Their enmity had been born at 2 a.m. one Friday night when they simultaneously approached an attractive Swedish girl who had shown up at Ying Yang in a coral blue cocktail dress, with Balinese warrior tattoos on her fleshy upper arms and high, white stilettos strapped to her bony feet. As she bobbed her head to sip her vodka rocks, Samson and Shore Patrol appeared before her.

“You looking for work?” their voices chorused, Samson’s tenor complementing Shore Patrol’s bass.

The girl sucked at her drink through the hollow swizzle, swung her gaze from Samson to Shore Patrol and back to Samson, and shrugged.

“Work?” Samson asked.

“Dancing?” Shore Patrol queried.

The Swedish girl, whose stringy blond hair rose around her head like a shabby lion’s mane, smiled at the two earnest, would-be headhunters, “Try elsewhere, you losers.”

And she walked away to join a Japanese businessman who awaited her in a corner booth.

Samson and Shore Patrol sized each other up for the first time.

Samson, 27, never told anyone his real name. He was, he told me, from somewhere in eastern Canada; perhaps it was Nova Scotia. When I met him he tried to sell me a knockoff Breitling watch.

Shore Patrol, 24, admitted to being from San Gabriel, Calif. He had been so nicknamed because one evening when an American serviceman at RIP had jokingly shouted out “Shore patrol!” Shore Patrol had managed to clear the premises so quickly that he appeared to be out the door before the bottle he had dropped hit the barroom floor. An AWOL U.S. serviceman, he was thereafter known as Shore Patrol, or SP.

It was Shore Patrol’s hurried bolt from RIP those months ago that had won him the reputation for blazing speed. Shore Patrol, who had been a sprinter in high school, relished the rumors about his quickness that had spread among the clientele at RIP.

Yet Samson, who had not witnessed Shore Patrol’s run for the door, was skeptical. Samson had also been an athlete during his youth, a fleet-footed high school wide receiver playing Canadian rules football. It irked him that someone else should be known as the fastest runner in the crowd. He had been sizing Shore Patrol up for some time and was convinced he had better wheels than SP, and whenever talk of SP’s barroom flight came up, Samson shook his head and told anyone who would listen, “That punk ain’t fast.”

I had been sent to Tokyo by Vogue to write about the most expensive hotel in the world. Before I reached that mountaintop hot-springs resort, though, I was sidetracked by the crowd of scumbags, lowlifes, cutthroats, thieves, dealers, pimps and hustlers who hung around RIP, a has-been dive that in its glory days had hosted the likes of Keanu Reeves, Sting and Seiko Matsuda but was now relegated to serving Asahi in cans to Samson and Shore Patrol. Randall, the frizzy-haired, tattooed, rugby player-sized Aussie who ran the place along with his partner, a straight-haired, weedy Japanese actor named Haru, were desperately seeking a scheme that would enliven their bar and restore its former status as a hot spot. Various ideas came and went as to how to refurbish the joint. One evening I came in to find Randall busy behind the bar killing cockroaches with arsenic-smelling bug spray and beaming because he had stumbled onto the idea that was going to turn RIP around.

“Piercing station,” Randall said, as baby roaches scurried across the bar toward me. “This whole piercing craze is about to hit Tokyo. The Japs will go crazy for it.”

I shrugged and ordered my J&B and soda.

“We’re out of Scotch,” Randall told me, slapping at cockroaches with his bare hands. “How about a nose ring?”

But RIP was wallowing in perpetual decline, consigned to being a backwater of the Roppongi party scene that fewer and fewer of the party people deigned to drop in on anymore. As it devolved into a place where the trendy dared not tread, it evolved into the perfect hole in the wall for those who did not want to be seen, for those who needed a darkened, quiet, secluded spot where they could conduct business with other similarly light-of-day-shy creatures. In Tokyo, with its paucity of spacious living situations, deals are usually done in public places. Even as Randall and Haru scratched their heads trying to come up with a new theme that might woo the smart set back to their establishment, they were inadvertently luring a new clientele that came precisely because the smart set was nowhere to be found. RIP’s location down a seldom-traveled side street 50 meters from Roppongi-dori made it centrally located yet discreet. RIP became the venue of choice for shady dealers.

The decor was suitably frowzy, languishing in a state of disassemblage because Randall and Haru were forever coming up with feckless new themes that would require tearing down bits and pieces of the bar but would be abandoned before any reconstruction took place. There were stretches of exposed steel beams and two-by-fours. Chicken-wire plaster braces showed through behind the racks of empty bottles. The dance floor had been stripped away, revealing that the bar had been constructed over a parking lot.

I too was in flux. My nascent marriage to a Dutch woman was showing signs of miscarrying. A contracted novel I had completed and sent to my publisher was about to be rejected. Needing a break, I had cobbled together a few queries and had cajoled my editor at Vogue into assigning me this relatively easy story about the most expensive hotel in the world. I had also convinced the Nation to provide a few thousand dollars in the form of a research grant; I was to produce for them an article about the Japanese economy, then in a severe slump. But I had been in Tokyo for more than two weeks and my research had ground to a halt; I had not been anywhere near the mountaintop retreat I was sent to write about.

Instead I had found among RIP’s shadow-dwellers kindred spirits. They were all hiding out from something — those of us over 30 from what we had become, those still in their 20s from their inevitable futures. There was no mystique about the place, no hallowed past or gilded myths to toast; it was the absence of mystique, the total lack of any kind of decor, that spoke to me the first time I walked into the place.

There was another problem I had come to Tokyo to escape. In Los Angeles, during the writing of that doomed novel, I had taken to ingesting prolific amounts of narcotics. I didn’t take these drugs — vicodins, percocets, dilaudids, morphine-sulfates, talwins, darvons, codeines, the occasional balloon or bindle of street heroin; basically, all the hairy-chested analgesic opiates — to help me write; I took these substances to make me feel better about how badly I was writing. I had convinced myself that what I needed was a quick trip back to Japan, where I had been relatively drug-free during the five years I had lived there in the late ’80s and early ’90s. What was required, I was sure, was a return to the site of former glories, to where I had written numerous magazine articles and come up with the material for my first and only book. My life in Los Angeles, with its failing marriage and dimly plotted writing projects, was without luster. Tokyo, on the other hand, was where my life could regain lost sparkle. I would become the person I imagined I used to be: vital, charming, intuitive, a thorough journalist and artful writer. My drug addiction would magically fall away from me, like a tearaway jersey ripped from a streaking tailback.

But Tokyo had changed.

The Tokyo where I came of age, amid the splash and glitter of the bubble economy, the dazzle of a gaudy, turbocharged boom that spit out six-figure salaries and fancy imported suits and allowed me for the first time in my life to feel like a grownup, was gone. Those were years when high school dropout hostesses, fresh off jumbo jet steerage one-way from Vancouver, Los Angeles, London, Stockholm or Melbourne, boasted of saving a million yen a month, and scruffy, snotty punks like myself, hair gelled and smarmy in Italian suits, abounded. We inhabited the neon-lit streets and shrieky nightclubs and black-lit bars with such aplomb because we were sure, totally, that we were in the right place at the right time. The vibe had been rapacious, but with the sense of optimism that springs from believing there is enough to go around.

The city that I flew into that dark February of 1996 was a half-decade removed from the glory of the bubble and mired in myriad political and financial scandals — the prime minister was teetering, the banking system was on the verge of collapse. The mood of the city was somber. I took as my economic barometer the condition and well-being of Tokyo’s foreign hostesses. If during the glory days there had been an insatiable demand for more hostesses, more good-time girls to pour drinks and make small talk with expense account-riding executives grown fat on Japan Inc., there was now a plethora of unemployed Caucasian blondes and brunettes roving the Roppongi and Ginza streets. Expense accounts had been slashed. It was no longer acceptable at Nomura, Dentsu or Mitsubishi to run up multi-thousand-dollar tabs, and the corporate warriors could no longer afford to spend millions of yen wooing these nocturnal flowers with lavish gifts and pecuniary displays of affection. Girls who used to make thousands of dollars a month and revel in diamond and gold perquisites were now unemployed. “One of the first things we slashed was entertainment expenses,” said Masa Kobayashi of Sakura Bank. “When times are tough, having a good time is not so much of a priority.”

But hostess bars, with their posh atmosphere, steady flow of drinks and beautiful women, had always helped businessmen close crucial deals. Times may have been tough, and businessmen less patient, but the need for a place to entertain clients and get a few cheap thrills ogling sexy, ostensibly available foreign women remained as real as ever. Just because business was down, that didn’t mean that business had stopped. “The hostess bar was a business place,” said Takeo Hideoka of All Nippon Airways. “That’s what it was first and foremost. Take away a place to do business outside the home and office, and the Japanese GNP would suffer even more than it has.”

It was the patrons of RIP who fueled the upstart industry that was replacing hostess bars as the evening entertainment of choice for well-heeled Japanese executives.

