Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  “What’s that like?” I asked.

  “They lock us in at night!” Clark laughed. There was now a group of young Thai men sitting at the picnic table and watching Clark talk. When he noticed this, he turned to one of them and spoke in fluent Thai. “This guy’s hooked on opium,” he said while nodding toward me.

  “Opium? What’s it like?” one of the Thais asked Clark.

  Before Clark could answer, another Thai replied, “It’s nothing. It’s just like ganja.”

  Clark grinned at this. “Did you understand that?” he asked me in English. “They don’t know anything about it.”

  “Hardly anybody does,” I replied. “I think only that really old monk has seen opium addicts before.”

  “I want to try it!” Clark said with wide eyes exaggerated by his thick glasses.

  “Are you crazy? You’re just getting off heroin.” I was envious of Clark having already gotten through the worst of his withdrawal symptoms. To me it seemed incredibly stupid for him to be already thinking about doing drugs again.

  My plate of pork fried in basil was brought out to me by the cook’s husband. The rice was hot and the night air was relatively cool. At once a cloud of mosquitoes appeared and began dive-bombing the rice as though blood could be sucked from the steaming grains. I waved them away with one hand while spooning in food with the other. The conversation about doing drugs continued among the Thais, but I tuned it out while eating and thought about what the night would bring. After I finished, I bought a six-pack of bottled water on David’s advice. “Maybe you won’t feel like getting out of bed tomorrow,” he said.

  Back at the dorm room I met the others. Besides David, there was Jerry, an amiable heroin addict from England with an encyclopedic knowledge of old Hollywood movies, and Rudy, a clean-cut Croat in his twenties who had lived in Germany since he was five. He claimed that during a trip to Amsterdam he had smoked some kind of potent superweed that caused him to become a paranoid insomniac—which, in turn, drove him to get hooked on sleeping pills. Then there was Sheldon, a shy kid from Hong Kong barely out of high school. Like me, he had also just arrived, but had so far refused to reveal to anyone in the dorm what he had come to be treated for. Finally there was Kurt, a middle-aged German who, despite his swimmer’s build, claimed he drank too much beer.

  Nobody, in fact, looked or acted how I had expected desperate substance abusers to look and act. I assumed that flying all the way to Thailand from Europe or America for drug detox would be a last resort for most. I was lucky—for me the monastery was almost in my own backyard. I spoke Thai and had a fair idea of what to expect as far as conditions were concerned. For the others it must have been like taking a leap of desperation into the unknown. They were thousands of miles from home and as helpless as small children, unable to speak the language or understand much of what was going on around them. Yet none of these men struck me as hopeless, last-resort cases.

  There were still a couple of hours before lights out, and I used the time to ask if anyone had passed any really bad nights in the dorm. I was particularly interested to know how Jerry the English junkie felt about it. “I must confess, I was already pretty much over withdrawal when I arrived here the second time,” he said.

  “You’ve been here before?” I asked.

  “I came here with a mate of mine who did the treatment two years ago. He was sure he could talk his way back in if he could speak directly to the abbot.”

  “What happened?”

  “The abbot turned him away. So my mate said he was going down to the islands to have a little holiday and I sort of joined him. We had some Subutex that we brought from England and I thought I’d come back here when they ran out. But we left the bloody pills on the train and didn’t discover it until we were on Koh Phangan. I did my withdrawal in a little hut with a Thai lady I met. It was bloody painful but she took care of me.”

  “So if you were already over it, why did you come here?”

  “I can’t go back home without my treatment. My village is full of gearheads and soon as I see one I know I’ll break down.”

  Now I was sure heroin’s withdrawal symptoms weren’t as severe as those of opium. If Jerry was able to sit it out in a hut with what was surely a Thai prostitute—and what she saw hadn’t caused her to bolt and flee the scene—then Jerry certainly hadn’t been through what I had been through.

