All or Nothing (10 page)

I quickly became a regular at the pain clinic. Anytime I was short of cash and needed to get straight, I went there. It was junkie central, a great place to make connections and learn new tricks. Before long I was going every day. Even the unflappable doctor seemed concerned. “Jesse, opiates affect your liver,” he told me, writing something down on a prescription pad. “Take some milk thistle.” He ripped off the sheet and handed it to me.

A couple of days later my dad approached me holding the doctor's note. “Milk thistle,” he said, sounding bewildered. “What the fuck is this all about?”

“I went to a doctor,” I told him calmly. “Something with my liver, but it's nothing. Don't worry about it.” I tried to wave it off.

My dad has always been a pretty big hypochondriac, and now his radar was lit up. He started checking on me, coming into my room in the middle of the night to find me shaking and sweating. His denial about my drug use was so strong that he started to believe I was suffering from an unrelated medical issue.

The pain clinic fueled my addiction, but the doctor wouldn't give me more than a certain amount. He couldn't have his patients dropping dead on him, so he carefully walked the line. But I needed more. My addiction was so bad that I would be dope-sick just a few hours after leaving the clinic. There was no way the doctor would keep up with my body's demands. I remembered Phil at the jewelry store with his ample supply of pills. I hadn't seen Phil in months, not since I left for Tallahassee, but I called him up anyway. “I need some OCs,” I told him.

“Meet me in the back of the shop,” he said, but this time he didn't have a backpack full of drugs. “I don't have any shit on me,” he told me. “I'm doing things a little different now. Give me your number and I'll have my guy call you.” Maybe I should have recognized this as a red flag, but I was too desperate to care.

The next day I got a call on my cell from an unknown number. I answered right away, knowing it must be Phil's guy, and heard a gravelly voice ask, “Is this Jesse?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Who's this?”

“This is Poncho, Phil's boy,” he said. “You looking for Oxys? I can hook you up, no problem.”

We agreed to meet the next day at a rest stop on the Sawgrass Expressway. It was the perfect place to meet, full of drug dealers, hustlers, teenage boozehounds, truckers, and tired drivers looking for a breather. There were cops around, but the Florida Highway Patrol, which scouted highway rest areas, was always complaining about shortages, so I figured we were cool. I found Poncho right away. Short and fat with a long scraggly beard and a large, hair-covered mole on his cheek, he fit the role of a dealer perfectly. I got into his run-down El Camino.

“What are you looking for?” he asked me. “Phil tells me you're looking to go big.”

I wanted a steady supply of pills just for my own consumption, but I didn't want to tell him that, so I concocted some bullshit story. “I'm well funded,” I said. “I got a guy who's looking for a steady line of Oxy.”

“I can get you 150 in a couple of days,” he said. “Let's start small. Get five hundred cash and I'll call you in forty-eight.”

A couple of days later it was just an hour before dinner service was going to start up at Smith's. The restaurant was booked solid, and I knew it was going to be a madhouse. As I set up my station I wasn't feeling good at all. I was sweaty and shaky as I started peeling some beets. Then I felt the phone vibrate in my pocket. I scrambled out back, smearing my cheek with bright red beet juice as I rushed out the door.

“You got the money?” Poncho asked.

“Yeah,” I told him. “You got the pills?”

“I'll be out back in a minute,” he said. “Meet me there.”

I grabbed the cash and hopped into Poncho's car. He drove up the block a bit before pulling into an empty parking lot. “Show me the money,” he instructed. I reached into my pocket, pulled out five $100 bills, and handed them to him. He dumped the pills in the center console, and just as I was reaching for the pills the car door opened.

“Don't you move, motherfucker!” That would have been hard to do. I'd just been yanked out of the passenger seat and thrown onto a narrow stretch of sunbaked pavement. My right cheek was pressed firmly into the ground, and blood oozed from my nose and chin as my hands were cuffed behind my back. The heel of a boot was wedged into the middle of my spine. I couldn't move a muscle. To top it all off, I was dope-sick. It had been hours since I last scored; I needed those pills from Poncho.

Then I heard the guns click. “Where are the fucking drugs?”

