Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (24 page)

He wracked his brain, repeatedly searching avenues of thought for a way out, to find, however small, something to alleviate his plight. The heat ratcheted up the tension in the prison, intensifying minor discomfort into misery. Near despair, horribly ill from withdrawal, he noticed his oversize pad of high-quality art paper.

Unobtainable in Thailand, the thick parchment-style paper was suitable for charcoal, pastels, and watercolors. Only one piece of it remained— another problem he had have to rectify whenever he saw the missionaries … something else to bitch about.

Then inspiration bubbled up in his mind like champagne in a shaken bottle. One sheet remained—made valuable by its very scarcity.

Excited, he grabbed the pad and rushed over to Min’s house—a Thai Chinese man especially avid for his pictures.

Swearing by everything he held sacred, Johann pressed home his revelation. He had only one piece of paper left; special paper that could not be purchased in Asia. Although he had not drawn anything on it yet, it represented the only way for him to create a work of art.

It was not as good as one of his pictures, which normally sold for four-to five-hundred, but it was ‘potentially’ a picture, deserving of a few hundred dollars at least. Without it, he could not create anything.

Amazingly, Min agreed. He’d hold the paper as a kind of ‘hostage’ for ransom. He gave Johann a hundred dollars and demanded he redeem it
when his money came through. He also made Johann give him a much reduced price on the next thing he drew, to be produced within thirty days, as he was notoriously unreliable in finishing work.

Eventually the missionaries returned; the money problem was solved, and life for Johann settled back into its usual routine.

He ransomed the ‘pre-art,’ and entered Bang Kwang legend as the man who sold a blank piece of paper to a Chinese drug lord for 2,500 baht, about as likely as a lake trout winning the Tour de France.

Journey to Ixtlan

T
he gentle warmth of the early morning sun felt good on our shoulders as we wended our way through the bustle of the prison waking and readying itself for the day. Stepping aside for the carts wheeling in sacks of rice, piles of vegetables, blocks of ice, and other supplies; dodging other prisoners rushing around on last minute personal errands before their working day began. We headed toward the front lawn near the building’s gate.

It was the beginning of December, the best time of year in Thailand, weather-wise, and Johann and I looked forward to a cool, breezy day perfect for inner exploration and discovery.

We had been occupied for months with the methods and techniques of sorcery described by Carlos Castaneda. Castaneda’s fascinating books are based on his experiences as an apprentice to a Yaqi Indian sorcerer in the Sonoran Desert of the American Southwest.

Johann—my best friend, was becoming a shaman. In furtherance of this transformation, he managed to obtain the first four books in Castaneda’s series. He worked his way through them with the intense dedication of a man determined to master the intricacies of a particularly difficult and demanding craft.

Although my own years of mystical studies were long behind me, I enjoyed helping Johann decipher the trickier passages. There is a rare sense of fulfillment in assisting someone’s spiritual growth.

Overcoming the miseries of our surroundings, we focused on the arcane knowledge from a different hemisphere. This philosophical quest was well-suited to the primitive South East Asian prison where we found ourselves. It is a place with myriad physical distractions, but lacking in things to occupy the mind, and subjecting the body to harsh privations while emptying the mind of minutiae is the classic recipe for achieving higher states of consciousness. Against our will, compelled by circumstance, this effective formula eased our metamorphosis considerably.

Johann and I were deep in discussion on the second book,
The Journey to Ixtlan
. The theme is a journey made by sorcerers to a city that does not exist. Castaneda and his teacher, Don Juan, imperceptibly cross over onto a spiritual plane adjacent to our own; an exercise designed to show Carlos the malleable nature of reality.

Ixtlan only exists as a state of mind, populated by beings themselves transported from different dimensions. It appears to Carlos as almost identical to the arid landscape of Northern Mexico, the town itself an older version of the pueblo’s common to the remote parts of the region. He saw what he expected to see until he met the challenge Don Juan set for him: a metaphysical trap to drag him up to the next level of awareness.

Johann was as concerned with practical matters as with the theoretical implications of the journey. How does one recognize landmarks on a spiritual plane? What business, if any, should be conducted with other beings? How do you regularly transport yourself to these levels?

These complicated questions dominated our conversation. One issue, though, needed no further discussion. This was the use of an “Ally” to achieve various mystical objectives. A large part of Castaneda’s training was dedicated to the use of psychoactive plants, which Don Juan termed “allies.”
In the Yaqi tradition, such plants each belong to a kind of small deity; a being which may (or may not) choose to help a sorcerer. Thus, the spirit of a species of cactus peyote, might take a liking to a magician, and become his ally. Conversely, the plant spirit might dislike you, and render no assistance, therefore eliminated as a useful source of power.

The sort of help a plant ally gives includes aiding a sorcerer to “see” the future or past, to transport oneself to other mystical domains, and to gain insights or transformative visions. We had only one ally, but it was a powerful one: Cannabis Sativa.

Cannabis, or marijuana, was readily available in the prison. It was not as strong a hallucinogen as mescaline (derived from the peyote cactus), or other Yaqi allies, but it allowed you to have more control over psychic experiences. Heroin is useless for mystical exercises, and the only mushrooms growing in the prison were too toxic. It was cannabis or nothing.

The weed we used was good quality—not the best opiate variety, but the THC crystals glittered in the sunlight, thick on the pale yellow-green buds. A piece the size of the cotton on the end of a Q-tip was enough to get two people pleasantly high.

Johann crushed ten times that much into the beautiful teak-and-abalone shell pipe. He sparked a neon-blue clear plastic lighter and sucked in a lungful of smoke, grimacing slightly to keep from coughing. He passed it over to me, and I did the same.

