PIPE DREAMS

What sad creatures we are. We live in an age in which we pay $35 for half a
roasted onion in an Italian restaurant staffed by Dominican immigrants, and
congratulate ourselves on our expertise and good taste. We distinguish
ourselves from the masses by slurping rancid grape juice and raving over
its delicate scent of "sweet cassis, chocolate, violets, tobacco and sweet
vanillin oak." But thank goodness for Nick Tosches, who won't be cheated
out of his life just because his compatriots have forgotten how to suck the
marrow out of it. Sick of the numbing comforts of New York, he sets off in
search of something everyone tells him no longer exists: an opium den.

Mr. Tosches sums up exactly how he feels at the beginning of "The Last
Opium Den" (Bloomsbury, 74 pages, $12.95): "F--- this world of $35 onions
and those who eat them. F--- this world of pseudo-sophisticated rubes who
could not recognize the finer things in life -- from a shot of vinegar to
the first wisp of fall through a tree -- let alone appreciate them, these
rubes who turned New York into a PG-rated mall and who oh so loved it thus.
They were dead. The neighborhood was dead. The city was dead. Even the
goddamn century was dead."

The 52-year-old author from Newark has made a career out of writing about
the darker shadows of life. His past works include: "Hellfire" (1982) about
the tormented life of Jerry Lee Lewis; "Dino: Living High in the Dirty
Business of Dreams" (1992), a portrait of screen icon Dean Martin; "Power
on Earth" (1986) about the infamous Mafia financier Michele Sindona; "The
Devil and Sonny Liston" (2000) about the thuggish heavyweight who lost the
world championship under mysterious circumstances to a young Muhammad Ali;
and most recently "Where Dead Voices Gather" (2001), a biography of obscure
Southern minstrel singer Emmett Miller.

"The Last Opium Den" is a tiny book (it took me about 40 minutes to read
it) based on an essay that Mr. Tosches published in Vanity Fair in 2000,
where it apparently drew the biggest reader response in the magazine's
history. What he is in search of is not heroin or laudanum, or any mixture
of speed or alcohol or cannabis, but fresh, unadulterated opium. The "plant
of joy" as the Sumerians called it 5,000 years ago; the "celestial drug "
of Thomas De Quincey's "The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater;" the
"forbidden, fabulous opium" in the words of another addict, Jean Cocteau.

It should be clear that there will be no mention in this book of the
horrors of addiction -- the lives ruined, the communities wasted, the
bloodshed in the name of the drug trade. Instead Mr. Tosches cares only
about "brocade-curtained, velvet cushioned places of luxurious decadence,"
"wordless kowtowing servants," and "lovely loosened limbs draped from the
high slit cheongsams of recumbent exotic concubines of sweet intoxication."
It's blatantly ridiculous, but if you can swallow the exoticism he does
write beautifully.

Unable to find what he wants in America or Europe he trots off to Asia.
First stop: Hong Kong, the city of "lush darkness" and "endless rushing
midnight." He "walks out into the night, across Salisbury Road, to the wide
neon boulevard of Nathan Road, whose countless winding side streets and
intertwining alleys were the places where all could be had for a price be
it sex or murder, a drink of rarest snake blood or a shot of purest dope,
gambling or guns, gold or embroidery or jade, amulets to ward off demons or
to court their favor."

Which is an interesting way of describing the place because actually I live
in a side street off Nathan Road and the worst thing I've ever seen is a
bloke urinating in an alley. But, truth aside, I'll admit his fictitious
version is more fun.

Mr. Tosches's contact takes him to Sham Shui Po, "an area so dark that it's
reputation as a black market serves as a veneer of relative
respectability," and to "restaurants where no English is spoken and where
white men are not welcome." Again and again he whispers "the hushed word
for opium, ya-p'ian." Here again his story doesn't pan out. Ya-p'ian is the
Putonghua pronunciation; the Cantonese is nga-pin, which he surely would
know if he ever really had said it to anyone in Hong Kong. In the city, he
is (or at least he says he is) offered heroin, artillery, explosives,
perfectly forged American $100 bills and even slave women and children --
but no opium.

Realizing he must go somewhere even more exotic, he heads for Thailand,
Cambodia and finally Laos. The pace doesn't let up. We get more and more
bombastic ramblings: the hellholes of Bangkok, the snakes of Chiang Mai,
the malnourished hookers of Phnom Penh, the wild swamps of the Tonle Sap --
and on it goes ad nauseum.

As batty and gratuitous as this book is, though, you can't help warming to
it. It's as much a rage against the mediocrity of the modern world -- with
its dual bastions of blandness and vulgarity -- as it is a search for
transcendence. If the underworld is so fascinating it's because our lives
are so lacking in mystery and romance. Seediness is the last place true
connoisseurship lingers. Is addiction to opium any worse than addiction to
television? Mr. Tosches wonders. Is it any less moral than pharmaceutical
pill-pushing or invasive psychoanalysis?

"The thought of breaking the law troubled me gravely," he writes. "But I
have always had another disease as well: the desire to live." He even
brings us wisdom from the gnostic "Gospel" of Thomas: "If you bring forth
what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring
forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
Exactly how relevant that is to opium smoking I'm not sure, but it's a nice
quote.

In the end the buzz seeker finds his opium den, though it isn't quite what
he was looking for. He scores his dope and the reader cheers him on as he
gets more stoned than anyone has ever been since the Sumerians first ground
up poppy seeds. Nick Tosches has lived life to its fullest, all is at peace
in the universe, and the dust jacket is pretty too.

Ms. McPartlin writes from Hong Kong.