Samson squatted beside a carbon-caked 250cc motorcycle, his blackened hands twisting and fiddling in an attempt to adjust the Suzuki’s carburetor. He had arrived in Japan with just one skill — he was a whiz at repairing and restoring internal combustion engines. The small garage space he rented in Koto Ward was no larger than a walk-in closet, allowing him to store three motorcycles if they stood handlebar to exhaust. During the day he unfurled a canopy over the sidewalk to stake out a few more precious feet of working space and set to tinkering with motorcycles, scooters, mopeds, even the odd lawn mower or hedge-trimmer. Renowned in this neighborhood as the kuroi tei no gaijin (“foreigner with black hands”), Samson quickly made a reputation for himself as reliable, dependable and, most important of all, trustworthy. He also developed an extensive web of connections that allowed him to traffic in hard-to-trace stolen motorcycle parts, as well as illicit substances that he would transfer from the foreign community to the Japanese community and vice versa.

He stood up when he saw me, wiping his hands beneath a Husqvarno poster of a preposterously top-heavy Latina model leaning forward over a set of chrome handlebars. I had met Samson at RIP, where we were introduced by a mutual acquaintance who knew of my chemical predilections. After unsuccessfully trying to sell me a dodgy watch, Samson told me to come see him at his shop.

In the shadowy light beneath the canopy, framed by exhaust pipes and mufflers arrayed on the wall behind him, Samson appeared hauntingly thin, his narrow cheekbones and cleft chin giving him a drawn, hungry look. He had brown hair, which he kept short and well-groomed. By design, there was nothing exceptional about his appearance, save that he always seemed to be smirking around his two prominent buck teeth.

“So how do you know Motoko?” he asked.

“We used to work together,” I told him.

He considered my answer, rolling his upper lip beneath his lower as he did so. He posed questions about why I was in Tokyo, about who I worked for.

We spoke of Bangkok, of pharmacies along Patpong, of bars we both knew. The conversation circled around but never quite settled on what I had come to see him about: heroin. I was impatient. My last few darvon were staving off serious discomfort, but I had concluded that in order to successfully research and complete my assignments I would need stronger narcotics.

My plan to wean myself from synthetic and nonsynthetic opiates in Tokyo had failed. I had sniffed what was supposed to be my last bindle of heroin on the plane to Tokyo. The dozen percocet and bottle of valium in my briefcase had been intended as a gradual detoxification kit. But the first morning in Tokyo, awake early because of a discomfiting combination of leg cramps and jet lag, I had wandered in the gray mist to see a sympathetic, elderly doctor I knew who provided me with a few dozen candy-colored darvons and some French tranquilizers called cercine. That had been a few days ago. Now I was running out of pills.

A few minutes later, while Samson washed his hands with powdered soap over a tiny, plastic basin, he said, facing the mirror, “So you’re riding the horse?”

After he dried his hands, he removed a bindle of Japanese newsprint from behind the busty Hispanic woman and carefully unfolded it, revealing a mound of brownish powder. He had already pushed in the bike he had been repairing and had shuttered his modest establishment. There was barely room for the two of us to stand without touching. He poured out a small, two-centimeter-long line of the powder on a shiny, vinyl motorcycle seat. I inhaled the powder with a rolled-up 1,000-yen note and handed the note to him.

As we stood face to face in the crowded little garage, we agreed that I would buy the remains of what was in the bindle for 20,000 yen. Samson, relaxing after his day’s work, handed me a deck of Polaroids.

“What do you think?” he asked.

The dark, shadowy photographs were of women, in bikinis or naked, with teased, stringy blond hair. Most of the girls were standing, but one or two were lying back on what appeared to be dining room tables holding their feet with their hands to show their splayed genitals to the camera. I was reminded of the Girl Next Door sections of various adult magazines.

“Who are they?” I asked.

Samson explained they were strippers, 24 of them, and they were en route to Tokyo via Vancouver. He had arranged to house, feed and transport these girls, who were to work in Bachelor Party, one of the new strip clubs opening around Tokyo. He had found them through a scout who worked in Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia, hiring girls to dance in the Far East. The new Tokyo clubs were competing for exotic dancers. Samson, along with Shore Patrol and a few other foreign hustlers, had gone into business providing girls for the new Tokyo topless and bottomless clubs. He kept an eye open for out-of-work hostesses and foreign girls fresh to Japan, but the clubs were increasingly requiring the top-heavy, siliconically and collagenically enhanced beauties of the type on the Husqvarna poster. Those sorts, the archetypal lap-dance queens, were harder to come by in Tokyo. Each club needed about 50 girls. For the girl with stupendous cleavage and firm buttocks, the money was very, very good.

“There’s a definite shortage,” Samson told me, “of classy ladies.”

When those girls whose Polaroids Samson had shown me arrived and were ensconced on Japanese executives’ laps, Samson would net his biggest score ever. None of the local agents had delivered 24 girls. Bachelor Party, an upstart club in Shibuya, would instantly leap to the fore of Tokyo’s new wave of erotic entertainment; Samson would then allow himself to leave Tokyo. He wanted to exit a winner, on the heels of a big score, a memorable move, one the patrons of RIP would be recounting to each other for months to come.

Like so many people I met in Tokyo that dark season, he wanted out.

“These white doves are Es.” Ian is gradually emptying the numerous pockets of his faded army pants and removing more and more drugs: tiny ziplock baggies of charis (unpressed hashish) and marijuana, pills, tabs, powders, bindles, bits of who knows what wrapped in foil. “I’ve also got Elephants, those are a little better, from Amsterdam. Now these pink ones, these are fucking brilliant, made in Japan, like Sony. Fuck you up good, these will. I’ve also got speed: sulphate; it’s a little brownish ’cause it got wet. This here is nitrazepam methylmorphine. Have you ever tried ketamine?”

Nobody knows exactly when the first Goan rave took place. Where subcontinental hippy culture ended and rave culture began is hard to say, since the two subcultures share a disdain for the mainstream and a fondness for hallucinogens. According to Manfred, a Zurich DJ who has been doing raves in Goa for four years, the first true rave — as opposed to the old-school beach party around a bonfire where everyone passed the chillum (Indian-style hash pipe), dropped acid and listened to Floyd — was back in 1987, when the legendary DJ Rey “brought the Hindu god Shiva to the dance floor” by playing acid-house cassettes brought over from England.

Rave season in Goa lasts from September to March, and for much of that stretch there are parties every other night. The locales vary — Ajuna, Disco Valley, Japora or Badam are the most frequent venues — depending on which police official or civil servant can be bribed at the lowest price; baksheesh (bribery) is an Indian institution. The organizers are ad hoc consortiums of chai-mat vendors, bar owners, drug dealers and land-owners looking for a quick rupee. At every one of these affairs you see the same old Crown or Macintosh amplifiers and beat-up Ritchie mixing boards; the output, a meaty 5,000 watts, is usually doubled by BGW preamps. No one uses turntables. (If you’ve ever had to haul hundreds of pounds of vinyl to a club or a friend’s house, then you understand the impracticality of lugging albums around the world, not to mention the excess baggage surcharges airlines will impose.) The DJs who work the Goa raves do so with cassette or digital audio tape. A trio of Sony Professional Walkmans or Sony or Aiwa digital audio tape players are the Goan equivalent to the twin direct-drive Technics turntables ubiquitous to most nightclubs in the Western world.

To find out where the parties are, after dinner — and Goa has some of India’s finest cuisine, a legacy of having been a Portuguese, rather than English, colony — hit Tito’s, Primrose or Hilltop, the three best local bars, and ask around. It’s not a matter of knowing the right people, and there is very little of that hipper-than-thou vibe and logistical complexity that permeates so much of European and American rave culture. “We’ve all come from thousands of miles to party,” says Jackie, a 21-year-old English girl. “We could have stayed at home if we wanted to be snobby and posh.”

The parties don’t really get going until 4, and it’s around dawn that the energy levels, various ingested chemicals and rising sun make for a high-octane, good-karma cocktail that will surprise even the most skeptical, hardened, jaded club-goer. Good Goan raves last until 2 or 3 in the afternoon; great ones go on for four days.

“If you need anything, talk to me.” Ian arranges his wares on the dirty tan mat as though he were dressing the window display at some kind of alternative Tiffany’s, one where, instead of silver and diamonds, the velvet jewel boxes would contain tablets of White Doves or lines of speed. “I’m the man with everything, except smack. I don’t handle smack. The locals do that. Did you see my tattoos?”

It is impossible to miss them. Two massive, insect-like creatures — anthropomorphic praying mantises? The monsters from the movie “Aliens”? A “Godzilla” marketing tie-in? — are coiled on each side of his spine. They cover his entire, otherwise pallid, back.

Ian’s decided to become my best friend because somebody told him I was a writer and he is going to set me straight — or get me bent as possible — and make sure I get the real, neurological story, which he insists requires that I buy one of the items he has arrayed before me. The 500 American, English, French, German, Dutch, Australian, Japanese, Israeli and Indian kids dancing under the Day-Glo paint-splattered tarpaulin, sprawled on the chai mats and embracing on the sand are, apparently, already satisfied customers of Ian’s; from a money pouch secured by a tiny brass and steel padlock (this mini-lock is the only thing about Ian I would call cute), he removes a wad of green and white 500 rupee (about $16) notes thick as a water-logged Tom Clancy paperback.

