The Last Opium Den Read Online Free Page A

where an insectivorous cuisine is common. We sit in the warm night air of a small cloistered square—more of a courtyard—in the heart of Nana, near where his girlfriend lives and works. The girls here are much more sedate, cooler, less rabid than those of Patpong Road.
     
    Between two bars, directly opposite a joint proclaiming, top floor 250 girls, is a little Buddhist shrine strewn with the flowers of the girls’ frequent offering. The passage from the courtyard leads to the main drag of Sukhumvit Soi 4, where, amid much smoke of oil and grill, street vendors cater to the taste of the girls: fried grasshoppers, fried grubs of different size and kind, fried beetles, served forth hot from bubbling oil in parcels of white greasy paper; roast-blackened baby sparrows, roast-blackened chicken feet, straight from the grill on skewers of splinter wood. My buddy has brought us a package of fried grasshoppers to share at the outdoor bar where we sit. The girls pay 10 baht, the equivalent of about 25 cents, for these scavenged or foraged delectables; everybody else pays twice that.
     
    “Have you ever had the maggots?” I ask, as he chews a mouthful of the almost tasteless fried grasshoppers, a fitting bar food, all salt and crunch, but a good source of protein as well. He shakes his head.
     
    “It’s the baby birds that scare me,” I say.
     
    Girls pass, approach the shrine, sweep back their hair with both hands in ritual obeisance.
     
    “They ask for a good night, a customer who treats them kindly,” observes my friend.
     
    Under the third precept of Buddhism, which demands abstinence from all sexual misconduct, 20 groups of women are listed as forbidden. Whores are not included among them.
     
    Again, flowers without smoke. My expatriate friend has been living in Bangkok for many years, and he tells me that he has never heard of the existence of an opium den.
     
    And yet Bangkok, with its vast Chinatown, is said to have boasted the biggest opium den in the world, an immense establishment on New Road, the oldest paved street in Bangkok. This biggest of opium dens is said to have been able to accommodate 8,000 smokers at once, and to have maintained a stock of 10,000 pipes. It is said to have operated into the early 1960s.
     
    Bored with the tourist joints of Patpong Road and Nana, I have asked another friend, a Bangkok native whose good name I shall leave unsullied, to take me where the Thai guys go. We drive across town to what he says is the best eating place in Bangkok. It is a nameless operation in a nameless alley near Songsawad Road in Chinatown. It does not exist by day, when the alley is crowded with trucks and the dense traffic of human haulers. It exists for only three hours, between six and nine at night, when a few old, unsteady folding tables and folding chairs are set out in the alley near the foodstuffs, fires, pots, and pans of two suddenly materialized cooking stalls. At the stroke of six, BMWs and chauffeured Mercedes-Benzes pull up at the corner of the alley; in minutes, all the chairs are taken. There are no menus. Some nights there are napkins, some nights not. Tonight is a lucky night.
     
    There are five tones in spoken Thai, each lending different meaning to a similar sound. I have no idea what is being said between my friend and the stall tenders, but some minutes later there arrive bowls of steaming fish-ball and noodle soup. The most coveted bird’s nests for the most precious of Chinese bird’s-nest soups are Thai: the swiftlet nests gathered from amid the paintings on the walls of a cave in the high, sheer cliffs of Koh Phi Phi Leh, an uninhabited island off the southern coast of the peninsula. A bowl of soup made from one of these small nests can cost the equivalent of between $200 and $300. And yet its taste is as nothing compared with the taste of the soup in this nameless dark alley. Its price is 60 baht, the equivalent of a dollar and change.
     
    Throughout the night’s