Once a woman has started on the trail of the poppy, the sledding is very easy and downgrade all the way.

—Judge Emily F. Murphy, The Black Candle (1922)

I’m not a Christian by anybody’s measure. My father’s family was supposedly Episcopalian; my mother’s Baptist. I once asked why we as a family never went to church, and my father replied that he’d be damned if he was going to waste his only day off listening to a sermon. On the rare occasion that I set foot inside a church while growing up, it was always with some churchgoing neighbor family who had coached their children to invite me along to a Sunday service. The only aspect of these outings that impressed me were the pastry feasts that followed the services of certain Protestant denominations. The Catholic masses that I attended were interesting for their rituals, but the after-service refreshments were stingy affairs. In the end, neither the colorful rites of the Catholics nor the sugar highs of the Protestants were able to inspire any spiritual yearnings in me.

From 1990 until 1995, I lived in Chiang Mai, and this brought Christians to my attention once again. Northern Thailand’s principal city has long been a base for Christian missionaries. The first one, a Presbyterian from North Carolina, arrived in 1867 when Chiang Mai was still a separate kingdom from Siam (which has officially been known as Thailand since 1949), and made his first convert two years later by using astronomical tables to predict an eclipse of the sun.

As the missionaries’ “vision” for pursuing converts spread beyond Chiang Mai, the Presbyterians began to clash with American Baptists who were competing to harvest the region’s souls. An agreement between the two denominations eventually kept the Baptists within the borders of neighboring Burma and the Presbyterians in what is now northern Thailand.

Living in Chiang Mai in the early 1990s, I at first found the city’s missionaries a curiosity, but the better I got to know them, the less I was able to smile through my encounters with them. Their inflexible ways and blinkered outlook on life were astounding. These were people who had traveled far from home and settled in the most exotic surroundings they could find, and then devoted their lives to making the locals dress, act, and believe exactly as they did. In Chiang Mai I met a middle-aged couple from America’s Midwest, overdressed in the tropical heat, who chirpily told of how they were able to convince whole villages in Burma to give up their traditional clothing and festivals. Being oblivious to their own arrogance was a trait that they all seemed to share.

More interesting to me, though, than the proselytizers themselves were their own lapsed children, living as natives in lands that their parents had dedicated entire lives to Christianizing. Some missionary families had spent generations in Southeast Asia, and it was not unheard of for their offspring to leave the fold or find more adventurous callings. Bill Young was one I heard about and wanted to meet. Born in Burma to Baptist missionary parents, Young was raised in tribal villages and was said to speak fluent Hmong and Lahu, as well as Shan. As a young man in the 1960s he had been recruited by the CIA to run espionage operations into southern China from northwestern Laos. Among other activities, Young arranged for Golden Triangle opium caravans returning from Thailand to transport radios and other espionage equipment to CIA listening posts inside the Chinese border. Young’s understanding of the terrain and the people who inhabited it resulted in his being possibly the most effective CIA agent who served in the Indochina War. But when he demurred at instituting policies that he thought would adversely affect the tribal peoples under his charge, he was replaced by a ruthless operative called Tony Poe—who is said to have been the inspiration for Marlon Brando’s commander-gone-mad character in the film Apocalypse Now.

Young’s story intrigued me, but he was reclusive. As one British resident of Chiang Mai told me, Young’s CIA past had been “exposed” in a book called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, and he had since refused all interviews. At the time I had not yet tried my hand at journalism or had anything published—I simply had a personal interest in hearing the stories of the region’s Western old-timers. Young had retired in Chiang Mai and become a member of the city’s large expatriate community, a colorful group that included a number of Vietnam vets (a few of them spectacularly unhinged) who had been discharged stateside before drifting back to Southeast Asia. There was also a commune of aging hippies who had reinvented themselves as New Age gurus; a colony of artists attired in a patchwork of tribal costumes and jewelry; a smattering of mildly pompous academics and experts on local arcana; even a group of Western monks cloistered at one of the city’s Buddhist monasteries.

Among these expats were a few genuine old Asia hands, real long-termers who had arrived in the 1950s or ’60s. They remembered when it was possible to ride a pedicab from one end of Thapae Road to the other without being passed by a single automobile. Length of stay was not the only criterion that made an old Asia hand—the genuine article had a certain attitude, an air of unflappability. They were never jaded or cynical. On a continent that turns some long-term Westerners into haters, whiners, and grumblers, they remained interested and engaged. Bill Young undoubtedly epitomized the persona, but I was having difficulty tracking him down. My asking around eventually led me to Roxanna Brown.

