The Last Opium Den (5 page)

I approach the regulation rickety slat stairs, ascend one step, and I can smell it: the most lovely smell on earth. At the top of the rickety stairs is a rickety door. Above the door is nailed a piece of wood painted with the image of a protective spirit-creature, sword in mouth, beneath the octagonal symbol of the Chinese Eight Trigrams. I knock, then knock again. The head and shirtless upper body of a young man protrude from the window to my left, waving me in.

I enter a dark room at the far side of which is an altar in shambles. The shirtless young man appears, beckons me up a step into another room. There, on the floor, are the bamboo mats, the trays of lamps, pipes, and other implements. A few men recline on their sides, their heads resting on little wooden pillow-benches.

“Chiang ici?”

“Papa, oui,” the young man responds. He leaves the room through a second doorway, which leads to a sagging porch of sorts. He returns with an old man shuffling in tow.

“Chiang?”

The old man nods. I present him with the bag of tea. He beams, beholds it as if it were treasure. He gently kicks one of the supine men, rousing him, summoning him to rise, then gestures that I take his place on the mat. Another man appears, shirtless, shoeless, hunkering on the other side of the tray that lies by my head. He, too, though quite a bit older than the man who led me in, refers to Chiang as Papa. Soon I will learn that it is not a matter of bloodline. It is what one properly calls the lord of the den: Papa.

As I lie there, looking about, I recall my old romantic visions of the opium den where I was born to lie: the dark brocade curtains and velvet cushions of luxurious decadence, the lovely loosened limbs of recumbent exotic concubines. Well, Chiang’s old lady may have loose limbs, but those are the only adjective and the only noun of my visions that here pertain. The place really is a dive.

It is then that I recall every reliable account of an opium den that I have read or heard. Except for the golden-era salons of Shanghai, public opium dens had always been dives. From the first New York City newspaper account of an opium den of 131 years ago—the same year, 1869, that Charles Dickens’s visits to the opium dens of Ratcliffe Highway, London, elicited similar descriptions—to the account, 85 years later, of the last opium den in New York, that is how they had all been depicted: as dives. Where had I gotten those fucking brocade curtains from?

Chiang tells the pipe man that there is to be no charge—I learn this later—and that I am to be invited to share in any meal. He himself prepares for me a little pot of good black tea to sip between pipes. It is as if money, even in this poorest of places, no longer has anything to do with any of it: not with him, not with the opium, not with this place. It is as if he, like the old image above the door, is here now only to do what he was born to do, and to ward off the end of a dying world of which he alone remains.

The lamp is lit, the pipe is tilted. I am home.