The old Swiss woman sitting at the next table in the restaurant in Basel takes her dentures out and sets them on a plate.

During lunch.

With smoke- and coffee-stained yellowing porcelain teeth and unnaturally bright pink ceramic gums, the lunch plate dentures perfectly capture the bizarre and rapidly deteriorating vibe of the waning days of this now-smacked out European sojourn.

My ex-girlfriend Pamela has been carrying on over lunch about a high school English teacher colleague that she’s silently in love with, and I am fighting a losing battle to stave off a righteous dope nod. I am tired of hearing about this English teacher person, about whom she has been waxing poetic since we first set foot in Europe.

I am the wrong choir to which to preach about this subject, having told her repeatedly that her love life is the last thing I want to hear about. In turn, I have been told that if I’m a true friend, I’ll listen. I have ceased to even pretend to listen.

“Do you think I should tell him how I feel?” she says.

“Huh?” I say.

I realize that I’ve shut my eyes, so I open them.

“Are you sleeping, Bob?” she says.

“Nuh.”

“You look like it.”

I rub my eyes—which have had heroin pupils the size of itty-bitty pinpricks under all light conditions for days—and say, “Nah.”

This is not a lie. A dope nod may look like sleep to the average person who doesn’t take narcotics, but it’s about as far from sleep as you can get. The first, glowing and giddy days of a brand new baby dope run—especially when you’ve been away from the shit for a while—are virtually sleepless. They are filled with sleeplike nods, but not sleep itself.

This sleepless twilight state is the coolest thing about the brief period before nature reasserts control and you become strung out, at which point, you can sleep again, but become deathly ill if you skip your regularly scheduled dose of heroin.

As we sit having lunch in Basel, I am very twilight.

“What’s up?” she says. “You’ve hardly been able to keep your eyes open the last three days.”

“Really?”

Ms. Ex- is correctemundo about this. I am putting so much of the tan Afghani dope I am copping in various places around Zurich up my nose, that I am barely ambulatory, let alone lucid. Last night, I spent four hours nodded out in the bathroom of our hotel room, standing up, leaning against the mirror above the sink.

When I went into the nicely appointed Zurich hotel bathroom, it was midnight. When I came to, still standing in the bathroom, it was Four AM. Time not only flies, it absolutely vanishes into the ether when you’ve got a good dope buzz on.

The dope in Zurich, which is always slamming, is especially banging this time of year.

I’ve nodded out sitting at tables in restaurants and cafés, seated at the dinner table, chilling on my couch, riding subways, buses and trains, hanging out in hotel lobbies, etc.

But never standing up.

Such are the special little moments of an aspiring junkie’s life:

Your first dope-induced puke.

Your first heavy-duty nod and psychedelic visual and auditory hallucination.

Your first hole burned in a sofa, bedspread or rug.

Your first near overdose and the life-on-a-razor’s-edge thrill of realizing that killing yourself and really, truly getting off are perilously similar sides of the same coin.

Etc.

I am extremely proud of my latest achievement, but terribly empty inside because there is no one I can tell—and certainly not Ms. Ex-, who doesn’t even smoke pot—who would appreciate the momentous nature of nodding out for four hours standing up without lecturing me ad infinitum about the wretched evils of heroin use. Even my Zurich restaurant owner friend and dope buddy Richard would use the story as an excuse to tell me that I do too much dope when I come to town and that everybody notices how wasted I am and that I should put a lid on it if I can’t comport myself with more dignity than to nod out all over town—seated or standing—because there are so many damned junkies and people using dope in Zurich that everybody can spot somebody zonked on smack from a distance.

He’s already said so several times since I got to Zurich.

I was about to nod when the old Swiss lady took her teeth; I have since snapped to attention.

Now, instead of closing my eyes and enjoying the dope-induced hallucination that I sensed was imminent—I tend toward happy and colorful scenes like fabulous twirling carousels, pastel Caribbean vista and the like—I’m about to lose my lunch.

“It’s very insulting when I’m talking to you and you’re falling asleep,” the Ex says.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ve just been really tired the last couple of days.”

Ms. Ex- is blissfully unaware that she’s traveling with somebody who’s seriously entering another junkie phase. She knows nothing of my junkie dabblings whether past, present or future. Heroin was a taste I acquired after our first breakup.

The choice of Zurich to be the last stop on this strange reunion tour before heading back to the USA is neither happenstance nor a quirk of airline ticketing procedures.

We’re in Switzerland because this is where the dope is, and I intend to stock up for the coming weeks back in the good old U.S.A.

We’ve been in Europe for two weeks.

