All or Nothing (11 page)
Authors: Jesse Schenker
But as much as I enjoyed working at the restaurant, I also wanted to get high. Soon I found a way to smuggle in OCs through my old coworker Dan. Once I had the job I moved out of the halfway house and managed to convince my parents to rent me an apartment. “I'm doing really good, and I've got a job,” I told them. They were so relieved that I was clean (or so they thought) that they rented me a nice apartment on Verde Trail in Boca.
At the new restaurant I hooked up with a guy named Ya-Ya who was a badass cook. We worked the line together, but he ran fucking circles around me. He was like an acrobat, grabbing hot sizzle trays with his bare hands and using his fingertips to flip over softshell crabs that had been cooking at 350 degrees in the deep fryer. Ya-Ya topped off his culinary gymnastics with a profitable side business dealing cocaine. It didn't take long for him to persuade me to give it a try.
One night when I knew everyone else had left work I went into the restaurant's bathroom and dumped out some of the coke, using my driver's license to form a single straight line. I rolled up a dollar-bill and put one end in my left nostril. Using my right index finger, I closed my right nostril and snorted in as hard as I could. Almost immediately, my nose and throat went numb. It was well past 2:00
A.M.
when I left the restaurant, but I felt full of energy. Soon I had a new schedule of getting by on blow during the week and looking forward to weekends with my OCs.
It didn't take long for me to need more, though. A little bit of coke during the week just wasn't cutting it. One day at work I was dope-sick. My pupils were dilated, and I felt nauseous. Every few minutes I had to run to the bathroom. I noticed Doug, the sous chef, watching me, and thought I was about to get in trouble for using on the job, but instead Doug approached me when I was in the walk-in gathering vegetables. He closed the door behind us and handed me a needle and a small bag of heroin. “You know what to do, right?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said.
“Okay, you owe me,” he said. “Get straight so you can get your ass back to work.”
I had never shot drugs before. The Buprenex I'd gotten at the pain clinic was injected intramuscularly, not into the vein. Heroin was a whole new experience. I went into the bathroom and found an empty stall. I put the heroin in the same spoon I used to baste fish and mixed it with water. Putting the lighter to the bottom, I let it simmer for just a second. Then I tore a piece of cotton from a cigarette and threw it in the spoon. Mesmerized, I watched the cotton absorb the speckled brown liquid before I placed the needle in the spoon and carefully drew the liquid into the syringe, making sure to remove any lingering air bubbles. I rolled up the left sleeve of my chef's coat. There was no need for a tourniquet; I had veins that would give any junkie a wet dream. I jabbed the needle into my forearm, watching the blood snake into the syringe.
Pushing the plunger into that single vein was perhaps the most gratifying experience of my entire life to that point. In an instant, my whole body softened; years' worth of tension lifted right off me. From then on, I alternated. Some days I did heroin, and on other days I stuck to OCs. But there was no doubt about it. The worm had turned. There was no going back from here.
Ballotine
: A boned chicken or duck thigh, stuffed with ground meat and other ingredients, that can be shaped like a sausage or re-formed to look like the leg, often with a clean piece of bone left in the end. Tied together to hold its shape and sometimes stitched up with a trussing needle, a ballotine is cooked by roasting, braising, or poaching.
S
oon I was shooting up every day, but I still didn't really know the ins and outs of intravenous drug use. No one had handed me a manual to consult. I had to learn as I went. Doug gave me some pointers. “Save your cottons,” he told me. “When you run short on dope, you can rinse the cottons and squeeze out the last little bit of drug.” From then on, I stored my cottons in an old cigar box that I kept on my night table. When needed, I loaded them into the barrel of a syringe, drew in water, and squeezed until they were dry. I squirted the contents onto a spoon and used a new cotton to draw the smack into a syringe.
