All or Nothing (8 page)

“Yeah,” I replied. “What do you have?”

Phil grabbed a backpack and dumped dozens of bags full of pills onto a table. He didn't have any Oxys, but there was more than enough Percocet, Darvocet, and Vicodin to keep Fred and me occupied for a while. I took whatever I could get with the money I had and went on my way.

Now that I had my GED, Fred and I started making plans to go on a three-week trip to Europe. I had been to Europe a few times with my family as a kid, but I'd never really traveled without them. Since neither of us was attending college, Fred and I saw this trip as our own warped version of a semester abroad. Our parents spoke to one another and came up with a plan. Fred's parents bought the Eurail passes, and my parents bought the plane tickets. My dad gave me a credit card for emergencies. At home my parents paid for everything. I didn't have to worry about things like rent, insurance, or paying for a car or gas. When I needed money for drugs, I milked my dad into giving me fifty or a hundred bucks. I supplemented this with the money I made working, but was still able to save quite a bit.

I took a few weeks off work, Fred and I scored a bunch of Oxys for the plane ride, and we were off. The trip to Europe came together within weeks of us voicing our desire to do it. We didn't have any plans other than working our way south so we would make it to Madrid three weeks later to catch a flight home. Until then, we were free, and we landed in London feeling like we owned Europe. We took the Chunnel to Holland, but by the time we arrived in Rotterdam we were already out of drugs and dope-sick. We figured Amsterdam would be the best place to score, so we made our way to the city's infamous red light district. A dealer we met there offered to sell us heroin, but by the time he took off with our money we realized he had ripped us off. Whatever we snorted made us both sick and didn't even get us high. We sat at Bulldog's Café for hours, smoking weed, drinking beer, and strategizing how to score some pills.

Before taking that trip, I had never even considered paying for sex, but there was no way I wasn't going to take advantage of Amsterdam's active (and legal) sex trade. Besides being dope-sick, Fred and I were both missing our girlfriends—we needed something to distract us. And who could resist the windows advertising a
50 GUILDER SUCK AND FUCK
? We walked around for maybe an hour and a half, looking at all the prospects, before I finally settled on one blond woman. She had a nice smile and gleaming white teeth and was wearing an orange bikini. I walked over to the door. “What's up?” I asked her.

“Fifty guilders for a suck and fuck,” she replied with a coy smile.

“Are you naked?”

“That's twenty-five extra,” she told me.

I realized I'd better make sure I knew all the fine print, so I started asking about positions. Finally I asked her, “How about one hundred for everything?” She agreed, and I thought I had covered all my bases, but once I got inside she told me that the deal was only for twenty minutes. “That's not good enough,” I protested. “I need thirty minutes.”

In response, the woman started laughing. “Everyone says they want thirty minutes,” she told me, “but they always finish before fifteen.” I took that as a challenge, but I ended up losing twenty guilders because I was done in less than five.

Fred and I made our way to the South of France, stopping first in Paris and then moving on to St. Raphael, a beautiful coastal town on the Mediterranean. On the trains, we chain-smoked cigarettes and watched the graffiti pass us by. We could barely appreciate how beautiful St. Raphael was because we were so dope-sick and miserable, but I was able to appreciate the town's amazing food markets.

At all the restaurants I had worked at in Florida, we ordered what we needed from vendors and the food came already broken down. We never saw an actual butcher or even a whole animal. But at the French markets the butchers sold directly to the customers, and their products were incredible. I stopped at a butcher's stall and stared in awe at a simple chicken, amazed by how small and white it was. In America the chickens were huge and yellow because they were stuffed from a diet of corn, but in France they didn't manipulate the soil or the animals in any way. I moved on to a vegetable stand and without thinking reached out to touch a beautiful purple eggplant, but the farmer quickly slapped my hand away. He took so much pride in the produce his family grew that he insisted on handing the eggplant to me. This was the first time I really thought about sourcing ingredients and where the food I cooked with actually came from.

