All or Nothing (7 page)

“But I don't have a dope dealer,” I tried to explain. “The only person who comes to mind is Brad.”

David handed me his phone. “Jesse, call Brad now,” he instructed. “Please.”

I'd first met Brad in seventh grade, when we were in detention together all the time. Brad had an older brother named Jordan and a sister named Jessica. Jessica was much older than us. She married her high school sweetheart right after graduation and moved to Los Angeles. But Jordan and Brad were always in trouble, and I was often in trouble right along with them.

I called Brad. “Dude, I'm looking for some pain pills,” I told him, but Brad didn't answer. Instead, he handed the phone to Jordan.

“I don't have Percocet, but I do have OxyContin,” he told me.

“Never heard of it,” I said.

“It's the strongest pain pill around,” Jordan answered. “They give them to terminal cancer patients and shit.”

I hung up and turned to David. “Dude, he doesn't have any Percs,” I told him, and David stormed off, dejected.

That night I stood there watching David as he worked the line. He was sweating profusely, much more so than normal. Every couple of minutes he had to step away from his station to hurl. It was the first time I'd ever seen anyone dope-sick, experiencing the early withdrawal symptoms that are a way of life for an addict.

That Friday afternoon an impossibly long week at school and work finally ended. Cate and I were at my house. As usual, my mom was frantic as she hurriedly prepared for a long weekend at the Ritz-Carlton in South Beach with my parents' friends Arthur and Joanie. My parents loved their weekend trips to Palm Beach or Miami. Sometimes they went to Tampa to see my aunt Barbara and uncle George. A couple times a year my dad and my uncle Mark would drive up to Orlando for a big dental convention, and my mother would go away somewhere with her girlfriends.

Cate and I were lying on my bed. She tried to kiss me but could sense that I wasn't really there. Jordan's words about OxyContin were still ringing in my head.

Cate looked at me and asked, “Do we have enough weed for the weekend?”

“Probably not,” I told her. “Let me call Brad and get an eighth.”

As I hung up the phone I realized that I was out of money. I'd already burned through my paycheck. I walked into my parents' room and found my dad lying on the bed with the evening news on.

“Dad, I need some money,” I told him.

“What's new, Jess?”

I told him some bullshit story about wanting to take Cate out to dinner and a movie. He handed me fifty bucks. “Make it last all weekend,” he warned. I told Cate I'd be back and split for Brad's house. When I got there, the door was open. I bolted up the stairs and found Brad having a little gathering in his room. As usual, he was fogged out of his fucking mind. Everyone in the room was high from smoking weed and popping Ecstasy.

I got the weed I came for and then, as I walked down the hallway, I stopped by Jordan's room. His door was open just a crack, and he was talking on the phone. Jordan sounded congested, like he'd just woken up from a deep sleep. I looked at my watch. It was 4:00
P.M
. I took a breath and walked into his room, knowing on some level that I was about to embark on a whole new path.

“Jesse, what the fuck do you want?” Jordan asked when he saw me.

“Dude, what's up with those pills you were talking about?”

Jordan sat up and told the person on the phone that he'd call them right back. He bent down and pulled what looked like a cigar box from under his bed. Slowly, he opened the box. Inside were dozens of small round blue pills and what looked like a pill cutter. “These are OC 80s,” he told me. “Each one is the equivalent of sixteen Percocet.” I started salivating, and my stomach turned with a combination of excitement and nervousness as Jordan took the pill cutter and cut a single pill into four equal parts. He handed me one quarter. “Take it and smoke a little pot,” he instructed, and then added, “Enjoy the ride.”

I handed Jordan ten bucks and bolted down the stairs to my car, full of what I can only describe as joy. Cate and I had the house to ourselves all weekend, the sun was shining, and I was holding a single piece of cellophane with a little slice of heaven inside. Sitting in my car, I blocked out the rest of the world. Nothing existed except for me and that little blue pill as I quickly swallowed it.

By the time I got back to my house I had already started to feel the warmth. It was like someone had draped a soft, warm blanket over my entire body. Nothing had ever made me feel that loved or cared for—not pot, not sex, not a compliment from my parents, not doing well at sports, and not even cooking gave me the same feeling of satisfaction. My parents had already left for the weekend. Cate and I snuggled up on the couch to watch the first two
Godfather
movies. Eight hours later, when we'd finished both movies, the Oxy was still kicking. I was in love.

I could still feel the effects of the Oxy the next morning. Right away I wanted more, but I didn't have any money to buy more. When I got my check the following weekend, I went straight to Jordan's to buy another quarter. This time I talked Cate into sharing it with me. She tried it and immediately vomited all over my patio. She could tell how strong it was, and it freaked her out. Cate had an inner restraint that I lacked, and she made me swear that I would never do Oxy again. But I knew I'd never be able to keep that promise.

Not long after, I met up with Jim on a Monday afternoon before work and told him about my experience with Oxy. Of course he was game to try it. We made a plan to meet at another restaurant in town called Beef 'O' Brady's. There each of us swallowed a quarter. Like it did with Cate, the Oxy made Jim vomit, but he loved the feeling as much as I did and wanted to do it again. He convinced me to make it a regular routine. Mondays quickly became OC Mondays. We both started with a quarter. Soon the quarter became a half, and then a half became three quarters, and before long three quarters became the whole pill. We went from swallowing to snorting, which made it hit us harder, faster, and therefore that much better. OC Mondays soon morphed into OC Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays and Fridays.

By the time I was seventeen I was physically addicted to OxyContin. Every morning I woke up feeling incredibly anxious and depressed. Nothing would help but OxyContin or Darvocet or some other opiate. My body needed the pills to function, just like a regular person needs food and water. Pills were my fuel.

