Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  I thought of that miniature silk shoe from China that had fascinated me as a child. I had totally forgotten about it when, after having lived in Southeast Asia for over a decade, I flew to San Diego following the death of my grandmother. While paying a visit to my grandfather, I was surprised to see two matching silk shoes in the glass cabinet. My uncle explained that he had found the missing shoe while going through my grandmother’s belongings, and this mention of the silk shoes caused my grandfather to launch into a family history that was previously unknown to me.

  He related how his father had once been a “coolie driver”—that was the very term my grandfather used—in California’s Central Valley, the boss of a team of Chinese laborers in charge of digging irrigation canals. Edgar Prentis Martin must also have been a collector of sorts, because the silk shoes in the cabinet were surrounded by a dozen jade miniatures that I had never before seen. The jades had been packed away in a box for decades but, thanks to my uncle, my great-grandfather’s small collection of Chinese antiques was reunited and on display. My grandfather surmised that his father’s curios must have been acquired from his workers, but I thought it more likely that he collected the pieces during trips to the Chinatowns that were once a part of nearly every city and town in California.

  Dear old great-granddad. If nobody else could relate to my predicament, I was certain that he would have understood me. Perhaps I was simply following in his footsteps. The difference between us was simple: Early twentieth-century California had exotic adventure at every turn, but I was born too late for that and had to go farther afield. And if the old “coolie driver” had enough interest in the culture of his underlings to acquire a collection of Chinese jades, was it a stretch to think that his curiosity might also have led him to an opium den? The time frame was right. I decided that Edgar Prentis Martin must have been an opium smoker. And if this were so—if great-granddad had indeed kicked the gong around—he, too, would have experienced how opium worms its way into the brain, planting itself deep like an indelible memory. Was it possible then that a taste for opium could be passed on in the genes? I was suddenly sure that it was—and my life was beginning to make sense to me.

  Then there was Roxanna. If I were able to do and see half the things she had done and seen since coming to Asia, I might be worthy of holding her opium pipe. The mere act of having a session with Roxanna was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences. How did I ever lose sight of that? The pathos that I sensed while in her bedroom that day was nothing more than the melancholia of a mind longing for opium. There was nothing hopeless about Roxanna. She was a survivor. Someone to be emulated, not pitied. A genuine old Asia hand. A role model. Roxanna had come out to Southeast Asia proficient in plucking chickens and was now, due solely to her inquisitiveness and determination, a world-renowned expert on Asian art. Over the thirty-five years that she had been in the region, everything around her had changed, but Roxanna had discovered a private means to escape the boredom and beastliness of the twenty-first century—and I was very fortunate to be in on her secret.

  By the time the weekend had arrived, I was convinced. I was in my mid-forties; my youth was finished. Besides my opium experimentation, I hadn’t done anything interesting or noteworthy in years. Paying the bills by writing about my adventures—boating up the Mekong from Cambodia into Laos, or following George Orwell’s footsteps in Upper Burma—was something I no longer had the drive or the energy to do. With the exception of Jake Burton, all my Bangkok journalist friends had long ago left the region, going home to America, Canada, and New Zealand. Tremendous changes over the past decade—especially advances in communications, information dissemination, and air-travel affordability brought about by the Internet—had made it possible for waves of Westerners to come out to Southeast Asia and stay. Being a stranger in a strange land no longer took much effort. Bangkok was teeming with expats, but I no longer knew anybody nor had the desire to make new friends. To me, that now seemed like a young person’s pursuit. Instead, I would take up an old man’s hobby once traditional among the Chinese. Being a devotee of the poppy was the most romantic way I could think of to live out the rest of my life—and now it felt like destiny.

  At Roxanna’s I briefly entertained the idea that I might talk her into letting me take some chandu home before she left on her trip to Seattle, but in the end I agreed to take the dross. Due to my past experiences I knew that the high morphine content of the dross would carry a mind-numbing kick, and I was by now desperate to feel something.

  Back at my apartment, I spread out the mat and set up my layout tray. It was a real joy to be arranging all the accoutrements as I had done so many times before—guided by the inlaid mother-of-pearl patterns on the hardwood tray. I had left Roxanna’s house after some thirteen pipes, but the buzz was hardly noticeable. I wanted to sample the dross after the slight effects of Roxanna’s chandu had subsided, so I slid the prepared layout tray under my coffee table and waited until midnight, killing time by poking around the Internet.

  The cover of an issue of Real Detective magazine from 1939. By the time this issue hit the stands, thirty years had passed since America’s nationwide opium-smoking ban was enacted, and its strict enforcement had made the habit increasingly rare in the United States. (From the author’s collection)

  At twelve, the neighborhood night watchman’s banging out the hour caught my attention, and I left my computer and brightly lit bedroom for the darkened living room. I pulled the layout tray from under the coffee table and positioned the gooseneck lamp so that its beam made the accoutrements sparkle in the darkness. I placed my Billiken mascot in one corner of the tray and propped up the little framed portrait of Miss Alicia de Santos so that her beseeching eyes were upon me. I fed a Billie Holiday disc into the stereo and turned the volume down until it was barely audible. It was Sunday night—technically just a few minutes into Monday morning—and the river was silent. There were no droning tugs pulling sand barges, no booze cruises entertained by cover bands whose fixed sets played like long, forced encores. Chinatown, nine stories below my window, was absolutely still.

