All or Nothing (6 page)

Cate and I also found ourselves alone in my house a lot. My parents would go out of town and leave Joee in charge, but she was no angel either and threw parties for her friends. I'd invite my own crew over, and we'd drink beer and smoke weed until 2:00 or 3:00
A.M.
, when one of our neighbors would inevitably call the police. Over time those Schenker house parties became the stuff of legend.

One night Cate and I moved into my parents' bathroom, a quiet place for us to chill. There was a deep pink tub surrounded by gleaming black tiles and adorned with little soap dishes and bottles filled with sweet-smelling oils and beads. Cate sat in the empty tub while I took up residence on the edge. We silently passed a bong back and forth, something we'd done dozens of other times. But this time something wasn't right. Finally it hit me. I was high, but I still felt the anxiety. The emptiness and anxiety were back; they were there even while I was smoking. This had never happened before. It struck me that pot was no longer enough to fill the gaping hole inside me.

It was 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning by the time Cate finally fell asleep. After I knew she was out, I went into my parents' medicine cabinet and swallowed six Benadryl. I didn't know what I was doing. But I had to do something to change the way I was feeling. The Benadryl didn't get me high. There was no euphoria, no pink cloud or white fucking elephant. I just passed out. But within a week over-the-counter meds were part of my new routine. Nyquil, Benadryl, Tylenol PM, Robitussin—nothing was off-limits.

One day I came home and found Joee sprawled on the floor of our parents' bedroom. “Jesse, I feel like shit. I think I'm going to puke,” she mumbled. That afternoon Joee had had her wisdom teeth removed, and she was in a lot of pain. I lifted her up and moved her onto the bed. Her face was red and swollen. She felt warm to the touch and was probably running a fever. She could barely speak. I tried to make her laugh by making fun of our parents—this was how we always bonded. As we were talking I noticed an orange plastic bottle with a gleaming white cap sitting on my mother's nightstand.

My search was over, at least for the moment. As soon as Joee fell asleep I snagged one of her five-milligram doses of oxycodone. Ten minutes later I was superman. The feeling of warmth started in the pit of my stomach and spread quickly throughout my entire body. As it spread all of my discomfort, anxiety, and ambivalence slowly washed away.

Before long the first thing I asked whenever entering someone's home was, “May I use your bathroom?” No, I didn't want to take a leak. I didn't want to wash my hands or blow my fucking nose. I was only interested in separating people from the contents of their medicine cabinets. I quickly found that neurotic Jewish mothers had the best stuff. I often found little cases filled with an assortment of unmarked pills. Sometimes I had no idea what I was taking, but that little fact didn't stop me. If I got worried, I called the Poison Control Center and pretended to be a parent whose kid had accidentally swallowed a pill.

“Can you help me? My son just swallowed a blue, oval-shaped pill with a line through the middle.”

“Sir, that's an anti-inflammatory. You can relax.”

Once I saw what that single oxycodone could do, it became my singular mission to find opiates—Percocet, Darvocet, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, or morphine. I wasn't picky. These were my new drug of choice, my go-to way of filling the void and finding peace. Nothing relieves emptiness like opiates.

In eleventh grade I started attending Atlantic Technical
Center and Technical High School, a massive place just ten minutes from my parents' house with thousands of students spread out over twenty different buildings. Housed in one of those ugly pink buildings was the Culinary Arts Program. Five mornings a week I attended classes there from 7:15 to 10:45. Then I'd drive over to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for academic classes from 12:00 to 2:40.

Most people think of Atlantic Tech as a place for students who have zero interest in college or academics and just want to enter the workforce, but the culinary program was a little different. My classmates there ran the gamut from housewives looking to pick up a new skill to older men who were on their third career. There were also plenty of kids like me, outcasts and misfits who naturally gravitated toward food. I connected with those kids in a way I never could have with the kids at my regular high school.