Roxanna ran a bar not far from Chiang Mai’s famous Night Bazaar. It was an unlicensed Hard Rock Café—the sort of knockoff that raised no eyebrows in the days before any international chains had reached the city. The bar’s interior walls were lined with dusty album covers, and there were faded and threadbare concert T-shirts tightly stretched and pinned to the ceiling with thumbtacks like the skins of oversized rodents. Roxanna’s bar was not yet open for business when I rapped on the door one day, but she answered and waved me in out of the sun.

Roxanna was small in stature, friendly, and about my mother’s age—not the type you would expect to see running a bar in Thailand, where the majority of Western barkeeps seem to be male, argumentative, and British. She wore a gauzy beige outfit that appeared to be patterned after a Vietnamese ao dai, and her short, reddish hair was tight around her head as if she had been wearing a cloche hat. I also noted a pronounced limp, but other than these facile observations, I failed to see anything remarkable about her. I scribbled some names and phone numbers into my notebook as Roxanna listed people who would know how to contact Bill Young. Five minutes later I was back on the street and thinking about my next move. Soon I’d forgotten all about Roxanna Brown.

In the end I never got to meet Bill Young in person. We talked on the telephone, but he apologetically explained that he was in ill health and unable to receive visitors. It would be a decade before I would meet Roxanna again.

A few weeks after Willi had promised to introduce me to that mysterious American with an old-time opium habit, I was back at the Chamber. It was late March and the day was brutally hot. Whenever I visited during Vientiane’s oppressive summer, Willi and I spent a significant portion of the session debating the merits of installing air-conditioning. Being a purist, I resisted. How could we have an authentic experience with an air conditioner droning in the background?

I had arrived mid-morning and by late afternoon both Willi and I were half-cooked. Through heavy lids I watched Willi holding a needle poised over the tiny wok of bubbling chandu, the yellow glare of the opium lamp reflecting in the beads of sweat that speckled his forehead and upper lip. My silk singlet was clammy with perspiration and clung to my back, but the porcelain pillow felt blessedly cool against my cheek. Willi finished preparing the pill, inhaled it with a series of short, gulping draws he called a “De Niro hit” (from the opium den scenes in Once Upon a Time in America), and let out a satisfied sigh as he blew the vapors toward the ceiling. He then announced a break by calling for the servant to bring iced coffee in the Vietnamese style—with generous dollops of sweetened condensed milk and chasers of hot tea. The coffee arrived with a plate of crumbly almond cookies, but these went untouched—it was simply too hot to eat. I sat upright on the opium bed just long enough to drink my coffee and then I let my eyelids slide shut and allowed my mind to drift, the heat and humidity forgotten. Willi and I lapsed into a comfortable silence and didn’t speak again until the sound of a three-wheeled motorcycle taxi puttering up the gravel drive made us suddenly alert. “It’s Rox,” Willi said, sliding off the bed and making his way out to greet her.

I could hear their conversation through the vents in the walls up along the Chamber ceiling. Willi paid the taxi driver to save Roxanna the trouble, and then I could hear her steps—an unsteady crunch on the gravel—as Willi led her around to the back of the house so she didn’t have to climb any stairs.

“Oh my, it’s dark in here!” Roxanna said as Willi guided her through the back door. She stood just inside the Chamber, letting her eyes adjust. I recognized her and noted that she had not changed at all in the ten years since I met her in Chiang Mai. Willi made introductions, but Roxanna didn’t remember me. No matter—there are no strangers in an opium den. Her pleasure and excitement at being with us was obvious, and it made me want the visit to live up to her expectations in every way. I cleared a place on the opium bed for her, moving the layout tray toward Willi’s side of the bed and putting away the picture books that he and I had been leafing through.

Roxanna complimented Willi on the Chamber’s décor—it had been more than a year since she’d seen it last and there were many new items on display. Willi graciously pointed out that much of it was my doing and asked me to field Roxanna’s queries about the provenance of each new piece. She was most interested in some ceramic pipe bowls that had been crafted a century before in the town of Jianshui in China’s Yunnan Province. The small town was famed for an ingenious inlay technique that used clays of contrasting colors to make designs on the surfaces of ceramics such as opium pipe bowls. The breakthrough caused a sensation among opium smokers in the nineteenth century: Here were bowls that could be intricately adorned with any design imaginable—bucolic landscapes, charming still lifes, scenes from legends, poetry in characters that mimicked brushstrokes, even personalized dedications—and yet the decorated surface was perfectly smooth for rolling and impervious to heat.