  The dross cooked up somewhat like chandu, but the beautiful color and delicious fragrance were missing. There was no golden “hair” produced by pulling the needle over the wok’s inner surface, the cooked opium fuzzy on the tip of the needle like a miniature stick of cotton candy. Instead, what stuck to the needle was a black blob. The dross smell was harsh and reminded me of the burning coal stink that permeates some cities in China. Rolling a dross pill was not unlike rolling opium, except that when heating the pill before sticking it to the bowl, I had to pay careful attention to keep it from bursting into flames and dropping into the lamp. The taste was dreadful, and as soon as I inhaled that first breath through my sugarcane pipe, I knew that smoking dross would ruin the stem’s sweet flavor—seasoned by months of smoking the finest chandu. Despite all this, I never once harbored the idea that perhaps I should stop before I started.

  Two hours into the session I began feeling nauseous and decided I had better hang it up for the night. My elaborate preparations to make this experience exactly mirror my pre-detox smoking sprees only added to my frustration—the scene was perfect except for its most important aspect: my being high. If only I could get back to the way it had been. I pushed the layout tray back under the coffee table and went to bed, resolving to try again in a couple of days. The next morning I called Roxanna to complain. She was preoccupied with packing for her trip to Seattle, and I could tell from her voice that she was losing patience with me and my sorry story.

  On Wednesday evening—the night of May 7, 2008—I tried again, this time stubbornly rolling until I lost count of the number of pipes I had smoked. When dawn arrived, my head ached and my ears were ringing furiously. I was vexed at having spent another night rolling without reward. I went to bed but could not sleep. Sometime after eight o’clock that morning, I remembered that Roxanna would be at the airport waiting for her flight to Seattle. I s
ent her a text message: This stuff isn’t working!

  She texted me back immediately: STOP!

  It was the last time I would ever hear from Roxanna Brown.

  My father died from having smoked too much, and the opium, evaporating in this pipe-bowl of his, takes on the mysterious smell of death.

  —Claude Farrère, Fumée d’opium (1904)

  I didn’t heed Roxanna’s warning. Instead, I decided that an air leak in my sugarcane pipe was keeping the dross from properly vaporizing. I spent an hour meticulously resealing the pipe’s saddle and then gluing a new collar onto my favorite bowl. I had made up my mind to smoke the entire bottle of dross before Roxanna returned so that I would have an excuse to buy some chandu from her. I didn’t think she would refuse me this time. I imagined that her talk at the University of Washington would be well received and that she would return home in a jubilant mood—and this would be perfect timing for me to ask another favor of her.

  The blankets were up on my apartment windows again, and I smoked in a perpetual faux twilight with nary a break. I ordered a medium-sized pizza every other day, and that was enough to satisfy my dross-stunted appetite. The intoxicating effect of the dross seemed to be only about a third of what it should have been—that is, what it used to be before I took the cure. I made up for it by smoking perhaps two or three times as many pipes as I had before. I was never really sure of my daily intake because I couldn’t be bothered to keep count. Only tourists keep count, I thought to myself with a smirk.

  Roxanna wouldn’t be staying in the United States for long after her talk at the university. She had mentioned something about visiting relatives, but trips to the States are shockingly expensive for anyone accustomed to the cost of living in Thailand, and I expected her to be back within a week or so. Seven days after my text message exchange with Roxanna, I got a phone call from her son. Instantly I sensed that something was wrong. And then he told me: “My mom is dead.”

  On the few occasions that Jamie and I had conversed in the past, I had always spoken English with him, but the shock of this news caused both languages that he and I had in common to fail me. It took what felt like long minutes for me to recover, and then all I could manage was an incredulous, “What?”

  We didn’t talk long. He told me what he knew, which was very little. He said the news was online. As soon as I hung up, I immediately went to my laptop and did an Internet search for Roxanna’s name. I then stared numbly at a list of headlines. News of her arrest and subsequent death in custody had already been online for days, but I had been too busy smoking dross to notice.

  I struggled against a strong feeling of disbelief to stay focused, reading the backlit lines word by word while adverts incongruously blinked and jiggled in the periphery. According to the news stories, Roxanna had been charged with “wire fraud” for allegedly allowing her electronic signature to be used in a tax fraud scheme. Her arrest was to be the first of a wider investigation into the smuggling of Southeast Asian antiquities into the United States, an investigation that had included raids on major museums on the West Coast. Roxanna was placed in a federal detention facility in Seattle on a Friday—two days after our text message exchange—and she was found dead in her cell at around two the following Wednesday morning. I counted the hours between her arrest and her death and knew immediately what had killed her.