Jim Large was one of those kids who I clicked with right away. We met in my first course, “Sanitation and Safety.” The nutritionist who taught the class was young, probably in her mid-twenties. She taught us things like the difference between simple and complex carbohydrates and safe food-handling procedures. I'd already learned a lot of this material from my McDonald's training, and Jim already had a gig cooking at one of the better restaurants in Coral Springs that I'll call Savannah. Despite the fact that he was short and chubby with stringy blond hair and glasses, his job and the fact that he had a car—a brand-new, bright yellow Jeep—made him a big deal around campus.

One day when I finished my shift at McDonald's and was walking out back, Jim pulled up in his Jeep. “Jump in,” he called to me. “There's someone I want you to meet.”

Jim took me straight to his boss at Savannah. “I got an opening for a dishwasher,” he said. I accepted the job right away. It was the perfect opportunity to watch, learn the line, and study the cooks. And it paid $7 an hour, 50 cents more than I was making at McDonald's.

My time at Savannah was baptism by fire. On my first night they were already short a cook. Jim approached me, looking a little nervous. “Can you help fry the calamari?” I was barely sixteen and I was manning the fry station at one of Broward County's hottest restaurants. Keeping up wasn't a problem. As I stood over the fryer that night with flour caked to my fingers and sweat pouring off my brow I learned something about myself: I wasn't just passionate about food—I was
good
at this.

But I was hired as a dishwasher, so after I fried my last calamari at midnight I made my way over to the dish pit, which was piled three feet high with dirty plates, pots, and pans. The garbage was overflowing, and huge globs of uneaten food littered the floor. It was disgusting, and I had to clean it all up. It was my responsibility. But for some strange reason I loved it. It was a simple task to conquer, and a direct use of all my excess energy. It helped that I saw it as a sort of competition with Jim, who'd had the job before me. I wanted to do it faster and better than Jim ever did. It was only after I'd dragged all the dirty mats out to the back alley, cleaned each dish, mopped every inch of the floor, and thrown out every bit of trash that I finally allowed myself to breathe. My fingers were stained black, my apron was filthy, and my pants were caked thick with grease. My clothes, hair, and even skin reeked of fryer oil and the dirty grill. But I fucking loved it.

In a short time I became the best dishwasher and calamari fryer that Savannah had ever seen. But all along my addiction to marijuana and prescription pain pills was growing. I could feel the pull in two directions, between the serenity of the kitchen and the euphoria of the drugs. I was headed for the inevitable clash between them.

After “Safety and Sanitation” we moved on to the “Hot Foods” course taught by Chef Ball, a tall black guy in his fifties who Jim and I loved. When we were learning to flambé with brandy, he kept telling us to add more. We thought this was hilarious. Later that day Jim and I were in the back with some other guys, doing shots of brandy behind the #10 cans, when Chef Ball walked in and caught us. “Come here, guys,” he said, bringing us into the kitchen. We thought we were in trouble, but then he said, “Let me teach you a trick.” He pulled out some parsley and handed us each a sprig. “If you're ever out drinking and get pulled over driving home, chew on some of this. It gets rid of the smell.” From that day on, Jim and I always had a sprig of parsley sticking out of our mouths. It was our way of tipping our hats to Chef Ball.

“Hot Foods” was where I learned the skills that took my creativity in the kitchen to a whole new level. I found learning about the five mother sauces—béchamel, velouté, espagnole or brown sauce, hollandaise, and tomato sauce—fascinating, but the velouté we learned to make, with its traditional roux, felt so old-fashioned to me. I started to play around with it, substituting oil and later chicken fat for the butter. It was around this time that I started obsessively collecting cookbooks. When I read about modern-day veloutés that were basically reductions without any flour, I realized that chefs really do have the license to take things in any direction they want. This was a lightbulb moment for me.

Now my creations at home were becoming more mature. I made pistachio nut–crusted salmon by grinding up pistachios, adding a bunch of butter, thyme, and garlic, and spreading this paste all over a cutting board. Then I put the salmon facedown in the paste, picked the whole thing up, and baked it in the oven. This might not have been groundbreaking in the culinary world, but it rocked my sixteen-year-old world. Despite my heavy level of partying, I never lost interest in experimenting in the kitchen. After parties, I always cooked gourmet meals for my friends and their families. Wherever I was when the keg was tapped, I went into the kitchen and made something with whatever ingredients I could find. One time the kitchen was bare except for a few basics, so I rolled out slices of Wonder Bread with a rolling pin, fried them in butter, and then made the ultimate tuna melt with tuna and cheddar cheese.