“Do you use these?” Roxanna asked, gently lifting one of the inlaid bowls from its shelf.

“Of course,” Willi replied. “Pick a pipe stem from the rack and any bowl from the cabinet. Steven here is my pipe boy. He doesn’t yet know how to roll, but he can do just about everything else.”

Roxanna laughed at the reference to a long-dead custom. In old China, overseas Chinatowns, and everywhere else that old Chinese culture was transplanted and took root, wealthy opium smokers employed the equivalent of a personal valet specially trained in the maintenance of opium accoutrements and, most important, in the art of preparing pipes. The pipe boy usually apprenticed in his early teens, when sharp eyesight and nimble fingers made training less of a challenge. Besides rolling, duties might also include ensuring that enough chandu was on hand in case a guest arrived unexpectedly; tending a charcoal fire during winter months to boil water for tea as well as to keep the oil for the opium lamp from congealing in the cold; scraping opium ash from pipe bowls and then collecting and storing the dross until there was a sizable enough quantity to resell to the local opium merchant for recycling. An accomplished pipe boy might also be able to play a repertoire of soothing ballads on a musical instrument such as the moon guitar.

Some smokers prohibited their pipe boys from using opium, lest they become addicted and lackadaisical in their tasks, but secondhand vapors usually ensured that nonsmoking pipe boys in the employ of heavy smokers developed a habit over time. If a boy turned to thievery to pay for clandestine trips to public dens or began to pilfer opium from his master’s stash, it was time to apprentice a new pipe boy. On the other hand, if after years of service a smoker became attached to his valet’s skills, he might purposely get the young man addicted to preempt him from thinking seriously about looking for a wife and starting a family.

In France’s colonies in Indochina, the practice of employing a pipe boy was such a status symbol among French opium smokers—the addicted colonials seemingly always reclining in the cool shadows alongside shirtless Vietnamese boys—that nonsmoking colonials became convinced opium could turn any virile Frenchman into a keeper of catamites.

Roxanna chose a pipe stem from the rack of six: a lady’s pipe crafted from a gracefully slim length of bamboo and fitted with a layered Yunnanese saddle and jade end pieces. She took her time in choosing a bowl from the cabinet, holding up each to a candle as she examined the inlaid designs and chop marks. I used the delay to pass a ramrod through the pipe stem and buff its surfaces with a damp cloth.

Roxanna’s final choice was telling: It was the obvious pick of a confirmed smoker. The bowl was from northern China, short on decorative frills but made from the absorbent Yixing clay that to this day is favored for making fine teapots—due to its purported ability to produce a more flavorful tea with each successive serving. Such pots are never washed with soap as this would strip away the delicate residue of countless teas that have steeped within them. Opium pipe bowls made from Yixing were thought to possess this same quality. As long as the bowl absorbed vapors of only the best chandu, its porous interior surface would retain a trace of the rich flavors that passed through it. With each and every pipe inhaled, the user of such a bowl came ever closer to having the perfect smoke. However, if the bowl was exposed to a single hit of oily smoke from inferior dross-laden opium, the mellow taste that it once imparted would be lost forever.

“I’m not particularly fond of jade,” Roxanna said while wiping the end of the pipe’s mouthpiece with a crooked thumb, “But I haven’t used a lady’s pipe since the war, and something tells me this one doesn’t get much use.”

“Then let’s breathe some life into it,” I said, taking the pipe from Roxanna and firmly pushing the bowl into the saddle’s socket. She made her way across the room and I noticed for the first time that she was using a cane. She propped it against the opium bed and sat down, the bed’s walled configuration necessitating that she slowly pull herself backward onto it. It was then I realized that one of her legs was a prosthetic.

Willi switched on a gooseneck desk lamp that beamed down on the layout tray. I handed him the pipe and he inspected it under the lamp. Roxanna was reclining on her right hip and examining the contents of the tray. She was wearing a sleeveless smock of Khmer silk in burgundy tones that matched her short-cropped, henna-rinsed hair. Again the mother image came into my mind. Perhaps it was just that her age and petite size reminded me of my own mom. Yet I was about to discover that behind her unassuming façade—the frail gait and amused smile—was an eccentric character whose past was more complex and fascinating than that of any other Westerner I had met in Asia. My search for an authentic old Asia hand in Chiang Mai had been wildly successful—it just took me a decade to realize it.