“Even after this is black marketed back into sterling,” Ian grins and shows a gold tooth, “we’re talking serious loot.”

Four hours later, Ian dances over to where I’m quivering like a scared child to Syndicate’s X Mood trance track. He’s got something in his hand, another packet of white pills with Chinese characters imprinted on them.

He shouts over the heavy, heavy bass. “You ready to get seriously fucked up?”

A few of us listened to our cassette players, others flipped through out-of-date magazines or new collections of the complete works of Maxim Gorky or Anton Chekov — vast, multi-volume sets printed on cheap paper that retailed for a few cents here in the Soviet Union. Barnett, the hulking, barefoot University of Alabama graduate who had recently gone off the wagon, slipped a liter of hot vodka from his duffel and unfolded a brand new pocket knife to gouge at his ingrown toenail. (He had rationalized his decision to stumble around Soviet Central Asia barefoot by pointing out that he was destined for the podiatrist’s office anyway because of his absurdly swollen big toe.) Now, he swigged the hot vodka and probed his foot with the knife, slicing away at the bulbous flesh that had swollen up around his nail. The train lurched forward, causing Barnett to cut a larger than anticipated hunk from his foot, splattering the side of the compartment with blood.

We made steady, albeit painfully slow, progress for an hour, then came to another halt in another similarly landscapeless patch of earth where the conductor stomped down the corridor, ordering everyone off the train. We gathered our shoulder bags and day packs, making our way along the narrow passageway to the rusted, metal-grill steps to the sand. An impromptu nomadic migration seemed to be in progress: Hundreds of passengers marched alongside the train, their bundles of clothes and wicker cages of chickens and hog-tied goats all moving along with them in shambling piles beneath the blistering afternoon sun. We were changing trains, word came down, to another train up ahead along the same track. So we joined the classless processions from third class and second class after being assured that, as we were first-class passengers, the rest of our luggage would be moved by the porters from the baggage car to the new train. Passing our still hissing, navy-blue locomotive, we came across a rusted, derelict, derailed hulk whose chassis was so twisted the rear coupler hung 10 meters over the desert. The locomotive had been torqued into such a gravity-defying angle it seemed it would collapse at any moment. But as we skirted around the engine rather than risk walking under it, I saw that a few tiny gray and brown birds, the first I had seen in this desert, had made nests in the shadowy undercarriage.

Just beyond was our new train, a series of light green passenger cars, in repose behind another engine, this one a living version of the tangled, skeletal conglomeration of wheels, axles and gears that lay dead in the tracks behind us. By the familiarity with which the great mass of passengers climbed aboard this new train and retook their seats, and the un-Soviet efficiency of the entire act, one had the impression that this transfer had been going on for years, that the rusted locomotive had been here as long as most of us had been alive and had become a regular part of the Tashkent-Samarkand run.

By the time we resettled into our compartments aboard the new train — slightly less dilapidated than the last train but with the same cigarette butts crammed into every possible corner and the same coating of soot on every surface — and were under way, it was already dark and Barnett had once again flipped out his pocket knife and was setting to work on his infected toe.

The sun went down, the temperature dropping from above 90 degrees to somewhere in the 40s. Barnett’s sister Melissa stood up, wrapping herself in her light-brown alpaca coat and heading out into the passageway. Wearing only the T-shirt and jeans I had boarded the train with — the rest of my clothes were in my luggage — I found Melissa standing in the narrow walk at the end of the car, on a grated shelf that connected over the coupler to form a walkway to the next car. The train had finally achieved a decent pace, and was now bashing along so that we could barely make out the small tumescences of sand alongside the tracks. Melissa stood against the back of the car. I slid in alongside her, my shoulder touching hers.

“I can’t be around him when he does that,” she said, barely audible over the screeching and buckling of train wheels.

“Jabs at his toe?” I asked.

She nodded. I needed to get the conversation around to us, or to make a pass, or somehow transgress the space between us to instigate the fling I was desperate to have.

“What do you think we should do?” I asked.

“About what?”

“About your brother’s toe.”

At the outset of the trip there had been a faculty chaperone, a German philosophy professor named Werner von Semperoff, whose charge it had been to lead us about the Soviet Union. During the earlier, Moscow leg of the trip he had been plentifully in appearance, at the head of our straggling band of students as we wandered past Lenin’s tomb or through the GUM department store.

He had introduced us to a lovely, middle-aged Russian woman with gun-metal gray eyes who was so much prettier than the Russian women we had seen in the streets that we assumed she worked for the KGB or some similar government agency. And evidently von Semperoff had better things to do than lead us through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the two Soviet Central Asian Republics we were scheduled to visit on this trip; for he hadn’t boarded the Aeroflot Tupelov-72 that had turbulently hurtled us from Moscow to Tashkent.

We heard from Sergei, the portly Intourist agent assigned to lead us through Central Asia, that von Semperoff would rejoin us at some later date at some distant city — when he said the name of the place, none of us had been familiar enough with Soviet place names to remember it.

We were college students on our spring break from the American College in Paris, moneyed brats mostly, expecting to take a peek into what was then the Evil Empire. Gorbachev had been in office only a year, and all we knew of him for sure was that he had a stain on his forehead that we conjectured was shaped like Afghanistan. It was then still a rarity for Westerners to visit the Soviet Union and when we entered the country our passports had been taken from us and we had been issued yellow Intourist cards that we had to carry everywhere with us and present at hotels, train stations and airports. Our parents had shelled out something like $2,000 so that we could sit in sweltering train compartments, listen to Motvrhead cassettes and drink hot vodka. It had been advertised as a study trip, but thus far the only class had been an impromptu lecture by von Semperoff back in Moscow on the perils of passing out drunk on the Moscow subway system.

During the first few days of wandering around Moscow in the slush and mud of spring thaw, trading dollars and francs for bootlegged Beluga caviar and canned Kamchatka crab legs because the food at the Hotel Cosmos had been stubbornly inedible, I had taken to making sure I was walking alongside Melissa or somehow seated next to her during bus rides and meal breaks. Prior to the trip, I had noticed her several times around school, but I had only met her the day before we left Paris, while I was standing next to the pinball machine in the American College Cafi. She wore her black hair long in the back with bangs falling to her eyebrows — Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders had prominently sported this style a few years earlier. Her cheeks were full but rested on high cheekbones, lending symmetry to the thin layer of baby fat that had yet to be burned away by the real world and real life. Her eyes were blue-green, her nose a sturdy isosceles triangle and her lips a parted, flattened rose.

Her body was a solid combination of muscle and girlish curves. She had been an athlete at whatever girl’s prep school she had attended; if I had to guess her sport it would have been field hockey, so she surprised me when she later told me she played volleyball. She was not long and sinewy, as were the volleyball players I had known; she was evenly proportioned with ample hips, a narrow waist the circumference of a long playing record and generous, upstanding breasts.

I had overheard her telling another girl she was going on this trip, and that her brother had flown over from Alabama to join her. I introduced myself. I swear I noticed something in the way she looked at me; I knew then the primary purpose of this trip.

We arrived in Samarkand sometime after midnight, the train gasping to a halt
at what seemed another unscheduled delay but was actually our destination.
The platform next to the train began to teem with life as passengers
disembarked and bundles were thrown from the train to outstretched arms.
Descending to the platform, we stood shivering amid the hurly-burly of
djellaba-clad Central Asians securing their fabric-wrapped parcels and baskets
of fruit. As first-class passengers, we were once again told not to worry about
our luggage, the porters would make sure it was passed on to the Intourist
drivers, who would see it safely to the Hotel Samarkand.

Teenagers in denim jackets shuffled alongside us as we walked through the
station, nodding to us and moving their heads as though they were talking.
They did this so that anyone watching would think they were trying to practice
their English. What they were actually hoping was to purchase some black
market gear.

We had heard, like all Westerners who visited Russia in those days, that one
could make a handsome profit by trading designer jeans. But the Russians and
Central Asians had been thoroughly unimpressed by the copious amounts of denim
we had imported; the market was by then flooded. What every Russian under the
age of 40 desperately wanted was heavy metal cassettes — Iron Maiden,
Dokken, AC/DC, Van Halen, Quiet Riot, Ratt and, the apparent favorite band of
all Russian metalheads, the Scorpions. Unfortunately, most of my fellow
travelers were too sophisticated to be listening to heavy metal; this was,
after all, the mid-’80s, and your average college student was then into
much hipper music: R.E.M., the Replacements, H|sker D|, the Talking Heads — music,
in other words, that Soviet headbangers found incomprehensible. As a music
fan with an annoyingly developed sense of the ironic, I happened to be going
through a phase of re-appreciating heavy metal (a phase that lasted
approximately seven years), particularly AC/DC and Van Halen, and so arrived
in the Soviet Union with a backpack full of metal cassettes that proved to be
more valuable than dollars in Gorbachev’s Russia.

We waited in the cavernous, darkened lobby of the Hotel Samarkand on battered
Brezhnev-era knockoff naugahyde chairs. Sergei, our Intourist guide, was
undertaking the usual protracted struggle to check us into the hotel. No
matter how many rooms were vacant, train compartments empty or airplane seats
unoccupied, no one in the Soviet Union’s tourist sector seemed particularly
pleased to be filling those spaces with hard-currency-paying foreigners. It
was as if the entire tourist infrastructure of the country was perpetually
reserved for some high-ranking government official who would never arrive.

