The night train from Stuttgart to Antwerp is rocketing through the German night at ninety miles an hour, leaving a trail of shit, piss and broken glass behind it.

I am standing in the WC, urinating and feeling no pain.

I finish whizzing and flush the toilet with a foot pedal. The metal bottom of the old school stainless steel Deutsche Bahn train toilet slips open, nothing beneath it but the rail bed rushing past in European darkness at high speed.

I listen to the Sisters of Mercy’s Amphetamine Logic through my headphones:

Nothing but the knife to live for

One life all I need

Give me one good reason

Give me…

Amphetamine logic

I check my watch—it is nearly midnight. I zip up and reach into my pocket for another codeine and acetaminophen tablet—Tylenol with Balls—purchased after much persuasion of an unsympathetic pharmacist in Stuttgart and wash it down with the last hit of beer from my bottle of Lowenbrau. I press on the foot pedal again to open the toilet and toss the bottle down the hole.

The empty bottle rattles down the shit chute before slamming on to the tracks at 90 MPH.

Wheee.

This is a level of fun for a grown man, but it is the sort of thing that constitutes entertainment when you are drunk and buzzed on low-grade narcotics on a fuzzy all-night European train trip, tucked away in a second-class couchette compartment.

The trouble is that I am wide-awake and there is no one with whom to play. My compartment mates—a guy who helps run a big zoo in the South and a top ranking official with one of the country’s biggest urban parks departments—are fast asleep, having passed out cold after our umpteenth round of German beer.

Leaving me to wander the corridors of the Belgium-bound night train in a semi-drunken codeine haze, and to amuse myself by tossing empty bottles down the toilet onto the tracks.

I stumble back to the couchette car and crawl into my lower bunk. The Chicago park guy is snoring like a tractor-trailer. I lay on my back and stare at the ceiling, listening to his snores mix with the background noise of the speeding train.

When I open my eyes, the train is moving more slowly through the weak light of a very early morning spring sun.

Thank God.

We must be close to arriving in Antwerp. This is my first time in Antwerp, a Flemish port town that is a center of the international diamond trade. Other than knowing that Antwerp is where Reubens lived, that Reubensque as a descriptive term is derived from Reubens and that the beer kicks ass, it is fresh territory.

Antwerpen is the third stop on the walking tour of Europe in which I am participating, an all expense paid ten-day journey to see walking trails.

The English part of the trip is behind me, five days in the rain, exploring walking trails in the vicinity of Manchester, rediscovering the fact that I am not a walking through the woods or field kind of guy.

Walks in the forests of Merry Olde England and other countries are the price of being on this free trip. A group that wishes government to set aside more land for walking trails in the U.S.A., and to spend more building them, is paying for the trip. They hope I will go back to America and write nice things about trails, journalistic ethics be damned.

The trails in the U.K. were nice—the countryside was lush and green and the sheep and other livestock were very picturesque—but they’re not my thing.

Arthur, the gray haired Brit leading the group of twelve has already told me he will have nightmares for years about a tall American man in a black trench coat following him through woods, howling about the mud and the bugs. Demanding that the itinerary be changed to include downtown Manchester for 1980s British musical reasons, and listening to the Sisters of Mercy on his headphones.

So still, so dark all over Europe.

And I ride down the Highway 101

By the side of the ocean headed for sunset

For the kingdom come

Arthur lived through the Nazi Luftwaffe air raids and V2 missile attacks on Britain during World War II, but is beginning to look like he may not make it through a couple of weeks in the woods with me.

We have the rest of the day until a big group dinner scheduled for a place near Antwerp’s small, but active, Red Light District. So, a few hours after the train pulls into Antwerp, I set off from our hotel to explore Antwerp and try to re-up on drugs of some sort, as the Stuttgart supply of acetaminophen and codeine is rapidly being depleted.

I hit an atmospheric little café near Antwerp’s towering cathedral, and quickly drink a couple of Westmalle Trappist Trippel beers, pre-lunch libations that will put the rest of the day in the proper perspective.

Sated, I wander down the Meir, an upper-end retail street, on a mission for narcotics.

My long black trench coat flaps in the wind as I scout for pharmacies.

There are many more walks through the woods to come in Belgium, Switzerland and France. Codeine is an excellent antidote for mud, vegetation and mosquitoes.

