Taiwan on Drugs - Episode 1 and 2

                    Taiwan on Drugs

Episode 1

     It was important for Emerson Davis to remember when it was that he went on the psilocybin hunt in Yang-Ming-Shan. Was it the first time he was here in 1979 or after he returned in 1984? It must have been 1979. He would have remembered 1984 for all the Thought Police and Ministry of Plenty allusions. Actually, Martial Law was lifted by President Chiang Ching-kuo on July 15, 1987. Taiwan had been under martial law for more than 38 years, which was qualified as "the longest imposition of martial law by a regime anywhere in the world." It must have been ‘79

    Drug laws in Taiwan in 1979 hadn’t changed much over the years, even after martial law was lifted in favor of neo-liberal two-party parody. It is a conservative Christian mix of reefer madness and dread. Sun Yat-sen’s 1924 “Anti-opium Will” notwithstanding, the KMT had continued to tax and regulate that and other drugs so that by the time they took over Taiwan, a Wine and Tobacco Monopoly was not unusual to corner the market, but while soft drugs were legally sold, there remained a taboo against hard drugs. Marijuana was a hard drug and magic mushrooms were nowhere except in Alice in Wonderland.

Emerson had no problem getting whatever intoxicant or hallucinogen on the streets of America and he was hopeful of getting some here, too. If homosexuals could congregate in Taipei’s clandestine basement bars, surely there must be some weed around somewhere.

The drug dude Emerson met was a collegiate-type, bearded and serious about studying Mandarin. The Language Learning and Training Center on Shi-Chou Road was famous for instructing leggy China Airline flight attendants and Taipower middle management, but it was also the place where seasoned ex-pats met to earn a living teaching English and enjoy the best green tomato cheeseburger island-wide. Arthur was discussing the ropes with Emerson in the top floor teachers’ dining room when the subject of drugs came up.

“No sex, religion, or politics in the classroom, for sure,” Arthur reminded him, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t ‘discuss’ two of three after class.”

“Which two?” asked Emerson naively, as a joke.

“Whichever two you agree on,” explained Arthur seriously. “Just be discreet about it.”

“I bet you could find something good to smoke after class, too, if you look hard enough,” said Emerson, cloaking his inquiry in another joke.

“Well, actually, that’s not that hard to find, either,” said Arthur straight-faced.

“Really,” asked Emerson inquisitively. Just then the gong rang out. Lunch period was over. It was time to go downstairs and back to class.

“Hey, maybe you’d like to come over and study some Mandarin with me one evening. I have some great tea, too, if you’re interested,” said Arthur as he stood up, winking, and took his aluminum tray to the counter.”

“That would be great. Where do you live?” asked Emerson as he followed Arthur with a tray of his own and the two headed down the stairs to the classrooms.”

“Yang-Ming-Shan,” said Arthur. “Do you know where that is? You take the bus down Jung-Shan-Bei-Road that goes up the mountain near the Foremost Restaurant. I’ll find out the number for you.”

Arthur, who had a dark scraggly beard and deep close-set eyes, was of the mountain. His home could have been a log cabin he was inviting Emerson to, but it was a run-down wooden bungalow built in the days when U.S. army officers ruled the mountain. It was a bungalow that couldn’t last long through the tropical misty mountain heights of an active volcano, hot springs within miles, vegetation that would overcome the walkway from the cul-de-sac to his warped front door if it weren’t tended to regularly. He impressed Emerson with his Mandarin skills, using it much more than Emerson could understand, but that was the point.  Arthur liked being esoteric.

 “Come in and make yourself comfortable. I’ll go get some of that team,” he said with the same raised eyebrow he displayed when the subject came up at the bushiban. In a moment he was back with a glass well-used water pipe. He sat around a second-hand coffee table and they passed the bong.

“Where’s that booklet you were telling me about?” he asked nonchalantly after expelling a fragrant cloud of blended hash and Cambodian.

Emerson reached into his backpack and took out an 8”x5” forty-page booklet in a plain brown cover wrapped in a soft plastic binder and handed it to Arthur with one hand as he took the bong with the other.

“I can’t really tell the difference between the good ones and the poisonous one.”

Arthur flipped through the booklet to the colored prints in the centerfold. “This is the variety,” he said almost gleefully. He pointed to a drawing of a mushroom with a red-pink head covered with dozens of black spots. The stem was half as wide as the head and just as long.

“They grow up in the cow pastures, under the shit pots,” he said as he reached over to hand Emerson a light for the bong.

“Want to go on a hunt?”

“When?”

“After the next rain. They grow after the rain.”

