The Last Opium Den (3 page)

On the way out, my companion speaks again with men round the table. Yes, this place, with its maze of rooms, had once been an opium den. But that was long ago. “Many year, no fin,” the eldest of them says to me.

After days and nights in Chinatown, days and nights of wandering and searching pleasure palaces and hellholes of Bangkok, I begin to see that the true presiding god of this place is Colonel Sanders. Images of the Colonel are everywhere; franchises abound, many of their entrances graced with life-size white plaster statues of the Giver of Fowl.

More than 200 Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in Thailand, not a single opium den. Somebody tells me that I should not leave Bangkok without trying the really special coffee at this really cool new place called Starbucks.

By land, by water, by plane. Across this river, through that jungle, each town dustier than the last.

Phnom Penh. I’ve been practicing my Cambodian for days, a vocabulary of one word whose proper pronunciation lies vaguely between a pian and a phian. Not far from the hotel where I’m staying, there’s a small, enclosed plaza that is notorious for its murder rate: a killing or so every week. At one corner of the plaza is a very big barroom, made all the bigger by the absence of a wall and part of the roof, which appear to have been lost to an explosion some years ago, thus opening the place to the limitless black Cambodian night. The bar, its entrance guarded by a machine-gun-bearing sentry, is loud with harsh Asian rock ‘n’ roll and screaming of all sorts. Outside, a bit beyond where the missing wall used to be, is a gigantic screen on which is projected a Malaysian monster movie with Cambodian subtitles, and the soundtrack screams that accompany every drive-in-size out-of-focus bloodletting occasionally drown out the screams of the place. In an area near the front of the bar, a large and formidable Cambodian woman, perhaps in her late 50s, stalks amid a gaggle of young girls, toward whom she directs not infrequent screams of her own. When our eyes meet, her face of stone turns to a vicious smile that flashes gold teeth, and she draws near.

“What you want, I have. All Phnom Penh. Anything. I have. You say me what want. I have.”

“A pian. You have a pian?”

She nods sternly, arrogantly, happily. “Yes. I have. What you want, I have. You say me what kind. I have all. Have 15-year-old. Have 13-year-old, have 12-year-old. What you want?”

Aged opium?

“Here, look this.” She snaps a snarl of clipped consonants, and a very small, very young, tawny-skinned girl joins us. “Here no many years. Like new. Twelve year. Not even bleed. See”—she flicks the girl’s lowered head upward—“like baby.” I can’t tell if the girl is actually adolescent or older and stunted by malnutrition. She is very skeletal. Her shoulder blades are sharp.

On the upstairs open-air porch of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, the lazy meandering of a lizard on a post near my table, the nighttime breeze from the Tonle Sap River, and the good, familiar taste of a hamburger are like a calmative. I hook up with a guy who knows his way around. He hooks me up with a Cambodian guy who really knows his way around and who will do anything for money.

Through the swarm of beggars outside the club, the Cambodian guy leads me about a mile or so along Sisowath Quay, then down a dark backstreet, to a scrap-patched bamboo shack. There is a group of shirtless, scrawny Cambodian men. There is a long, involved discussion, with no small amount of obvious debate among the group of shirtless, scrawny men. My companion explains to me that the legacy of the Khmer Rouge is that Cambodian no longer trusts Cambodian. In the end, there is assent among the men. They will sell me opium pellets for eating. But I don’t want to eat opium. I want to smoke opium. I want to smoke opium in an opium den. There is no opium den, they say. They do not even have a pipe. They know of no one who has a pipe. We leave.

My companion assures me that out in the wild swamp country where the Tonle Sap and the Bassac and the Mekong are one, there are men who still smoke opium. One of them is a friend of his. This friend is beyond the reach of any telephone. All we can do is go to the swamp country and hope that we will find him. The journey cannot be made by car. We hire a two-passenger moto whose driver knows the twisted trails of the outback, and we ride off into the night.

In the middle of nowhere, my companion tells the driver to stop. Outside of the moto’s little beam of light, all is black except for the moonless sea of stars overhead. My companion walks away, vanishing into the blackness, and a few minutes later returns. He tells me that he will lead me to his friend, then return to town. His friend will drive me back later.

