The codeine tablets I copped from the pharmacy on the Keyserlei in Antwerp are definitely the thing.

They are, in fact, the perfect accompaniment to the Westmalle Trappist Trippel beer I am drinking in a café on a cobblestone back street near the atmospheric and towering gothic Cathedral of Our Lady.

Not to mention the Xanax I scored in Berlin with a sob story about a script left sitting on a kitchen counter in Washington, D.C. Indeed, the Xanax is putting the beer and codeine buzz in a properly mellow perspective.

As is the hashish I have imported to Belgium as a souvenir of a nice week just spent in Amsterdam.

I am not certain if the latter is the sort of thing that aggravates Belgians and other Europeans upset about Holland’s liberal drug laws, but I regularly cross the Dutch frontier into the rest of Europe holding some stashed hash or pot.

Before repairing to the warmth and comfort of my café, I smoked about half of a thick hash and tobacco cigarette while wandering the streets of old Antwerp.

All of these substances are proving to be exactly what the doctor ordered, in exactly the right combination.

In the perfect place.

At an ideal time.

Specifically, Thanksgiving Day.

It is not Thanksgiving in Belgium, just another Thursday—and a damned cold one at that.

This is fine with me.

Here in Antwerp—the Flemish port city north of Brussels that is a center of the international diamond trade—an icy and unforgiving Northern European pre-winter wind is whipping off the River Scheldt. The streets and squares are packed with people. And the traffic is on the nasty side.

Christmas lights and decorations are going up.

Artists are painting intricate Santa Clauses—Sinterklaas in Flemish—in shop windows.

There are the beginnings of Christmas markets in several squares.

The holidays in Europe are more dignified and, well, European than what you get back in the States—Christmas decorations that go up before Halloween making for an unsettling sense of Permanent Yuletide, guys in Santa suits sitting under garishly decorated plastic trees in the center courts of shopping malls surrounded by mechanical reindeer and short, thin chicks playing the role of elves. Etc.

Yes, the European holiday scene is far better.

I’m smoking a pungent Gitane and woozily contemplating my surroundings, which—thanks to the Trappist monks who brew the beer, the pharmaceutical company biochemists who concoct the codeine and Xanax and the South Asians who make the kick-ass Black Hash sold all over Amsterdam—are very interesting indeed.

The place in which I am parked is called Het Elfde Gebod.

Het Elfde Gebod is Flemish for “The 11^th Commandment.”

The meaning of this oblique reference is beyond me. Although I was obligated to study theology as part of a Jesuit education at Georgetown, I am not terribly Biblical—and certainly not in a scholarly sense—except for the way I consume liquor and drugs, which has a very Old Testament aura about it.

Het Elfde Gebod has bare brick walls and heavy wood beams, and it is full of religious artifacts.

Angels suspended from the ceiling.

Statues of saints and the Madonna.

Stained glass windows.

And a long, long list of ambrosia-like Belgian brews, some of them with names like Lucifer and Judas, from which to choose. With classical music as the backdrop.

Belgian beer is God’s way of telling man that only a handful of peoples have any business brewing beer and that Americans are not among them.

Spending quality time with beer and drugs in Het Elfde Gebod is my idea of the perfect Thanksgiving. No travel hassles. No monstrous and pesky family issues. No tugs of war with significant others to determine with whose family and in which region you will pass the holiday this year.

It’s a pity the Old World became so miserable that refugees inflicted themselves, and a holiday they created celebrating the subjugation of indigenous peoples, on the New World. The important thing is that, for some reason, God spared Europe the gluttonous excess, familial agony and traveling horror of Thanksgiving. Not to mention the extraordinarily unique modern American torment of having to watch the Detroit Lions play on Thanksgiving year after year after year after year.

I am resolutely staying on the other side of the Atlantic until this all passes, and having a damned good time doing it.