So they smoked and drank beer and some dried tofu. It was agreed to discuss it further at school when the weather was right.

In Taiwan, you don’t have to wait too long between rain storms. The chance came the very next week. They discussed the weather that day at lunch and the hunt was scheduled.

The Saturday morning came and Emerson called to confirm.

“Meet me on your cycle in an hour and we’ll head up Yang-Ming-Shan,” said Arthur.

“Um, I don’t have a motorcycle. I was going to take the bus.”

“What? No cycle?”

“Can’t we ride on your cycle?”

“Are you fooling, man? You and me on my cycle? We’ll barely make it up the mountain road, fuck the pasture lanes.”

“We’ll then let’s forget it.” Emerson knew it was too good to be true.

“I tell you, come over anyway. We’ll see what we can do.”

So Emerson took the bus to Arthur’s place up Yang-Ming-Shan and the two of them hopped on Arthur’s old YueLoong motorcycle. As he had suspected, the motorcycle labored and barely made it up the steep incline of the main Yang-Ming-Shan Road. A few times, it almost stalled as it strained itself to get upward. Cars, cycles, and even bicycles passed it by, that’s how slow it was.

Finally, after a half hour of questionable climbing, they reached what Arthur said was a side road that lead to a cow pasture. It was hard for Emerson to believe there were even cows on the mountain. Going up, Emerson had seen not a single animal besides wandering street dogs, some faster than their cycle.

They found no cows that day; not even a pasture, and certainly no shit pots. Though they tried for a few hours, getting off the cycle to walk around in a field that seemed like it could be a pasture, they found nothing, stepped on nothing wet besides the dew soaked weeds. But Emerson had fun.

Arthur didn’t have fun. The only outcome that day for him was a broken down motorcycle. It was a total loss. He couldn’t even practice Mandarin with Emerson, the beginner. They never spoke about drugs in Taiwan again and he never asked Emerson over again for a smoke.

 

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Episode 2

     Closer to the other side of the tracks, when the tracks of Taiwan Railroad ran grade level on and over the streets of Taipei, there was another bushiban where Emerson Davis taught English. It was in a twelve-floor, discolored tiled building, windows unwashed since built twenty years before. The blackened beige tiles and windows were mercifully covered with tarps of cartoonish advertisements interspersed with rows of back-lit florescent translucent signs, two long signs over the second, third, and forth floors of windows, stretching around the block of this rounded corner where two main Taipei streets, Jung Shan-North Road and Chung-Shao Road, converge; the classrooms of JJELS were up two tiny elevators through a nondescript narrow entrance.

     JJELS was the progenitor of ELSI just as sure as Mai-Dang-Le was the progenitor of Mai-Dang-Lao; McDonalds to you. Unauthorized and bogus but delicious nevertheless, this tasty bushiban caught every fly-by-night foreigner passing through Taiwan with English tongues and put them in front of sloppy little classrooms for students who hungered for the language of exporters, but couldn’t afford ELSI’s high-priced spread. The teachers may have been the dregs of their western societies but, as Emerson’s famous fellow Lon-Gilander once wrote, some would rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, sinners being much more fun. Some ex-pats had no credentials and choice.

     There were six odors people smelled in the streets of Taipei in 1979; Long-Life cigarette smoke, contraband Marlboro, lead-filled bus and motorcycle fumes, unshelled tea eggs, deep-fried stinky fermented tofu, and stagnant open sewers, sometimes mistaken for the latter. Marihuana and hashish weren’t smells there, but Emerson could almost smell it whenever he entered the teachers’ lounge of JJELS. There was an odor there that made Emerson want a joint.

     While Emerson Davis was a teacher, he made contact with others of dubious lifestyles as they came and went through Taiwan. His open mind and drug use blended well with his grandfather’s socialist tendencies making Emerson eclectic and accepting of all varieties of people outside acceptable society. Indeed, it enabled him to co-exist in Taiwan without having to endure a thing.

     Emerson resented government mind controls of any kind, spiritual, political, or material. The antithesis was controlled substances like LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, hash and weed. An erratic personality was the key to unlocking others who resented ruling class discipline.

     The KMT government in Taiwan politely picked and chose which western influence they’d allow to be exploited. Anything that made money for the rich and kept the poor ignorant was good. Liquor, beetle nuts, amphetamine, and airplane glue in paper bags was good. Anything that opened the mind and revealed their dictatorship was bad.

     Parker and Claire were two of the erratic personalities Emerson met in the teachers’ lounge at JJELS. The Australian couple laughed like sinners. They were the cult Emerson wanted to join before he learned it was too late.