  Before the lights were turned out, I looked through a meager collection of books piled in a corner of the room. Some had been left behind by previous occupants of the dorm and others belonged to the monastery. Typically, there was a selection of English-language Dharma primers. Having gone through a dabbling-in-Buddhism stage years before, I remembered that even back when I had an interest in the subject such books were difficult to focus on. Once the withdrawals began, reading one would be like trying to decipher cuneiform. Finally I found a volume of the collected works of Franz Kafka—which seemed wonderfully appropriate. Perhaps I could will myself into becoming a giant bug and in that way keep the withdrawal pains from killing me.

  When Art came by the dorm and asked us to turn out the lights, I went out and drank another two cups of “herb tea.” I was very relieved to hear that the doors to the foreign men’s dorm stayed open all night—in contrast to both the women’s and Thai men’s dorms. I took advantage of the open-door policy by getting up two or three times during the night and drinking more herb tea, and made at least that many visits to the toilet to pee. In between the trips outside I got some surprisingly restful sleep.

  On November 22, 2007, at around one in the afternoon I wrote the following in my journal:

  It’s been over 24 hrs since my last pipe & I’m surprised at how easy it’s been. Feel weak & like I have a mild cold but so far the ugly symptoms that I’ve experienced in the past have not yet set in. I fear the night when everyone is asleep and I will be rolling around in pain.

  Earlier that morning I had borrowed a reading light from Art and rigged up my bunk so that the light hung from the back of a chair. The bulb was just outside the mosquito net, which diffused the light somewhat; the chair back blocked the light and kept it from disturbing others in the room. I wasn’t exactly getting prepared to read all night. I remembered from my previous attempts to quit that darkness made the pain worse. During the Halloween Massacre I had lights burning in every room for the entire three days. What worried me most was that I might begin thrashing around and have to be restrained. I was relieved that my dorm mates were a friendly bunch and seemed to like me.

  The morning had started at five with the sweeping of mango leaves from the reception area. Everyone was required to do this daily task and it took about twenty minutes. Then we headed to the shrine next to the registration office, where the brooms were collected and the Thais gathered to light incense and pay their respects.

  I approached the shrine, curious to see what deity was being venerated, and was told that it contained the body of the founder of the monastery. I watched but stopped short of any outward display of reverence. The Thais wouldn’t have mocked or minded—on the contrary, they all take their religion seriously and feel pride when they see Westerners taking an interest. I knew this, yet I felt self-conscious until a young Thai woman who was handing out incense gave three of the sandalwood-coated sticks to me. I was emboldened by her gesture; it was as though she hadn’t even stopped to think that I might not want to venerate the remains of an old monk enshrined under a banyan tree. I lit the joss sticks over a candle, and pushed them into a sand-filled receptacle already bristling with scores of others. Then I got down on my knees and bent forward three times, touching my forehead to the floor as I had seen Thais do countless times during my eighteen years in Thailand. When I was finished, I walked through the crisp morning darkness back to the detox compound.

  After regrouping inside the walls, we were led by a handful of monks in performing basic calisthenics. Besides being weak from the lack of opium, it had been months, perhaps years, since I
had attempted any sort of exercise—but I wasn’t about to start second-guessing the regimen. The ease of the previous night had quickly made a believer of me. My attitude at this point was: Don’t question anything, just do it.

  At eight was morning muster in front of the tallest structure in the detox compound—a giant whitewashed statue of the Buddha sitting on an ornate concrete dais. Everyone lined up shoulder to shoulder, with the non-Thais in a separate line at the very back, and then the Thais counted off. There were almost fifty people in treatment at that time, fewer than ten of them foreigners. Once roll call was completed, the giant Buddha smiled placidly as the Thai national anthem was sung without musical accompaniment.

  At one-thirty everyone was called outside to drink a cup of bitter tea. This was to be followed by an herbal sauna—the men having traded their baggy red uniforms for knee-length Thai-style sarongs. It was pure luck that I chose the end of November to do detox. The weather was as comfortable as it ever gets in central Thailand, the daytime high temperatures never much above eighty degrees Fahrenheit. During Thailand’s hot season, roughly mid-March through mid-June, the local temperatures were said to get over one hundred degrees for stretches of several weeks, and none of the dorms at Wat Tham Krabok were air-conditioned. I imagined that doing herbal sauna during the summer months would be like descending from one level of Buddhist hell into the next.

