“How did that happen? Were you doing a story about the wat and met your husband because he was doing detox there?” I was sitting up cross-legged now. I knew the business end of the pipe would soon be pointing at me, and being out of position to receive it would give me an excuse to delay smoking.
“No, this was long after I stopped doing journalism. In the late seventies I was living in Hong Kong working for Arts of Asia magazine. I got arrested for smoking opium and deported. That’s when I came to Thailand and went to Tham Krabok to stop smoking. My husband was a monk there.” Roxanna had finished rolling the pill and it was now stuck to the bowl.
“So the detox at the wat didn’t work for you?”
She smiled again. “Well … here I am.”
“So that means … I mean, I’ve heard you can only do the detox once. They won’t let you go back and do it a second time.”
“Yes, that’s right. I already had my chance,” Roxanna said.
It is said that even after his famous cure, Jean Cocteau went back and dabbled. Of all his quotes from Opium: Diary of a Cure, there is one that, for me anyway, was clear evidence of this: “The patience of a poppy. He who has smoked will smoke. Opium knows how to wait.”
What’s the harm? I suddenly thought to myself. I straightened out my legs and leaned back, the right side of my face coming to rest on the porcelain pillow. It was cool against my cheek and ear. Roxanna pointed the pipe toward me and I guided the mouthpiece to my lips. The heated bowl crackled almost fiercely as I hungrily sucked the vapors into my lungs. The pill vaporized in an instant and I held my breath for as long as I could before exhaling a near-invisible stream at the roof. It was as easy as that. Looking back, I don’t know why I did it. I just did.
Without asking, Roxanna began to measure out another dose. I didn’t feel any effect yet from that pipe, but it had only been a minute or so since the vapors left my lungs. I closed my eyes and waited.
“Really, it was probably the worst decision I ever made in my life,” Roxanna continued.
“You mean doing the detox?”
“No, no. I mean breaking my vow never to smoke opium again. They warned me something terrible would happen if I broke that vow. I tried it just once with an old friend and it wasn’t long after that I had my motorcycle accident and lost my leg.”
I kept silent. Surely it was just superstition. Or the power of suggestion. Or a horrible coincidence. That vow was just to scare those meth-crazed kids into stopping. Those Buddha statues that I took the vow before were just pieces of cast bronze.
“Then in the hospital the doctors filled me up with morphine. Nobody expected me to live. My Thai family had to beg the doctors to treat me because they were all convinced it was a waste of time. I wasn’t even in a room, they just had me on a gurney out in the hallway because they were expecting to release my body to my family in a short time.” Roxanna finished preparing the second pipe and handed it to me. I took it and smoked the pill slowly this time, again keeping the vapors in and only letting go when Roxanna gave me a mild scolding. “That’s really bad for your lungs,” she said.
“I’m sorry, can you roll me another?” I asked.
During the next several pipes Roxanna told me in detail about her accident. It happened in Bangkok at the intersection near the famous Erawan Shrine. She told me of how the driver of a ten-wheeled truck had plowed into her motorcycle and then fled the scene. She described how being crushed under the wheels left her so disfigured that her Thai husband soon abandoned her. Roxanna’s first prosthetic leg was a constant source of pain, but even after she had been fitted with a more comfortable one, there were still social obstacles to overcome. She told about a Thai male colleague at the ceramics museum who sought to undermine her position by using her disability against her—at one point even going so far as to order the staff to move the museum library to the third floor so Roxanna would have to climb the stairs every time she needed to look something up.
“You don’t really believe that, do you?” I interrupted. “I mean, about breaking the vow causing your accident?”
“Yes, I do!” Roxanna said with widened eyes. “And I’ve heard stories about other people who broke that vow and had bad things happen to them, too.”
Roxanna never struck me as somebody who bought into the paranormal. We had spent many hours together discussing everything under the sun, and I had never once gotten the idea that she let emotion stand in the way of reason. Life had made Roxanna pragmatic, but perhaps this was an exception to her pragmatism. Surely the horror of her accident would have made a deep impression on her. I might feel the same way about breaking that sacred vow had I gone through what Roxanna had. How else to explain being randomly visited upon by such violence and subsequent hardship?