I moved one of the two drum-shaped porcelain stools at the foot of the opium bed and positioned it so that I sat between Willi and Roxanna, giving me an intimate view of them facing each other over the layout tray. Willi used an eyedropper to count seven drops of chandu into the tiny copper wok and then, pinching its ivory handle between thumb and forefinger, he perched the wok on the chimney of the opium lamp. We all watched in silence. After the first pill had been rolled Willi handed the slender pipe to Roxanna mouthpiece first, keeping hold of the end piece so he could guide the pipe bowl over the flame as she inhaled deeply. Save for the sound of the pendulum clock and the burbling of the bowl, the room was silent. Roxanna exhaled slowly with her eyes closed, and a gentle smile crossed her face. Willi began rolling another pill. “You have some catching up to do. Steven and I are way ahead of you.”

Willi rolled five pills for Roxanna over a period of twenty minutes, and during that time I sat and listened as they talked themselves up to date. When there was finally a lull in their conversation I jumped in with a question I had been eagerly awaiting a chance to ask: “So you were in Vietnam during the war?”

“Yes, there and Cambodia and Laos.”

“You were in the military?” I asked.

“I was a journalist. Freelance.”

Roxanna took the mouthpiece of the pipe in her left hand and held it to her lips, again letting Willi steady the pipe bowl over the lamp. I noticed that she did not hold the vapors in her lungs as Willi and I habitually did—she immediately exhaled and did so with her eyes closed. When she opened them again she looked up at me and smiled, which I took as encouragement to ask another question.

“Did you know Michael Herr?”

“I knew friends of his.” Again, a short answer followed by a smile that I was having trouble reading. Opium makes one hypersensitive to everything, including the feelings of others. In this matter it has nearly the opposite effect of alcohol. Booze shatters inhibitions; opium fosters empathy. I wasn’t sure whether Roxanna’s reaction to my questions was a soft rebuke. I decided to make one more attempt before dropping it.

“Tell me about somebody I might have heard of.”

Roxanna took another draw from the pipe and then carefully shifted onto her back, rolling her head on the porcelain pillow until she faced the ceiling. Her eyes were shut and her features seemed to soften as the opium caused her facial muscles to relax. I was sure she would decline to continue the conversation—maybe even refuse to talk to me again. Willi shot me a look that said, Let her be, and just as he did, she opened her eyes and began to tell a story.

“I was with my friends. There were about six of us, all journalists and photographers. Saigon was expected to fall that week and we were all of us there in the city. There wasn’t any need to fly out of Saigon to look for the war. The fighting was all around us.”

Roxanna’s smile was in evidence again and I found it baffling. Later—much later—I understood her smile to be a manifestation of her acute shyness.

“We were all at the bar of the Continental Hotel. Not the famous bar on the terrace—that was closed for fear of rocket attacks. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but the bar at the Continental was the place to go to catch news or at least rumors. I remember we were talking about the best way to cover the fall, and how we were going to get out of South Vietnam after it fell, and when. And then this stranger walked in and looked around the room like he was expecting to find somebody.”

Willi quietly began preparing another pipe for Roxanna, his movements concise and understated so as not to distract from her story.

“There was something about this man that made him stand out. He was very ordinary looking, and at first I couldn’t put my finger on it. He stood there between the tables looking around, and then he accidentally dropped his notebook on the floor, and when he bent down to pick it up, some other things like a pen and a pair of sunglasses fell out of his shirt pocket and hit the floor, too. The guy stooped down to get his things, and two Vietnamese waiters were also down on the floor trying to help him, giggling in that way Vietnamese do when somebody embarrasses themselves. By then we were all watching, and one of my friends said, ‘Who is that asshole?’ and right away I answered, ‘That’s Hunter Thompson.’ ”

I sat straight up on the porcelain stool and asked, “Hunter S. Thompson?”

“Well, yes. Rolling Stone sent him to cover the fall of Saigon. At the time I happened to be reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I must have recognized him from the author photo. I don’t remember now how I knew, but in that instant I just knew who he was.”

“Did you get to meet him?”

“Oh, yes. We invited him to sit with us and he did. Every one of us was very much in awe. Here we were a bunch of journalists, most of us freelancers or stringers, and in walks this famous writer on assignment for a magazine that we all admired. He ordered a drink, and the others were kind of stunned into silence, and since I was reading his book, I ended up doing most of the talking.”