  Later, over the course of weeks and then months, details of Roxanna’s story would come out. She was detained by federal agents in her Seattle hotel room the day before her speaking engagement at the University of Washington. After four hours of interrogation, Roxanna was arrested and being taken away just as a colleague from the university arrived at her hotel room to take her to dinner. Knocking at her door, Roxanna’s colleague was astonished when federal agents emerged, saying they were on “official business” as they hustled Roxanna into an elevator. In an effort to explain the awkward situation, Roxanna told her colleague that she had “made a mistake” and “faxed her signature” before the elevator door slid shut and put an abrupt end to the conversation.

  Because Roxanna was arrested on a Friday evening, she could not appear in court until the following Monday. In the interim she was to be held at the five-hundred-bed Federal Detention Center at SeaTac near the Seattle airport. During the check-in process she was given a brief medical screening. Records of the screening were later obtained by Maria Cantwell, the Democratic senator from Washington, at the request of one of Roxanna’s colleagues who, on behalf of Roxanna’s family and friends, was looking for answers. The review indicated that, among other things, Roxanna was taking medication for depression and chronic constipation. The latter is a side effect of opium use that I, too, experienced whenever I was smoking daily. Opium slows one’s digestive system to a crawl, which is why there is runaway diarrhea during withdrawal.

  According to other inmates at the detention center who were quoted in the papers, Roxanna became ill over the weekend with “flu-like symptoms,” including nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. She was deemed too sick to attend her court hearing on Monday but managed to make the hearing in a wheelchair the following day. Because of Roxanna’s dual citizenship, the judge considered the sixty-two-year-old woman with one leg a flight risk and denied bail.

  Roxanna was returned to the detention facility where her symptoms worsened. Medication was given to her but to no effect. Fellow inmates allegedly reported to a guard that Roxanna was vomiting something that “smelled like excrement.” Badly in need of a shower, Roxanna at one point used a plastic chair as a walker, inching along the prison corridors to get to the shower room, when she lost her balance and fell onto the floor. According to one inmate, this happened right in front of a guard who did nothing to help. “The officer watched this happen and simply gave her dirty looks,” was how the inmate was quoted on the website of the Seattle Weekly. Some of the inmates then helped Roxanna to the shower, even turning on the water for her because she was too weak to do it herself.

  That night, the detention facility was put under lockdown as usual at ten, and sometime later, inmates in neighboring cells heard Roxanna’s frantic screams for help. The sound was so alarming that one of the inmates later told a reporter that she began praying for Roxanna. A guard told Roxanna through her cell door that she would have to wait until morning for medical attention, but Roxanna did not live to see another day. Paramedics were finally called and opened her cell door around 2 A.M. An inmate in a neighboring cell could see Roxanna when the cell door was opened. She saw Roxanna “on the floor, with her eyes open, but clearly dead.”

  Reading between the lines, I tried to piece together Roxanna’s last days. While traveling, Roxanna switched to eating opium instead of smoking it. She carried the liquid chandu in a tiny brown dropper bottle, a smaller version of the one we used during our smoking sessions. Because just a single drop under the tongue was the equivalent of several pipes, Roxanna didn’t need to bring much opium along with her. She never overindulged while eating opium, taking only enough to keep the withdrawal symptoms at bay. Roxanna rarely discussed this most inconvenient aspect of her addiction, but she once told me that on one previous arrival at an American airport she had been sent to secondary inspection. The official who searched her didn’t give her bottle of chandu a second look. Nobody, including the authorities, knew what high-quality opium looked or smelled like, and a limping, elderly woman was beyond suspicion in most situations anyway.

  I surmise that Roxanna must have had an opportunity to flush her chandu down the toilet during the time she was being interrogated in her hotel room. While checking in at the detention facility, she might have kept quiet about her addiction—and a modern-day doctor would know nothing about the subtle characteristics that mark an opium addict. Did Roxanna think she could ride out the withdrawal on her own? She must have known what would happen if she admitted the truth: a forced regimen of methadone, the synthetic opioid that is used as a heroin substitute. Methadone is just as addictive as opium, and
its withdrawal symptoms are said to be worse and last longer than those of natural opiates.

  Roxanna had a very high threshold for pain. During one of our sessions—the opium as usual allowing us to converse with unemotional candor—she confided to me that her old injuries still caused her considerable and constant pain. Waking up from a period of sleep was the worst, she said, when the pain throughout her body was so overwhelming that she admitted her first thoughts upon awakening were often of suicide.

  My own opium use was always recreational—even when I rationalized it as a form of “research.” For Roxanna, opium took away pain and gave her the strength to persevere. Could she have used other painkillers? Sure. Would an addiction to Vicodin or Oxycontin be better for her overall health? I’m not a doctor, but it seems to me that the way opium vapors are absorbed into the bloodstream through the lungs and not via the stomach lining might in itself make opium preferable to taking pills. Then again, I know of no studies into the long-term effects of opium vapors on the lungs. I should also point out that I am not trying to justify Roxanna’s opium use, or anyone else’s, on the theory that the narcotic is superior to modern painkillers. I’m too familiar with opium’s self-serving nature to be an advocate.