—and if at that moment I was not too distracted by other things—I would have felt a flash of pity. But as soon as I looked away and continued on my way, I would have begun forgetting. Perhaps five minutes later I’d have completely forgotten the kitten.

  During the time when I was heavily into opium, such sights meant virtually nothing to me. Instead of being saddened, I saw life with the detachment of a hermitic sage. All things suffer; all things must die—there was no need to get emotional about it. But after about a month without opium, it was as though I had lost all control of my ability to put saddening sights and thoughts into perspective. I would see that same starving kitten and the sight would break my heart. I could walk on for another ten minutes and my heart would still be breaking; I could think of nothing else. And after a while all those little heartbreaks, day after day, started adding up. In time, my inability to cope with these thoughts brought on a paralyzing depression.

  Despite my vow against it, I began to consider drinking alcohol to ease my mood. This in itself was rather extraordinary because I had all but given up drinking a decade earlier. Living in Bangkok during my twenties and thirties, there was no shortage of opportunities for partying. I had a group of friends, most of whom were journalists, and there was always a reason to go out on the town. At the time I probably got drunk on an average of two or three times a week. Budding alcoholism perhaps, but not unusual among young expats in the anything-goes Bangkok of the 1990s.

  In 1998, at the age of thirty-six, I was in Laos doing research for a guidebook for Rough Guides. This one would be written from scratch—a first edition—and that meant I had to spend months in Laos exploring the travel possibilities. The Lao are famous drinkers, and I happened to be there during Lao New Year, celebrated in mid-April. The holiday is best described as a weeklong bender powered by a vodka-like liquor made from glutinous rice. And in Laos, there is no getting out of drinking. During this week of celebration the Lao will offer every visitor they encounter a shot of rice liquor. Foreigners are especially welcomed, and declining to partake is really not an option. The Lao believe that there are spirits everywhere—the paranormal kind—and that these animist spirits will be highly offended if any mortal refuses to imbibe a shot of new year’s cheer. The result was that I spent a good portion of April 1998 either roaring drunk or with a crippling hangover. Once the haze had cleared, I realized that I had lost a notebook full of information that I had been collecting over the past couple months.

  I decided then and there to dry out—vowing not to drink alcohol again until research for the Rough Guide to Laos was finished. Within a few weeks, to my surprise, I felt much better—better than I’d remembered feeling in a long time. I finished the book but put off starting to drink again—and this procrastination continued—simply because I no longer had any desire to drink. That is, until barely a month after I left Wat Tham Krabok, when suddenly I had this urge to hoist a bottle.

  But it sounded too familiar. There’s something about opiates: How many rock-star heroin addicts kicked the habit only to become prodigious boozers? I was determined not to follow the pattern. I wasn’t even sure if my body would allow me to drink. Since I had stopped, there were a handful of times—usually social events such as weddings—when I had taken part in raising a glass to toast somebody or something. On all these occasions, the only effect the alcohol seemed to have was to make me slightly woozy—and I never had any desire for more.

  So I pushed this newfound thirst for alcohol into the back of my head by reminding myself of something my friend in San Francisco had said when I told him about my planned detox:

  “They say you can’t turn a pickle back into a cucumber.”

  I was determined to prove this pessimistic little adage wrong.

  Soon after I had telephoned Roxanna and told her that I was taking a break from opium, she began calling me almost daily. I was happy to talk, yet I was reluctant to pay her a visit. I didn’t crave opium; I wasn’t pining for the pipe, but I did have a strong feeling that if I were to visit Roxanna’s house—the location of at least a hundred of our shared opium-smoking sessions—I might find that I suddenly did have cravings, and that those cravings were overwhelming.

  Roxanna seemed to understand all this without my having to explain it. She never proposed that we get together. Even so, after a while her phone calls began making me anxious. The problem was, prior to my detox our phone conversations had always been brief. We had never spent much time talking on the phone because a call from Roxanna was always an invitation to smoke opium (or, after a certain point in our relationship, the phone calls were initiated by me in an effort to get myself invited to her place under some pretext or another). We had always done our real conversing while reclining with the layout tray between us—and this is what I was starting to miss.

  Feeling guilty about my behavior the previous October in Vientiane, I also called Willi and told him that I was “fasting.” Since Willi had seen my overindulgences firsthand, I was more forthcoming with him while explaining my reasons for taking a break—but I said nothing about having taken the cure at Wat Tham Krabok. “When you’re ready to break your fast, come on up and we’ll do it in style,” Willi said. I promised that I would, all the while feeling hollow inside with the knowledge that it could never happen.

  As weeks became months, I found myself passing long, solitary days in my apartment. The homebody that I had become while smoking alone felt no need to reconnect with the world—at least not face to face. As before, I spent plenty of time communicating via email and browsing the Internet, but somehow I now felt lost. The things that had fascinated me before—the discoveries made during Internet searches, hours and hours spent reading nostalgic blogs, the déjà vu that I felt when staring at old photographs—all of it now struck me as annoyingly dull. I robotically clicked from one website to the next. Nothing held my attention for long. I was bored with everything.

  “The mortal boredom of the smoker who is cured!” It was Jean Cocteau again. He had been there. Speaking of his former life as an opium addict, he said: “I am ashamed to have been expelled from that world, compared with which the world of health resembles those revolting films in which ministers unveil statues.”

  Cocteau was right. The modern world still seemed just as stupid and pointless to me as it had when I was using opium to escape it. Only now I could not escape it�
��except to hide in my room and measure time by meals that I had little appetite for. My mental voyages and imagined companionship had seemed so real that now, without the chemical magic to evoke them, I felt lobotomized.

  My collecting—what had been my passion for years and years—had come to a standstill. I was too broke to acquire anything new. Instead, I had to concentrate on making enough money so I wouldn’t have to sell off any more pieces to pay the rent. Even if I had been able to afford new acquisitions, I would have paid much higher prices than before. Opium antiques were becoming popular, and just as Roxanna had predicted, prices began rising as novice collectors had gotten into the game. Admittedly, the situation was partly my own doing: Much of the new interest was due to my book and the website I had constructed to promote it.

  When demand outstrips supply, prices go up and merchants take notice. There were just so many authentic antique opium pipes out there. It didn’t take long for merchants who dealt in opium antiques to start getting creative. The Chinese have a long history of making fake antiques—they’ve been doing it for so long, their early fakes are now real antiques. C. A. S. Williams had this to say about it:

  It is fairly safe to say that very few genuine pieces are to be found except in the hands of collectors and dealers, for the country has been all but combed clean … and imitations are all the more plentiful in consequence. Some of the spurious antiques, mostly porcelains, are extremely cleverly manufactured, and much ingenuity is exercised in their reproduction.… Marks on the bottom are often deceptive, the wrong period being frequently given in order to mislead the unwary purchaser.