  A daily soak was mandatory, but it instantly became my favorite event of the day. The sauna room was very basic: nothing more than a large concrete box with two rows of benches inside. A thick curtain over the door kept the steam in. Two of these sauna rooms were side by side, one for men and one for women.

  Above and behind these concrete structures was a fire-fueled boiler and stacks of chopped wood. Reams of lemongrass and other herbs were fed into the boiler, and the resulting steam was vented into the rooms. The aromatic sauna was said to be excellent for the lungs and skin, as well as cause toxins to be sweated out through the pores. I huffed in deep breaths of the tangy steam, knowing that my lungs must be coated with the same oily vapors that turned the inside of my opium pipe tar black. Perspiring profusely, I wiped the moisture from my upper arms and could feel the slimy opium residue as it was oozing from my skin. At intervals of a few minutes, Art, who was waiting outside, gave the command for us to emerge from the steamy darkness and ladle ice-cold well water over our bodies from an adjacent cistern. My withdrawal from opium amplified the cold, and it was all I could do to keep from shrieking during these ice-water sluicings.

  An attendant monk was stationed at each sauna to keep it in working order, chopping wood and feeding lemongrass into the boiler. At this particular sauna the monk in charge was one of the monastery’s outstanding features. Phra Gordon was easily the most popular of the Westerners ordained as Buddhist monks at Wat Tham Krabok. Non-Asian monks are uncommon in Southeast Asia—but they’re not unheard of. Gordon, however, was African American, and in all my time in the region I had only seen two black Buddhist monks. By saying Gordon was “popular” I mean that he was often a topic of conversation among the farang addicts at the wat, so it wasn’t long before I heard his story. Jerry the English junkie told it to me a day or two after I arrived.

  According to Jerry, Gordon was a Vietnam War veteran who had come to Thailand to do some traveling after his stint was up. While on a bus heading north from Bangkok, Gordon found himself stranded when the vehicle got punctures in all four of its tires. Waiting for the flat tires to be fixed, he decided to explore the area on foot. The bus happened to break down right in front of the gate to Wat Tham Krabok, and so Gordon walked the winding path up to the monastery. And there he stayed.

  Jerry told me he’d asked Gordon if he planned to live at the monastery the rest of his life, and Gordon had said, “It’s only a bus stop.”

  There were other Western monks besides Gordon and Hans, the monk who checked me in. Phra Neil, an Englishman with a face like one of N. C. Wyeth’s pirates, was a former heroin addict and tended the second of the monastery’s two saunas. Phra Marc, a placid Belgian of indiscernible age, worked in the kitchen and translated Buddhist texts from Thai into English. And there was Saundra—a fortyish Buddhist nun with a shaved head and white robe. She, too, had been addicted to heroin in her native England.

  I would have thought that these Westerners ordained and living at the monastery would have little time for the questions of drug addicts. There was an endless chain of us, cycling through the process constantly, no doubt asking the same questions over and over—yet I detected not a hint of cynicism or boredom among any of the Western monks during my interaction with them. All were upbeat and reassuring, even though it was obvious they were extremely busy most of the time.

  It was Saundra who gave me support on my first day of the vomiting cure—the principal procedure of the monastery’s detox regimen. Unlike the nine-herb bitter tea that I had been quaffing since my arrival, this curative potion brewed from dream-inspired ingredients was to be consumed but not digested—after drinking, it had to be immediately purged. Saundra came to the dorm and explained to me what would take place, giving tips on how to make everything go as smoothly as possible—such as making sure I did not eat beforehand. “Some of these Thai guys eat a full meal before the cure, and you can imagine what it looks like coming up.”

  Although addicts who came for treatment had to take the vomiting cure for only five days, Saundra still did it regularly because she felt she still needed it—even after years of being off heroin.