     Together they sat in a musty empty office two floors up from JJELS, a perk of a job they came across while waiting for class in the teachers’ lounge. The Aussies laughed with Emerson at the list of sentences and paragraphs they were paid to place stickers over in the volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia. It was okay for the import company to sell the English encyclopedia to aspiring middle class families in Taiwan but they were certain facts about the world the KMT didn’t want Taiwanese students to know. For example, the Communist party didn’t win the civil war in China. Cover up the pages: “This content deemed unacceptable for dissemination in the ROC” printed over and over in rows and paragraphs like substitute text, slapped with stickers onto encyclopedia pages.

     “Look at this, Emerson,” said Parker holding up his volume to the light. Emerson leaned over to see the text Parker was referring to. In his hand, the stapled pages constituting the manual of deletable passages, exactly which page, paragraph, and sentence had to be censored. A handy scissor lay nearby to cut the stickers to specific size.

     “The section on the People’s Republic of Mongolia is out,” Parker went on. “They don’t want the buggers to know it’s not part of the Republic of China.”

     “The a-holes tell people Outer Mongolia is in the R.O.C., mate,” Claire continued.

     “I don’t know about you all,” said Parker as he slammed volume three to the desk, “but I could go for a nice fag about now.”

     “A fag?” Emerson said, squinting. (In America, fags weren’t smoked.)

     “Yes, a big fat fag,” repeated Parker as he stood up from his seat.

     “I second that,” said Emerson and got up, too. “It’s almost time to get back downstairs to classes, anyway.” They were used to having cigarettes in the stairwell, just as the adult students did, in droves, downstairs during breaks between classes. They sat on closed cardboard boxes filled with volumes of encyclopedia, cleaning supplies, other combustible goods, and chatted.

     “Hey mate, you like reefa?” said Parker between drags on his fag.

     “Actually, I do,” said Emerson softly.

     “Well mate, join us Saturday. We’re heading up to Tianmu to make a deal with some locals.”

     “I don’t know,” said Emerson disappointedly. “I’m supposed to meet a student to do some language exchange.” Emerson had made arrangements with a co-ed from the reputable Language and Learning Center. Language was only part of the exchange.

     Well, maybe next time, mate,” said Parker.

     “Yes, come along, mate,” said Claire. “We’ll all get pissed.”

     “Why will you get pissed?” wondered Emerson.

     “Because that’s what we do, mate, when we get stoned.” Emerson had always had happy thoughts when high. He couldn’t imagine getting pissed because of weed and beer.

     It was the crowd Emerson wanted to be a part of; the smokers, but the following weekend, it all went up in smoke.

     Emerson read about in the island’s English newspaper, The China Post. “Drug Rings Broken of Foreigners,” it read in their classical Chinglish. The article, with a photo of two Taiwanese men wearing motorcycle helmets being led into a police station, was front page news next to an article about how the Taiwan Relations Act treaty was imposed on Jimmy Carter’s administration by the ninety-sixth Congress through legislation.

     What happened was this: two young Taiwanese men (and a young woman) were walking erratically along on the sidewalk along the main road in Tianmu casually smoking marihuana when a police car happened to drive by. The police got out to help the poor drunkards and found potheads instead. They immediately told the police where they got it from and led them to the door. Three Australian nationals were arrested.

     In court, the judge pardoned the weak, impressionable Taiwanese victims and sentenced the Aussies to life in Green Island Prison. Nowadays Cannabis is a schedule 2 narcotic in the ROC, and possession can result in up to three years imprisonment but not in 1979 with Chinese xenophobia running high on Carter’s cut-out; the Aussies were just Americans with different accents.

     Parker wasn’t one of the Australians arrested. He served as an interface with news about his mates in prison, but he couldn’t let the school management know that he knew the perpetrators. Parker solicited reading material for them from his colleagues at JJE-LSD, as it came to be called. Every foreign teacher in Taiwan knew the tale. Emerson donated his copy of Flashback, the autobiography of Timothy Leary, for the prisoners to read. The teachers heard stories of maggots in their friends’ food and roaches in their filthy prison cells. Attempts were made by their lawyers to negotiate, on behalf of Canberra, with the Taiwanese judiciary, for their deportation to serve in an Australian prison.

     Emerson had dodged a bullet and headed back to Lon-Giland, clean from head to toe, with the Taiwanese student he’d made his wife.

 

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Episode 3

Le Petit Taichung Chiffonnier (The Taichung Rag Picker)

Le Petit Taichung Chiffonnier

(The Taichung Rag Picker)

“What do those yellow lines on the street mean?”

“I think it means – I’m not sure – don’t stop your vehicle here?” My thirty-year-old law school graduate daughter pays attention to everything, especially if it’s unusual.