“I don't have any,” I said into the ground. “I'm not a fucking drug dealer.” It didn't matter that for once I was telling the truth. Five big, burly cops lifted me off the ground and leaned me against the back of a large, unmarked SUV with tinted windows. Their jackets read
DEA
and
BROWARD SHERIFF'S OFFICE
, and they were holding shotguns, all pointed in my direction, as they arrested me for trafficking OxyContin. Phil had set me up. I didn't know it at the time, but he had been busted while I was living in Tallahassee and became a narc for the police to avoid some major fucking prison time.

With cops on either side of me, I climbed into the backseat of the SUV. They drove me, not to jail, but to my parents' house. I was only seventeen, still a minor. I got out and walked up the driveway, still flanked by cops on either side. One of the cops walked over to the garage door and started banging. My dad walked out almost immediately, wearing shorts and a Bob Dylan T-shirt. His hair was slightly disheveled, as if he had just woken up from a nap. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes before looking in my direction.

“We've arrested your son for trafficking OxyContin,” the cop informed my dad. “It's a serious charge.” My dad started moving toward me with blood in his eyes. For a minute I thought he was going to kill me, but the cops restrained him. “Mr. Schenker, we need your permission to search the premises,” the cop said, and my dad helplessly motioned for them to enter. The cops rummaged through my room, but it was a perfunctory search. It didn't take them long to realize I was an addict, not a dealer. But that didn't stop them from taking me to jail.

By the time my parents bailed me out the next day I had already started detoxing. The car ride home was miserable. “What the fuck are you doing trafficking OxyContin?” my dad wanted to know. For once, I didn't have a good answer. I was too sick and didn't even have the strength to come up with a cover story. When we got back to the house, my parents went into their room and closed the door without saying a word. Slowly, I walked over and placed my ear against the door. I heard them talking, my mother crying. It was nothing I hadn't heard before. More important to me in that moment was my need to get straight. My dad kept a money clip in a dish on the kitchen counter. Every day after work, without fail, he dropped the clip in that dish. I quickly walked over and lifted forty bucks. Minutes later my dad walked out of the bedroom. “I made an appointment for the three of us with Alan this afternoon,” he told me, and then he walked out the door.

After he was gone, I approached my mother. Her face was drawn, her eyes red and puffy from crying. She grabbed a tissue and wiped her nose. Her vulnerability was palpable, and I swooped in like a falcon. “Mom,” I said, “I'm going out for a pack of cigarettes.”

“Jesse, I don't trust you,” she said tearfully. “I don't want you to leave.”

“It's just for cigarettes,” I told her. “I'll be back in thirty minutes.”

I called Jordan as I was walking out the door. “I need Oxy,” I told him. “Can I meet you?”

“I'm leaving for work soon,” he said. “Meet me in twenty minutes.” I drove as fast as I could to his house.

That afternoon I sat down with Alan and my parents. The dope-sickness was gone, and I had steadied myself for what was coming. Alan had been warning my parents about my addiction for years, but now he was truly pissed. Drug trafficking was no slap on the wrist: I was being charged with a felony. “Jesse, you need rehab. This is serious,” he said.

My dad made some calls the next day. A family friend recommended a top-shelf criminal defense attorney who demanded a $15,000 retainer. My parents sat me down with the attorney a few days later. “Jesse,” the attorney said, “you're in a lot of trouble. Drug trafficking is a fifteen-year mandatory minimum sentence.” The attorney paused for a moment, and then said, “Just get yourself clean, fix your life, and we'll work something out.”

The attorney advised my parents to use a twenty-eight-day provision in my insurance policy to get me into drug and alcohol rehab at Fort Lauderdale Hospital. He explained that this might help me avoid spending time in prison. Beyond the legal ramifications, putting me in rehab also helped ease my parents' fears. They were overwhelmed and scared, with no clue what to do with me. But twenty-eight days was a drop in the bucket for someone like me who had been strung out for years. Those types of treatment programs are like a big revolving door for junkies. People bounce in and out, often doing better for a while and then relapsing. Others just give up and die. Not me. I didn't want to stop using. I didn't even think I had a problem.