The staff of the Samarkand, once they were roused from whatever collective
backroom stupor they had managed to organize for themselves, grudgingly passed
over a dozen fourth-floor room keys with no room number indicators attached to
them. A surly, sour-smelling desk worker assured us through Sergei that all
the keys in the hotel worked in every door, except those doors with newer
locks for which the keys had been lost. We fell in behind a bell captain in a
tattered uniform who led us up several flights of marble stairs where we
disbursed to claim our rooms. Our luggage, we were assured, was on its own
separate way up.

I arranged to share a room with Barnett, who immediately fell onto the spongy
mattress to pass out, his bare feet hanging over the side of the bed and his
toe swollen to the size of a newborn infant’s head. The room was even colder
than it had been outside. Flipping through his duffel bag, I removed a Roll
Tide sweat shirt, which I threw on over my cut-off army pants and polo shirt.
The light switch near the door had proven useless; when Barnett had flipped the
switch upon entering the room, the switch had come off in his hand, leaving one
exposed wire, which we both felt it prudent to avoid. In the bathroom I found
a string hanging from the ceiling that when pulled produced a tepid stream of
yellow light sufficient for me to make out the following day’s agenda. It
went something like this: Breakfast, Mosque, Mosque, Mosque, Lunch, Mosque,
Mosque, Monument to the Great Patriotic War, Dinner. I rooted through
Barnett’s duffel again for some caviar, which I ate with my fingers.

It was Melissa’s idea that we take a walk. She had knocked on our door,
ostensibly to check on her brother, and finding me with my fingers blackened
by Beluga and her brother unconscious on the bed, she asked if I would like to
take a stroll, explore the city. At that point, had she suggested we sneak
into a Soviet nuclear testing facility I would have gone along with her.

The roads were deserted. The streetlights did not work, save at the
occasional intersection where a flickering bulb would burn surrounded by
thousands of moths. But a full moon cast a dull glow and lit the way down a
wide, palm tree-lined avenue. The vast, imposing, shadowy gray buildings that
loomed on each side appeared to be government buildings. Every five minutes,
olive-colored trucks rumbled past, the driver slowing to stare at Melissa and
me.

Melissa led us from the main drag onto a two-lane dirt road, past shuttered
apartment buildings. She was intoxicated by the place, by the strangeness of
it, the foreignness; it was vastly different from her native Jefferson County,
Ala., and it was even a wide remove from the Fifth Arrondissement in Paris,
where she had been living the last few years. The people here were
ethnically opposite; their arid land was topographically alien; their
languages — Cyrillic and Arabic — were alphabetically exotic; their system of
government was anathema. There was even a distinctive smell to the place, a
honeyed sweetness mingled with the usual third world sour.
In this unknown land, I hoped, this place of mystery, surely the romantic
possibilities were limitless. If back in the United States we never
would have met, we had been brought closer together by Paris and then tossed next
to each other on the same narrow dirt road here in Samarkand.

We turned again, onto a track that led off through irrigated tracts of
desert farm land. Already, that feeling of wonderment and mystery at our
dislocation had begun to give way, for me at least, to something like fear and
discomfort; for not only did we not know where we were, neither did anyone
else. Our classmates were by now into their third pints of vodka or were
already asleep while Sergei, our Intourist guide, was probably into his
60th pint of vodka. We had vanished off the map, had simply walked out of
our hotel and stumbled onto the cultivated fringes of some has-been caravan
town now run by a bunch of drunk commissars.

But I was reluctant to show this fear to Melissa. She was of sturdier stock
than me. Her father, she had told me, was a celebrity of sorts, the head
football coach of a prominent college team that had not lived up to preseason
expectations, although Melissa had insisted that the Aloha Bowl had been the
stated goal of this team all season long. And as she walked in that evening
light, her face silhouetted by the full moon’s glow, she was plainly the
striking, good-looking embodiment of her family’s wholesome American image,
her brother’s soporific condition notwithstanding. She still held at that
moment, at age 20, all the charms of girlhood and the knowing sexuality of
womanhood. As hard as she tried to seem like a woman of the world, to seem
sophisticated — in Paris, I knew, she went to trendy bontes like Bain Douch, Appocalypse and La
Piscine — there was the redolent whiff of the cheerleader and
“A” student about her. Even on this dusty lane, in this Central Asian night,
she was plainly an American Girl of the type I tirelessly lusted after
through high school and college.

We had emerged onto another paved stretch of blacktop. The vast sky, a
purple-lit sheet of pin-prick stars that ran in an immense belt from horizon
to horizon, provided us with no clues as to where we were. Every star was of
a brightness sufficient to be deemed the brightest in the sky, and anyway,
even if we had been able to divine a North Star, we had no clue in what direction our hotel lay. It had been a kilometer since we had seen any man-made structures,
and I pointed this out to Melissa as a bad sign, indicating that we were heading away from civilization rather than toward it.
Yet when we reversed course, hoping to find the narrow lane on which we had
come to this paved stretch of road, the lane seemed to have vanished, the side
of the road offering up only the relentless sameness of tilled plots with
farmhouses invisible in the night. The moonlight that had previously seemed
ample now was inadequate. The darkness closed in around us.

“Nous sommes perdus,” said Melissa in her Alabama-twanged French.
At that moment light flickered on the horizon at the end of the ribbon of
black road. At first I took it to be a distant flash of thunder, but the light
seemed too yellow, somehow artificial.

Headlights! It was a truck. Its husky, gasping engine already audible
through the thin, dry desert air, a canopied diesel cab was erratically
swerving toward us. We were found. We could thumb a lift back to whatever
passed for the center of this one collectively-owned horse town.

This was a troop truck, the property of the People’s Army of the Soviet
Socialist Republics. We stopped waving when we saw the maddened, febrile eyes
of the driver and his three compatriots in the lighted cab of the vehicle,
leering in shock at us over the headlights of the truck as it came to idle.
Plainly, whatever we were, we did not belong here, along this dirt road, in
the middle of the night, when all good comrades were safely asleep. While
the driver swung open his door with a slow metallic groan, the whole canopied
back of the truck seemed to come alive as the troops in the trailer
roused themselves and began to peer over the cab. Russian conversation
erupted.

And even from this distance, struggling to see past the headlights, I could
tell that the majority of gazes had fallen upon Melissa.

About two dozen soldiers disembarked from the vehicle to form a semi-circle,
panting sour, boozy effluvium at us. The soldiers wore olive-green uniforms
soiled with thick, grimy layers of dust and boots caked with dried mud. They
had been working all day. And probably drinking all day and night.
A mustachioed man wearing a green cap who had been sitting next to the driver
appeared to be in command. He regarded us with a mixture of curiosity,
suspicion and a desire to sniff out some way to make this serendipitous
discovery somehow pay off for him.

He spoke brusquely — fast, hoarse commands in Russian that we could not
understand.

We did not have passports, and we had surrendered our Intourist cards upon
checking into the hotel. I had my wallet, from which I produced a California
driver’s license that I showed to the man in the cap. He took this and
studied it, and then looked over Melissa’s Carte de Sejour, a document
entitling her to study in France. In the hopes of further convincing him we
were Americans, students and definitely not some bizarre brand of counter-revolutionary Soviet citizen or air-dropped Western spies, I showed him the
American Express card my father had given me and Melissa produced, of all
things, a Galeries Lafayette charge card.

“Hotel Samarkand, Hotel Samarkand,” we kept repeating over and over.

The crowd of curious, drunken soldiers was becoming restless. For them,
Melissa was a wondrous surprise. A gift, perhaps. A foreign woman, in
jewelry, wandering on a stretch of road where she should not have been. And
her very presence out here indicated she would not be missed. For if anyone
were monitoring her whereabouts, then surely she would not have been allowed to
wander so far. If these 20 soldiers gave a thought to me it was only that
they would have to kill me, either before or after they were finished with
Melissa.

Two of the men lunged forward, their green uniforms shaking off a small
cloud of dust that swirled in the headlights. They tugged at Melissa’s coat;
she grabbed for my shoulder.

I took her in my arms.

The man in the cap sternly ordered the men back into line.

Then he held his hand out, gesturing for Melissa to put her hand in his. She
shook her head. He slapped the palm of his own hand and proffered it again.

She tentatively held her hand out. The man in the cap bent down for a closer
look at the emerald ring on her right hand.

The troops were murmuring among themselves now. A few had grown bored,
probably from the realization that whatever was to be gained from us would not
trickle down to them. But a few of the soldiers remained interested in us,
and a noisy round of arguing between the man in the cap and some of the
soldiers ensued, during which violent hand gestures were thrown our way and my
driver’s license and Melissa’s Carte de Sejour were passed from hand to hand,
and once cast down to the pavement.

Finally, the man in the cap took Melissa by the arm, attempting to pull her
away from me, toward the back of the truck. She clung to me, shaking her head
violently.