I listened to Roxanna’s story and tried to think things out, but there was something more worrying to me at that moment—more worrying even than a karmic curse. Roxanna had already prepared ten pipes for me, yet I felt absolutely nothing. There was no opium electricity, no opium tingle, not even an opium itch.
“It’s the damnedest thing, Rox. I just don’t feel anything.”
I went home that afternoon angry and frustrated. Angry at myself for having broken my vow not to smoke opium; frustrated because I had gotten nothing out of it. I felt completely sober. There was only one noticeable effect but I wouldn’t realize it until the following day: The ten pipes had ossified my intestines with constipation.
Over the next few days I thought a lot about what had occurred. I remembered having a similar experience on at least one occasion in the past—a night during which I seemed unable to feel opium’s distinctive intoxication. It happened during my period of heavy smoking. Despite everything working properly and more than my usual number of pills, I simply could not get high. I remembered chalking it up to my own mood that night, thinking that I’d created some sort of psychological block. The following night I had smoked again—that very same batch of chandu with the very same pipe and bowl—and I got so cooked that I felt my head melting into the porcelain pillow.
I called Roxanna on Friday and asked if I could visit that weekend. She replied that any day was good because her son was staying with friends in Chiang Mai. “Saturday’s fine. Sunday’s okay, too. Whichever day you decide not to come I’m going to spend at my office to escape the heat.”
With beating the heat in mind (as well as being anxious to try smoking again as soon as possible), I chose Saturday morning, asking if it was okay if I arrived early. We agreed on seven, and that night I got little sleep due to the excitement of an imminent session. I wasn’t worried about a relapse. On the contrary, I decided this was just the corrective I needed to keep life interesting. Perhaps once a month at most: I would smoke opium no more frequently than that. But first, I needed to get the full feeling again. Then I would lay off smoking for a month or so.
Roxanna was downstairs drinking a fruit smoothie when I arrived. This was her usual dinner, which her brother-in-law prepared and brought over from his nearby house every evening. Roxanna explained that she hadn’t been hungry the night before and so had saved it in the fridge. “Do you want some?” she asked. “There’s more than enough.”
I declined because I had bought two bottles of Gatorade at the 7-Eleven before hailing a taxi. I got a glass from the dish rack and some ice from the little Igloo cooler that served as an icebox while Roxanna asked how I’d slept the night after our session. Normally we never discussed opium downstairs, but Jamie wasn’t home and although Roxanna’s neighbors could clearly be seen and heard through the slatted walls, there wasn’t another English-speaker within miles.
“It was really weird. I just didn’t feel anything,” I said.
“Well, you haven’t smoked in a long time. Maybe you need to build up a little in your system.”
“Does that make sense?” I asked.
Roxanna chuckled. “No, it doesn’t. Not in my experience, anyway. If you haven’t been smoking you should n
eed less, not more.”
Roxanna started up the stairs and I waited until she got to the top. She climbed the stairs slowly but steadily without her cane, and I didn’t want to crowd her from behind. Once I caught up with her, I closed the door behind us and started arranging the layout tray. It was just like old times. As Roxanna was lowering herself to the floor I said, “Let’s wait to close the windows until you’ve trimmed the wick and you’re happy with the flame. I’m afraid as soon as these windows are shut it’ll heat up like an oven in here.”
“Yes, it will,” Roxanna replied simply. She began adding coconut oil to the lamp and it overfilled, spilling some onto the lamp tray. “Oh, darn,” she said to nobody in particular.
Once everything was set and Roxanna began rolling pipes for me and herself in succession, she told me about a trip to America that she would soon be embarking on. It was one of her academic junkets, something that she did a couple times a year. These trips usually involved Roxanna speaking about Southeast Asian ceramics at some university. The way she excitedly talked about these events made it obvious that Roxanna really enjoyed the opportunity to share her passion and see colleagues from around the world. During the time that I had known her, Roxanna had traveled a number of times: to the Philippines, to Singapore, and, if I remember correctly, to Australia. This time it would be Seattle, to give a lecture at the University of Washington.
