All or Nothing (12 page)

I knew Sam was trying to scare me straight, and I was honestly a little bit afraid of him. Sam wasn't like me. Sure, we had gotten in trouble together when we were kids, but he'd grown up and was living a normal life by then. I still couldn't imagine such a thing for myself. Sam brought me back to his place and even took a few days off work to look after me while I detoxed on his couch. He fed me spoonfuls of cough syrup with codeine to take the edge off, but other than that, he made it clear that he would not accept any dalliances. One day I walked into his bedroom and found him sitting on the edge of his mattress, looking tense. On his night table sat a fully loaded Glock 17. He glanced back and forth between the gun and me. “I love you, Jesse,” he told me. “But if you try anything, I will fucking end you.”

Every morning at 6:00 Sam woke me up, fed me breakfast (or at least tried to), and then trekked with me downtown to the Broward Addiction Recovery Center (BARC), a beat-down, county-run facility in the heart of Fort Lauderdale's most notorious ghetto. The detox unit was funded by the county and accepted patients on a sliding-scale basis, so beds there were scarce. It was nothing like the nice rehab centers I had been to in the past, but at this point I was broke, uninsured, and addicted. I didn't have many options. Sam and I went down to BARC every day to try to get me a bed, but after a week I was still on the waiting list.

Sam couldn't take any more time off work and needed to hand me off to someone else. My parents wanted nothing to do with me, so I ended up at my grandparents' house. Audrey and Seymour are my maternal grandparents. As a child, I loved going to their house and grilling with Papa Seymour and playing with racecars that he'd picked out just for me. But this wasn't like those childhood visits. I barely spoke to them that night. I just sweated it out in their guest room and then went back to BARC the next morning. This time I lucked out. Some patient had moved on to the next level of treatment, and a bed was finally available for me.

BARC turned out to be straight out of
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Fifteen beds were crammed into four dingy, windowless rooms. The common area held a couple of tables where addicts in various stages of withdrawal sat around in hospital scrubs reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes nonstop.

That night I immediately slumped into bed, a shaky, sweaty mess, and mercifully fell asleep. At daybreak a firm hand shook my bed. I rubbed my eyes and put on my glasses, and only then did the full measure of my circumstances come into focus. The concrete walls of the room were painted a ghostly white. My bed was nothing more than a cot with rusted metal legs holding up a sagging layer of wire mesh. The mattress was encased in rubber and covered with a worn, paper-thin sheet. All of the beds around me were filled. Next to me was a thirtysomething derelict who smelled like shit and was mumbling incoherently. His whole body was trembling. I looked up at the tall, pale nurse who was towering over me. “Get up,” she commanded. “It's time for your medication.”

At BARC I noticed that a small, tender bump in my forearm had moved deep into the muscle, causing my forearm to swell up to twice its normal size. This wasn't my first abscess; junkies get them all the time from dirty needles. I was funded for five days at BARC, after which I received a twenty-eight-day voucher for intensive residential treatment (IRT) in Fort Lauderdale. It was a lot nicer there, and the intake staff took one look at my arm and sent me to the emergency room to have the abscess drained.

At the hospital the doctor opened and drained a golf-ball-size infection, cleaning it out with a long, thin string that looked like a shoelace. The pain was agonizing, but the look on the doctor's face as he attended to me was somehow worse. He looked at me with something worse than disdain. It was indifference. As he worked he didn't say a word, but his expression and mannerisms clearly told me,
You're nothing more than a fucking junkie who's just going to go out and get high again.
More than anything, I wished I disagreed with him.

I passed the time in treatment playing guitar, smoking cigarettes, and trading schemes with other patients. Every afternoon we had group therapy, which was run by Erin, an intense, take-no-crap therapist I had first met during my outpatient therapy at Challenges. Though I'd detoxed away my physical addiction, my urge to use hadn't gone away. A lot of my fellow patients felt the same way. I heard about all sorts of different tools people used to smuggle in drugs—shampoo bottles, clothing, stuffed animals, and food items. There was no end to the addicts' creativity. Drug deals went down regularly even though the grounds had a zero-tolerance policy. The rules didn't matter. Addicts are some of the most resourceful people in the world.