But one thing Doug never warned me about was cotton fever. Sometimes cotton fibers break off from the filter, and if they're dirty or carrying some bacteria that makes it into your bloodstream, you're fucked. Most addicts don't make it a point to carry sterile cotton balls or Q-tips. A clean filtered cigarette can do the trick, but most of the time you have to find a cigarette butt on the ground, in an ashtray, or from the garbage, which I did all the time.
I got my first taste of cotton fever one night about thirty minutes after shooting up. It whacked me upside the fucking head like I was on day two of the world's worst flu. My ears started ringing, and I felt a vicelike pressure on each side of my head. Sweat started oozing out of my every pore, and I began shaking uncontrollably. Then came bone-numbing chills as my temperature spiked to 105 degrees. I filled my bathtub with scalding hot water to try to warm up, but nothing helped. I just started shaking violently and vomiting nonstop. Thankfully, after a few hours it simply passed.
In time, heroin took over everything. Most days I couldn't even make it into work. I spent my days dope-sick, trying my best to cope. When I did show up, I was late and had track marks on my arms. “I have to do this, Jesse. You're a fucking mess,” Doug said when he fired me. Pretty ironic, I thought, since he was the one who had introduced me to the stuff.
The worst part was having to tell my dad I'd been fired. “What's the matter with you, Jesse?” he asked.
Feeling like I was out of options, I confessed. “I'm using again,” I told him.
My dad immediately kicked into high gear. “We're going to look after you here,” he said. “We'll monitor you, take you to meetings.” My dad has always been a problem solver, a take-charge kind of guy. He figured he could just detox me at home, but he didn't have any clue about the depth of the addiction I was dealing with.
My dad called a doctor friend and got me a prescription for Percocet. Then he and my mom took me to a new therapist, Larry Kreisberg. Larry had a much harder edge than Alan and didn't take any bullshit. During our first session Larry figured out that I was shooting drugs and got straight to the point: he demanded that I confront my parents. “You've got to tell them the truth,” he said. Then he told me that I was going to be drug-tested at home just like I would be at a halfway house or in rehab.
During the car ride home I told my parents that I was shooting drugs. When we got home, they cried, hugged, and said that they couldn't believe this was happening. But the evidence was all there. My arms were littered with track marks. When they moved me out of my apartment in Boca, they'd seen how filthy and roach-infested it was. Now they finally realized this was a serious problem, and they were determined to help me fix it. They kept me under their thumb more than ever before.
At my parents' house I had no job, no money, and a raging drug habit. I had to get creative in order to score. I asked my dad to drive me to a meeting, walked in while he watched me from the car, and then took off to meet a dealer after he'd driven off. After a few weeks I convinced my parents to let me drive myself to meetings. This gave me an hour to score and get back to the house. But my dad wouldn't let me get a job, and I needed money. Little by little, I started taking our musical equipment to the pawnshop, eventually pawning my drum set and my dad's guitars, amplifiers, and stereos.
I found new dealers who met me at the Cypress Head gates to exchange money for drugs. One of those dealers, Trevor, was totally wild. He had done some serious prison time for driving under the influence and carrying a concealed weapon, but he always seemed to have a steady supply of OC. I learned how to shoot OCs by taking the blue pill and sucking off the time-release coating, leaving just the white pill. Then I carefully removed the cellophane wrapper from the bottom of a cigarette pack, dropped the pill into the cellophane, and took the bottom of a lighter to crush the pill until it was the texture of smooth powder. I placed the powder into a spoon and cooked it until it bubbled and there was a faint trace of steam above the spoon. I pushed the plunger down. Quickly, I became an expert. I could even drive a stick shift with one hand and fix with the other.
While this going on, Larry was counseling my parents on how to deal with me. He encouraged them to join Al-Anon and told them that they needed to cut me off at the knees. They had to stop enabling me, he told them. I needed to feel discomfort to make changes. But I knew my parents couldn't bear the thought of me experiencing discomfort, so I never believed they would follow Larry's advice.