After leaving the hospital, I went to Challenges Addiction Treatment Center. My parents told me this was my one shot at rehab. At Challenges we lived in residential housing and were transported by van to attend counseling sessions and recovery meetings and to run regular errands. It took me a week to figure out how to smuggle in drugs. We each received a $100 weekly food allowance (mine was supplied by my parents); I promptly used most of it to buy Oxy. This wasn't always easy. Dealers took advantage of my situation, and I had to pay double for home delivery, plus we were checked on every hour. But I got the timing down to an exact science with the same focus I had once used at Smith's to efficiently knock out the Cav Pie. When the counselors picked us up in a van once a week and took us to Publix to buy groceries, I'd have only a few dollars left. So I'd buy a few things and then flirt with the counselor or cause some other distraction to keep them from checking my bags to see how little I'd bought.

The problem with this plan was that I needed to eat, so I happily traded my skills in the kitchen. I started by lying to my roommate and telling him that my parents hadn't given me any money for groceries that week. Then I said, “Hey, I saw that you bought some chicken. Do you want me to make you a really nice roast chicken for dinner?” I cooked the dinner, and then of course he asked me to eat with him. Then, the next day in front of everyone, I asked him, “Hey, man, how was that roast chicken?” When everyone else heard him rave about my cooking, they asked me to cook for them too. Before long I always had someone to cook for—and eat with—and the money I needed to buy drugs.

The meals I cooked for the other patients were usually simple and nostalgic. While they were getting clean, they wanted to eat what their mothers had made for them growing up, so I cooked meatloaf with mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and fried chicken. It wasn't about being creative or inventive then. Cooking was simply a tool I used to survive. My old buddy Sam was the only friend from home who stuck by me. When I was on furlough, he came to visit me, brought me groceries, and took me out to the movies.

Of course, we were subject to random drug testing at Challenges, and this indeed provided a challenge. But somehow I lucked out. Those early tests didn't detect OCs. This was before the OxyContin epidemic really took hold, and because they are semisynthetic, OCs were untraceable by earlier urine testing. By month four at Challenges I qualified for work release and got my car back. I wasn't the only one who was still using while in rehab. One night at 10:00 my roommate asked me if he could borrow my car so he could drive to Miami to score. I said yes, adding, “If you're not back in three hours, I'm going to report the car stolen.” When 4:00
A.M.
rolled around and he was still nowhere in sight, I stayed true to my word. I found a groundskeeper and told him that my car had been stolen. About an hour later my roommate had been dropped off by the police. The car was wrecked. Apparently they couldn't wait to get high, so they shot up while driving and drove headfirst into a palm tree. I stuck to my story that he'd taken the car without my permission, and my insurance ended up covering the cost.

By month six, I graduated from Challenges and moved on to Incentives, a halfway house in Boca Raton. It was run by a couple of guys who were former heroin addicts from New York. They had relocated to Florida for their recovery and were both twenty-five years sober. Those hard-core guys would have done anything to help me get clean. At Incentives, everyone had to work, and I landed a sweet gig at a happening new Asian fusion restaurant in Boca Raton. I was responsible for the pasta station, cooking modern variations of classic pasta dishes with an Asian flare.

One of our signature pastas was Lobster Bolognese. Instead of the tomato sauce, spaghetti, and ground beef in a traditional Bolognese, I made lobster bisque with red chilies and Korean pepper flakes and served it with potato gnocchi and a whole Maine lobster. Right away I was back into it, getting to work early to cut the carrots, onions, and celery for the bisque and take apart the lobsters, preserving each claw so that it would look pretty perched on top of the dish. Another dish I loved to cook was a Thai pancake made of equal parts coconut milk and rice flour, whisked together into a batterlike consistency. I cooked the pancakes in small cast-iron pans, folded them up like tacos, and then stuffed them with rock shrimp and bean sprouts.

At this time a lot of chefs were bringing ingredients from Southeast Asia into the States, turning Asian fusion cooking into a big trend, but even before the culinary world was saturated with this style of cooking I enjoyed learning how to use classic techniques with new ingredients. I heated up sesame oil until it was smoking and then poured it over a piece of raw fish, loving the sound of the sizzle when the hot oil hit the fish.