Willi had finished rolling. The pill of opium was stuck to the bowl and just waiting to be reheated. Roxanna noticed this and reached across the tray, prompting Willi to hand her the pipe. She didn’t speak as she took the pipe into both hands, this time holding it over the flame without any assistance. It was a long, sustained draw on a pill flawlessly rolled and perfectly vaporized. Roxanna closed her eyes and slowly exhaled with a sigh that concluded in a barely audible coo of bliss. For long seconds she lay silent, and I guessed that her opium-rushed memories were becoming vivid.

“Hunter offered to buy me a drink, but instead I asked him if he wanted to go back to the apartment to smoke opium,” Roxanna said with a chuckle. “He said he’d never tried it and he didn’t seem too keen, but the others were excited at the idea of having Hunter Thompson as a guest at the apartment, and everyone was saying, ‘Come on! It’s just down the street!’ so he finally agreed.”

“Was the apartment on Tu Do Street?” I asked.

“I don’t remember exactly. It was so long ago. It wasn’t my place—I lived with a Vietnamese family in another part of town. The apartment was rented by some friends, and it was where we used to hang out whenever we were in Saigon.”

Saigon! Hearing that city’s former name always gave me a thrill. I had visited Ho Chi Minh City for the first time in April 1993. Vietnam had just opened its doors to unrestricted tourism the week before I arrived. No longer was it necessary to hire a government guide—really an official babysitter—at an exorbitant rate. No longer was most of the country off-limits. Except for Russians, Ho Chi Minh City had hosted very few Westerners since 1975 and the city still had an occupied feel about it. Vietnamese men and women approached me constantly during my stay, stopping me with a tap on my shoulder or by clasping my arm—alarming to somebody who has grown accustomed to Thailand where grabbing at strangers is considered rude. The Vietnamese wanted to know if I was American, and then they grilled me about lost relatives who had fled to California or Texas or some state they couldn’t remember how to pronounce.

In Ho Chi Minh City at the time, one of the only sites being actively promoted by the national tourism authority was the Museum of American War Crimes, a hall in which the walls were covered with greatly enlarged photographs of Vietnamese civilians with horrific wounds, and the display shelves were crowded with ghastly jars of pickled fetuses said to be victims of Agent Orange. Partly to assuage my guilt after emerging from this chamber of horrors, I lingered at the museum gift shop and ended up buying a green pith helmet of the type the North Vietnamese Army had worn during the war. While riding in a pedicab back to my hotel I unthinkingly put the hat on, but not more than a few seconds passed before the pedicab driver leaned into my ear and whispered with real anger, “VC no good!”

The helmet, of course, immediately came off.

On a subsequent visit to Ho Chi Minh City a mere two years later, I found that the mood of the former capital of South Vietnam had changed. Those intimations that old Saigon was an occupied city—displaying all those Uncle Ho portraits against its will—were gone, and I walked the streets alongside crowds of backpackers, eliciting no more attention from the locals than anyone else.

I tried to imagine the Saigon that Roxanna had known, a desperate place that I could detect only hints of during my first trip in 1993. What I hadn’t seen were any signs of the decadence and hedonism for which the city was known back when it was a springboard to war. In Ho Chi Minh City of the 1990s there were no prostitutes on Hondas yelling bawdy offers in pidgin English. There were no bars with names meant to elicit homesickness in young American soldiers. There were certainly no longer any opium dens to be found. I envied Roxanna her exciting past—the Southeast Asia she had seen and lived.

“Opium was illegal at the time but then so was prostitution and gambling and everything else Saigon was known for,” Roxanna continued. Willi was unhurriedly preparing another pipe, pausing between steps to give full attention to her story. “There was one opium den we used to go to, but we couldn’t go as a big group because there just wasn’t enough room and it would have been too disturbing for the other patrons. I often used to go by myself, sometimes with one other person, but if there were more than two wanting to smoke, the apartment was much more comfortable.”

“Did you roll your own pipes?” I asked.

“I could roll for myself and maybe one other person, but if there was a crowd I wasn’t fast enough to keep people from getting impatient. So whenever a bunch of us wanted to smoke at the apartment we used to telephone the opium den and ask them to send over one of their attendants to roll for us. Half an hour later he would show up on his bicycle with a pipe and lamp in a wooden carrying case. Inside was a kit full of little drawers and everything you needed to smoke opium—all the tools, oil for the lamp, all of it was there.”

