A few days later I was in a taxi arriving at a modern high-rise—the residence of the American embassy’s cultural attaché, who through Lisa had offered to host my party. Alone in the elevator, I straightened my collar before a wide mirror that covered the back of the compartment. My pupils were pinpoints, but I could detect no other clue that might give away the fact that I had broken my monthlong fast by smoking fifteen pipes prior to leaving my apartment. I had purposely arrived at the party early to get accustomed to the surroundings and help with setting up, but the host had already seen to all the arrangements: There was a table in the dining room, every inch of which was covered with platters of Thai food. Two stacks of copies of my book were arranged on a coffee table in the living room.
Lisa was already there. She was booked on a flight back to the States later that night so we took advantage of the quiet and talked over things before the guests began arriving. She said that quite a few people from the embassy would be there, although except for the host, I knew none of them because all of my embassy friends had rotated to new postings outside of Thailand. It didn’t matter. Atypically for me, I was looking forward to being in a room full of new faces.
I’ve known U.S. embassy people to be punctual, and these were no exception. By 7:30 P.M. the apartment was crowded with guests and I was kept busy being introduced and signing copies of my book. At one point there were sharp, ringing taps on a wineglass and I was asked to say a few words. Speaking in front of crowds has always been one of my least favorite tasks, but I was aided by the confidence-bolstering properties of opium—which seemed to turn my leaden tongue to silver.
The rest of the evening was spent chatting and answering questions. People approached me one at a time or in groups of twos and threes. Many of them had been in Southeast Asia for some time—not exactly old hands but savvy enough to know the score. After complimenting me on my book, they all seemed to ask the same question: Was it possible to smoke opium in Thailand?
Recreational drug users are well known for wanting to “turn on” others to an activity they find highly enjoyable. But recreational drug use, by its very definition, is something outside the realm of work or study—and for that reason I didn’t see myself as engaging in it. I was using opium for research, and, enjoyable as my experiences might have been, I knew there was nothing to be gained by introducing others to the bliss that I had found within the glow of the opium lamp. In fact, there was much to lose by doing so.
I smiled patiently as one person after another worked through some introductory small talk before popping the question. Was it my imagination or did I detect a glimmer of hope in their eyes? I became convinced that many of them wanted me to answer with a wink and a whisper. Instead, with the pupils of my eyes as tiny as poppy seeds, I shook my head with feigned regret as I shut the door on their hopes. “I’m afraid nothing remains of that old world,” I said.
Doctors would have us believe that opium dulls us and takes away our sense of values. But if opium pulls the old scale of values from under our feet, it sets up another for us, superior and more delicate.
—Jean Cocteau, Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication (1930)
The fast now broken, my appetite for opium became voracious. Opium’s slow, decade-long seduction suddenly flared into a passion of an almost sexual nature. As I watched my hands performing the rituals: trimming the wick, cooking the chandu, and then rolling pill after perfect pill, I was mesmerized by them. Instead of taking a break between each pipe as I had before, I allowed myself to roll and smoke as many as seven pills in succession before putting the pipe down and closing my eyes to savor the effects. Before I realized it, I was smoking daily. I kept up my standards just as before—showering and dressing in a silk sarong and crisp linen shirt before reclining; always reminding myself that what I was doing was rare and special and never to be taken for granted. I slept at dawn and awoke in the late afternoon still feeling pleasantly fuzzy from the night before. By nine or ten that evening I was on the mat again.
I began listening to music during the long, languid breaks that I took between vaporizing pills. My taste in music had always been varied; the cabinet below the shelf that supported my stereo was full of cassette tapes and CDs featuring everything from traditional bluegrass to 1970s funk to Burmese heavy metal bands. But now I had absolutely no desire to listen to anything even remotely modern. It was as though the opium was pulling me back to a time when composers might have used opium themselves, creating songs while under the influence of the drug and perhaps even making music with the enjoyment of opium smokers in mind.