His friend’s hut stands high on stilts amid the boughs and rustling branches of trees. At the top of a bamboo ladder, the friend stands smiling. My companion says some words to him, and the friend welcomes me naturally and warmly as my companion leaves us.

The friend is younger than I, and he seems to be a very happy man. He is lean, sinewy, and moves with slow grace. The walls of the hut are made of bamboo and woven strips of frond, its floor of slats. There is light from a small oil lamp, and from candles. His eyes are glassy. He has been smoking ganja from a water pipe, and he continues to do so as I sit on one of the hut’s two soft and timeworn mats. That he knows I cannot understand him does not keep him from speaking to me, ever smiling, occasionally nodding in delight as if I have enjoyed or agreed with this or that observation of his.

Done with his ganja, he turns his attention to a chipped and cracked lacquer box, from which he takes a large soft black square that is wrapped in cellophane imprinted with little yellow pagodas. He unwraps the opium, places it on a lacquer tray that holds two small, sharp knives, a pair of thin-bladed scissors, a box of matches, a spindle fashioned from a bicycle spoke, a short rectangular strip of stiff dry frond, and an unlighted coconut-oil lamp whose glass chimney has been crafted by expertly cutting the bottom from a jelly-jar glass. Lifting a slat from the floor, he withdraws a cloth-wrapped opium pipe from a hidden compartment. The pipe is about 18 inches long, made of dark carved wood, with a damper saddle of brass and a bowl of stone.

With one of the knives, he cuts off a piece of the opium, kneads and flattens it, and divides it into several equal parts. With the scissors, he trims the wick of the lamp. He strikes a match and lights the lamp, adjusting its homely chimney. The sweet, subtle scent of the oil laces the air. With the point of the spindle he takes a tiny piece of opium, places it on the piece of dry frond, and, over the chimneyed flame of the lamp, turns and rolls the opium with the spindle point until it is transformed into a perfect minuscule cone the consistency of soft, almost melted caramel, and the rich, tawny color of hazelnut.

He transfers this lovely morsel from the spindle point to the small hole at the center of the pipe’s solid stone piece. As he reclines, mouth to pipe, he tilts the bowl over the lamp’s chimney, holding it in place precisely where the alchemy can be wrought—the elusive “sweet spot”—and sucks mightily. The opium bubbles, and the delicious perfume of the stuff, more beautiful than that of any garden, flowers unseeable and unknowable, mingles with color turned to scent, hue of tawny hazelnut to aroma of hazelnut roasting, foreshadowing more sublime synesthesia to come. Tending all the while with spindle point the bubbling opium in its tiny hole, he sucks until his cheeks are all high bone and taut concave flesh, an intense facial exercise that after some years leaves the imprint of the habit on the contours of the smoker’s face: those “Ho Chi Minh cheekbones,” by which every habituated smoker can recognize another.

The morsel done, he scrapes out the toxic residue from the damper, prepares another morsel, sets it in the pipe, and passes the sucking end to me, instructing me gently with words I do not comprehend as he positions, adjusts, and holds the pipe for me over the sweet spot of the lamp. My pattern of breath is wrong, and the bubbling opium extinguishes again and again. Finally, yes—he nods, there is the baptism of approval in his eyes—I have it: the vapors deep in my lungs, wisping full from the fastness of my mouth, the opium bubbling in luscious magic in the pipe bowl over the lamp. Then it is gone. There follows another pipeful for me, then one for him; yet another for me, another for him. We smile to each other from our parallel mats, the pipe and tray of implements between us. I offer him an American cigarette, which he takes with delight. We lie back and smoke; and now, wordlessly, we understand each other perfectly in the eloquence of a silence that not only contains all that has ever been and all that ever will be said, but also drosses the vast babel of it, leaving only the ethereal purity of that wordless poetry that only the greatest of poets have glimpsed in epiphany. Their epiphanies seem to be borne for me to read in the cigarette smoke that swirls above me. Shakespeare—“O learn to read what silent love hath writ”—entwined with Pound’s great and final testament: “I have tried to write Paradise / Do not move / Let the wind speak / that is paradise.”

To learn to read what silent love hath writ, to bow to the power of the wind. This is to live. This is to know that what one can say or write is as nothing before that silence and that power. The Ch’an master Niu-t’ou Fa-Yung, more than 1,300 years ago: “How can we obtain truth through words?”