The travel journal so far:

Amsterdam—I go through minor withdrawal from my New York City habit after the dope I bring to Europe runs out. I try scoring in Amsterdam, but get ripped off by a smooth-talking Turk I encounter on the fringes of the Red Light District who sells me “Turkey Sugar” that is either (A). the planet’s shittiest dope or (B). snuff. After this episode (not my first misguided attempt ever to cop in Amsterdam), I give up, go through a few days of mild sniffles and moderate malaise and relegate myself to safe, easy and legal pot and hash sold in Amsterdam’s splendid “smoking cafés.” Pamela—with whom I was off, then on again, and, now, am off again, but traveling with—takes to parading around the hotel room in bra and panties, although we are not sleeping together, having mutually agreed that we are, in fact, off again and only traveling together on a pleasant little vacation-like trip through several European cities. I drink heavily and on a regular schedule, starting with powerful Belgian beer by lunchtime. She does Van Gogh and the Rijksmuseum. I do the Bulldog and the Paradiso.

Berlin—I start smoking my way through the ten grams of hashish I bring to Germany from Amsterdam in a film canister. To avoid criticism from the Ex-, I only smoke while leaning out the bathroom window of our hotel room overlooking the picturesque Gendarmenmarkt in Eastern Berlin and on the streets of Berlin when no one is looking. I cut back on the drinking because Ms. Ex- notices that I reek of beer a lot. Plus, I become cantankerously drunk on several occasions, leading her to storm out of a music store on the Ku’Damm in Western Berlin, where she gets hopelessly lost, showing up at the hotel at one in the morning crying that I abandoned her in Berlin and that she doesn’t speak German and could have gotten killed because parts of Berlin remind her of the Lower East Side in New York City in the 1980s. She bitterly accuses me of having issues with alcohol. Not.

Prague—A haze of hashish and the Czech liquor called Becherovka. Weeeee!!!!

Vienna—Ms. Ex- comes down with a vague and mysterious malaise that confines her to our hotel room overlooking the Stephansplatz. For several days. I revel in beery Viennese drunks abetted by Xanax and hashish and ameliorated by copious consumption of Turkish coffee at various cafés.

Innsbruck—The hash runs out and so does the joy of traveling with the Ex-. All I want is dope to take the edge off. A screaming match between us breaks out at the foot of the ski jump overlooking town, delighting a minibus of Japanese tourists, several of whom get us in the frame of their photos.

And, then, Zurich, from which we’ve taken the train to Basel for a few hours.

“Wake up!” Pamela says. “You’re sleeping again.”

“I’m not sleeping. But I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Why?”

“The woman at the next table.”

“What?”

“Look at the old lady.”

“Oh, my God. That’s disgusting.”

I look at the woman, smile and point at my mouth.

She looks at me blankly.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Could you put your teeth back in?”

She stares at me uncomprehendingly.

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” I growl.

“Bob, you’re being rude,” Pamela says.

“I’m being rude? What about her?”

“She’s elderly. She’s somebody’s grandma.”

“Your teeth,” I say. “Put them back in, bitte.”

The old lady frowns.

I know a German guy in D.C. married to a chick whose ex-boyfriend, two boyfriends before, was a well-known ‘80s porn star. Horst, the German guy who is probably not so well hung as his predecessor, makes dentures for a dental lab.

“Der zähne,” I say.

The old lady scowls.

“Hmm,” the Ex- says. “Tell her more.”

“I don’t know more,” I say. “I said teeth in German.”

“Maybe she doesn’t understand.”

“Der zähne,” I say pointing at my mouth in an agitated way. “Der zähne! Der zähne!”

“Shhhh!” Pamela says.

“What?”

“You’re screaming. You look insane yelling ‘Teeth!’ in German.”

The old woman shouts something in Swiss German, wagging her finger for emphasis.

I bury my head in my hands and start laughing, but not in a happy-go-lucky ha-ha way. It is the stoned laugh of the semi-numb damned guy who realizes he needs to be more deeply in the twilight.

Pronto.

Pamela is shaking her head. Our waitress, attracted by the commotion—me screaming “Der zähne” like a demented dentist with a crappy German accent and the old lady shouting whatever she hollered—comes over.

I look at her and say, “Do you think you could tell that woman to put her teeth back in her mouth.”

She looks at the dentures on the plate and at me and says, “But, ahf kurze.”

Problem solved.

The waitress says something to the elderly woman in Swiss German. The woman puts her teeth back from whence they came.

Problem solved. I excuse myself and head for the comfort and quiet of the bathroom. More dope will see me through until we return to Zurich.

Robert Guskind has been writing for a long time. An award-winning Washington-based journalist and contributor to major national magazines and newspapers, he now lives very close to Manhattan, where he continues to write, shoot photographs and work on a book based on his travels and experiences as a reporter and formerly disreputable dope fiend. He is all better now and is a regular contributor to Cherrybleeds.