As my junior year drew to close I completely lost interest in school and just stopped going. On the rare days when I did show up to school, I was popping pills like a madman—ten Percocets or fifteen Darvocets a day was pretty much the norm. I just nodded off in the back of class. No one knew what the hell was wrong with me. The other kids assumed I was stoned, but I was way beyond stoned.

My parents were too distracted by their own lives to notice, especially after my dad felt a lump in his groin and was later diagnosed with lymphoma. He kicked it into high gear, traveling around the country to get multiple opinions from every expert he could find before having it removed. This incident scared me, but I drowned that feeling with pills.

One day I approached my parents about dropping out of high school. My argument was simple—I was attending culinary school by day and cooking at restaurants by night. By then I'd gotten really good and had been promoted to the front of the line at The Seawater Grill. For once I was honest with my parents about my intentions. “I don't want to go to high school,” I told them. “I'm passionate about cooking, and I'm good at it. Why don't you just let me get a GED?” My parents gave me no resistance and were completely understanding about my decision. “Just be the best chef you can be, Jesse” was all my father said.

Once I dropped out of high school, I focused on cooking even more. At school I was studying “Baking and Pastry” with Chef Steve, learning how to make all sorts of quick breads, Danish, cakes, pies, and tarts. I never had much of a sweet tooth, but when I made puff pastry for the first time, laying down layer after layer of dough and getting my hands covered in grease in the process, I fell in love and gained a whole new appreciation for fresh baked goods.

Meanwhile, I felt that I'd learned just about everything I could from working at The Seawater Grill and was eager to move on. Jim was working at Graffiti and felt the same way. We talked to Chef Steve, who said we should be working at the best restaurant in the county, an award-winning café I'll call Smith's in Pompano Beach. Smith's was run by a well-respected celebrity chef. Jim went down there and got a job immediately. He was always ahead of the game, but I was younger and lived farther away. For my seventeenth birthday, I begged my parents to make a reservation at Smith's. I'd called numerous times, but the chef either wasn't there or didn't want to talk to me. This time, when we got there, Jim was in the back making salads, and he introduced me to the chef. He must have admired my persistence because he told me to show up for work the next day at three o'clock.

The job at Smith's paid only $7 an hour. It was less money than I was making at Seawater, but a step up on the career ladder.

I was put in charge of a dish called Cav Pie, one of Smith's signature dishes. It was basically a layer of sour cream covered with onions and four different colors of caviar. My job was to put the mixture into a mold so that it resembled a pie. Then I cut it into small wedges, put it on a plate with toast points, and passed it through the window to the grill cook. For the dinner shift, everyone would sit down at the same time and I'd quickly get slammed. But there was a fire inside of me to be the fastest, best cook they'd ever seen. I figured out little tricks that helped me go faster, like cutting the ends off the bread and putting it in the toaster ahead of time, so that when the order came through all I had to do was cut the bread. On my first night I was knocking out the Cav Pie so efficiently that the grill cook looked at me in awe and asked, “Damn, kid, are you pre-toasting the bread?” In less than six weeks I was up on the line cooking alongside him.

But as my addiction to OxyContin grew, my performance at work suffered. I started coming in late and leaving early, or showing up to work dope-sick on days when I couldn't get any pills. I started out strong at Smith's but eventually became the weak link as I started letting my addiction get in the way of my career.

Jim and I were doing some crazy shit. We were popping all sorts of pharmaceuticals—whatever we could find, really. If we couldn't get ahold of anything we wanted, sometimes we'd drive through the ghetto in Fort Lauderdale and pick up some cocaine. A handful of times we wound up getting crystal meth, instead, but had no idea until taking a bump and experiencing the worst burn imaginable shooting up into our brains. An hour later when our brief euphoria transformed into discombobulated pacing, we realized that this was not cocaine.

Sometimes we'd set each other up in the employee bathroom, setting lines of cocaine or OC up for each other under the toilet paper roll. Every night we made the same pledge that we weren't going to do it again the next day because we didn't want to get hooked, but inevitably by the end of the night we'd look at each other and say, “Fuck it.” We had to score. We were a terrible influence on each other. Once we decided to get high, we'd call Jordan from the office phone at Smith's. “I'm going to sleep in twenty minutes,” he'd tell us. “Be here by then.” We knew he meant it. If we didn't get there in time, he'd lock the door and ignore the sound of us pounding on it. So we'd throw the phone down, change our clothes, and then speed to Jordan's house, weaving in and out of traffic just to get there in time. One time I was rushing so fast to get to Jordan's that I hit the median and cracked my fender. But that didn't bother me. I just kept driving.

Pickle

Pickle
: To preserve food by anaerobic fermentation in brine or vinegar. This procedure gives the resulting food, called a pickle, a salty or sour taste.

G
oing to culinary school in the morning and working at the restaurant at night left plenty of hours in the day for me to fill. I started spending more time with friends who shared what was at this point my main interest: pills. My buddy Fred got on the Oxy Train pretty fast. It didn't take much to get him to try what I considered a life-changing pill. Fred had a neighbor named Skyler who dabbled in some not-so-kosher shit. Skyler told us to check out a guy named Phil. We went through Fred's stepdad's change collection, filled a few socks with quarters, and took them to the change machine at Albertson's. Then we went to meet the dope dealer.

Phil worked at a jewelry store in Pompano Beach that was basically right down the street from Smith's. I went into the shop and asked for Phil. He immediately led me into a back room where customers weren't normally allowed. “You know Skyler?” he asked me.