It is cold, gloomy and wet in Zurich.

It has been raining so hard, for so many days, in fact, that Zurich is starting to remind me of Dublin or Manchester or Seattle.

The weather, however, is bright and sunshiny compared to my mood, which is so dark and foul that if I were a place, I would be Die Unterwelt.

The Underworld.

In point of fact, I am so down that wish I was Toten in die Unterwelt, or however one says, “I wish I was dead in Hell” in Swiss German as opposed to German German.

It is, no doubt, different.

Everything is.

Even the fine South Asian dope—the “Sugar”—I have purchased in Zurich that is coursing through my veins hasn’t wiped away the funk, even if it has made the vicissitudes of life somewhat easier to bear.

The Sugar I’ve been sniffing in large quantity—and I’ve got two grams of the sandy colored powder with which to work—is very banging shit, as they say, although the vernacular in Zurich is different.

The fact is, I should be feeling no pain. My main emotion as I stare at the storm clouds that are obscuring the Alps far beyond the Zurichsee, should be something along the lines of:

Wheeeeee.

Or,

Whaaalllaaaa.

Or,

Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala.

Or,

Deedadeedadeedadeedadeedadeedadeeda.

But, it is not.

I stop on a sodden street corner and observe the panorama of the Bellevueplatz, and the blue Zurich streetcars rumbling in and out in the torrential rain.

I take a Xanax from my pocket, put it in my mouth and swallow it with saliva. A couple of hours ago I purchased 100 Xanax without prescription, just a long bogus speech about oppressive anxiety and nervousness, from a pharmacy on Bahnhofstrasse, the street lined by Swiss banks and hyper-expensive stores that is Zurich’s miracle mile.

The Xanaxes—generic name alprazolam from the benzodiazepine family, the biochemical anti-anxiety agents that are God’s apology to mankind for making the world a shitty and tense place and life so freaking irritating—are just .5 milligram ones, but who cares?

I walked into a drugstore and got 100 of them without a script. For way less money than they cost in the USA.

I have already eaten two of them. The one I just popped is my third.

I am a touch resistant to Xanax, having built up significant tolerance to them. Whereas, a milligram of Xanax is enough to send the average person to Happy Land or knock him or her on his or her ass, I can swallow a couple of milligrams and still be wide awake. Wired, in fact, if I chase them with espresso.

I do not know why God has granted me such admirable tolerance to most substances. I would given anything to be one of those people that get wasted on nothing.

Yet, despite the heroin and the alprazolam—which should foster a ha-ha, happy, devil may care, who gives a fuck attitude—I am in the depths of deep and despondent depression.

Fuck it all straight to die unterwelt.

The cause of this angst is a female named Gabi from Munich.

Blonde, young and pretty in that young, blonde German fraulein way, Gabriella from Munich was supposed to get on a train and meet me in Zurich.

She is not here, nor will she be.

Why, in fact, should she be?

The sum total of my experience with Gabi amounts to six or so hours over the course of two hours in a shady bar near Munich’s hauptbahnhof making out with her. Before I left Munich, she proposed coming to join me in Zurich and, then, possibly accompanying me back to the Good Old USA.

Nevermind that importing this blonde Bavarian chick to America might not be the best of moves—and that it would certainly be a decision made in haste.

It would have been what it would have been and, in point of fact, it would have been a bad idea.

Heroin, however, as any junkie prone to occasional reflection knows, interferes with the body in many, many ways; it shuts down some of its most important functions, starting with the ability to digest food and defecate and moving on to all of its psycho-emotional aspects.

Heroin = Clouded Judgment.

Heroin + Liquor = Mush Brain.

Heroin + Liquor + Xanax = Huh?

What?

Was I saying something?

S’up?

Why are you looking at me like that, dude?

Hence, making plans with Gabriella from Munich.

Alas, when I called the number she gave me, a German man answered.

“Is Gabi there?” I said.

He said something German that I didn’t understand.

“Gabriella, she is there, bitte?” I said, slowly, approximating the diction of someone who doesn’t speak English for the benefit of someone who doesn’t understand English.

He screamed things in German that were undoubtedly foul and vulgar; I could tell by the tone of his voice.

Yes, Gabi is a memory—one that will no doubt disappear from RAM thanks to heroin, liquor, Xanax or another substance that causes loss of data or, God Forbid, a control-alt-delete reboot situation—unless I want to double back to Munich.

I’m in a bad way.

I miss Gabi’s mangled German-infused diction.

Excited I am bekomink from you.

