The Story of Junk (28 page)

It's seventeen hours to Tokyo in a jumbo jet without a single unoccupied seat. Everyone but us is Japanese. Before the movie starts there's a newsreel. The big news is a midair crash of a Japan Air Lines plane. There are a few survivors, somehow—I don't get how, the broadcast's in Japanese. Three of the survivors, a child and two young women, appear in interviews, heads bandaged, necks braced. Fire has left one badly burned. Our cabin is quiet. This is Japan Air Lines.

Seven hours into the first leg of the trip, I get dopesick in my seat. I'm choking on my tongue, can't swallow. My skin feels loose on my skeleton, my eyes are running. So's my nose. The fellow in the seat next to me offers a pack of Kleenex, asks if I want any help from the crew. No, no, I say, and head for the john. I can see Mary Motion sitting a few rows behind me, her eyes wide and wondering, and Mario on the other side of the plane, pretending he doesn't know me.

In my bag I've got a couple of methadone biscuits, some Lomotil and codeine, but no dope. I've been too cautious. Didn't want to travel with powder. What a jerk. What am I making this trip for, if not to carry? I stumble into the loo and bite off a piece of a meth biscuit, swallow a codeine. A minute later, it comes back up. My entire body retches, but nothing else is in it. I catch myself in the blue-green light of the tiny bathroom mirror. I have a sense there isn't a drop of fluid left inside me, no bile, no blood. I don't know how I can still be alive. If appearances mean anything, I'm not.

I swallow another piece of meth. Before I return to my seat, a stewardess brings me the sugar I ask for in little packets; down they go. I stare at her, eyes full of tears, I'm choking on my breath. “More sugar, please,” I gasp. She hesitates a moment, gets me another handful. Soon the hacking cough stops, but I'm far from feeling right. My arms seem a very long distance away, my hair feels false. Maybe this is normal, I think, as I notice the other passengers. They look green, too.

At the Tokyo airport, we change to a smaller jet for the trip to Bangkok, another five hours away. Everyone on this plane is Indian, they're going to Kashmir. Three men dressed in flimsy white leggings and long flowing blouses, their heads wrapped in white turbans, their faces hidden by full graying beards, are the only passengers in the first-class seats. I'm at a window in coach. I don't know why I feel resentful—this is their part of the world. White skin doesn't always bestow privileges. I stare out the window. The sky's black.

For dinner we get soba noodles, seaweed, and some kind of bean cake for the third time since the trip began. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, the menu's always the same. So is the entertainment: the plane-crash news. Over the summer of 1985, there have been more crashes than at any one time in the history of commercial aviation. I try to sleep. No use.

It's midnight when we arrive in Bangkok. Police are everywhere, soldiers too. There's been a coup, the borders are closed. Our cab driver says, “It's nothing.”

Many more sleepless hours pass in the hotel room I share with Mary, who falls out the minute we get inside. The thin carpet is red, the bedspread is red, the curtains are red. The walls appear to be yellow, I'm not sure. We haven't bothered with the lights. The neon glow from the street outside provides all the illumination I can bear.

Mario spends the night in the hotel bar, chatting up a “sex-teen”-year-old girl, one of many. I stay in my room, chipping at the codeine. I'm trying to save the meth. We don't know how long it'll be before we can score—maybe hours, maybe days. I find more packets of sugar from the plane, eat them. I pull the thin bedsheet over my head. First I'm freezing, then I'm sweating. All night long I'm turning the air conditioner off and on, on and off, opening and closing the window. The air outside is rank. I listen for gunfire, hear nothing.

In the morning I force myself into the shower. The water rails against my skin like pellets of thin steel. I order coffee from room service. It arrives in a steaming pot. I drink all of it.

At the hotel travel agency, I buy our plane tickets north. We're headed for Chiang Mai, a town in the hills near the Burmese border, popular with tourists. “It's cooler there,” the ticket agent tells me. “May I arrange your hotel?” Angelo's already given me the name of the place he wants us to stay. The agent reserves three rooms.