“I’ve been working on my talk for weeks now. Do you want to hear it?”
“Sure.” I was a bit preoccupied, worrying because I had already smoked four pipes and still didn’t feel anything. Perhaps if I concentrated on listening to Roxanna’s lecture, the buzz might creep up and pleasantly surprise me.
“Could you go downstairs and get it? You’ll see it on my bed in a blue plastic folder. Oh, and could you bring me up a cigarette?”
I popped downstairs and into her bedroom, grabbing a single cigarette from the pack on her vanity. I caught a glimpse of her old snapshots tacked to the plywood wall, curling in the tropical heat. I felt a pang of something. Was it guilt? I really could have pressed Roxanna to go back to Wat Tham Krabok. It was doubtful the monastery still had records of people who took the cure so many years before. Her current passport number would be different from the one she used back then. The wat would probably have taken her back no questions asked.
I walked out the bedroom door but as I mounted the stairs, my thoughts had already turned to something else: smoking. When I entered the upstairs room I saw that Roxanna was now standing. “I can’t do this lying down,” she said. “I need to pretend I’m behind a podium to get some real practice.”
So I handed her the folder and took her place on the floor beside the layout tray. “Do you mind if I roll for myself?” I asked. “I need some practice, too.”
“Go right ahead,” she said.
While Roxanna was reading her lecture, I began preparing a pipe as though none of the past year had ever happened. I pushed the guilt I’d felt earlier out of my mind. Things happen for a reason, I told myself.
My own interest in ceramics was very narrow: If it was a component of an opium pipe or some other piece of opium paraphernalia and it happened to be ceramic, I was interested—otherwise, I paid little attention to it. So while I listened to Roxanna speaking, the details were lost on me. Yet, I could appreciate her passion for the subject. There was pride in Roxanna’s voice as she sought to share her knowledge of a subject that, no matter how esoteric, was hers.
“The Ming Gap.” My fondness for idiosyncratic juxtapositions of words made the term stick in my head, but I only had the most basic understanding of what it referred to. It didn’t matter. What the Ming Gap meant to me was how much Roxanna and I had in common. We had both exiled ourselves on these exotic shores and then set about educating ourselves about some little-known Asian subject that had inspired us. Our passionate enthusiasm made us both experts in our respective fields, and we had both gone to great lengths to share our discoveries with others. And then we had both stood by and watched as others sought to profit monetarily from our beloved subjects, resorting to trickery that clouded the field with counterfeits and misinformation.
I focused on my rolling while Roxanna gave a detailed chronology of a Ming dynasty export ban, a centuries-long gap in Chinese trade that caused Southeast Asian cultures to develop their own ceramics. I forced myself to wait long minutes between pipes, hoping to seem interested and not distract her with my greed. When Roxanna had finished her lecture she slowly lowered herself to the floor and placed the folder at the head of the layout tray. “How was that?” she asked.
“Captivating,” I replied. “I just hope there’s not a snap quiz.”
Roxanna smiled. “It needs work, but I’ll be able to polish things up during my flight to Seattle.”
“Would you like me to roll you one?” I asked. “I’m a little rusty but it’s coming back.”
“Sure. I’m ready for one.”
Roxanna then began to tell me about a problem she was having at the museum. It was a recurring dilemma that centered around a colleague of hers—the one who was actively trying to undermine her authority among the museum staff. “He deals in ceramics on the side,” she said.
Roxanna explained to me again about how the vast majority of pieces that made up the ceramics museum’s collection belonged to the founder of Bangkok University. It was a fabulous collection, but the museum founder, like many rich collectors, had become the target of dealers and middlemen trying to pass off reproductions as genuine antiquities. And it so happened that Roxanna’s colleague was one of these.
“He sold some purportedly rare pieces to the founder, some for huge amounts of money. I’m apparently the only one who can see that these ceramics aren’t genuine. They’re copies, but they were very well made and artificially aged. The founder has no idea.”
Roxanna paused as I handed her the pipe. She closed her eyes for a moment after exhaling. I had heard this story a number of times before, but with each telling I was struck by how heavily the dilemma weighed on her.