In New York City, those large orange perpendicular lines, looking like a chain-link fence painted on the intersection, is to warn vehicles not to stop there in traffic when the light turns red up ahead at the corner. If you are caught stopped there, a cop could come and give you a ticket. Better yet, to save manpower, a camera could snap a photo of your license plate number and another machine could mail you a ticket. On “gridlock alert” days, the fine is doubled, and tripled if it’s in a “work zone.” You are told on the news to leave you vehicle home to avoid getting locked on the grid without a key to the highway.

In Taichung, this is not what the yellow grid painted on some streets means. Cops here don’t trifle with foolish things like giving drivers parking tickets of any kind, unless the infraction is across the street from a KMT or DPP member’s property, sometimes both.

     “I think it means ‘Caution’ because there is a hidden side street approaching,” I explained. “It doesn’t even have to be at a crossroads. I’ve also seen streets that vehicles may be exiting garage driveways onto painted with this pattern.” I could see my daughter nodding her head and grinning in legal comprehension.

“However, I’m not sure what the penalty is, if any, if there is a collision on that grid, nor do I know who is responsible in an accident, the driver on the straight way or the one entering from the side.” I knew that would be her next question.

“Who is that man down there?” my daughter asked. Through the miracle of modern technology in the computer age she could see the street outside my fourth floor patio, thanks to Skype, the image sent twelve thousand miles away to her computer monitor in Pittsburgh. My daughter could see the scene and a man just off to the side of the yellow grid, as if all lines pointed to him.

“You mean the man near the corner of my lane?”

“Yeah, the man with the cardboard box on his head putting something onto the back of a flatbed truck. Now he’s sitting on something and doing something.” There was only one man on the street below. I knew who she meant.

“Well, he’s a kind of recycler,” I explained. “He’s recycling garbage, I think.” His putting the world in order makes him different than say the auto mechanic who shares his corner. That mechanic throws tires helter skelter and attracts mosquitoes.

That little rag-picker parks his truck there every morning and stays through the hot Taichung afternoon. Then, he ties up large plastic bags that he’s filled secures them to the bed of his pick-up, and drives away, to somewhere,” I couldn’t tell her where.

 The day I gave my daughter a video call tour of our new home, the busy man was wearing a cardboard box on his head, indeed, but he usually wears a ragged and torn bamboo leaf hat.

He is a grizzled old man, about five-foot four-inches tall, slightly hunched and stooped with skin like sun-dried raisins but not quite as dark. I think his body itself shriveled up from all the attention it got from the tropical Taiwan sun. Every muscle in his arms, legs and feet are connected to gruesomely skinny sinews of flesh that must stink like a flesh-eating plant, if you could smell it, and distinguish it separately from his pungent work garden of trash. Not smile nor grin nor glace around does he make in his busy vocation all day long.

Every muscle in his arms is connected to gruesome slender fingers like a burn victim who hadn’t had a skin graft yet. His body looks like a dried-up salamander, his head like the skull over the cross bones of a poison warning with deep eye sockets and protruding teeth; amazingly he has teeth! His head has a short cut of occasional white splinters.

 He was surrounded with second-hand piles of organized paper and plastic goods; carefully folded colorful food wrappers, stacks of 500cc paper cups of emptied bubble-tea drinks. If perhaps there is a drop of liquid left in the cup, he downs it head-up skyward before he adds the another cup to his stack. I’ve even seem him eat food of the ‘bian-dang’ sectioned plates, though I’m not sure if it’s from leftovers or ones he’s brought for himself for lunch. 

Under his blue Toyota flatbed pick-up truck, there lay an old large black dog, part Labrador. If you look closely, you can see the dog’s tail wag occasionally from between the tires. It’s his dog, and an obedient dog it is, avoiding traffic on the narrow two-way street and the burning sun above the sheltering vehicle. He needs the shade and perhaps a bone the rag picker might find in a bag somewhere. Perhaps someone was giving the man and his dog food to eat.

My daughter could get the picture from the Skype video. You can bet your bottom dollar that this old street hoarder had never put his finger on a keyboard, whether or not it was working or attached to a computer, just like Buddha. But he was the Buddha I tell you. I saw a golden glow surrounding his filthy figure. No one dares tell Buddha to get the hell away from in front of their house or remove his garbage from the street, even if he is a hazard. Sometimes you do penance. After all, he wasn’t that much more disheveled than Taichung itself, not counting the rich Westside. Perhaps it mattered that he took up shop on a side street outside a storefront Buddhist temple alongside the corrugated fence of an overgrown vacant lot used by the stone mason down the block. Furthermore, he was parked legally I’m told; no red or yellow line on the grimy street below his holy sandal feet. No one would dare tell him to move, not even the police; their ancestors might be evicted from heaven if they did so.