Despite our surroundings, Fred and I were having a hard time getting by without a steady supply of pills. One afternoon we sat on the beach, staring out into the turquoise water. Out of nowhere Fred jumped up and announced, “I need to sweat this shit out.” He pointed to an enormous floating dock maybe a mile from the shore. “I'm going to swim to that dock,” he told me. As I watched Fred start swimming I knew I didn't want to sweat it out with him. Instead, I became completely determined to do whatever I had to do to get us drugs.

I immediately left the beach and walked to the nearest pharmacy. I asked for the pharmacist and made up an elaborate story about losing my luggage and the pain medication that I desperately needed along with it. The pharmacist didn't speak much English, but she got the gist of what I was saying. “For narcotiques you need a doctor's prescription,” she said, but that didn't deter me. “Where's the closest doctor?” I asked her, and she informed me that there was only one doctor in the whole town. She gave me his name, and I immediately went to his office, which was inside a quaint little house.

I lucked out—the doctor was willing to see me. Knowing this was my only shot, I put on the performance of my fucking life. I told the doctor that I had severe spinal problems and back pain and that my doctor back home had put me on morphine and OxyContin. The doctor tried to examine me, and every time he touched my back I screamed out in pain. I could've won an Oscar for that performance, and the doctor bought it. But they didn't have the pills I was talking about in Europe; they sold different drugs. The doctor finally wrote me a script for a medication that was basically the equivalent of Percocet. The best part was that he included three refills.

I grabbed the script and ran back to the beach. Fred was sitting on the floating dock in the middle of the Mediterranean. I started waving to him like a madman, shouting, “I fucking got it!” He swam back to shore, and we went straight to the pharmacy to fill the script. We each popped two of the pills and went to a local hamburger joint on the beach, waiting for our bellies to get warm. But these pills weren't what we were used to. They were a time-release formula that worked very differently. An hour went by and nothing happened. We didn't feel anything. Another hour passed and still nothing. At this point we both thought the pills were bogus. Then all of a sudden . . .
whazam!
At the exact same moment we both started to feel the telltale tickle. The warmth and the sensation of complete peace and serenity that came with it overtook us.

From that point on we were like two pigs in shit. For the next two weeks we carried the script with us from city to city and refilled it when the pills ran out. The funny thing is, though, we didn't want to refill it. For some reason, right after scoring we decided that we wanted to kick our habit. I guess having the safety net of the script made us feel confident enough to try. We didn't want to admit to each other (or to ourselves) that we were hooked, so we tried to deny it by waiting as long as we could take it to score.

By the time we got to our next stop, Rome, we were dope-sick and miserable. When I had told the guys at work about my trip, one of them told me about an amazing underground restaurant in Rome that was full of locals. Fred and I went there our first night in Italy, looking to distract ourselves with a good meal. This place gave a new meaning to the term “family-run.” The mother, father, and grandmother were all cooking in the kitchen while the kids ran around downstairs. None of them spoke any English, but it didn't matter. I ordered their specialty: Tripe Parmesan, which was fried pig stomach baked with a classic tomato sauce and homemade cheese. I ate every bite of the amazing meal along with delicious homemade bread dipped in good olive oil. But I was so dope-sick that as soon as I got the food down, it came back up and went all over the table. The family who owned the place started cursing at me in Italian. They quickly ran over and folded up the whole tablecloth with our used plates and my vomit inside, the whole time yelling at us to
uscita
—to “exit.”

That was enough for me to give up on trying to kick the pills. I filled the script, and the rest of the trip was a drug-fueled orgy of food, booze, sex, and of course pills. Fred and I went from Rome to Florence, which was the city that had the biggest impact on me in terms of food. Fred and I met a group of South African girls there who took us out to small hole-in-the-wall places that tourists didn't know about. They always told the waiters that I was a chef so the restaurant's chef would come out and talk to us, but I wasn't really a chef. I was just a kid who wanted to be one. When the chefs came out, the girls translated for me, and I learned how passionate these chefs were about the ingredients they used and about making sure they were locally sourced.