“These reproduction pieces are now in the museum collection. Well, I thought as long as I can keep them out of sight, it’s not a big problem. But now my colleague is insisting that we display these pieces in the museum right alongside all the genuine ones. This gives him credibility as a dealer. When I wasn’t there he had the staff switch some of the displays around. Can you imagine? I have to deal with this every day!”
There was a sharpness in Roxanna’s eyes that I saw only when she got started on this subject. She was genuinely angry about it. “Things have gotten so confused,” Roxanna said, shaking her head before letting the matter drop.
I thought of the times that I myself had informed collectors of bad acquisitions, and how the news was not always well received. Perhaps I have an oddball way of looking at the problem. If it were me, I would prefer to know that I’d made a mistake so that I could learn from it—rather than having that mistake go unnoticed and perhaps be repeated. For many collectors, however, it seems that ignorance is bliss. In the past I had advised Roxanna to approach the museum founder—the person who had hired Roxanna to be the director—and at least let him know about how her colleague was using her disability against her.
This time I said nothing. I was still preoccupied with my inability to feel the opium. I had smoked another six pipes during Roxanna’s lecture—for a total of ten—and I could now feel only the slightest tingle in the back of my neck. This was way off. At ten pipes after a five-month break I should have been flying. Was it possible that the monastery’s cure had caused some chemical change in my brain? Stubbornly, I kept rolling.
“How many has that been?” Roxanna asked.
“Ten.”
“Oh my. You’re going to make yourself sick.”
“How? It’s having almost no effect on me. I don’t even itch.”
“Why don’t you try some dross? I boiled up a batch a couple weeks ago. There’s a jar of it in
my room.”
Dross. I had to snicker. Roxanna had access to the world’s best chandu yet she saved and recycled her dross by a process of boiling and filtering. The result was a jar of smokable black gunk. Willi had always flushed his dross down the toilet, and after my experience in Europe, I’d never had any urge to try smoking it again. Roxanna said hers was “first dross,” meaning it was the residual waste of opium that had only been smoked once. Apparently in the old days there were people who got a third life out of opium by smoking “second dross,” or the dross of the dross. That, however, made no sense to me. The whole idea behind the opium pipe’s unique design and vaporization process, besides preserving heat-sensitive alkaloids, was to remove the impurities and elements such as morphine that put a drag on opium’s lively high.
When it came to smoking pure dross, it was only for the desperate: addicts too poor to afford anything else. In Opium-Smoking in America and China, H. H. Kane tells of a hardcore “opium fiend” in Manhattan who would scrape the dross from pipe bowls and eat it. And Cocteau had this to say about the practice: “The vice of opium-smoking is to smoke the dross.”
“How about this idea?” I said to Roxanna. “What if I take some dross home with me? What would you charge me for it?”
“Oh, I’m not going to sell you dross. If you want it, just take it.”
As soon as I said it, I knew it was a supremely stupid idea. I changed tack: “Maybe I’ll do that during the time when you’re in the States.”
“Okay,” Roxanna said. “I’m leaving in two weeks so we can get together again next weekend if you want.”
The following week I found myself thinking about opium almost constantly. If there had been a way to set the alarm clock for Friday and sleep the week away, I would have done it. Instead I spent my time pondering the events that had brought me to this point in my life—and coming up with reasons to rationalize my return to the opium fold. I decided that it probably all came down to genetics. Not some gene that predisposed me for addiction, but one that hardwired me for collecting and a preference for things Asian. Could such traits be genetically inherited? I knew that some traits, such as being a night owl, were regarded by most people as a matter of temperament. Though seemingly a result of nurturing, my nightly tendency to work into the wee hours came to the fore when I was in my thirties—long after I had left home and was living abroad. During one of my trips to San Diego in the 1990s, I was surprised to learn that I shared this preference for working late nights with my mother. Couldn’t such character traits be genetically passed down from our ancestors, sometimes even skipping a generation or two? And if this was so, I reasoned, why couldn’t my great-grandfather be the source of both my acquisitive and Orientalist tendencies?
Opium Fiend Page 35