It is not far-fetched to surmise that ragtime great Scott Joplin had experienced opium. At least one of his collaborators, the now largely forgotten Louis Chauvin, became addicted to the drug in the opium dens of St. Louis. There is something about Joplin’s piano rags that, when played at the correct tempo (modern pianists tend to play them too fast), perfectly complement opium’s subtle buzz. I found compositions like “The Easy Winners” most soothing and especially fitting for the bittersweet hours just before dawn.
Early in the evening I usually desired something bouncier, such as Dixieland jazz: Red Nichols’s snappy 1929 version of “Chinatown, My Chinatown” kicked off many a session. I was also charmed by the buoyant optimism of Depression-era crooners, their cheerful messages going hand in hand with opium’s uplifting effects. Even the blues couldn’t bring me down. I discovered Billie Holiday and ordered a three-disc set online so I could listen to her for hours on end. I’d close my eyes and let her lilting voice wash over me while I searched the lyrics for evidence of her alleged opium addiction.
Not every minute of my nightly revelry was spent reclining. Ideas popped into my head and sent me to the shelf of books that I called my library, or more often, to my laptop for an Internet search. These mind rambles were not limited to opium-related subjects. I tended to avoid news and current events but instead spent hours on Wikipedia, clicking links until I’d forgotten what subject had brought me to the website in the first place. I also frequented Flickr and dedicated much time to exploring the accounts of members who collected and uploaded old portrait photographs. I knew that if the photos depicted Americans and dated from the 1880s to the 1910s, there was a slight chance they were also opium smokers. With this in mind I spent hours staring into the eyes of these sepia-toned faces, searching for a telltale glint. I felt I had more in common with the dead people in these images—these aloof souls guarding their secrets as old airs played endlessly in their heads—than I did with the millions of live people to be found just beyond my apartment door.
To entertain myself during the wee hours, I began scanning old photos of my travels in Asia and uploading them to Flickr. I followed a blog aimed at middle-aged Americans who were feeling nostalgic for the Disneyland of their childhood, and the reddening snapshots of Adventureland circa 1970 brought back some good old memories. Yet despite my almost complete apathy for the present, I had no problem keeping up correspondence with friends outside Thailand via email, even finding the time to leave posts among strangers on online forums. Nobody had any idea of what I was going through. The only clue to my state of mind was that I seemed to be awake at all hours. That friends many time zones away noticed this was evident when I once received an email message—addressed to myself and several others—whose subject line asked the question “Does Steve ever sleep?”
I almost never left my apartment during the day other than to take short walks down the lane to buy food—except when I was on some odd quest inspired by my nocturnal musings. One such opium-inspired project sent me on a search for an old-school Chinese tailor who could fashion me a linen suit like those once worn by the colonials of French Indochina. A friend visiting from Cambodia showed me where I could buy quality linen at a shop in Sampeng, a tunnel-like alley that runs through Bangkok’s Chinatown. For the equivalent of seventy dollars, I bought four meters of buff-colored linen for the suit and three of beige rayon for the lining (the
shopkeeper claimed that silk would counteract the cooling properties of the linen).
The tailor I found was only about a mile from my apartment and near the Oriental Hotel. Had I not been pointed in that direction by one of my American embassy friends, I would never have thought to look there. Many tailors’ shops line the lanes surrounding Bangkok’s oldest and most famous hotel, but most are what you’d expect in an area that is flush with rich foreign tourists: blatant attempts to separate the visitors from their money. These tailors are mostly from India and are almost as transient as the tourists they target—none of their shops seem to last more than a season or two before changing hands. Such operations are easily pegged because the tailors themselves often stand outside their own shops and tout their wares: “A fine silk suit for you, sir?”
