The leaden, pewter clouds are so loaded with ocean moisture that every time they explode into another torrential, wind driven downpour, it feels like the rain will never end.

The pounding, drenching Pacific rains go on hour after hour.

Day in. Day out.

I watch storm after storm rolling in on the satellite photos on the San Diego TV weather reports and cringe.

Outside my buddy Richard’s Baja California beach house, the Pacific is as angry and gray as I am despondent and blue.

I lay on my back on the mattress on the floor of my second floor bedroom loft, sensing the onset of dope withdrawal—chills, cold sweat and runny nose—and stare at the ceiling.

Rainwater leaking through the roof is dripping into a bucket a couple of feet from my head. Another leak is plop-plop-plopping into a pot near my feet. A glass pitcher is filling slowly near the door.

Every pot, pan and container in the house has been pressed into service.

The house—atop a cliff between Tijuana and Rosarito Beach with a two-story glass wall facing the Pacific and Coronado Island offshore—leaks like a sieve.

Among the things you leave behind when you say adios to Los Estados Unidos at the San Ysidro border crossing at Tijuana are roofs that keep out the rain.

Everything leaks down here in Meh-Hee-Coh, from expensive homes owned by gringos to the shacks of dirt-poor Mexican laborers.

Dripping water is as constant a background noise as pounding surf.

Plop-Plip-Ploop.

Da-Drip-Da-Drip.

Ploop-Plap-Ploop-Plap.

The first two words I added to my minuscule Spanish vocabulary when I arrived in Mexico were cura, which is what they call the single doses of black tar heroin that saturate the local drug marketplace, and lluvia, which means rain.

Even worse than the incessant lluvia is the fact that it turns large parts of the landscape to oozing brown liquid which, in turn, messes mightily with my ability to get a cura when I want/need one.

The locals joke that Rosarito has two names:

Rosalodo, because everything turns to mud during the winter rains.

And, Rosapolvo, because choking dust fills the air when things dry out.

The polvo is a pain in the ass, coating everything in a fine earth brown powder, but I live in dread of the lluvia because of the lodo.

Lodo is the enemy.

Many local roads, other than the highway between Tijuana and Cabo San Lucas and other significant ones, are unpaved. Much of the reliable supply of dope, on the other hand, emanates from the dealers who live up in the hills above town. The dope comes from a handful of individuals and families that pay off the cops and are allowed to sell dope to local gringos by the Mexican authorities. Unfortunately, the hills are inaccessible in a normal vehicle once the roads become awful and steep trails of mud and muck.

When the sky opens up, getting dope becomes an infinitely trickier task, made more difficult by shortages in money that prevent stockpiling, not that a stockpile of dope can ever last as long as intended.

And so, life reduces to a simple equation:

Lluvia = Lodo = No Curas = Great Unhappiness.

On some days when the roads turn to slop, Richard and I score curas in Rosarito Beach from a small time local dealer who lives in a relatively paved part of town that caters to tourists. Mostly, however, the rain means that I’ll be damp, miserable and dope sick, and that I’ll spend the day glumly listening to depressing music, watching pelicans struggling to fly in the gale force winds coming off the Pacific and feeling nauseous. All to the tormenting background sound of water plop-plop-plopping through the roof into our collection of pots, pans and pails.

This is not the Paradiso Mexicano I had in mind when I decided to relocate to the Baja California.

I get up and go downstairs.

Richard is sitting in front of the fireplace, keeping warm and dry and reading a magazine.

“What do you want to do?” I say. “I’m getting sick.”

We’re supposed to be writing a novel together. This is why I put nearly everything I own that I haven’t already sold to buy dope into storage and moved to the Baja from DC. But, mostly, we hang out and shoot and smoke Mexican black tar dope.

“I’m not driving to Rosarito,” Richard says, knowing that our local drug transactions are simpler when he does the transacting because whereas I’m completely gringo, he has Mexican roots, speaks Spanish and has been hanging out here since he was a child.

Richard belongs. I do not.

“Why not?” I say.

“Have you looked outside?”

“I want to get some dope.”

“There’s none around.”

“Aren’t you starting to feel like shit?”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Come on. Maybe Baby has some.”

Baby, so-called, is our dope contact in Rosarito Beach. He lives in little pink cinder block house with his mother a couple of blocks from the beach and a big club called Papas & Beer.

“I doubt it,” Richard says, turning his attention back to the magazine. “Last time we saw baby he asked us to get him some.”

“Come on. I feel like shit.”

“We agreed not to get high dope every day.”

Richard and I resolve every day to moderate our dope intake and, every day, I whine and complain enough to erode this resolve and we end up making a dope run into Rosarito or up to La Gloria, a rundown, poor village in the hills above town.