Still, the drug stores of Antwerp are a new territory for me. This is a potential problem—scoring prescription drugs from pharmacies in Europe can be amazingly simple, but it helps to know the turf.

I wander into a pharmacy—an apoteek—that looks like it hasn’t changed since the early part of the Twentieth Century. It’s all done up in dark wood and neat glass cases. There are various containers full of powders and liquids behind the counter.

It is manned by a guy with gray hair who is wearing round wire-rimmed glasses and a white smock.

“Do you speak any English?” I say.

“Little bit,” he says, pronouncing “bit” like “beet.”

“Maybe you can help me,” I say. “I’m American….”

I pull out my passport and hold it up.

“And I’m here for a few days on a walking tour…”

“Eh valkin’ tur?” the pharmacist says.

“I’m with a group,” I say. “Walkers….uh….wandelen? Grande Randonnée? Rambling?”

I feel like a dork saying this, but it’s central to my story.

“Ah, I unterstant,” the pharmacist, who is staring at me intently, says. “Dee voh-kink.”

“And I have a problem with my knee,” I say, patting my knee.

“A pro-blam?” he says.

“Pain,” I say. “I have much pain. Aiiiyyyy! In the knee. And because I am walking so much it hurts. I’m probably going to have to have arthroscopic surgery on it at some point, but right now, I need a painkiller.”

“Peen kay-luhr?” he says.

“Something to take away pain,” I say. “Like codeine. That’s what my American doctor recommends. You know codeine? Is there a Flemish word for it?”

Happy pill, perhaps? De gelukkige pil?

He looks at me blankly.

“Maybe you just call it codeine?” I continue. “I need some until I can see my doctor in the United States. Codeine to take pain away so that I can walk.”

Jesus H. Christ.

Trying to get drugs is a demanding and time-consuming job.

A normal person would be going to museums looking at Flemish art.

Or shopping.

But, not me.

I touch my knee and say, “Aiiiyyy!” again as though I’m a bizarre cartoon character trying to cop drugs in a foreign land with a strange combination of broken English, sound effects and pantomime. Like Marcel Marceau with sound looking for pharmaceuticals.

“You are havink pain?” he says.

“Severe pain in the knee,” I say. “Terrible pain. Bad aiiiyyy.”

“Yes,” he says. “I can hilp peen.”

“Dank you,” I say, trying to approximate “thank you” in Flemish. “Dank you so much. What a blessing. I’ve been in agony.”

He looks in a drawer and hands me a small box.

“You tek,” he says. “Hilps peen.”

I pay him for the pills and pretend to limp slightly as I leave.

I’m practically in a cold sweat as I stand on the corner. I open the box, take out two of the small capsules and swallow them.

Then, I look at the box.

Mother of all fuckers.

It says something about homeopathic.

Homeopathic?

Like natural?

Holistic is fine, just not right now.

Screw homeopathic.

I want narcotic.

If I want homeopathic, I’ll eat vegetation on one of my walks through the bloody woods.

I’ve swallowed a pill that probably contains dried lichen from Waterloo, powdered wildflowers from the Ardennes and ground Alpine Marmot claws.

Bite me.

I stop at a café, slump down at a table, order another Westmalle, drink it quickly and continue down the Meir.

I reenact my story a few minutes later at a more modern looking apoteek.

My reward is two red-and-yellow metal tubes of codeine and acetaminophen tablets.

Now we’re talking.

A few minutes later, I walk out of another apoteek two blocks away with an additional tube.

Ten minutes after that comes another tube from another apoteek.

Etc.

An hour-and-a-half later, there are so many metal tubes of codeine tablets in my coat that the pockets look like they have rocks in them and I clink as I walk.

I stop at a café, sit down at a table and order another strong Belgian beer. I take a codeine tablet and wash it down with the triple-strength brew made by Belgian monks.

By the time I make it back to the hotel, I am very much the jolly walking dude.

Arthur is in the lobby. He looks at me and asks me in his English accent where I’ve been.

“Walking all over Antwerp,” I say.

“Quite the city walker, aren’t you?” he says.

“I love walking in the city, Arthur,” I say. “It’s the woods that suck.”

He reminds me that a ten-mile rural trail through the Belgian forest and fields will be the first thing on the agenda in the morning.

That’s okay, because now, I can handle the Codeine Forest.

“Cool,” I smile, knowing that I’ve got enough pills in my pocket to last until Paris.

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.