In America, you ist doing vhat?

To Zurich I am komink.

Etc.

I want to speak broken English with Gabi, so I can say things like:

A long time for you I am waiting.

And

In Zurich, with me in my hotel you will stay.

Unrequited love sucks.

So too, unrequited lust.

I hop on a tram and head to my buddy Richard’s soul food restaurant and blues club on Zypressenstrasse, which is in a part of Zurich with a large population of Turks, Serbs and other immigrant workers.

The restaurant doesn’t open for hours yet, but I bang on the door and Magbul, Richard’s Afghani bartender—with whom I have bonded over late night drinks at a dance club near the Zurich airport—lets me in. Magbul invites me to wait upstairs in the boss’s office.

He should be there any minute.

I sit at Richard’s desk. The next thing I know, someone is saying, “Wake up.”

“Huh?” I say.

“You’re out like a light,” Richard says. “Wake up.”

No kidding. What does he expect?

A great deal of the dope has traveled up my nose.

I have no reason or desire to be lucid; it defeats the purpose of doing heroin.

I open my eyes. I can smell the ribs that a couple of the Pakistani chefs are cooking in the tiny kitchen down the hall.

Outside, a steady drizzle is still falling.

My first thought is, why is Richard fucking with my nod and bringing me back to the depressing Swiss land of rain? I was happy and content in the Land of Nod.

“You know,” Richard says. “I’ve told you a million times that you can’t do dope here and nod out like that.”

“I was asleep,” I say. “What’s the big deal? Everybody nods on dope.”

“Because everybody’s going to know you’re high.”

“C’mon. Nobody cares.”

“I do.”

Like Richard doesn’t do dope and consume vast quantities of alcohol.

“Give me a break,” I whine. “I’m depressed.”

“Are you still bummed about the German chick?”

“Yup.”

Richard gets up and puts a Robert Cray album into the CD player in his office.

Great. The blues. Just what I want to hear.

“Forget about her,” he says. “She took you for a ride.”

“I really dug her,” I say.

“Give me a break. You were the shill.”

“The shill?”

“The shill. The mark. The victim. It was a scam, bro. She’s a bargirl. She works in the place. The whole point is to get you to spend a lot of money buying her drinks. You know how many guys have gotten drunk and engaged to bargirls? It happens all the time.”

“I don’t get it, though. I was leaving the next day. So, why bother with the phone number and all that? You really think it was a scam?”

I’m not sure what’s worse. Knowing I was conned. Being dumb enough to believe the chick was going to show up in Zurich. Or telling Richard I got suckered.

“It’s a classic set up,” he says. “Cheer up. It happens to everybody.”

“Did it every happen to you?”

“Not that way, but I’ve blown plenty of money when I’m drinking. It’s nothing. Can you afford what you spent on her?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then chalk it up to experience,” he says. “Hang out tonight. There are plenty of girls around. Swiss girls from rich families. Rich girls are fun too. You should give them a chance.”

“Is Jill around?”

Jill is an American from Laguna Beach who lives in Zurich and teaches grade school. I have had an interest in her.

“Yeah,” Richard says. “She’s still drinking too much and she’s back with Firooz.”

Firooz is Jill’s on-again, off-again photographer boyfriend who comes with a reputation for a lot of slimy dealings with the models he shoots.

“Cool,” I say.

“She lives at the bar,” he says. “My advice to you, Skippy, is forget about her.”

I tell Richard that I’ve got split.

I’m hooking up for a couple of drinks with a German jewelry designer I know through my ex-girlfriend; he lives right over the border near Schaffhausen.

Unfortunately, this means that now that I’ve worked hard on getting wasted, I will have to try to look as straight as possible.

This is not good planning on my part, but it is part of the Curse of the Junkie.

Fritjof, the jewelry designer, shows up at my hotel at the appointed hour with his wife, Sabina.

We drive off, as I consider my options.

I can go back to the states to recharge my batteries, and return to Zurich when I am happier.

I can continue to hang in Zurich, and pursue Jill or another as yet unknown female.

I can hang out with Richard.

Or,

I can hang out with myself and spend days on end in a drug and alcohol induced haze.

Decisions. Decisions.

In the meantime, there’s tonight with my German friends.

We pull up to an old industrial building in a part of Zurich that I don’t know. It has been converted to a restaurant and club.

I can feel the thumping bass of European dance music when we get close to the door.

“Very cool place,” Fritjof says. “Many good vuhmans. You vill like.”

I’m sure I will.

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.