When my parents went out for the night, I ransacked their closets. I found wads of cash in a shoebox. In my mom's closet I found gold chains from the '80s that she didn't wear anymore, pearls, and antique silverware. It was a treasure trove. I should have felt guilty, but I was addicted. I needed to get high every day, and it required a steady supply of cash. My conscience had evaporated.
There was one item I'd been eyeing for some time. It was a watch with a beautiful oyster case milled from a single piece of metal, a gleaming eighteen-karat yellow gold exterior, and a diamond-studded dial. I knew that watch was worth a lot; $25,000 was the number I had heard tossed around. A watch like that could easily fetch a couple hundred bucks at a pawnshop, but grabbing it was a slight problem. My mother kept her daily jewelry in a bathroom drawer. I normally didn't go into that drawer. I went for the stuff she didn't wear, like diamond necklaces and big gaudy rings. She kept those in a large Ziploc bag in my dad's closet.
I was on my way out to meet Trevor when I heard my mother say it. “I can't find my Rolex. I think I must've misplaced it.”
My dad didn't flinch. The words just tumbled out. “I think Jesse took it.”
“No,” my mother said. “It's around. I know it'll turn up.”
My mother was still deep in denial, but my dad knew better. Over the years he was always the one to post bail, find an attorney, sign a lease, get me into rehab, and grease the wheel. Ever since I returned from Tallahassee, he had been watching me like a hawk. He saw that my skin was warm and flushed. At night he sat by my bed watching me toss and turn in my sleep. I was decomposing in front of my father's eyes, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
I went into my parents' room, where my dad was lying on the bed. “Dad, can I borrow your car?” I asked. “I'm going to a meeting.”
He didn't move an inch, but I'll never forget what he said. “Jesse, in my heart I could never throw you out,” he told me. “But in my head I can and I will. Don't fuck with me. I want you back here in an hour and a half.”
I grabbed the keys and sped off in my dad's Infiniti to meet Trevor. I had $500 cash in my pocketânot exactly a fair exchange for a $25,000 Rolex, but it was enough to score me two days' worth of OC. By then I was shooting 160 milligrams every few hours, enough to kill a small elephant.
While I was gone, my dad went into my room. It was a disaster area, but he rummaged through my stuff until he found what he was looking for. I was still driving when the phone rang. “Get the fuck home now,” was all he said. For once, I didn't argue. I turned around and sped home. When I entered the kitchen from the garage, my dad was waiting for me at the table. “Jesse, what the fuck is this?” He was holding the receipt from the pawnshop.
I didn't have an answer, so I turned indignant. “What are you doing in my fucking room?” I desperately needed to turn the situation to my advantage, but for once, I couldn't. On that day there was no manipulating my father as he came face-to-face with the true extent of my addiction. So I turned up the volume, kicking over furniture and screaming at the top of my lungs. I could feel the veins in my temple bulging, every muscle in my body tense with rage. My dad was shocked. He had never seen that side of me before. For years I had been playing the role of the docile manipulator. I'd acted out with my actions, but never before with words.
“Drugs or family,” my father said with an eerie calm in his voice. “You can't have both, Jesse.” I looked him in the eye, and in an instant I knew I had to go. I couldn't remain in my parents' house for another minute. I quickly threw some things in a bag and walked out. My father was standing in the driveway. “Let me take you to Broward General,” he offered, but I just ignored him and kept walking until I got to the clubhouse, where I called my friend Luisa. “Come pick me up. I have some cash. I need to get out of here.”
The next few weeks were a blur of drugs and debauchery as I bounced from one home of an oddball junkie who agreed to take me in to the next. It never lasted long; my stash would be gone almost immediately, and once my hosts realized that I didn't have any drugs or money, they'd give me the boot. All I had were the clothes I'd stuffed in my backpack. To find me, my friends drove around looking for me because I didn't even have a phone. One day Sam tracked me down and told me, “I got your stuff back,” with an angry bite to his voice. “The pawnshop didn't argue with me when I told them they'd bought it from a heroin junkie. What's the matter with you, Jesse? There was so much shit there I couldn't fit it all in the back of my car.”