Another round of angry discussion ensued, during which Melissa kept on
hugging me.

“Married, married,” she said, pointing to her ring and then to me.

The man in the cap shook his head slowly. Some decision had been reached. He gestured for us to go to the truck. We didn’t move.

He then barked at us angrily in Russian. The crowd of soldiers parted for us
as we walked to the truck, several of the soldiers reaching out to feel
Melissa’s hair as she passed.

We had been ordered into the sour-smelling cab, where we sat surrounded by
four Russian soldiers. Melissa placed herself onto my lap rather than on the
hard seat next to the commander. The truck started up, grinding into gear, and
we set off down the narrow road. As the Russian men slid closer to Melissa
she managed to arrange herself so that she was perched atop me.

We did not know where we were going. But as disoriented as I was, I was sure
our hotel lay somewhere to the right of this road. As long as we hung a right
at some point, we would be fine. That would mean we were being driven back to
our hotel. We rolled up to a deserted intersection, a barren crossing of two
seldom-traveled roads. Turn right, I was thinking, hang a right. Please,
please, please.

We turned left.

Now I was certain we were in trouble. We would be arrested. Or even worse:
Melissa would be raped, tortured, mutilated, her body abandoned for the
coyotes — did they even have coyotes? — somewhere in this vast, inhospitable
desert. And what would happen to me? Would I valiantly — and pointlessly — seek
to defend Melissa’s honor? Force these God-hating Reds to kill me before they
had their way with Melissa? I really had no choice but to surrender myself on
the altar of Melissa’s honor. If they were driving us to some more convenient
disposal point, where our screams would be unheard and our bodies unfound,
then to be honorable was also the only rational course. I would be killed
either way. I had run through the probabilities and decided I would make a
last stand when we were out of the truck. I would at least die with dignity,
defending the honor of American womanhood.

“They’ll have to kill me to get to you,” I murmured to Melissa.

“What are you talking about?” she said.

We were slowing down. There it was, the Hotel Samarkand, lit up and
beckoning, the most beautiful sight I would lay eyes on in the Soviet Union.
The soldiers opened the door and let us out, returning my driver’s license,
her student identification and our credit cards.

Upstairs, when Melissa came with me to check on her brother, we found Barnett
had disappeared. The imprint of his body was still visible in the foam
mattress. We assumed he was somewhere in the hotel, drinking with our
classmates. So it was just us. She stood next to me beside the bed. And
finally, for the first time this whole trip, we knew exactly where we were
going.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

I woke up before Melissa and climbed out of bed to look for our baggage. It
had not yet arrived. I found a tin of crab legs in Barnett’s duffel, which I
pried open with his pocket knife to eat with my fingers.

Melissa stirred, blinking her eyes as she lay up in bed on one elbow.
“That’s disgusting.”
I shrugged.
“Where’s my brother?”
I shrugged. “Maybe he turned up, saw us and then went to sleep in your
room.”
I swallowed a hunk of crab meat.
“Our luggage still hasn’t arrived,” I told her.
This jolted Melissa out of bed. “What?”
I offered a moist slab of crab. She shook her head, pushing my hand aside.
“Where is it?”
I shrugged again.

Fifteen minutes later we were downstairs, along with our classmates, crowding
around Sergei, our Intourist guide, and demanding that our luggage be located
immediately. Was it in the hotel? At the station? On the train? Sergei had
no idea.
We had now been in the same clothes for close to 24 hours, without
our toiletries, soap, clean underwear, warm clothes. The girls, more
agitated than the boys, were in a state of open rebellion. They dreaded the
prospect of going another day without changing clothes or freshening up. Then
there was the sticky problem of tampons, feminine hygiene, myriad issues
Sergei was uniquely unqualified to address.
The luggage, I suspected, had rolled back to Tashkent on the first train we
had taken. It would take days to locate it, days more to send it to us, and
by then who knew how many times it would have been ransacked. My guess was
that from here on we had only what we carried. In my case, that meant my
worldly possessions now consisted of my Walkman, my cache of heavy metal
cassettes and a few sets of triple-A batteries.
Melissa walked from the crowd surrounding Sergei to sit on the faux-naugahyde
lobby chair next to me, leaning her head onto my shoulder in a gesture I
adored. Even without a shower or clean clothes, she smelled wonderful.
She sat upright. “Where is my brother?”

The hotel staff revealed that Barnett had gone out sometime after we had; they
remembered because he had been barefoot and carrying a half-liter of vodka.
“He’s probably drying out somewhere,” I consoled Melissa. “He’ll turn up.”
She shot me a glance that instilled in me fear that there would be no encore
of last night.
After we plied a hotel employee with a Motvrhead “Ace of Spades” cassette, he
suggested we check the local detention center, the drunk tank where comrades
who pass out on city streets were taken during morning sweeps.
He joined Melissa, Sergei and me in a taxi, directing us down the wide avenue
to a building resembling a college dormitory before which uniformed men and
women sat fanning themselves in the shade. A few fruit vendors were doing
slow trade in the lee of the building. We parked and followed the hotel
employee along the uneven sidewalk to the dirty granite portico. In a vast,
low-ceilinged, dimly lit lobby a blue-capped official sat behind a beaten-up
wooden desk that had nothing on it save a dirty black telephone.
After a brief conversation, Sergei pointed to the telephone.
“Nyet, nyet.” The man with the blue cap kept shaking his head.
I gathered we needed this man to pick up this telephone to call someone to
find out about Melissa’s brother. Melissa stood with her arms crossed,
fuming. I mourned the loss of my Motvrhead cassette.

Finally, Melissa, tired at the unexplained delay, stormed forward and grabbed
the telephone.
“Hello?” she asked.
An angry voice shouted back in Russian, audible from where I stood.
She handed the phone to the hotel employee, who held it in his hand for a
moment and then dropped it, as if burned.
The man behind the desk stood up, replacing the phone in its cradle. He
shouted something in Russian.
“He says to wait a moment,” Sergei said.
The blue-capped official stood with his arms folded, staring at us. He was
literally waiting, not for anything to happen but to prove that he had the
power to make us wait. Removing a long, paper-filtered Russian cigarette from
a blue package, he lit it with a wooden match and smoked it all the way down
to the nub before flipping it to the cinder floor and stamping it out. Then
he sat down and lifted the phone, speaking to whoever was always listening on
the other end.
He asked a few questions, waited, asked more questions and hung up the phone.
“We must wait a moment,” Sergei said again.
“Is he here?” Melissa asked.
Sergei shrugged. “They are checking.”
The man with the cap mumbled something.
We headed up a flight of stairs and along a corridor, past cavernous offices
filled literally to overflowing with paper. This was the only time in my life
I have ever seen papers spilling out of an office; some of the rooms were so
stuffed with bundled-up blocks of documentation that there was no more space for
human beings. As these piles of paper had settled, their collective weight
had buckled the poorly reinforced walls, causing the walls to cave in around
several streams of extruding documents that littered the hallways. The
bureaucrats working here skirted the various paper mounds, stepping over the
reams as if they weren’t there.
The whole of the building smelt of stale, black, Russian tobacco; cigarette
butts were mashed into every available corner or crevice and flattened along
the cinder floors. After passing a foul-smelling, empty cafeteria we walked
downstairs and out of the building to pass into another, smaller structure
where uniformed men sat on stools and benches smoking cigarettes. A man in a
green uniform with a leather strap running across his chest sat at a desk near
the back. His face was pinkish red, as if he had been holding his breath all
day. As we entered, he pretended to be busy with a Cyrillic document. The
other men whose duties, apparently, consisted of sitting on benches smoking
cigarettes, made leering gestures toward Melissa and offered guttural, Uzbeki
comments.
The pink-faced man shook his head before we could begin speaking. With his
eyes closed he spoke in Russian, as if he already knew why we had come.
“He is here,” Sergei said, translating for us.
“Where is he?” Melissa demanded. “Can we see him?”
There was a problem.
“He has caused harm to the People’s property,” Sergei explained.
What Barnett had busted up was not exactly clear. Having stumbled about this
city myself, I could not recall seeing anything not constructed of concrete
and granite.
“What did he do?” Melissa asked.
Sergei shook his head.
The pink-faced man shuffled some documents on his desk, producing an onion-skin sheaf of paper that outlined in Cyrillic letters Barnett’s list of
transgressions. Sergei looked it over.
Sergei rubbed his chin and turned to me. “Perhaps some of your cassettes.”
“My tapes?”
“Yes,” Sergei said. “What else do you have of comparable value?”
He was right. But I didn’t want to give up all my tapes. With the luggage
missing, these were my sole remaining assets. “He doesn’t like this kind of
music.”
Sergei shook his head, “He can sell them.”
“Give him the tapes,” Melissa ordered.
Reluctantly, I handed over my precious store of heavy metal cassettes, which
the pink-faced officer quickly stashed in his desk drawer.
“And your cassette player,” Sergei told me.

Barnett had not been ill-treated during his stay in an Uzbeki drunk tank. One
of the guards had actually bandaged his infected big toe with a filthy strip
of cotton packing. Barnett didn’t thank us upon his release, taking it for
granted that his sister would come for him and bail him out yet again. While
we rode back to the hotel, I desperately tried to think of the night spent
with Melissa rather than the fact that I would have to go the rest of this
trip without any music. Somehow, in my mind, it had become a trade: All my
tapes for Melissa, or at least for her affection. And that was a fair deal.