We sat on the lawn which stretched for a hundred feet on the left side beyond the building’s front gate. The lawn was thirty feet wide and lined with small trees that were not large enough to provide shade or any hiding places.

A concrete path led straight from the front gate to the main factory; the lawn on one side, and a much larger vegetable garden on the other.

This sidewalk was perpetually busy, as it was the only paved artery connecting the building to the rest of the prison. Weekdays saw cartloads of
finished clothes (as the building’s main factory produced rip-off Levi’s and Gucci goods), taken out of the building for distribution. Supplies were delivered for the coffee shop. People came and went to visits. A steady stream of officers and prisoners on their daily errands walked on the path a few feet away from us.

Our choice of location for getting high was regarded as lunacy by many, who thought we were virtually guaranteed a quick trip to a punishment cell. But they wrongly assessed the authority’s psychology and perception. As Johann and I were fully aware, the guards and blue boys were on the lookout for “suspicious behavior.” Anyone seeming to be hiding something was immediately grabbed and interrogated. On the other hand, if one did what one wanted out in the open, completely unconcerned about others, the authorities were wholly uninterested.

Since farangs are already considered to be slightly mad by Thais, the fact that we chose to sit on the lawn in the heat of the day was unremarkable. The seeming absence of our guilt was a license to commit a crime.

Johann’s pipe gave off very little smoke, and it was our custom to hold our breath until only a trickle of smoke escaped our lungs, as the odor was not strong enough to draw attention to itself.

Carefree and quietly at peace, we sat smoking in direct sight of the guards at the gatehouse, three paces from the building’s foot traffic.

As the cannabis took effect, the world was slowly transformed, taking on a crystalline clarity. Dew on the grass caressed the light, every drop turned into a priceless diamond. Trees, bushes, the lawn all were infused with a limpid quality, each detail of nature becoming a jeweled wonder. Clouds in the sky formed a billowing armada of portents; the bearers of messages of the gods.

The powerful ganja helped to alter our perceptions. It enabled us to see an underlying, secret reality, one that lurked beneath the surface of ordinary life. Both of us were well practiced with guided imagery and visualization
techniques. Slipping into a waking dream took little effort, and with the aid of the potent cannabis, it was almost second nature.

We stared at the vegetable garden and at the walls that enclosed the building. Gradually the scene before us wavered, and then faded away. It was replaced by a vivid landscape partly drawn from our imaginations partly from our own travels into deserts. Johann and I recreated Castaneda’s journey into the Sonoran Desert, a mountainous terrain in Northern Mexico, next to the border states of Arizona and New Mexico.

With the ‘thousand yard stare,’ a method of staring without blinking that allowed us to peer more deeply into our altered state, we took turns describing the vision we had conjured up.

We plodded through bone-dry hills and canyons, a scene that grew in solidity with each step we took. A narrow goat-path could be discerned among the boulders and dust, snaking its way uphill and down dale. We followed its course, noting the occasional lizard and scorpion scurrying off at our approach.

We topped a rise, and low squat rectangles of adobe dwellings materialized before us. Earth-colored, clustered together tightly, our Ixtlan was silent and empty. Whatever beings inhabited the city had chosen to conceal themselves.

Johann and I reached the border where the desert ended, which was a few minutes walk, taking us among the buildings. We drew back from the town with a sense of foreboding; the need for caution impressed itself upon us from an unknown source.

Gradually, we pulled ourselves back to the hill-top, where we sat looking down on the goat-path and the town. The traffic of the prison returned in our peripheral vision, but did not disturb us. It was remote enough to be insignificant.

Time felt suspended, and a great distance separated us from events in the prison. Johann continued to load the pipe as whim dictated, and our fascination with Ixtlan kept the vision fresh.

Tooey, our Thai ‘houseboy’ who cleaned and ran errands for us, hurried by, but did not evoke much interest in us. The fact that he did not say hello seemed odd, but we were too preoccupied to make an issue of it. He returned the way he had appeared, rapidly.

Later still, Todd—an American who shared space with us in the house, also appeared, walking past us to confer briefly with guards in the gatehouse, then past us again.

His failure to greet us was also atypical, but not particularly disturbing. If they were wrapped up in their own concerns, we would not take it as an insult.

Two other neighbors, both Germans from our cell in the dorm went by us and out the gate. It seemed that they had returned a few minutes later, but our sense of time was skewed. Neither said a word to us.

When, at last, we felt more than saw the long shadows of the trees, signaling afternoon had arrived—the end of the day, we drifted back into reality. We awoke from our voyage refreshed, and in an excellent mood, a bit languid and completely at ease.

We had not accomplished anything, per se, except to evoke a simulacrum of Ixtlan, but it was a step along a “path with heart,” as Don Juan might say. It was a thing well done, and therefore valuable in its own right.

No one was in the house when we went back to change and take showers, though there was the usual activity in the houses next to ours. People were busy in preparation for being locked down for the night.

On returning from the area next to the toilets where we showered, Tooey, Todd, and Heinrich (our German neighbor), accosted us with cries of surprise and disbelief.

“Where were you?”

“Yeah, what happened to you guys?”

“We were looking for you everywhere!”

Johann and I looked at them strangely. He spoke first.

“We were on the front lawn all day. You walked right by us.”

All three denied it with feeling, shaking their heads in unison.

“No way”

“Impossible!”“Not!”

They pestered us to tell them where we had been hiding and to stop playing games. The argument grew heated, and our denials were considered patently absurd.