After IRT, I received a voucher for Prospect, a halfway house in the same shady section of Fort Lauderdale as BARC. All residents there were required to find a job and attend outpatient rehab, but I only went to rehab maybe three times. I had more important things on my mind, like finding the best place to score. The unease that had settled back over me when I stopped using was too much to bear. I needed an outlet, and the only one I knew of was drugs.

There was nothing I wouldn't do to score. I was desperate and often victimized my fellow junkies just to get high. I'd first met Dimitri at BARC. He had been using for years, had contracted HIV and hepatitis C from sharing needles, and had recently been diagnosed with cancer. Dimitri was stick-thin with thin wisps of long, scraggly hair partially obscuring his deep-set eyes. His pale skin hung from his face like melted candle wax. Because of his illness, Dimitri had prescriptions for every drug imaginable, and I offered to pay him to get his prescriptions filled. But when we got to the pharmacy, I took his pills and left him zero cash. I didn't have any. As soon as Dimitri's pills ran out, I took off for Miami looking to score. When I got back to Prospect only hours later, I was locked out and found my belongings stuffed in a garbage bag outside the front door.

Needing a place to stay, I showed up at a halfway house called Florida House, holding my garbage bag of belongings and wearing my Oscar-worthy game face. Florida House was run by two guys in recovery who agreed to take me in right away. They were good people who insisted that residents get a job. Before long I landed a sweet gig at Mark's restaurant in Mizner Park. It was never hard to get a job once I said that I had cooked at Smith's. Other chefs respected my former boss and always took me at my word. Mark Milettello was an award-winning chef who'd played a part in creating the New World “Flor-ribbean” cuisine that came out of South Florida in the early '90s. I worked the grill station during lunch, a real wood-burning grill that was one of the hardest to work. It took serious skill to control the temperature on that thing, but I loved feeding the fire.

Once I got paid, I was supposed to turn over part of my check as rent to the guys who ran Florida House, but before even going into work on payday I packed up my stuff. I grabbed my check and called Brad, begging him to let me stay. As soon as he agreed I bolted from Mark's, screwing over my job and the halfway house in the same moment.

I loved staying at Brad's. At night I earned my keep by cooking for him, making the shepherd's pie I had created with Cate years before and the meatloaf I perfected in rehab. While I was staying there, I got a job at a place called Rino's as the lunch chef. Rino was an Italian-born chef making his way in sunny Florida, and I learned a lot from him about working with pasta and fresh fish. He also taught me more of the rustic Italian cooking techniques I had first admired in Florence, like always starting the garlic in cold olive oil. I played around using the skills I'd picked up at the Asian fusion restaurant with classic Italian ingredients, using hot olive oil instead of sesame to cook a thinly sliced piece of fish.

I had it pretty good at Brad's house, but eventually my appetite for more got the best of me. My drug habit was out of control, and my salary from Rino's alone couldn't sustain it. I started stealing from Brad, and he had no choice but to throw me out. But as angry as he was, he could never throw me to the wolves. “You've got to get the fuck out of here,” Brad told me. “I'm dropping you at Victor's.”

Victor took me in right away. He and I had grown up together but traveled in completely different circles. By then he had developed a reputation as one of Broward County's top coke dealers. Mostly he dealt at bars and strip clubs, but his source was Carson, a big-time dealer with a well-deserved reputation for violence. Nobody fucked with Carson. When Victor introduced us, he described Carson as his wholesaler.

Cocaine wasn't my thing. All it did was distract me from what I really wanted, which was heroin. One day I had just shot some heroin at Victor's and was feeling good when another friend of ours came by. I saw him putting some coke in a spoon—just like I'd done with the heroin—and asked what he was doing. “It's amazing,” he told me simply. “Here, I'll give you a touch.” Placing a quarter of a gram in my spoon, he instructed me to let it dissolve instead of cooking it. After I went through the process and shot the coke directly into my arm, I felt a crazy rush that came up through my throat. I could taste it. It was so intense that it almost made me puke. I heard a ringing in my ears and felt chills on the back of my neck, but after two minutes it was gone and I wanted more.