Jim eventually left Savannah to work at another hot local restaurant I'll call Graffiti, and I could feel my own time at Savannah coming to an end. I needed more. Before long I met Pete Etter, the executive chef at a happening restaurant in Boca that I'll call The Seawater Grill. Pete was an imposing guy, six-three or six-four and cue-ball bald except for two awkward patches of hair on each side of his head. He walked with a limp, always reeked of cigarettes, and wore nautical-themed shirts over his chef whites. Right away, he offered me a job making salads for $9 an hour.

After only one week at The Seawater Grill, Pete called me into a meeting in the restaurant's massive walk-in refrigerator.
Funny place for a meeting,
I thought to myself. I felt like I was about to relive some scene from a Mafia movie where I get whacked and the cops find my frozen body hanging by a hook a week later. “Jesse,” Pete said to me, “I've never met anyone with more innate cooking talent than you. I picture you running your own kitchen someday. Just put your head down and keep your nose to the grindstone and you'll get there.”

I don't know what motivated Pete to say that to me, but his words inspired me. Unknowingly, he'd thrown down a challenge. Now I had to be better than every other chef at Seawater. I came in earlier and stayed later than all the other employees. I tidied up the other chefs' stations when they were finished working, organized the walk-ins, and even helped the dishwashers clean the mats and mop the bathrooms at the end of the night.

By then we were in the “Cold Foods” section at school, learning our knife skills by chopping vegetables in an area of the kitchen that was kept so cold we had to wear two chef's coats. Chef Wilcock and I never got along, but in his class I really got into knife work. I loved using the melon baller to cut vegetables, and at home I started making perfectly circular carrots, wrapping them in blanched leeks, and tying them up with blanched pieces of chives. It was also in this class that I learned the terminology I needed to become a chef. I already knew what I was doing, but now I knew how to speak the language.

Before long a new food runner started work at Seawater. Dan was a few years older than me, probably twenty or twenty-one. He was movie-star handsome and muscular with a great sense of humor. Like Jim, he was someone I hit if off with immediately. After work, Dan and I would sit on the hood of his car smoking joints and staring at the stars. “God, I'd love a Percocet right now,” I said one night. Dan gave me a funny look. Then he started laughing, but didn't say a word. He went inside, and a few minutes later he walked out with David, the restaurant's main grill guy and a totally badass cook. David looked tough, with a tattoo of a half-naked chick on his left bicep and the rest of his arms covered in cuts and burn marks. David stood there, sizing me up. I had no idea what he was thinking.

“You the kid who wants Percs?” he finally asked.

“Yup.”

David rummaged through his front hip pocket before handing over two small white pills. “Five bucks a pop, kid,” he told me. “Does that sound okay?”

I bolted straight for my Honda, grabbed ten bucks from the console, and handed it to David. He put the two pills in my hand, and I swallowed them on the spot. By the time I got to Cate's later that night I was in high gear. The feeling of serenity I thought I had lost forever had finally returned.

A week later I pulled up at work, and as I was opening the door, suddenly there was David with his face pressed against the window. His eyes were popping out of his head, sweat was streaming down his face, and his breath was fogging up the window. It was almost ninety degrees out, but he was visibly shivering, and I could see that his pupils were dilated and fixed.

“Dude, what's up?” I asked him. “You don't look so good.”

“My doctor just got busted,” he told me. “My supply has dried up.”

“Sorry, dude. That sucks,” I replied.

I didn't give much thought to David's predicament. I liked David, but this was his deal. Besides, I figured another supplier would turn up. When you're using, you just learn to roll with the punches. I didn't know then that David was a full-blown addict and that he was going through withdrawal right in front of me.

“Dude, you have to know somebody who can get us some Percs,” David pleaded with me.