Windbreaker comes around again and asks if I like traveling.
“Yeah. I go to Southeast Asia—Thailand, Malaysia, and so on—about once a year. And, I try to visit a new country at least once every one or two years.”
“You do drugs when you were there?”
“Pardon me?”
“You do drugs when you were there?”
“Where?”
“Thailand. Did you do drugs in Thailand?”
“Huh?”
“Have you done drugs in Thailand? You know, ecstasy?”
On the bookshelf just behind Windbreaker is an article my friend dé Dale clipped for me from The Bangkok Times a few weeks ago. It describes Thailand’s illicit trade in narcotics, yaba in particular.
“You must be joking.” I say. “Of course, I haven’t.”
“Oh? Why not?” Windbreaker seems surprised.
“Why not? Because I have zero interest in being thrown into a Thai jail is why not!”
“How about Japan, you ever do drugs in Japan? You ever smoke ‘ganja’?”
“Ganja?”
“Marijuana.”
“Marijuana? No. Never.”
“You’ve never smoked ganja?”
“Look, I’d be lying if I said I’d never smoked,” I admit, somewhat apologetically. “In college, you know, I 'experimented' with it just like everyone else. Hell, even President Clinton did. But, no, I have never smoked marijuana in Japan.”
Cross my heart and hope to die.
A taller cop, thinning on top and shabbily dressed, takes a large case off the top of my refrigerator, places it on the dining table and opens it. Inside is a water pipe, broken down into about eight pieces.
“What’s this?” he asks, holding up the Bohemian glass bowl that forms the base of the pipe.
“It’s an narghilè,”I say. [1]
“A what?”
“A water pipe from Lebanon,” I explain, “for smoking tobacco. The tobacco is in the cabinet across from the fridge. Top shelf.”
If there anything in my apartment is suspicious, it’s that pipe, but, rather than pack it up with all the other things the cops are now confiscating, he returns the narghilè to its case and puts it back on top of the refrigerator. You can smoke dope with one of those, not that I’m going to tell them.
The same cop, clearly not the sharpest tool in the proverbial shed, asks if I am Muslim.
“How many Muslims do you know keep a well-stocked bar?”
I have a small shrine of sorts dedicated to St. Max Kolbe—patron saint of, among all things, addicts—stocked with Ron Zacapa Centenario, Absinthe, Bombay Sapphire, Satsuma potato shōchū, Tres Generacionestequila, Pernod, and so on to keep the home fire burning.
He sighs irritably, then, starts hunting through the contents of my refrigerator where, in addition to the usual perishables, I keep vitamins and other supplements on the top rack of the door.
“What’s this,” he asks, holding up a small bottle of filled with a green liquid.
“It’s Champo-Phenique,” I answer. “It’s for insect bites and cold sores.”
He bags it up as evidence. Then, he removes a small box. “And this?”
“I have rhinitis,” I explain, pulling a handkerchief from my back pocket and honking the klaxon good and loud for effect. “It helps.” Sniff-sniff.
The box contains about a month’s supply of Modafinil, a mild stimulant I’ve been taking for the past three years—I happen to be slightly jazzed up on it this morning. Did I give the truth a slight twist by saying it helped with my rhinitis? Not really. It does help me keep my eyes open when the allergy meds I take daily are trying to pull the shades down.
But Modafinil does so much more, something that I’m not about to let them in on, because, as they say, loose lips sink ships, a fact that is made all the more poignant when your boat is filled gunwale-to-gunwale with plainclothesmen. Modafinil taken with a cocktail of the Cognamine and other nootropic smart drugs will have you soaring like a rocket all night and landing softly as if onto a giant marshmallow. Astonishingly enough, none of them are controlled substances in Japan.[2]
The cop drops the Modafinil into a Ziploc bag to be sent to the lab, then closes the fridge having done his bit.
[1]The names for water pipes vary from country to country. In many parts of the Middle East water pipes are called narghilè (pronounced “arghileh”). “Hookah” comes from the Indian word for the pipe.
[2]“Nootropics” are drugs that are said to enhance cognition, memory, and attention. Many of the drugs mentioned above have since become controlled substances in Japan. (Party poopers.)
The first posting/chapter in this series can be found here.
Rokuban: Too Close to the Sun and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.