Because of the rain, our last shopping trip for drugs was several days ago. We carefully rationed the dope, but the last of it went early this morning.

And, now, desperation is taking hold in a major way.

“We’re not doing dope every day,” I say. “We’ve done it four days in a row. Before that, we didn’t do it for three.”

“I don’t want to get strung out,” Richard says.

“We are strung out.”

“We can’t afford to get loaded every day.”

“It’s my money.”

I remind Richard that we exist on the paycheck I am still drawing from the magazine in Washington for which I ostensibly work, money I am receiving to write articles from Mexico and Southern California that I’m not writing.

It is a great gig, but unlikely to last much longer.

“Don’t tell me how to spend my money,” I continue.

“It’s my house.”

“Oh, right. I forgot. This is your castle.”

“What did you say?”

Increasingly, and especially when we’re under dope-caused duress, Richard and I bicker and curse each other out like an estranged couple.

“Fuck you and your castle,” I say.

I gesture around the vast and empty living room. After Richard’s mother passed away suddenly in the house several years ago, his family emptied the place out, intending to sell it until Richard decided to move in. The furniture and accessories in the living room consist of a workstation for his Mac, 1,000 CDs I shipped from Washington, a boom box, several chairs belonging to the outside deck and a dining table with chairs.

Richard takes the car keys from his pocket, throws them at me, and shouts, “Take the car, motherfucker! Get out of here! Go do what you want!”

“Thank you,” I say, triumphant. “You want any dope?”

“If you don’t like the house, leave.”

“I love the house. You know that. I’m sorry. Do you want any dope?”

“If you find some.”

“I’ll drive to La Gloria if I have to.”

“Don’t take the car off the paved road. Park at the grocery store in La Gloria and walk.”

There is, at least, a paved road that runs into the middle of La Gloria, from which, the dope dealers’ houses are a good hike through the Baja mud.

I drive south down the toll road from Tijuana in the torrential rain toward Rosarito, glancing occasionally to the right at the angry Pacific and the dark canopy of clouds.

My first stop in Rosarito Beach, which has a paved main drag and many unpaved side streets, is Baby’s place. He is sitting at his kitchen table surrounded by pots and pans to catch the rain dribbling through the roof.

I ask if he has any curas.

He looks miserable and says that he hasn’t had any in two days and, as far as he knows, a lot of the dealers in the hills are out too. People are knocking on the door every fifteen minutes. Nobody has anything.

“What about Israel and Ishmael?” I say, referring to a family of Biblically named dope dealers who supply most of the gringos in Rosarito and environs with Mexican tar, as long as their payoffs to the various police agencies—local, state and federal—remain current.

Baby shrugs and says, “You know I no go there.”

He has a long running dispute with Israel, Ishmael and Family.

I walk back through the Mexican mud and rain to Richard’s old BMW sedan, and head up into the hills on a narrow, curvy and rain-slicked—but paved—road pockmarked with humongous potholes.

Fifteen minutes later, it is pouring harder than ever and I pull into the mud in front of the small grocery store in La Gloria just up the road from a Pemex gas station and down the road from the local police station.

Israel’s and Ishmael’s house is across the road, about a quarter mile up a steep slope of mud.

I get out of the car, pull up the hood on my jacket in a futile attempt to keep dry and trudge across the road through the cold February rain.

A few hundred yards up the hill, I sink into six inches of mud. It oozes through and under my jeans and into my shoes. I long to score in a place where I don’t run the risk of being buried in a mudslide and not being found until an archeologist excavates me in 1,500 years.

Homo Gringodopefiendicus.

I curse out loud and continue marching up the steep hill through the downpour, hoping that I don’t fall face first into the brown Baja California slime.

I look like a mud wrestler when I reach the house. Israel’s wife answers the door.

She looks at me and invites me in.

“I am surprise you come,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “A lot of lluvia and lodo.”

“Where is Ree-Shard?”

“He doesn’t want to come out. I come for him.”

“Is okay.”

“You have curas?”

“Si. How mush you wan?”

“Eight. Ocho.”

I’ll buy eight, tell Richard I got four and keep the extra dope for myself.

“You way here,” she says.

She walks into another room. I stand near the door, watching rain dripping from a dozen different leaks in the roof into pots, pans and buckets.

She returns with eight deep brown curas of Mexican tar encased in Saran Wrap and foil. I give her eighty dollars.

A minute later, I’m sliding back down the steep hill through the mudflow.

I am drenched to the bone and splattered with mud, but I have dope in my pocket and I know that, eventually, the rain has to stop.

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.