All that in the swirling smoke of a Marlboro Light.

Through rifts in the thatched roof, I can see the stars in the black of night. There are the sounds of night birds, the lone distant howls of creatures. Feral dogs? Wolves? Demons? No matter: those that fly and those that prowl, we are beneath the same stars, fleeting spirits born of and destined to the same almighty silence. The oldest word in Western literature, the word with which the Iliad began: rage. Yes. To speak is to rage against that silence whose winds are the only true poets. I think of Homer beholding these same stars. To rage, to kneel in wisdom before wisdom that is beyond wisdom. What does it matter? I grind out my cigarette. Another pipe for me, another for him. Another for me, another for him.

I am not going to rhapsodize here about opium. But I will say this: it is the perfect drug. There is nothing else like it. In this age of pharmaceutical-pill pushing, it delivers all that drugs such as Prozac promise. Forget about the medieval-like bugaboo of serotonin, the atrocities of Freud, the iatrogenic “disorders” that compose the Malleus Maleficarum by which today’s shrinks and psychopharmacologists con their vulnerable marks. All the pills and all the whoredom of psychotherapy in the world are nothing compared with the ancient Coptic words of the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” It is as simple and unsolvable as that. Forget about the interplay of opium and serotonin. Its interplay with the wisdom of the Gospel of Thomas is the thing. Its vapors are of that thing within.

I believe that this is why this most delicately exquisite of intoxicants, this least stupefying of drugs—less so even than marijuana—is nevertheless so addictive. How could the taste of paradise be otherwise? Yes, of course, so much better it would be to possess that taste purely through understanding and living. But as wretched a thing as terminal opium addiction might be, it is no more wretched than addictions of more familiar and acceptable sorts. Opium addicts can live to fine old ages, and can an addiction to paradise, artificial as it may be, be considered more ignoble than an addiction to television, movies, or the other lower artificialities of a world so vacant as to be aware of and conversant in the pseudo-science of serotonin but not of or in the wisdom of Thomas, a world so vacant as to be enamored of the false connoisseurship of rancid grape juice but not the true connoisseurship of something such as opium, let alone of life?

Enough of this profundity. The labor involved in its elucidation is far too great. You want enlightenment? Go get it yourself. Anyway, as I said—or was it one of those other guys?—paradise has no words.

And my friend in the hut, it turns out, has no moto. He has to walk a mile through the scrub to borrow a neighbor’s. He does this. Before returning me to town, he rolls a cigarillo of ganja, mixing the ganja with the accumulated toxic residues of the opium pipe, and for good measure sprinkling it with a white crystalline powder that I take to be methedrine—ya ba, the new plague. I lie there watching him smoke it. When he is done, he stands, and we descend the bamboo ladder to an old and battered moto. We bolt off into the black of night, swerving at breakneck speed down unseen trails. He seems to know the place of every sharp bend, every furrow, and every rock, even though he cannot see them. I sit clutching the seat behind him. I can only wonder at the effects of his cigarillo. We begin to bounce roughly over big exposed roots of trees, splash whirring through splattering mud, branches and brush scraping now at an elbow or an ankle, then across the face. Turning to me with a laugh, he yells one of the few English words he knows: “Shortcut.”

After one last high bouncing jolt over God knows what, we come down on a paved road. Now I can smell the moto’s speed, and my friend’s laughing, talking, and turned-away driving increase. The road is deserted, but the lights of Phnom Penh can be seen. It is maybe three or four in the morning. We zoom round a bend, the road widens, and there, before us, the police have set up a random checkpoint blockade. My friend slows as we near the police. They are still a good distance away, but they can discern our slowing down, and they relax their stance and lower their machine guns. It is then that my friend, turning to me with renewed and invigorated laughter, pats the tank of the moto as if it were the flank of a horse, then jolts dead straight ahead at full speed through the blockade, never turning to look, but jabbering and laughing to me all the while. We are past the blockade, still moving at full speed—faster now, suddenly downhill, when the machine-gun fire is heard like long strips of firecrackers going off behind us. Are they shooting at us or over us? My friend swerves off the road, onto another, then another, emerges at a bridge, beyond which he swerves again, and there, as if from nowhere, is the entrance to my hotel. He wishes me a fond farewell, and he is off again into the night.