Melissa and I were together the rest of that trip. Upon our return to Paris,
however, our affair abruptly ended. We were both in relationships, silly
college romances that were easy to slip back into. Occasionally, we ran into
each other at the American College in Paris cafeteria or in the hallways
around 31 Avenue Bosquet, and we said hello and smiled, and there was that
mutual recognition of our collective memory.
And we would be like, oh yeah, you, that was something.

You don’t know when you board that jumbo jet how long you will be gone. You know only that you have to go. You are perhaps running from something rather than to anything. You are motivated not just by a desire to change the scenery, but by an urge to transform yourself, by a belief that although you don’t like yourself much in New York, you will love yourself in Shanghai, Prague or Mexico City. There you will become the dashing, secure, desirable person you have never managed to become here. You go for broke. You cut your losses. You make a run for the border.

There are different ways to bolt. There are those who meticulously plan their expatriate sojourns, enlisting grants, foundations and fellowships that ease them into cushy lives abroad; there are those who graduate from college, hear that beer costs 18 cents a mug in Bucharest and hop the next standby flight to Romania; and there are those for whom it comes down to a simple choice: overseas or jail.

All of them share certain experiences, emotions and pitfalls. It is
hard moving away from Home Sweet Home, even if you are being
chased by federal marshals or importunate bookmakers. You will
miss the obvious things: a good slice of pizza, baseball and Seinfeld
— and some things you didn’t think you would miss: frozen pizza,
Rickey Henderson and “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.”

And, unless you move to England — or Canada, which doesn’t count
as a foreign country — you miss your native language. Sure, you
can get the Herald Tribune or funky local English-language
newspapers, but aside from that who-what-when-where English,
you may be hard pressed to find anyone to converse with in your
own tongue. You soon long to be understood, to be heard, to have
someone actually get your jokes. You become tired of always
thinking of what to say in a language that for all intents and
purposes, until you came to this country, was unintelligible
gibberish. And you miss your friends, because who understands you
and gets your jokes better than your friends? (The nationalized,
inefficient, long distance telephone monopoly in your chosen
country will profit handsomely from your hunger to speak to
anyone who understands why you miss “The Courtship of Eddie’s
Father.”)

And you become pitifully lonely. The first few weeks are
interminable stretches of solitude, punctuated by restaurant meals
during which you stare at native couples and families and envy their
shared human warmth. You were once part of a family, half of a
couple, a section of a circle of friends, and now you are a
foreigner, alone in a strange land. That fantasy you entertained of
picking up a mysterious woman in a smoke-filled bar who would
teach you her language, show you the ropes and initiate you into
hitherto unknown rituals of amorous delight was just that, a fantasy.
The women in whatever country you go to will at first strike you as
so beautiful, so feminine, so totally, completely, and utterly
non-American that you will become dizzy riding subways and
strolling down streets, your neck will strain from craning and your
mind will reverberate with useless English pick-up lines. The
reality is that those women will seem unattainable by virtue of the
fact that your vocabulary in their native language extends to
discussing the weather and inquiring about railway timetables.

But that initial period of loneliness provides a crucial phase of
psychic purification; you rediscover who you are when divorced
from pernicious influences such as friends, parents and The Grind.
You will be surprised to find you enjoy dressing in other colors
besides black, really love the early progressive rock of Canadian
power-trio Rush and actually don’t much like the taste of
Jdgermeister. There is no one here pressuring you to pound shots of
syrupy rum, scoffing at you for wearing a pastel sweater and
forcing you to listen to white-label drum ‘n’ bass releases.

You are molting, shedding your old, American skin and becoming
an expatriate. This is a painful but rewarding process. You feel
misunderstood, insecure, vulnerable, but you are aware that
something is happening inside: You are becoming wiser, more
worldly. You catch your reflection in a shop window or some
subway doors — you are wearing a rakish new suit purchased in
your adopted land — and you detect about yourself a hint of
glamour, elegance and mystery that had been decidedly lacking
when you were living in your parents’ house. You are an
expatriate, an exile, a fugitive: Henry Miller in Paris, Bogey in
Casablanca, Cary Grant in Monaco. Anything can happen now. You
are in a position to define your own destiny. You are an American
man in a good suit in a foreign land. Nothing can stop you.

Suddenly, the females who seemed unavailable a few months ago
are interested, drawn by your newfound confidence, jaunty swagger
and improved language skills. And you find that being a foreigner
opens many doors — in part because you’re such a rube you can
pretend they aren’t closed. Opportunities present themselves. That
first job leads to other job offers. You begin to make serious
money, you pay back college loans and old gambling debts. You
realize you are, for the first time, totally self-sufficient. (By the
way, Americans living abroad get a sweet deal from the IRS: Your
foreign income is tax free up to $70,000 a year.)

You have arrived: You have a better job than you could get back
home. You’re making more money. And the girl you are seeing is
prettier than any girlfriend you’ve ever had back in the States. But
still, something is wrong. You are not satisfied, and here you have
arrived at the expatriate’s dilemma: Is all this real? This job, this
girl, this life, it all happened far away from home, in a strange land
that your friends back home can’t even find on a map. (Thailand or
Taiwan? China or Japan? Sweden or Switzerland? Your friends can
never remember where you are anyway.) It becomes a
philosophical issue: If none of your friends see you succeed, then
did you ever really make it?

When I was 25, two years after arriving in Tokyo, I became the
managing editor of an English-language, monthly city magazine. I
was paid a handsome salary; I finagled a job for my best friend
from New York who flew out to Tokyo; I wore fashionable,
absurdly expensive clothing and dated a wide array of females, each
of whom, I was sure, would never have gone out with me back
home. Life had never been so good. This was during the era of
Japan’s bubble economy, when speculative frenzy and Japanese
purchases of overpriced movie studios and Impressionist paintings
made Tokyo seem like the center of the world. For the first few
months at that job, I truly felt as if I could have anything I wanted,
that life would be a procession of gilded possibilities and golden
opportunities. I was young, bright, promising and in the right city
at the right time.

But in the evening after work, I walked up Gaien Nishi Dori from
our offices to the Aoyama Book Center, where in the harsh glare of
white fluorescence, I would flip through American and British
publications. Those glamorous magazines would be so slick, so
glossy, so packed with photos of celebrities I recognized and bylines
I envied; those magazines seemed real. And the magazine I was
working on, full of Japanese celebrities no one back home had ever
heard of and bylines by writers whose stories I had rewritten,
would appear the local rag it was.

One afternoon, a photographer who sometimes shot for us brought
a young magazine writer by our offices. The blond, slender writer
was a young Brit sent to Tokyo by an American men’s magazine.
Though he was not condescending, he had absolutely no interest in
contributing to our magazine. He was a decent fellow, sharp, clever
and eager as young writers are. But as I spoke to him I became
envious. I realized that no matter how many stories about Japan I
had written, it was this Brit’s one story about Tokyo that would
actually be read back home.

From that point on I was acutely aware that making it in a foreign
country, no matter how far I went, was not the same as making it
back home.

And this was actually a symptom of that earlier insecurity that made
me leave the States in the first place. You see, it isn’t New York or
Atlanta or your home town that’s the problem; it’s you. You go
abroad because you feel like a failure. You go abroad because you
are depressed. You go abroad, in part, to escape yourself.

Then you discover the truth of the hackneyed new age adage: No
matter where you go, there you are.

And that’s when it’s time to go home.

Chiang Mai, a city of 156,000 in Northern Thailand, is where MTV stops. MTV Asia blares in Hong Kong high-rises and Bangkok brothels, in Kuala Lumpur discos and Macau casinos, but Chiang Mai is beyond the reach of the Asianet satellite that broadcasts MTV. And when MTV Asia — Japanese idol singers, Indian heavy metal bands, Kylie Minogue and all — isn’t on the tube, you really feel remote. (There is something reassuring about a VJ, any VJ, even if he speaks half in Chinese and his name is Woo.) Where MTV ends, the Golden Triangle begins.

it was the introduction of the opium poppy for cultivation by British and French merchants in the mid-19th century that changed Chiang Mai from a prosperous center for Theravada Buddhism to the booming economic heart of northern Thailand. Before 1800, opium smoking in Burma, Laos and Thailand, the three countries whose border regions make up the Golden Triangle, had been virtually unheard of. By 1930 there were 6,441 government-regulated opium dens. The Kingdom of Siam, Thailand’s predecessor state, earned 14 percent of its tax revenues through its 972 licensed opium dens. While Chiang Mai had once been a center for pottery, weaving, silver work and woodcarving, it now became the destination point for hundreds of mule caravans hauling the bulk of the Golden Triangle’s annual production of 3,000 tons of opium.
As demand for refined opium products like heroin and morphine has increased in Asia and the West, the economics of the Golden Triangle, which produces 73 percent of the world’s opium, have become ever more intertwined with the poppy plant. A succession of local warlords, some with CIA backing because of their staunch anti-communist stances, have ruled the region and fought for control of its rich harvest. Thai generals, Shan rebels, communist guerrillas and exiled Kuomintang (Nationalist Chinese) commanders have all, at one time, sought and controlled a large piece of the opium action. The business of opium is so immense — heroin generates $2 million a day on the streets of New York alone — that its windfall has financed wars and toppled governments. (In 1990 the United States government indicted Shan rebel leader, opium warlord and Chiang Mai local Khun Sa as an international drug trafficker, labeling him “the self-proclaimed king of opium.”) Alfred W. McCoy wrote in “The Politics of Heroin”: “This illicit traffic allows opium and heroin traders at all levels enormous incomes that they can use to purchase enough protection to survive any attempt at suppression.”