By contrast, the tailor that my friend directed me to was Thai-Chinese and had been in the same shop for decades. Thinking there was a good chance that he could make the suit I wanted, I brought with me a still from the French film The Lover that I had found online. It was a photo of Tony Leung Ka-fai as he was dressed when he met Jane March on the ferry to Saigon. This movie, by the way, has the best opium smoking scenes of any I’ve ever watched. The paraphernalia are authentic antiques, and the smoking is realistic. The film is also rare in that it really looks and feels like Southeast Asia: The light is right; the colors are correct; the background noises ring true. A friend of Roxanna’s, a former Vietcong who had become the curator of the Da Nang Museum of Cham Sculpture, once told me that he was astounded by how this film seemed to bring colonial Vietnam back to life.
So, with an image of Tony Leung Ka-fai wearing a tropical linen suit in hand, I presented myself to the tailor, and in my most polite Thai tried to talk him into cutting a suit that was in none of his catalogs or magazines. The tailor was probably about sixty, born too late to have actually seen anyone wearing what I was asking him to make—but he was amiable and game to try. He didn’t seem too interested in the photo of Tony Leung Ka-fai, handing it back to me after I explained what I wanted. I took this to mean that he already had an idea in mind and didn’t need the photographic cue. I stood for measurements and told the tailor that I was in no hurry—I didn’t want the typical three-day suit. As long as I got the vintage style I was looking for, I didn’t care how long it took to finish.
When I came in for my first fitting a week later, the suit jacket was still little more than a chalk-marked vest. The tailor had misplaced the trousers, and after fifteen minutes of looking he gave up and suggested that I try them on during my next visit. A second week passed and I came in again for another fitting—the last before the suit was to be completed. But something was wrong: The jacket was alarmingly tight. I pointed this out to the tailor, but he seemed unworried. He asked if I wanted authentic vintage style, and I affirmed my original request and left it at that. I have a knack for opening my mouth and complaining too soon, and, especially in Thailand where being quick to question is considered poor form, there had been many times when I wished I had simply held my tongue. I thought this might be another such instance, so I let the matter drop. Instead, I made an appointment to come in and pick up the finished suit the following week, and then headed back to my apartment for a mind-soothing smoke.
On the way home I ran into a friend from River City mall, the Thai manager of an antiques shop that I visited weekly when I first started collecting. My trips to the mall had slowed once I began buying most of my opium antiques online, but over the years I still made an effort to stop by and chat with her now and then. After I fell into smoking heavily, it became too much of a bother for me to get to her shop before the 6 P.M. closing time, so I stopped visiting. On this day it struck me as soon as I saw my friend that it had been many months since we’d last met.
“You’ve gotten thin,” she said in Thai.
Her remark might have been taken for a typical Thai greeting: People who haven’t been face-to-face for long periods of time often comment immediately on any perceived change in weight. This wasn’t the usual greeting, however—my friend sounded concerned. “Have you been sick?” she asked.
“I’ve been in Cambodia,” I replied.
This was the lie I had been telling everybody. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the remark about getting thin, and I was hearing it more frequently. The more opium I smoked, the less food my body seemed to need. Traveling in Cambodia was the best way to explain away weight loss. All Thais think of Cambodia as a barbaric place where the food is unspeakably filthy, so they expect you to get sick and lose weight during visits there. My friend smiled sympathetically and advised me to get plenty of sleep. Then it was my turn to smile as I thought about just how blurred the line between my sleeping and waking hours had become.
A week later I was back at the tailor’s shop trying on the finished product. I stood there dumbstruck by my image in the mirror. Nothing fit. The jacket was too tight, the sleeves sliding halfway up my arms when I held them out in front of me. The trousers, on the other hand, looked like the bottom half of a zoot suit: They were balloon-like and with an excess of cloth bunched at my shoes. This wasn’t some strange redistribution of weight caused by the opium—the tailor had ruined the suit.
Losing one’s temper in Thailand is always a mistake. There was nothing to be gained by blowing up, but I had to know why my suit had gone so wrong. After some questions, the tailor led me back to the innermost area of his shop, and there I learned where he formed his idea about how my suit should look: On the wall was a poster of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. The jackets on both men were a couple of sizes too small. The tailor helpfully pointed out that Charlie Chaplin also had his suits cut in the same manner. A small jacket and baggy trousers were authentic vintage style.