I am staying at an anonymous and cheap hotel in Brussels that is often frequented by rock bands touring on a budget, and hanging out with my friend Laurence, who is Swiss-born, tall and blonde. She works for a cool record label based in Brussels. On Saturday, Laurence and I are hitting a wedding reception for the bass player of a Belgian speed metal band that is taking place at a rock club in Brussels.

I have a super high alcohol beer called a Last Judgment, get the check from my waiter and head back out to the frigid streets of Antwerp. There are several pharmacies I want to visit in order to stock up on extra codeine and acetaminophen AKA Percocet in the United States. One can never have too many narcotic painkillers.

In Antwerp, Brussels and other Belgian cities, all you have to do is walk into a pharmacy and claim a toothache, backache or some other vague and troubling malaise involving the kind of ache codeine can dull and you walk out with a healthy supply of codeine tablets.

Codeine is an over-the-counter medication in many European countries. This is yet another reason that Europe, and specifically Belgium, is such a wonderful and magical place.

After I score more drugs, I’ll catch a five or six o’clock train back to Brussels and hook up for dinner with Laurence somewhere in the vicinity of the magnificent Grand-Place.

An apotheken—a drug store—is up ahead on the right.

I have done this, quite literally, a hundred times in a dozen countries in Europe, leading me to know as much about specific pharmacies in certain cities as some people know about art galleries and restaurants. I know which ones are almost no questions asked, which hassle you slightly while ultimately giving you what you ask for, which ones tell you to come back with a local doctor’s prescription and which, basically, tell you to take a hike—no script equals no pills and, no, we don’t know a doctor you can visit to get one.

I assume a studied expression of prolonged suffering due to a penetrating ache begging for narcotic amelioration and move in for the score.

A middle-aged woman with blonde hair from a bottle looks up at me from beneath thick glasses.

“Hello,” I smile. “Do you speak English?”

“A lee-tell,” she says.

“Good. Maybe you can help me. I’m American and I’m in Belgium for the next month…”

She looks at me curiously and says, “Yes?”

“I have a terrible back problem. It’s been going on for months. I think it’s a herniated disc, but I’m not sure.”

“Yes?”

The pharmacist is tugging at her white smock.

“I take a drug in the United States called Percocet for the pain. Have you heard of it?”

“Pear-koh-sets?”

“Yes! It’s codeine and acetaminophen or codeine and aspirin, in which case it’s called Percodan.”

“Ah so. Codeine. I know this medication.”

“Well, I hate to take it. You know, it just isn’t good to take too much. But, I forgot all my pills in the U.S. and my prescription is there too. I’m in pain and I need some pills for the month I’ll be here. Do you know a doctor?”

“For the pain?” she says.

“Well, I have a doctor for that in the United States. Really, I need a prescription for the codeine.”

“Ah, this is no problem. You do not need this in Belgium. I can give you these…”

She reaches into a drawer and pulls out a little metal cylindrical container that looks like something that could hold very large breath mints administered by the dose, except that the package design, which is yellow and white lettering on a red background, is clearly more utilitarian and pharmaceutical in nature than something that kills doggy breath.

“There are twelff in here,” she says. “I can giff you more if you wish.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Like I said, I hate taking this stuff. I don’t think it’s very good for you in the long run, but I’m going to be here a month.”

She reaches into the drawer, pulls out two more cylinders of codeine pills and says, “I giff you twelff more or twelff more than this.”

“Hmm,” I say, doing my best not to smile or drool. “Maybe the twelve and the twelve more. That should be enough.”

“Very well.”

She puts the three containers in a small bag, hands them to me and asks for the equivalent of fifteen dollars. I hand over the cash and thank her for her help.

“It is nothing,” she says. “If you are here and you are in need of more, you return. I giff you more.”

I thank her profusely, turn and leave.

I nearly dance down the sidewalk, where workmen are stringing tasteful little white lights on shrubs.

This may not be a traditional Thanksgiving, but I, for one, am thankful.

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.