One night we ordered a dish with veal head and the chef came out beforehand to show us the head. Then he proceeded to tell us in broken English all about the farm where it was raised, which had been run by his family's neighbor for several generations. He explained that because the chickens used the land first, their feces fertilized the soil. Then the veal ate that grass. We could have walked from the restaurant to the farm—that's how close it was—and the chef told me that he wouldn't use anything from more than ten or twelve kilometers away.

Another night the girls took us down a back alley in a quiet, residential neighborhood to a restaurant called Il Latini. Everything was dark and silent until we turned the corner and suddenly saw a guy holding a clipboard, calling out names, and forty or fifty people waiting to go inside. When we finally sat down, hanging overhead were dozens of hams that were sliced and thrown down on the table with fresh melon. We ate ribolita, a traditional Tuscan soup made with kale, savoy cabbage, leeks, carrots, celery, red onion, white beans, and tomato and thickened with whole wheat bread; wild boar cooked with tomatoes, red wine, and chocolate; and a delicious Florentine steak. I had never seen these simple, hearty dishes in the United States, but they were just part of a normal day in Florence. Through the debauchery I took all of this in and saved the menus from every restaurant I ate at.

On our last night in Florence, Fred and I went for a walk past the train station to the city's only McDonald's, which was a known hangout for hookers. We saw one girl who was tall and thin with dark, flawless skin, wearing a trench coat and nothing else. I took her back to the hotel, but I was so wasted that I couldn't come. She was servicing me in the bathtub while I looked at a porn magazine, but no matter what she did, there was no way it was going to happen. “I'm going to have to charge you double,” she told me in disgust. Amazingly, this wasn't the last time I would hear that line. It's embarrassing but true—dope dick is real.

As soon as the girl left the hotel room we bolted for the train to Montpellier in the South of France, which was leaving in less than an hour. It was night, but we were too high to sleep on the eight-hour train ride. The time of day meant nothing to us on that trip. The hours blended into each other in a haze of drugs and sheer momentum. In Montpellier, we stumbled out of the nightclubs at four or five in the morning, when the bakers were just showing up to work and starting production. On the walk back to the hotel the streets were suffused with the sweet smell of fresh pastries.

One night in Montpellier we went to an American nightclub that was blasting Nirvana and had a Chevrolet coming out through the roof. We were already strung out on pills and immediately started throwing back tequila shots and smoking hash. After a while I couldn't stay awake any longer.

“Dude, I'm fucking done,” I told Fred. “I'm going back to the room.”

“Okay, I think I'll stay a little longer,” he replied.

“Cool, bring back some chicks,” I said, but I was mostly joking. I went to the hotel and passed out. The next thing I knew Fred was shaking me.

“Jesse, wake up!” I rubbed my eyes, put on my glasses, and looked up. Fred was standing at the foot of the bed surrounded by five women. None of them spoke any English, but they understood ménage à trois quite well.

The final stop on our trip, and also the wildest, was Barcelona. On the train ride there Fred and I started talking to two girls who were tall, blond, and gorgeous. They spoke perfect English and looked like two girls who had grown up in California, but they were actually from Sweden and told us they had studied Swedish massage. We gave them the name of the hotel we were staying at on Las Ramblas, the city's boisterous and downright sketchy main drag.

That night there was a knock at the door. Fred and I looked at each other in surprise before opening it. There stood our two Swedish friends. “We want to practice our technique,” they told us.

After they left several debaucherous hours later, Fred and I decided to go for a walk. It was late, ten or eleven at least, but we were high and restless and the city was just starting to come to life. After getting hustled multiple times by some guys playing three-card monte on Las Ramblas, we arrived at a nightclub. As soon as we walked in a woman standing just inside the entrance asked, “Do you want Ecstasy?” We said yes, and she immediately grabbed me, pulled my body to hers, and started kissing me. Before I knew what was going on she slid a pill under my tongue and then did the same thing with Fred. After a few minutes we were gone, off together in some distant universe.