Details like this set my head spinning. I would have given anything to be able to go back in time and see an opium smoker’s travel kit being used. I had a number of such kits in my collection but the function of some of the components was a mystery to me. Not wanting to interrupt her story, I made a mental note to ask Roxanna about the kit later that evening.

“So when the guy from the opium den arrived, we spread out some mats on the floor of the apartment. I remember giving Hunter instructions on how to inhale. Beginners are always surprised at how hard you have to huff to get the opium to vaporize. Since he was the guest of honor, we offered Hunter the first pipe. We were all pretty thrilled by the whole scene. Imagine, Saigon was surrounded by North Vietnamese, everyone was terrified and the city was descending into chaos, and there we were smoking opium with Hunter Thompson.”

Willi handed the pipe to Roxanna and again she took a long draw. Despite the excitement she described, her voice had become far-off and flat, almost like the intonations of somebody under a hypnotist’s spell.

“Then something strange happened. After his very first pipe Hunter began hyperventilating. At first I thought he was joking with us, but it was real. It was like he was freaking out. He was pulling at his shirt like he was trying to rip it off, like he couldn’t breathe. And his eyes were huge and rolling around. It was really scary.”

Roxanna looked toward the shrine as though the scene were unfolding within the clouds of incense that enveloped the Den God. I thought I detected a hint of concern on her face as she relived the emotions of that day long ago.

“The guy from the opium den told us to get hot and cold towels and apply them to Hunter, so we hurried to the kitchen, putting one towel under the tap and pouring hot water on another. Then we rushed back and began rubbing his face and chest with this succession of hot and cold towels. And it worked. Hunter started to calm down and finally he seemed okay. We asked him what happened and he said he didn’t know. He looked sheepish and then excused himself and quickly left the apartment. It was really odd.”

Roxanna paused and her face creased into a puckish smile, as though she was recalling the punch line of an old joke she hadn’t heard in a while.

“So we had the guy from the den roll us some pipes, and we started talking about what just happened. Some of my friends were really down on Hunter. Maybe they were just really disappointed. You know, his reputation and all … we were expecting to turn him on and have this experience right out of his book. But to see him panic like that, well …”

Roxanna interrupted herself to ask Willi how many pipes she had smoked. He looked at me. “Ask the pipe boy.”

“It’s been nine so far,” I said, grateful that I’d remembered to keep track.

“Oh dear, maybe it’s time for a break.”

Roxanna began fossicking through her handbag and finally produced a pack of Thai cigarettes and a plastic disposable lighter. Willi invited her to try one of his local cheroots instead. Roxanna took one, sniffed at the cheroot’s banana-leaf wrapper, and smilingly consented as Willi struck a match and cupped it in his hands. Roxanna held the cheroot to her lips and leaned it forward into the flame. After Willi blew out the match he said, “Disposable lighters are on the list of banned items in the Chamber.”

“As they should be,” Roxanna concurred. “How much style have we abandoned for the sake of a little convenience? I remember when a Zippo lighter was one of those accessories you didn’t feel complete without.”

If old studio portraits of opium smokers are to be believed, tobacco smoking was an indispensable part of a typical opium-smoking session—even long after the Chinese discovered the secrets of vaporization and had dispensed with the tobacco and opium blend. Tobacco was most often smoked in an upright metal water pipe with a tall, gracefully curved stem. Perhaps due to lingering associations, these metal tobacco pipes are commonly sold in antiques shops as opium pipes. Stickler that I was for historical accuracy, I drew the line at smoking tobacco in the Chamber—I had tried it once but didn’t like how the nicotine seemed to dampen my opium euphoria.

Roxanna and Willi had gone quiet while smoking their cheroots, but I still had questions about the encounter with Thompson. “So he left the apartment after freaking out, but you must have seen him again around town, right?”

“Well, after Hunter left the apartment some of my journalist friends hatched a plan. They decided they were going to play with his head. Maybe they felt silly for being so in awe of him earlier. I don’t know. You know how young men are. So that’s what they did over the next few days: They took turns working on Hunter. First, two guys went to his hotel to inspect his room and give him advice about which window was best for defending the building. They gave him an old pistol and some ammunition and they pointed through the window down at the street to give him an idea of the range of the thing. Then they left him there.