My hands are shaking so badly I can't hold the tickets. I stuff them in my bag, approach the hotel dining room. A breakfast buffet is set up on the bar, staffed by men in olive-and-gold bus jackets, standing where the hookers had been the night before. The men are all short and all have the same haircut, styled, possibly, with an ax. They look pockmarked and sallow. I down another coffee, try to swallow a piece of fruit, settle for a few bites of sticky rice. Mario comes in, smiling, clean-shaven, wet from the shower. The girl was very nice, he says. It was fun in the bar last night. He had a nice massage. We should have come on down.

We still have a few hours to kill before plane time. In the narrow street outside the hotel, the air is so muggy and thick with smog I can hardly move my legs. Again I wish I'd brought something with me. Ridiculous, leaving all the dope at home. I'm much sicker than I ever expected, but I don't want to take a chance on buying something here from a total stranger.

We hail a cab, because it's air-conditioned. The driver wants to sell us a nickel bag of pot. I frown at this but Mario thinks it's great. I try to convince him otherwise. Everyone knows cabdrivers are cops, and besides, marijuana's not what we're here for. When I'm not looking, he buys it anyway. “Everyone does it,” he whines.

“We're not everybody,” I reply.

He looks dubious.

We drive along the Patpong Road, a main drag, strip joints mostly, a few jewelers. Bangkok's a stinking place. Where are the temples of gold? Families are living in the street, tending their woks over fires in the gutter, cooking breakfast. The sickening smell of frying palm oil wafts through the trees. With the auto exhaust fumes and heavy humidity, the air's nearly impossible to breathe. I bite off another piece of meth.

It's only eleven a.m., but we head for a bar and knock back a few beers. I don't taste them. My tongue feels bloody. I'm biting it. My eyes swim in my head. Mario wants a plate of French fries. They carry the stench of that sickening oil. I'll kill him, I think, before this is over.

We've all lost interest in a tour of the city's canals recommended in my guidebook. Klongs, they call them. “King Klongs,” I say to Mary, who looks as glum as I feel. We walk back to the hotel.

It's almost noon and the equatorial heat has steeply escalated. All along the sidewalk, food vendors sitting under striped umbrellas display edibles we can't identify. Never have I seen food like this: strange shapes, unnatural colors, horrid odors. Shops advertise silk and linen suits made to order in a day. Men and women in thin polyester clothing rush to jobs. What about that coup? No sign of an army anywhere. I buy an English-language newspaper. The coup was a failure, but a couple of English journalists were killed and the borders are still closed. There's an article about the Thai Queen's visit to the Paris collections. A woman in low-heeled leather pumps passes by. Everyone else wears flip-flops.

The Bangkok airport looks different in daylight, clean and not too busy. The only activity on the tarmac surrounds a Vietnamese plane loading cargo. The terminal's metal detector buzzes as I pass. Two attendants approach, and a nearby guard. They want to search my bag. At the bottom of an inside pouch, I have a small plastic paper-cutter with a retractable blade. It doesn't look any more threatening than the prize in a Cracker Jack box. The blade is barely a half-inch long but it's sharp enough to cut a piece from a solid rock of dope—or a face. There's a small pocketknife in there, too, and a prescription bottle with my various pills. The guard seems more interested in my Polaroid. I waste a picture on him, and he lets me pass.

The trip north takes less than an hour. A man holding a sign with the name of our hotel takes us to a van, where a perky young woman is waiting, all smiles. I notice her skin—not a line, not a wrinkle—her cheeks are naturally rosy. She wears her hair short, cut in a subtle flip. Her dark eyes dance into mine. I haven't seen anyone like her since high school.

She says her name is Taffy. This makes me laugh and she takes me for a jolly person. I laugh again. She's a student at a nearby college and she's very congenial. How long will we be staying in Chiang Mai? she asks, very cheerful, never losing the smile. Where are we from? Would we like to take a tour of the temples?

Sure, I say. Temples? Sure. She hands me a four-color brochure. It describes several different excursions, some whole-day, some half-day, some two-day. I pick the first one scheduled for the morning, a half-day. Taffy seems happy at this. Her cheeriness is contagious. Could she be stoned? No, I don't think she's ever smelled dope in her life.

I thumb through the rest of the brochure. There are thirty-six temples within the walls of Chiang Mai, eighty more in the country around it. Taffy says if we stay another day, we can take in a few mountain villages, too. In one all they make is umbrellas. In another, silks. Which, I wonder to myself, is the one where they make the heroin?

