Book Review: The Last Opium Den

Nick Tosches is butch. In "The Sex Revolts," a book about gender and music, Joy Press and Simon Reynolds called him the "most unabashedly phallocratic of rock critics." He got even more macho as he proceeded into fiction, investigative journalism and biography, turning his attention away from the sybarites of the music world and toward realms where unadulterated testosterone reign even more supreme -- his prime subjects became organized crime and boxing. Over the years, his voice ripened from adolescent gonzo mania into the literary equivalent of the aging gangsters he half-celebrated in the heroin-trafficking thriller "Trinities," becoming smoke-cured, elegant and more brutal than ever.

Today, his cultivated underworld aura makes him a bit of an anachronism, a man of Godfather values in the time of the Sopranos. Thus it's not surprising that in "The Last Opium Den," he nourishes visions of "dark, brocade-curtained, velvet-cushioned places of luxurious decadence, filled with the mingled smoke and scents of burning joss sticks and the celestial, forbidden, fabulous stuff itself. Wordless, kowtowing servants. Timelessness. Sanctuary. Lovely loosened limbs draped from the high-slit cheongsams of recumbent exotic concubines of sweet intoxication." As Graham Greene wrote, "Seediness has a very deep appeal ... It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost."

"The Last Opium Den," a 74-page slip of a book, is a slightly expanded version of an article that Tosches published in Vanity Fair last year. It's a fantasy of the sphere he should have lived in, the one he imagined in "Trinities." Early in his story, he draws the contrast between his idealized exotic haven and trendy Manhattan's "pseudo-sophisticated rubes ... who turned New York into a PG-rated mall and who oh so loved it thus." Disgusted with the world around him, he sets out to find the one that he believes must exist -- the world of opium dens and all the gorgeous dissipation they conjure.

It's a compelling quest, but there's a huge flaw in Tosches' setup. Were he simply searching for a remnant of the darkly indolent Shanghai splendor of old opium dens, for an echo of crepuscular romance in a garish world, "The Last Opium Den" would be authoritative. As it is, Tosches' coolly glowing prose makes for an invigorating trip, but the man is an unreliable guide. "The Last Opium Den" is premised not just on the idea that glamorous, plush opium dens are impossible to find. It insists that opium dens of all sorts are extinct, even in Asia. And that, I can tell you from experience, simply isn't so.

Tosches presents himself as an insider, one privy to all kinds of secret information. He is blessed with the assistance of various Virgils, who prompt offhand lines like, "I turn to yet another native acquaintance ... with whom I am able to penetrate the inner circles of the triads of the Sham Shui Po district, an area so dark that its reputation as a black market serves as a veneer of relative respectability." Yet no one can help him. "Sinners and saints, lawmen and criminals, drug addicts and scholars, lunatics and seekers. They all told me the same: there ain't no such thing no more; them days are gone." Failing to find what he's looking for in Bangkok, he writes ruefully, "More than two hundred Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in Thailand, not a single opium den."

That statement is untrue. I know because, like Tosches, I was intoxicated by opium dreams, and I longed to smoke the stuff in a den, with my head on a pillow and an old man tending the pipe. Yet unlike Tosches, I was able to find an opium den in Thailand after casually asking around for a couple of days. I'd been staying in the northern town of Pai, a hippie hangout near the Burmese border. The den was in a Lahu minority village about a half-hour away by motorbike. It catered mostly to Western backpackers and burnouts -- a clientele hardly less ersatz than the New York yuppies Tosches scorns. There was no glamour or silk brocade -- livestock were corralled beneath the raised floor, the oil lamps flickered out of sawed-off Coke cans. But it was an opium den all the same, perfumed with the Elysian smoke.