One day soon after that Victor went out and I searched his room until I found a quarter-ounce of coke under his mattress. Over the next few hours I shot all of it, and by the time Victor came home I was chewing my face off. “What the fuck did you do?” he asked me. Before long I learned to mix heroin and coke together, and I got the rush of cocaine and the bliss of heroin all at once, a swarm of warmth and happiness that sucked me in completely.

This was an expensive habit. Our friend Luisa was waitressing at a cheesy wine bar in Coral Springs that I'll call The Grove. I told her that I needed a night job, and she introduced me to the owner, Rodger, who was an ex-cop. His chef had just quit, and he hired me right away. Every morning I left Victor's house and walked across the golf course to work the lunch shift at Rino's, then I walked a couple of blocks to The Grove to start prepping for dinner.

When I got to The Grove, it was a wine bar that served food, but not really a restaurant. The menu consisted of frozen deep-fried appetizers like chicken wings that came straight out of a bag, cheesy chicken tostadas, and potato skins. I was skinny and sick and craving drugs in a bad way, but it was just me in the kitchen, and I managed to be in the moment with the food. Right away I saw how I could improve the menu and the quality of the food we served at The Grove. I started bringing in fresh chicken wings and making my own clarified butter for the hot sauce instead of using a premixed sauce. The celery and carrots we used sat roughly cut in ten-gallon containers filled with water. After a couple of days they were soggy and gross, so I nixed this and started cutting the vegetables to order so they were always fresh and crispy. When someone rented out the back room for a private party, I took the tostadas and cut them into perfect one-inch batons, fried them, and stood them up on a nice plate with some homemade dipping sauces so they became a proper hors d'oeuvre.

The frozen spinach and artichoke dip that The Grove used came in a container that looked like a mini-Pringles can; when I ripped open the top, it emitted a sulfuric stench, like roasted broccoli that had been sitting out all night. I went to the store and bought some cream and reduced it down until it got nice and thick. Then I added fresh Parmesan cheese. I took whole artichokes and peeled them (much more effectively than I had as a young teen), fried them, and then chopped them up and threw them into the pot along with whole bunches of fresh spinach. I set the mixture to drain overnight, and by the next day it was a thick, delicious dip. Not only did the dip taste better, but making it fresh was also a lot cheaper than buying everything premade. Before long the regulars at The Grove recognized my contributions. “If this place stays open any longer, it will be because of you,” they told me.

Despite being completely drowned in drugs, I savored my time in the kitchen, even if I was just frying chicken wings. This was the only time when I wasn't thinking about hustling to score drugs. I temporarily forgot about being dope-sick, my family, and my fucked-up circumstances. For the moment at least, it was just me and the chicken wings.

Some nights Rino came to The Grove for drinks, and I watched him and Rodger out of the corner of my eye, talking about me. I had spent years pulling the wool over everyone's eyes, but I couldn't bullshit Rodger. He knew I had a drug problem and tried to help me by only giving me a little bit of money at a time. It didn't matter. I would have done anything to get drugs. The Grove had a room out back that connected to the restaurant. Inside were shelves stacked with liquor and a couple of refrigerators and freezers that held lobster tails and filet mignon. I stole a key to the back room and made a copy. After work I grabbed as much as I could carry, then met up with dealers and exchanged the food for drugs.

I didn't have a car, so I just walked or took the city bus everywhere, but I was getting sick of this. One of the waiters at Rino's had a 1982 Volvo that he was looking to unload. It had logged over 100,000 miles and was pretty beat-up. “A thousand bucks,” he told me.

“I'll give you two hundred dollars now and then two hundred a week for the next four weeks,” I replied. I gave him the $200, and he handed me the keys. A week later I quit Rino's and left with the car, never paying the waiter the $800 I still owed him. Now I had wheels and my days free, which I spent either trying to get loaded, being dope-sick, or coming down off a cocaine and heroin frenzy.

This arrangement suited me fine until Victor got arrested for possession of cocaine. Luckily I wasn't around when the arrest went down, but I continued to stay at his house long after he was gone. One day Carson swung by. “Where's Victor?” he wanted to know.