But those guys were clowns! I thought to myself, yet no such protestation left my lips. Breaking the tailor’s face would have been counterproductive. Instead I told him that I’d changed my mind. I wanted a suit that fit in the modern way. The tailor assured me there was enough material left to make another jacket and so I again stood for measurements. When I returned two weeks later, a stunning piece of work awaited me. The suit fit perfectly.
I brought my suit home, added a white cotton shirt to the ensemble, and immediately had a few pipes while wearing it. The linen was stiff and had a smell that brought a fabric store to mind, but I hoped the opium vapors would permeate the waxy fibers with each bowl that I smoked, giving them that unique chandu scent and a patina as soft as the honey-hued ivory mouthpiece of my favorite pipe. How many decades had it been since somebody rolled pills to ragtime while wearing a suit? I decided to wear it every Saturday night, making the opium-smoking ritual a bit more formal than my usual sarong-and-guayabera-clad sessions.
Regardless of what I was wearing, I spent every night like a pasha on a divan, holding court before the friends, relatives, and acquaintances who crowded my imagination. They pushed in for a look, asking questions that allowed me to ramble on about my favorite subject for hours. My imaginary guests were not limited to people I actually knew. During the course of one late evening I tutored Johnny Depp in the fine art of rolling. I had seen his botched performance in the opening scenes of the film From Hell, and I sympathized with his predicament. “Of course you had no idea how to roll,” I assured him. “There was no way for you to research the scene. Here, let me show you.…”
On another occasion I prepared pipes for Francis Ford Coppola and Sergio Leone while playfully chastising both men for their attempts at opium-smoking scenes in Apocalypse Now Redux and Once Upon a Time in America respectively. “Your opium lamp didn’t even have a chimney!” I railed at Coppola in tones of mock outrage. “The opium would have burned to a crisp the moment Aurore Clément held the bowl to that naked flame! How on earth did Martin Sheen manage to get high?”
“Oh, believe me, Martin was high on other things,” Coppola replied after exhaling a column of vapors.
I decided to cut the director some slack; the
opium had put me in a forgiving mood. “Really, though, your omission can be excused. The Shanghai Lil sequence in Footlight Parade made the same mistake. James Cagney stumbles through an opium den and sees two beautiful women having pipes prepared for them”—I paused for effect while leveling my own pipe above the lamp—“over a flame without a chimney! And that movie came out in 1933! There’s no excuse for it; there were still opium dens back then!”
The author smoking opium at his Bangkok apartment in 2007. During this time he was nursing a twenty-pipe-per-day opium habit. (Photograph by Jack Barton)
Burning the midnight oil night after night, I arrived at some new phase of opium geekdom. My interests had become so narrow and the depth of my knowledge so great, that like a lonely soul trapped at the bottom of a mineshaft, only by resorting to my imagination could I enjoy some like-minded conversation.
My old books claimed that opium smokers needed ever larger doses in order to maintain the desired effects, but I found this to be untrue. As long as I was smoking high-quality, dross-free chandu, the same number of pills—five to seven—was enough to bring on the bliss. That said, I actually did steadily increase my dosage, because I wanted to keep rolling throughout the night. So even when I didn’t really need more opium, I kept smoking just for love of the ritual. I noticed, too, that the feelings brought on by intoxication were not quite the same as when I used to spend nights in Willi’s Chamber of Fragrant Mists. If anything, my sense of well-being was more all-encompassing than before. I felt safe and warm and looked after, a feeling that I dimly remembered from way back: I was a child, sick with some mild childhood malady, being lovingly doted on by my mother. These were feelings of safety and comfort that only a child knows, when all the world is under a warm blanket in a cozy bed—feelings that are lost as one grows older and learns of the risks and uncertainties of life on the big outside. As long as I smoked opium I was continuously enveloped in this protective blanket of contentment.
Opium Fiend Page 25