The Last Opium Den Read Online Free Page B

roamings, my friend explains that opium is a dead drug. The drug of Thailand today, as throughout Southeast Asia, is ya ba, “crazy medicine”—speed. While Thailand has all but eradicated the opium poppy in its effort to ingratiate itself with the Western powers, the country is still a central transport area for the heroin refined from the opium of the poppy fields of other, nearby regions. More and more, however, the transport caravans of the drug lords are hauling truckloads of amphetamine as well as of heroin.
     
    As my friend saw and convincingly expressed it, the relatively recent and fast-growing spread of cheap and plentiful ya ba is a plague that will ultimately prove far more destructive than heroin to the foundations of Asian society, just as speed itself is, in the long run, far more physically destructive and deadly a drug than heroin. I could go to the drug bazaars of the slums of Klong Toey, west of Bangkok. There I could buy all the marijuana, all the crack, all the heroin, all the speed that any man could ever crave. But I would find no opium.
     
    In the morning, I meet with an older friend of my friend. He remembers the opium-den days of Bangkok, and he knows Chinatown well. He takes me to an ancient “teahouse” of many stories on Yaowarat Road in Chinatown. At the second landing, he exchanges words with a group of ominous-looking men gathered round a circular table. One of them nods, and we proceed through a curtain into a narrow hall that becomes a maze of narrow halls, lined with small rooms. An old woman takes us to one of the rooms, brings us two small, dirty teacups and a pot of hot tea. A teenage girl enters, then another. These girls bear numbers, pinned to their open shirts. One is No. 58. The other, astoundingly, is No. 199. How many girls does this maze hold? I like No. 58, and, ahem, she says she likes me. She pours tea into the dirty cups, begins stroking my crotch. She looks fresh, new to this place and still full of life. She speaks a little English, and while my companion lies back to enjoy his tea, I employ the only Thai that I have almost learned to properly intone: fin, which, in the second of its five tones, means opium. She mistakes my meaning as a desire for heroin. She seems shocked, makes gestures of jabbing a spike into her slender forearm. “Why want? No good.” Then blasé: “We buy, then we make love.” My companion explicates in Thai. She seems no longer shocked but, rather, nonplussed, regarding me with a bemused smile as if I were a most odd man, misplaced in time.
     
    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