  Every afternoon a mechanical ringer like a schoolyard bell signaled everyone to assemble at the courtyard outside the Thai men’s dorm. There, a wide cement patio was bisected by a long trough, about a foot wide and a foot deep. Along the trough, at intervals of every few feet, were stainless-steel pails filled to the brim with clear water. On the water’s surface floated a bowl-shaped plastic scooper of the type rural Thais use for bathing.

  When I arrived at the courtyard, dressed in nothing but my Thai-style sarong and flip-flops, there was already a crowd gathered. About a dozen others were also wearing sarongs. Like me, they were newly arrived at the wat and were undergoing the first five days of treatment, which revolved around the all-important vomiting cure. The rest wore red-pajama detox uniforms, indicating that they had already finished their initial five days. Saundra directed me to one of the pails filled with water, advising me to step out of my flip-flops and kneel on them so as to cushion my knees from the hard cement. I got into position, lining up with the sarong-clad addicts along one side of the trough and facing the crowd of baggy red uniforms who stood about chattering with excitement before what would be the main event of the day. A pair of conga drums sat incongruously on the patio, and one of the Thai men was playfully tapping on them. Absently, I thought perhaps the congas were left over from some recent performance to entertain the addicts.

  An older Thai monk sporting what looked like crude prison tattoos arrived on the scene and walked directly over to me. This was the man all the farang addicts referred to as “the Medicine Monk.” It was his task to dispense the secret potion. Something about his chiseled face looked familiar, but it took me a while to realize why: The Medicine Monk had a passing resemblance to Master Kan from the 1970s television series Kung Fu. Both Art and Saundra were standing behind me, and as the tattooed monk approached, Art told him that I could speak Thai. He also let slip that I was an opium addict and that I lived in Talat Noi, Bangkok’s old opium-smoking quarter.

  The Medicine Monk’s face registered surprise. Little mounds of muscle where his eyebrows should have been contracted, pushing layers of wrinkles into his forehead. “There’s still opium in Talat Noi?” he asked.

  “No sir,” I answered. “I got it from a farang.”

  Whether or not he was satisfied with this answer, he didn’t dwell on it. The Medicine Monk asked me if I had any medical conditions or history of recent surgery. I said I did not. He then asked the same thing of a Thai man who was knee
ling next to me, and then of another down the line. Glancing at them from the corner of my eye, I realized they were the same young men who had taken the vow with me the day before—we three were the only ones on our first day of the vomiting cure.

  That finished, the Medicine Monk produced a large, clear-glass bottle of a type that I recognized as being used in Thailand for native rice liquor. The label had been removed, and in place of the metal twist-off cap was a rubber stopper. The bottle was filled with a muddy, reddish-brown liquid. The courtyard had become silent—quiet enough to hear the deep, resonant thump of the rubber plug being pulled from the bottle. Suddenly somebody began pounding the conga drums rhythmically and all the uniform-clad addicts broke into a bouncy Thai song at the tops of their lungs. I didn’t recognize it, but I caught some of the lyrics and knew they were singing about giving up drugs: “If you can’t stop, you’ll die for sure,” they sang.

  The Medicine Monk produced a shot glass and carefully poured the potion into it as I kneeled before him with my hands held in the wai of gratitude. He passed the glass to me and I took it with my right hand. Art stood behind me with his hand on my shoulder, “Deum hai mot!” (“Drink it all!”) he shouted into my ear over the music. I did not stop to ponder the act or sniff at the potion, but instead knocked the dose back like it was a shot of tequila. There was a vile taste followed by withering vapors venting through my nostrils and a burning sensation dropping like a hot stone into the pit of my gut. I shuddered.

  Art then handed me the plastic scooper brimming with water from the pail and both he and Saundra urged me to quickly drink it down. “Hold your body as erect as possible and pour the water down your throat,” she yelled. “Drink until your belly is distended and then drink more.”

  I had expected the potion to cause projectile vomiting as soon as it was swallowed, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Art and Saundra coached me to drink as much water as I could stand, and then to hold it in for a minute or two. This was supposed to allow the potion to draw the toxins from my body. When I could drink no more, I looked around woozily. The music was still bouncing away and some of the red pajamas were dancing and cavorting, teasingly calling out encouragement to their friends taking the cure.