“If you go up there it will become clear,” a junior officer in the Thai military explained to David, my photographer traveling companion, and me, pointing to the verdant mountain ranges that loom above Chiang Mai. “Generals and governments come and go; opium is the real king of these hills.”
So our idea was to go into the hills. Sure, we would ride elephants and gaze at ruins, but what we were looking for was something else. I hate saying it because it sounds so stupid now, but we wanted adventure.
We hired two Karen tribesmen as guides. We bought hiking boots. We took malaria pills. We innovated ways to lighten our packs. We consulted maps. We planned a six-day route up through Mae Hong Sa and down along the Burmese border and then back into civilization.
We should have listened to the sunburned, brain-dead, weed-thin American in the lobby of the Chiang Mai Orchid Hotel who had been in the jungle outside Chiang Mai for six months and had come to town for some air-conditioning. Upon hearing of our plan, he asked, “What kind of idiots would want to do something like that?”

From the godlike perspective of looking down on a topographical map, a 2,000-foot hill looks manageable. The green that indicates higher ground seems invitingly lush after all the white and brown that indicate the lower elevations. In reality, when you are humping up it on a mud trail with no switchbacks, a 2,000-foot hill is a monster of a mountain, slick, unforgiving and treacherous. Many of Thailand’s northern mountains — they are mountains, despite what the guidebooks and locals say — don’t have well-beaten, clearly marked tracks. Instead, you have to claw your way up pig runs or seldom-used paths through thick undergrowth teeming with leaches and ticks. It’s bad jungle, with the climate changing every 30 minutes from pelting rain to blistering sun and the mud making for unsure footing.
Within six hours of being dropped off by a jeep at the end of the loneliest dirt road I’ve ever seen, we were enmeshed in the lush green vegetation, banana stalks, giant bamboo, royal palms and thorny licorice. We hadn’t known it would be like this. We hadn’t considered that with steep mountains and quintuple-canopy jungle in a dozen shades of green and rainbowed crystal waterfalls came exhaustion and thirst and confusion and wishing to hell we had stuck to the original plan. The simple plan. The tourist’s plan. There were nice, organized, enjoyable treks for tourists where one can ride elephants, stay in clean villages, do a little rafting. Who were we to buck the system?
All the estimates we, and our Karen guides Perm and Sarbom, had made back in our Chiang Mai hotel rooms of the time it would take between villages were wrong. For example, we had estimated four hours between Sadaeng and Mae Dat La. It took closer to seven. And that was seven bad hours of going up and down mountains, slogging up waist-deep rivers and tip-toeing to keep our balance along the muddy edges of rice paddies. The Karen tribesmen maybe could have done it in four. Maybe. We had our doubts.
“I thought there was a trail,” David shouted as we waited for Sarbom to hack through thick brush with his machete. “There’s supposed to be a fucking trail.”
“This is a trail,” Perm explained (Sarbom didn’t speak English), “a not-used-much trail.”

It’s the downhills that kill. Uphill was horrible, but downhill in the mud and mossy rocks was deadly. And by the second day, I felt like my knees were running out of cartilage, that nothing was cushioning the impact of bone against bone and each downhill step was somehow degenerative or permanently debilitating. I was being punished for the aplomb of walking into the jungle and just assuming everything would be all right. And while we were fatigued, our native guides were still going strong and carrying all our luggage. (We would hire, over the course of the trek, four porters, a pony, elephants and a Lisu opium trader named Sook.)
It was midway through the third day when, as David was verging on heat stroke and my right knee simply stopped working and poisonous blue snakes made their first appearance on the trail (they liked the rain) and it was getting dark fast and we were still hours away from the nearest village and even Perm, our guide who had taken on a sort of Daniel Boone-meets-Bruce Lee heroic quality in our eyes, said that finding the way in the dark would be impossible, that it dawned on us that maybe we were in serious trouble, that maybe we had made a terrible mistake, the kind of mistake people die from. And if something were to happen to us, who would ever know? A few Hmong tribesmen on their way out to hunt? A couple of Lisu merchants? A Chinese opium buyer making his rounds? There were no roads. No planes in the sky to spot us. We would simply vanish. Fallen off a cliff. Bit by a snake. Shot by a drunk tribesman. There were so many ways.
“This is bad,” we were mumbling as we descended another killer downhill. “This is so, so bad.”
And we were out of water.

We made Nao Lao Dum, a Lisu village somewhere along the Burmese border, as the sun shot orange and blue streaks through nimbus clouds in a dramatic last stand before surrendering behind a craggy mountain. Sai Pu Dong, the village headman, was between 25 and 60. It was impossible to narrow his age any more based on looks alone. His face was mottled and scarred, but his arms and legs remained sinewy and tight-skinned. When he smiled, he flashed teeth bright red from betel nut chewing.
Naked children stared at us as we staggered in after climbing the terraced rice paddy, they mobbed us as we wended up the trail into the village, and as the headman greeted us the crowd of children and women swelled to about 50, all just drop-jawed staring at the spectacle that had wandered into their village.
There were no roads to Nao Lao Dum, only footpaths so narrow that if you didn’t know they were there you would miss them. Where there are no roads there are no police and no schools and no bureaucracy and no missionaries. No law. And certainly no toilets. Call me a wuss, but it’s hard taking a crap when 30 kids are giggling watching you squat. And it’s not that you’re crapping that’s so funny, it’s you, just being foreign and wearing sunglasses or a red shirt. Utterly shocking. It wouldn’t matter to them if you were taking a crap or assembling Stinger missiles, it’s you they’re fascinated by.
Headman’s elephant grass hut wobbled precariously on stilts. Wide gaps had been intentionally left between floorboards so any grain of rice that didn’t end up in your mouth fell through the floor to the ground below for the pigs, chickens and cows who made an awful racket down there jockeying for scraps.
A crowd of men were gathered around a cooking fire in Headman’s hut. The women and children skulked at the periphery of the orange glow, their shadowy features catching the flickering light for a moment and then vanishing as the flames shifted in the draft. The place was better in the dark. You couldn’t see all the cow turds and pig shit and fleas and garbage. You couldn’t see what was floating around in your water, even after it was boiled.
“When was the last time you had foreigners here?” I asked.
“Two opium harvests ago.” Headman answered as one of his wives spooned something into a bowl for me. “Eat.”
It would have been rude to refuse. “What is it?”
“Pork,” I was told.
The Lisu men were digging in.
“It’s cooked?” I asked.
Headman nodded.
I took a bite, chewed and swallowed. It was fatty and cold.
“After we cook it,” Headman explained to me through Perm, “we soak the meat in the raw blood and guts for flavor.”

Opium was the opiate of the masses. Opium served the same purpose for the hill tribes as the cocktail after work does for Manhattan’s work force. No matter how poor the village, no matter how destitute the inhabitants, every male over the age of 18 owned a well-crafted glass-bowled opium pipe, a gas or oil lamp for heating opium, crushed aspirin for mixing with opium to eliminate headaches, several thin steel sticks and pokers for heating the opium and reaming the pipes, a small pillow or smooth bench for laying his head upon and, probably, some opium. Even if the kids were naked and they ate rice mixed with barley for dinner, dad had an opium pipe. Even if they couldn’t afford a candle to light their hut, dad had an oil lamp for heating his opium.
After the cooking, eating and cleaning, the men broke out their pipes and went to work with their oil lamps heating the opium and mixing it with aspirin powder. (Aspirin powder was the only Western medicine they had and it never occurred to them to use it for anything besides cutting opium.) Once the paste was heated and mixed it was rolled between the palms into cylinders and then broken off piece by piece to smoke. The reason one must lie down to smoke — and hence the evolution of the opium den — is that it takes one hand to hold the opium, and one to direct the foot-long pipe so that the opium is close to the flame but not directly burned by it. Unless your head is down near the ground, you can’t see how close the flame is to the pipe.
It takes five pipes to get high. Seven to begin to drift away. And between 10 and 20 and you don’t feel any more of your pain. Your knees feel strong. Your stomach cramps are suddenly gone. And you’re not hungry anymore. The hill tribes smoke it because it is the best thing they have in otherwise tough, hardscrabble lives. Take opium away and replace it with what? Corn? That’s what the Thai government tried to do. Once you’re up in these hills you see why that will never work. Corn, as useful as it is for making whiskey, doesn’t get one away from it all for a few hours.
The dozens of children gazing at us, the mangy dog next to me scratching violently, the fleas biting me, the leach stings, the raw pork, the dirty water, suddenly it was all tolerable and didn’t seem so horrible. But then nothing seems horrible when you’re on the pipe and that’s why opium will always be king of these hills.