“A few days later, more of my friends showed up at Hunter’s hotel room and gave him a bag of grenades. They told him the pistol would be worthless if the hotel was overrun by the North Vietnamese. They advised him to toss the grenades out the door so they rolled down the stairs. Later they told me Hunter looked very alarmed by the whole idea. The guys thought it was hilarious. They planned out their next visit and somebody even found an M-16 they could give Hunter, but when they went back to his hotel he had already checked out. For the next few days we looked everywhere for him, but Hunter was gone. It wasn’t until later I found out he’d flown out of Vietnam.”

I sat there stunned by what I had just heard. The known version of the story about Hunter S. Thompson’s Saigon gig was that Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner had torpedoed the assignment, pulling the plug after Thompson was already on his way to cover the fall. Without an employer—and the insurance coverage that came with the magazine assignment—Thompson had decided it was too dangerous to stay in Saigon.

Was it possible that this accepted version was just a piece of the larger story? Roxanna didn’t linger on the subject. After asking Willi if he wanted a break from preparing pipes, she switched places with him on the opium bed so that she was lying on her left side and her right hand was free to roll. Roxanna prepared pipes in the same way that she had told her war story, in a deliberate, unhurried fashion. She lacked Willi’s speed and flourishes, but instead had the cadence of someone who could roll pills in her sleep.

This photo of an opium smoker has an insert showing a rare close-up of a pill being rolled. The image is from a 1919 issue of the French magazine Le Pays de France, but the photos are two of a series believed to have been taken in New York. (From the collection of Yves Domzalski)

“Was Saigon during that time really as dangerous as your friends made out?” I asked.

“Probably not. Nobody I knew was killed covering the fall. Probably the closest call I ever had was in Cambodia. Although at the time I didn’t know it was a close call.”

Roxanna handed the primed pipe to Willi, who took it with both hands to show that he didn’t need her to guide him over the flame.

“I had this idea to go to Phnom Penh. This was in 1970, a couple weeks after Lon Nol had replaced Prince Sihanouk in a coup. Cambodia was where the story was, and a lot of my friends were there already. Plus, there were two superb opium dens in Phnom Penh, and I was always looking for a reason to visit.”

Again I sat up straight on the porcelain stool, about to interrupt and ask for details about Phnom Penh’s opium dens, but Roxanna had already moved on.

“The road between Saigon and Phnom Penh was bad. Route One, it was called. On the map it looked like a highway, but a lot of Route One wasn’t paved. I thought if I left Saigon early enough in the morning I could reach Phnom Penh well before dark, so I set out on my motorbike just before dawn.”

“You drove a motorcycle?” I asked with surprise. “Alone?”

“There really wasn’t any other way. It wasn’t like in Vietnam where I could always hitch a ride just about anywhere in U.S. Army helicopters. My journalist friends were always so jealous of me. Being a young white woman I was a rarity in Southeast Asia. Those military guys almost never said no when I asked for a ride. Of course, in Cambodia there were no U.S. military flights. Not officially anyway. And I couldn’t afford to charter a private plane, so the motorbike was the only alternative.”

Willi handed the pipe back to Roxanna and she used a damp sponge to wipe the blackened opium residue from the pipe bowl’s surface.

“I’ll never forget that border crossing. The Vietnamese and Cambodian border officials were shooting at each other. It wasn’t a heavy firefight, just this kind of low-key feud. The Vietnamese had a card game going, spread out on a grass mat on the floor, but every few minutes one of them would get up and fire some shots at the Cambodian border post a couple hundred yards away.”

Roxanna flicked the pipe bowl with the nail of her index finger, listening to the sound it made in order to judge whether or not the bowl needed to be scraped clean of dross. I couldn’t tell the difference, but she must have decided the bowl was still clear because she began counting another dose of chandu into the little copper wok.

“I was delayed there for hours because the Vietnamese said I had to wait until lunchtime. That was when the two sides had both agreed to stop shooting. I joined the Vietnamese officials for a lunch of pho and after we finished eating they stamped me out of Vietnam. By that time the sun was horribly hot, but at least the crossing was quiet. I walked the motorbike across the no-man’s-land between the two border posts. When I got to the Cambodian side, I saw their little concrete post was all shot up and deserted. I thought they must all be dead, and I almost turned around and walked the motorbike back into Vietnam. Then I heard something from behind the building. It was somebody snoring. I found the Cambodian officials taking a nap in the shade. One of them got up and stamped my passport, and then I was on my way.”

Like Willi, Roxanna eschewed the fancy rolling tool on the layout tray and instead rolled the pill of opium against the pipe bowl’s smooth upper surface. Their techniques diverged in the way that Roxanna used the flat end of the needle to scrape the wok clean of dried chandu and then dipped the sticky pill into the powdery remnants. When Roxanna rolled not a speck of opium was wasted.