    

     “Looks like your truck is full,” my wife heard as we looked down and saw a slender man of seventy years step off a bicycle near the rag picker who looked up at him. The man stood at the tail gate of the pick- up, and took hold of a blue nylon rope that was wound and tied around a white burlap plastic sack full of recyclables.  He gripped it now, and as tight as he could, pulled it closer around the sack stacked in the back. He then grabbed the loose end of the rope with his other hand and slipped it through a shiny silver ring, one of six along each side of the little flatbed truck. The rag-picker stopped folding the empty paper food boxes and stood up slowly from the large cooking oil can that served as his work stool. He started chatting with the seventy-year-old youngster helping him pack up. We couldn’t hear what they said as a scooter passed on the street but it looked like they knew each other.

     “Have to be there by nightfall,” my wife heard him say in a rich Taiwanese dialect once the scooter had passed. “Be there soon or they won’t let me in! I’ll have to go back again tomorrow morning, damn it.”

     “Well then, you let me finish tying your load up and get on your way. You don’t want to drop any along the roads.”

“No, no, I won’t want to do that,” he said loudly. “Not after all this work.”

“Yeah, it’ll be all over the road,” the visitor said as he finished trying the load down. He then walked around the truck to see if all else was safely tied.

I smiled at my wife as she translated what they said. The road around them was so littered with remaining plastic bottles, paper cups, newspaper, cardboard, and aluminum cans, all strewn about. The visitor was worried he’d dirty the street if this load fell off the truck? Hah! Not the rag-picker. Nor was he worried that falling trash would be a hazard for vehicles. Buddha doesn’t worry; He lets others work out their karma.

“Yeah, it looks like you’re set,” said the lean visitor as he walked toward his one-speed, heavy, old-style bicycle. He gave the rope one more tug to show it was safe, nodded his head at his eighty-year-old senior, mounted his bike and rode away.

The rag-picker went back to work, tidying up some loose ends and excess junk that would have to wait until tomorrow to be sorted. The rest remained on the road, mixed juices of many foods from the containers dripping down the slope of the street across the lane toward the stack of used tires near the auto mechanic shop on the first floor of our condo. Soda mixed with soup and dried on the red hot asphalt leaving a sickly sweet smell and sticky mess that cockroaches and flies love. They’d be licking it in no time.

He piled the rest against the corrugated steel fence just near the gate outlined by two orange plastic caution cones a friend of Buddha had placed there. He had his work load ready for tomorrow. For now it was quitting time at his makeshift street-side recycling plant.

The old rag-picker walked around his flatbed Toyota. He removed a tattered brown barbecue apron he had probably found among someone’s trash. It was large and could have been wrapped around his waist twice as it hung like a lamp shade around his scrawny knees. Underneath, a pair of soiled brown shorts hung, darker in color around the crotch from sweat and urine. He pulled it over his head, not bothering to untie it, and walked into the street where his truck was parked, facing the wrong way, to an open passenger door. There is no wrong way for Buddha. It had been left open all day obscuring the road to anyone making a turn off the lane to the street. To hell with the yellow cross-street grid! Buddha knows no grid, or anger. He brings to a halt every two cars that passed each other on the narrow roadway, but that’s his function; to stop people in their tracks. Karma alone would help them pass through Buddha’s earthly threshold. No concave street traffic mirror could repel a demon from hell or hinder an angel. Simply, it was time for him to leave and the door had to be closed. That’s all.

The old black Labrador mix awoke and came out from under the truck when it heard the door slam. It was the signal that it was time to get up and go. It smartly stayed along the side of the road and slowly climbed up through the driver’s side door and into the seat. Then the old rag-picker followed, almost like a dance routine, took care to climb into the truck. He sat in the driver’s seat.

My wife and I watched from the ledge of our fourth floor patio. We saw, but didn’t hear the truck engine start up; we saw the brake lights glow red. It was hard to believe that this man would have a key in his ratty shorts pocket, but he did! He even had a wallet somewhere inside with a driver’s license, I guess. No holes in this man’s pocket for sure!

The right turn directional started flashing. It never occurred to me that he would do it. This eighty-year-old rag-picker from Taichung was not picking rags nor was he hoarding trash and garbage. The truck carefully crossed over to the right side of the two-way street and moved up behind traffic at the red light ahead on his way to the recycle redemption center where he would be paid for a hard day’s work. How much money would he get for his work-time? That’s not the point, is it?