Steven Martin - Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction

Copyright 2012 by Steven Martin

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

V ILLARD B OOKS and V ILLARD & V C IRCLED Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Richard Curtis Associates for permission to reprint excerpts from The Big Smoke by Emily Hahn (The New Yorker, February 15, 1969), copyright 1969. Reprinted by permission of Richard Curtis Associates.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martin, Steven.
Opium fiend: a 21st century slave to a 19th century addiction / Steven Martin.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-51785-2
1. Martin, Steven. 2. Drug paraphernaliaCollectors and collectingUnited StatesBiography. 3. AntiquesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
NK4897.M36 2012
362.293092dc23 2012006896
[B]

www.villard.com

Jacket design: Christopher Sergio
Jacket photograph: Andreas Rosenkranz/arcangel-images.com

v3.1

This memoir chronicles my experiences as a collector of antique opium-smoking paraphernalia. I do not advocate the use of opium. I do not wish to convey that anyone who smokes opium will have the same experiences that I had. I am not suggesting that anyone do or not do any of the things that I have done. My aim is simply to share what has happened to me. Most of the names in this memoir have been changed, the notable exceptions being Roxanna Brown, Karl Taro Greenfeld, and my own. Some locations and biographical details have also been altered to preserve the anonymity of the persons discussed. All research conducted for this book was my own, and any errors contained within it are also my own.

*Traditional English-language place names reflect those used in the text.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore

Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven (1845)

Halloween, that day of symbolic horrors, seemed an appropriate time to stop. I had already stocked the refrigerator of my apartment in Bangkoks Chinatown with nutritious, easy-to-digest food such as goats milk and yogurt, even though I knew it would be days before I could eat again. The flush lever on my toilet had long before rusted tight, and Id become accustomed to lifting the lid of the water tank and pulling up on the little chain. Within a day or so that porcelain lid would be too heavy for me to lift, so I took it off and put it behind the toilet where I wouldnt trip over it.

The door to my ninth-floor flat was situated down a dark corridor and next to a little-used stairwell that was marked as a fire escape. Like most doors in Chinatown, mine was barred against intruders with a wrought iron outer door. From inside the apartment it was possible to reach out through the bars of the outer door and fasten a large padlock on its latch, giving the impression that nobody was home. My bedroom window looked out on the corridor, and it, too, was barred. In addition to the bars, this window had layers of opacity to ensure privacy: on the inside heavy drapes, and on the outside a tinted windowpane completely obscured by a screen covered with dust so thick it might have been mistaken for a curtain of ash-colored velvet. From outside my apartment it was all but impossible to tell that I was inside.

For months I had been a recluse to the extent that my face-to-face social obligations were almost nil. But this situation was masked by the fact that I worked from homepeople rarely saw me in person anyway. Communications didnt worry me. Everybody knew that email had become my preferred method of keeping in touch. What they didnt know was that Id discovered email was perfect for preserving a faade of normalcy no matter how crazy things got. I could take as long as I needed to reply while fabricating plausible excuses as to why I couldnt leave my apartment. If I became too addled to talk coherently, I could dodge telephone calls by simply ignoring them. Roxanna was the one person whose calls would be difficult to ignore, but her invitations had fallen off as my downward spiral had become more and more apparent.

As I waited for the symptoms to start, I began to think of ways to occupy my mind. I was no stranger to this scenario: I had twice tried to put a halt to my daily smoking. My first attempt might have succeeded if only Id been more disciplined. Backing off from the habit wasnt as difficult as Id thought it would be, and this had made me confident that I was still my own master. But then I lost control. Two months of restrained dabbling on weekends had descended into a daily orgy of indulgence.

A second attempt at cutting back was harder, but Id managed to abstain for a whole month before finding the perfect excuse for a relapse. And thus began my free fall. Subsequent attempts to quit were painful ordeals that lasted a single harrowing night and ended at dawn, when I would crawl back to the mat, light the lamp, and smoke with a voraciousness that shocked me. I watched as my own hands prepared pipe after pipe, both thrilled and terrified to know that a line Id memorized from a Victorian-era book now applied to me: I had succumbed to the fascinations of opium.

By Halloween 2007, I had been smoking opium continuously for monthsas much as thirty pipes a day. I decided to try to quit again. This time, I told myself, I would not fail. I knew I would be in for a rougher ride; I had let my habit get so out of hand that the withdrawal would be many times worse than my previous ordeals. I recalled those days of soul-piercing pain, the nights of sweat-soaked insomnia, and I tried to imagine how anything might be worse.

To steel myself for the storm, I pretended that I was going to suffer a bout of malaria in the days before quinine. The idea appealed to my sense of the romantichere was another age-old affliction that had to be weathered stoically. But I knew very well that malarial fevers were never as ugly as what I would soon experience. Among my small library of century-old books with gilt leather bindings I had discovered a paragraph or two that described in clinical prose what I was about to endure.

I had read about the all-encompassing pain that drove opium addicts to beg for the relief that could be had only via a few draws on the pipe. I had read of people tightly trussed to their beds and locked in rooms by loved ones who then stopped their ears with raw cotton to block out the tortured screams. There were tales of prayers shrieked through the night; pleas for a hasty death that were sometimes answered by a body too shocked to function beyond a few days without opium. The morning after would be no scene of poignant demise; no Death of Chatterton angelically sprawled across his bed high above London. It would more resemble the aftermath of a cholera victims death throesa room defiled by the performance of a macabre, bone-twisting Watusi to the rhythms of explosive farts and geysers of liquid shit.