At the hotel we drop our bags and go outside to get the lay. Mario says it's too early to check in with the connection. I didn't know we had an appointment. They have hours, he tells me. I give out an involuntary sigh. It's the same all over, isn't it?

The streets of Chiang Mai are deserted. Though it's late afternoon, there's hardly a shadow. The sky's blue-on-blue, not a cloud, the air so hot and pink and quiet it feels like a dream. I keep thinking the road's unpaved but it isn't—some kind of dusty illusion. The whole town seems built on straw. A high fence of loosely tied wooden poles runs down one side of the street, shielding the jumble of rickety houses behind it. On the other is a low line of stuccoed shops, most of them shuttered against the sun. A skinny Caucasian fellow lurches toward us with that telltale junkie buckle to his knees. His hair is long and stringy, his black jeans torn at the seat and dusty as the street. He hasn't had a bath or a meal in a while. His skin is just this side of human, his eyes have rolled back in his head. Mary makes a sound. “Well,” she smirks. “We've come to the right place.”

We're going to carry the dope in our intestines, packed tight in knotted condoms. We need to find a drugstore right away. The hotel concierge has told us there's one just down the road. There is. Poking through the crowded shelves, we look for laxatives and lubricants, condoms, and tuberculin spikes. Behind the counter, a middle-aged Thai man and woman, husband and wife, serve us without comment or question. No Taffy here. No “Where are you from? Do you like our town? Will you stay long?” None of that. They don't ask if we're related or what brought us. They know.

I stay many minutes at the shelves, as absorbed in the colorful boxes and shapely bottles as I was as a kid in the old courthouse that was my hometown library. George Washington had slept there; it had atmosphere. Intoxicated by the smell of polished wood and library paste, lulled by the metronomic ticks of a grandfather clock in the reading room, I lost myself then, as now, in a world of the senses, ruled by a habit of mind. But here products come from China, Egypt, Vietnam, and Germany—George Washington never saw anything like this.

My hand reaches for a small Chinese box with blue lettering. I feel a shallow breath behind my ear. “You don't want that,” says a voice. The Thai man is standing at my shoulder, gesturing at the box. “That's not for you,” he says.

Really? I want to know what it is. The man is loath to say. I have to be careful. I don't want to make a scene. I replace the box and pick up a tube of toothpaste. The man smiles then, trades glances with his wife; we're all very friendly. Mary Motion and I buy a tube of K-Y jelly each, several boxes of condoms, some strong laxative tabs, a couple of clean gimmicks. I pretend this is business-as-usual. In Chiang Mai, maybe it is.

Back on the street it's like a sauna, hot but dry, better than the muggy air of Bangkok, anyway. In the heat even the distant hills look pooped. In the hotel parking lot, pedicab drivers in native costume nap in the passenger seats. We stop in the hotel bar, take a table. The tourists are all out with Taffy or one of the other guides; we're the only customers, one waiter, one barmaid. Mary wonders if they know why we're here. She's too paranoid. “We're tourists,” I say. “We're seeing the world.”

Mario checks his watch, downs his drink. “Time to go,” he says in his thin, reedy voice, forever jovial. Everything to him is a yuk. I don't trust him but he's the one with the directions, which he doesn't share with us. Orders from Angelo, he smiles. I don't.

“Don't forget to bring back a sample,” I growl. He gives me a high-sign and a gap-toothed grin. When he's gone I tell Mary we should follow him.

“Not me,” she says, looking around uncomfortably. “I'll wait here.” We're sitting near a large picture window, just out of the sun. I watch Mario climb into a pedicab and go off. We order another round.

I can't get drunk enough. I ate my last meth biscuit hours ago, it's wearing off. After the long journey, the stultifying heat and sleepless nights, after the vodka I've consumed, I'm in a state of semi-withdrawal. Forty hours ago I was buckling my seat-belt at JFK. Now I'm staring into a glass, wishing it didn't have a bottom.

Mary and I wait for Mario and drink. We talk about New York, about the free time we'll have for shopping in Singapore, whether or not we should “lose” our passports there. Singapore is our vacation cover. The Thailand stamps dated only days apart might look funny at customs. Well, we can always get new ones. Mary says you just drop the passport in a mailbox somewhere and tell the consul it's been stolen. People steal American passports all the time.