We were five now — David the photographer, Perm, Sarbom, Sook the opium merchant and me, plus a pony we had bought for 8,000 baht ($160) from a Lisu tribeswoman. But the gray pony, once we loaded our gear in baskets and slung the baskets on his back, proved to be slower than we had thought. Still, it was good not carrying anything — not that David and I were carrying anything, anyway; we had long ago given our packs to Perm, Sarbom and Sook. Sook was 4-foot-10, weighed about 115 pounds and had small, cruel features and an expression that conveyed total indifference, to you, to his own well-being, to the world. He was a certified opium addict who broke the rule of drug dealers the world over: He got high off his own supply. It took Sook 35 pipes to catch a buzz. He smoked three times day, including first thing in the morning. And after he smoked he could carry a 50-pound backpack through 10 miles of bad jungle and not feel a thing. He was ageless, his growth stunted from opium and his expression childlike in its emptiness. But he had a never-ending supply of opium, so wherever we brought him we were warmly welcomed by the locals; he was a good guy to have around.
We marched knee-deep up a rocky stream, Sarbom behind us keeping the pony walking by shooting rocks at its ass with a slingshot. (Slingshots are immensely popular in these mountains. It is the child’s first toy.) Perm led us out of the stream and up another muddy trail that offered about as much traction as a hill of frozen yogurt. As we climbed, the familiar noises of Sarbom’s snapping slingshot, the flustering of the pony, the bird calls and the gibbon shrieks were suddenly interrupted by a sharp cracking sound and then a rapid succession of breaks and whizzes in nearby bushes.
The smell of smoke.
Perm, Sarbom and Sook dropped to the ground. David and I stood and stared at each other for a moment before realizing what was happening. We were being shot at. We hit the mud. I hurriedly unbuttoned my pants and pissed while lying in the mud.
Perm shouted something in Karen.
A child’s voice answered. We were being shot at by children.
There followed a long exchange during which we assured the children firing at us at that we were not interested in stealing their prized bulls or confiscating their opium. And nor were we Nationalist Chinese (KMT) troops looking to extort opium. The KMT had been through here recently and had forced the villagers to give up the bulk of their opium and a few ponies. These KMT units were relics of Chiang Kai Shek’s defeated 3rd and 5th Nationalist Armies, which had crossed in 1949 from China’s Yunan province into Burma and then kept moving south to northern Thailand, where, with the tacit cooperation of the Thai government and weapons from Taiwan and the United States, they had established fully militarized bases. The KMT these days was nothing like the efficient heroin-exporting machine it had been in the 1960s, when thousand-mule caravans guarded by hundreds of armed troops plied these mountains, but they were still a considerable, well-armed and dangerous presence. With their American-made M-14s and AR-16s — compared to the local tribes’ cheap Chinese imitations of 19th century British muskets — the KMT were still among the top opium buyers and refiners.
“We are tourists,” we assured them. If only that were true, if only we had done some sedate nature walk with a pack of healthy Germans and Swedes, a few hours of hiking, some food, plenty of water, clean villages and real trails. That would be the life. There are hundreds of companies offering that kind of safe, touristy trip, and if you’re ever in Chiang Mai and get the urge to head into the hills, do it the easy way. Don’t be stupid and get shot at.
Our attackers turned out to be one 8-year-old child with a Chinese-made musket taller than he was. He emerged from behind a thorny licorice plant onto the trail about 20 feet ahead of us, smiling widely. He wore a blue wool cap and a T-shirt on which was a tattered silk-screen of Paul Molitor, a baseball player now with the Minnesota Twins but pictured in the silk-screen with his original team, the Milwaukee Brewers.
“What the fuck is this?” I demanded of Perm as I buttoned up my pants. “Who the fuck would shoot at us?”
And then focusing my anger on Perm because he was the only guide who spoke English, “And who would take us to a place like this?”
Wide-eyed, dirty-faced Paul Molitor spoke quickly.
Perm translated: “He wasn’t trying to hit us.”
Paul Molitor spoke again.
“And he says he will take us into town and introduce us to his headman.”
“What’s the big deal about a headman?” I asked. “We’ve met plenty of headmen.”
“Special headman,” Perm assured me. “Powerful headman. Headman of all headmen.”

“Billy Bong will see you now,” a thin Karen warrior dressed in a thickly woven V-neck tunic told us. From his mouth dangled an unlit teak tobacco pipe.
We took off our shoes and climbed the ladder to the tin-roofed hut that stood a whole story higher than any other hut in the village. The hut had wooden windows. The hut had doors. The hut had separate rooms. There was an outhouse in back. This Billy Bong lived in a palace.
All the windows of the innermost chamber were shuttered and the only light in the room emanated from two candles stuck to empty condensed milk cans. Billy Bong was little more than skin and bones beneath an orange, flowing, V-neck tunic and trousers. He lay with his eyes closed and his head resting on a shiny black stone slab. His opium pipe lay on a small, gray and black carpet before him. He opened his eyes as we entered. His high cheek bones, drawn skin and strong jaw gave him a dissipated look. He did not look cruel but rather exhausted. He smiled. He said something to Paul Molitor, who had entered ahead of them, and Paul Molitor spoke rapidly back.
“Why don’t you go home?” Billy Bong said, looking at our eyes.
“We want to,” I said. “As soon as possible, as soon as we can get out, to a road or something, somewhere where we can be picked up.”
“There is a village one day from here, through the village runs a river, down the river there is a road. There are jeeps there.”
“Then that’s where we want to go.”
He began heating opium on the oil lamp. “The village is five mountains away.”
We sighed.
“But I can get you there in five hours. No walking.”
“How?”
Then we heard an animal call like a distorted, amplified amateur trumpet blast and turned and beheld through the doorway an armed Karen warrior seated atop the immense, dinosaurlike head of a five-ton cow elephant. Behind her were five more elephants, standing in a broken line along a trail up the hill from Billy Bong’s hut.
“My elephants will take you,” said Billy Bong as he lit his pipe.
Billy Bong, Headman among Headmen of the Black Karen, was the supreme tribal leader in these parts. Billy Bong (his real name was Ba Pu Long, but he insisted Westerners call him Billy Bong) had five wives and 22 children whose names ranged from Ee Pa (literal translation: First Girl) to Ee Pa Pa (twenty-second girl). As Supreme Headman he was in charge of the local opium production, and of keeping KMT and Shan hands off of that opium, and Billy Bong wanted to expand.
“No more Khun Sa,” Billy Bong said of the indicted warlord. “No more KMT. The Karen people must take charge of their own opium. Karen people will rule these hills. Tell them that where you are from.”

We climbed onto Billy Bong’s elephants from the deck of his hut, stepping between the elephant’s eyes and then sitting cautiously on the wooden benches strapped to the elephant’s backs. Billy Bong had informed us he always traveled by elephant, and it is a magnificent way to travel. Elephants are sure-footed, steady if a bit stubborn, and capable of climbing steeper hills than ponies. (We gave Billy Bong our pony in gratitude.) The only things to watch out for are branches and the occasional showers of dirt elephants throw over their shoulders. Their guides keep them moving with slingshots and monosyllabic commands. (Elephants will only listen to one master at a time. When an elephant is sold — in these mountains the price is between 200,000 and 400,000 baht, or $8,000 to $16,000 — the new master must spend a month together with the former master handling the elephant before the elephant will listen to the new owner’s commands.) They are smart, temperamental animals who spend 20 hours a day eating. And they were our saviors.
We got out. On the back of the elephants who took us over the mountains, the ride a relief for sore legs and battered egos. Riding on their backs above the jungle, so that our heads scraped the bottom of the canopy, made the drenching rains and blistering sun seem not so bad. As they climbed up the mud tracks, their immense flat feet finding traction where there would appear to be none and their trunks rooting out bamboo from the side of the trail, as we rose higher and higher to the top of a mountain, they were taking us to heaven. This was ecstasy, to ride and not walk, to be carried and not to carry, to be above the jungle and not in it, to be safe and not threatened.
After the elephants, rafting down the Nam Mae Yuam river was easy — no walking, just poling along the bottom during slow parts and keeping balanced during rapids, but nothing as tough as those mountains. All the bad part of what we had been through began to seem not so bad as it became clearer we would make it out with only partially torn ligaments and severe dysentery and eye infections and leach scars and maybe a stomach amoeba or two, but we would make it.
Yes, it became obvious we would be OK, and that realization makes you happy when you’ve been through a rough spot. For just a moment, you are relieved. And then, instantly, your worldly concerns return. All those cares that seemed trivial as you were dehydrating in the jungle or dousing leaches with Deat or worrying about being shot, all those cares return suddenly and you think about money and cars and girlfriends and all the civilization you left behind and how you will be fine, you will go home and you will take all that up again. And you think that maybe what matters more than everything that happened out there in the jungle is keeping up on your credit card bills and changing the oil every 3,000 miles.
I don’t know. My knees are still fucked up.