“The Cambodian countryside was a real contrast to Vietnam. There was no traffic on the road, nobody but me. And there wasn’t anybody working the rice fields, either. Even the little villages I passed through were empty. I had been riding for an hour or so and, wouldn’t you know it, I got a flat tire. It was so hot and there was no shade on that road, and I remember being afraid of the heat more than anything else. I walked the motorbike in the direction of Phnom Penh. There was nothing else I could do.”

If I had been reclining I would not have been able to keep my eyes from sliding shut and letting my imagination supply the visuals, but sitting upright on the porcelain stool kept my mind sharp and allowed me to focus on both listening to Roxanna’s story and observing her rolling technique. I was spellbound. After she had finished shaping the pill on the end of the needle, Roxanna had an alarming way of seating the pill on the bowl’s needle hole, letting the wad of chandu cool for what seemed an inadequate amount of time before abruptly thrusting the needle deep into the bowl to break the pill free from the needle. Each time I saw her do this I was sure that she had botched this most difficult step in the process, but each time I was surprised to see her easily extract the needle, leaving the pill stuck fast to the bowl, and with a perfect little hole through which to inhale the vapors.

“I had been walking for only a few minutes when out of nowhere a man and a boy appeared on the road ahead of me. They were very dark skinned and were wearing the black pajamas of the Khmer Rouge. The boy had a shoulder bag full of tools and the man was carrying a bicycle pump and without even looking at me they began working on the flat tire. It was really odd. They quickly fixed the tire and pumped it back up and then without a word they walked down the road in the direction I had come. I got on the bike and started it, but when I looked back to wave at them, they were gone.”

Willi slid off the opium bed and motioned for me to take his place. Roxanna stopped telling her story until I was comfortably reclining on my right side and facing her over the tray. She handed me the slender pipe, guiding it over the lamp while I inhaled, but she didn’t resume speaking until my lips had left the jade mouthpiece.

“I didn’t see another soul until I got to the ferry crossing hours later, but by then I was only an hour away from Phnom Penh. Just after I arrived in the city, I ran into a couple of friends including Sean Flynn. He was Errol Flynn’s son. The famous actor.”

“Sure, I’ve heard of Errol Flynn,” I said while letting the opium vapors slowly escape from my lungs.

“Well, if you know who Errol Flynn was then you’ll know how handsome he was. His son, Sean, was even better looking. He had the type of face that if you walked into a room full of people, he was the first person you noticed. But he was one of those rare people who don’t seem to realize how attractive they are. There was nothing vain about Sean.”

Roxanna took the pipe from me and removed the bowl to scrape it clean of ash. Her fingertips were so calloused that she was able to handle the hot bowl with her bare hands. She held the doorknob-sized bowl in her left hand while gripping the scraper—about the length of a household screwdriver—in her right, winding the scraper’s curved blade around the inside of the bowl. Sand-like dross poured from the bowl’s open end as Roxanna shook it over a cylindrical container, creating what looked like a small pile of ground-up pencil leads.

“When I told Sean where I’d just come from he thought I was joking. The news in Phnom Penh was that Route One was too dangerous to travel. I told him my story about the flat tire, and he was sure that who I met were Khmer Rouge. The fact that they’d helped me really excited him. It wasn’t long after that I heard he and photojournalist Dana Stone rode some motorbikes back in the direction of Saigon and were captured. They were never seen alive again.”

By now there was no emotion in her voice or on her face. Had I known nothing about opium, I might have taken her reaction—or the lack of one—to be that classic symptom much remarked upon by nineteenth-century observers: the opium addict’s famed “indifference.” But I knew that opium smokers were anything but indifferent. Like so much else about this drug, it was a misunderstanding on the part of nonsmokers. Roxanna’s reaction wasn’t indifference but a sense of detached observation that feels to the smoker like the wisdom of a sage who sits on a mountaintop and views life from on high. As Jean Cocteau explained it, life is an express train speeding toward a dark tunnel that is death: “To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving.”

Roxanna lifted the little bottle of chandu from the tray and gave it a light shake. The blood-colored liquid mixing within was so toxic that if consumed orally, this small amount could have poisoned hundreds. She loosened the dropper from the bottle as she cradled the pipe against her breast. “Are you ready for more?” she asked.

“You know I am,” I answered.