All or Nothing (13 page)

“He got picked up,” I told him.

“Bitch better not talk,” he replied coldly.

In less than a week there was an eviction notice posted on Victor's door. I started sneaking in through the windows, but one night I came home from working at The Grove and found that the place had been boarded up. The furniture had all been dumped out in the parking lot. I started sleeping in my car behind The Grove, but like I'd done with every other place I'd lived, I didn't take care of it. The oil light had been on for weeks, and the wipers didn't work, but I wasn't going to fix anything; I barely had money for gas. Every penny I earned went straight to drugs.

When Brad heard about Victor's arrest, he came by The Grove one night to check on me. He had forgiven me, probably in part because of his own growing heroin addiction. We quickly patched things up and made plans to score.

Not long after, I was doing about fifty on the Sawgrass Expressway one night when my car died. I put it in neutral and tried turning the engine over a couple of times. Nothing. Cars were lining up behind me, honking their horns, but I couldn't do a thing. I tried turning the engine one more time before it burst and caught on fire. Melted insulation immediately started pouring through the AC vents as I pulled over onto the shoulder. I got out and just started running. When I looked back and saw flames underneath the car, I suddenly remembered that I had left my spoon and needle in the center console. I ran back and opened the car door, dodging flames as I tried to rescue my drug paraphernalia. After grabbing my stuff, I started running again as the car burned. In the distance I heard sirens. I walked the rest of the way to Brad's house and asked him to drive me back to the scene later that night. The car was still there, but it was now nothing more than a pile of smoldering metal.

Claire, a bartender at The Grove, was a recovering junkie. We hit it off, and she took me in, treating me like a son. Whenever I needed to get straight, I showed up at Claire's house, and she fed me, bathed me, and made sure I had clean clothes to wear. She probably would have let me stay there, but her husband hated me. He was about forty years old, with a prosthetic leg, and liked to hit me with his crutch.

Through Claire I met Don, a seventy-year-old former firefighter from Chicago who was a major crackhead. He carried his crack pipe and accessories in a black leather tote bag. I could tell that Don had been smoking for years. He was always coughing, and his eyes were filmy and rimmed with red. Like me, he was always edgy and restless.

Don had managed to wrangle a steady supply of scripts from his doctor and hooked me up with OCs, but I also needed a place to crash. Don owned a house in Deerfield Beach and also had a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in Pompano. Inside was an immaculate, well-maintained saltwater fish tank, but otherwise the place looked like an abandoned shooting gallery. It was filled with an incongruous collection of random tools, discarded tables, empty propane tanks, and file boxes stacked high with paper. There was no heat, air conditioning, or running water, just an outdoor shower connected to an empty propane tank. Don agreed to let me rent a room for a couple of hundred bucks a month.

The warehouse sat on the edge of Dixie Highway and Atlantic Boulevard. After work I wandered around the neighborhood, strung out of my mind. Bored and armed kids congregated on the stoops of abandoned buildings. Others gathered in empty parking lots. Mothers pushed their crying babies in strollers late into the night. The locals fucked with me all the time, but I just scrounged the ground for discarded cigarette butts, anything to keep the buzz going and drown out the reality of my life.

My car was gone, and to get to The Grove from the warehouse I had to take two buses. My shift started at six, so I had to drag my ass out of bed by four to get there in time. One day I woke up really dope-sick. I was burning up and sweating profusely, but I was also incredibly cold. The damp air inside Don's filthy warehouse felt like a hundred razor blades raking my skin. I stayed in bed and never showed up to work at The Grove.

Brad came to see me soon after and told me he had moved into a new apartment. He seemed to feel bad about what had gone down and was willing to let me stay with him. His timing was perfect. I hadn't paid Don in weeks, and he changed the locks the very next day. A few days after arriving at Brad's, he drove me back to the warehouse to get my stuff. I knocked on the door. No one answered, but I could hear feet shuffling inside. I knew Don was in there. “Don, it's Jesse,” I called. “Open the door. I just want to get my shit and leave.” Minutes passed before Don finally opened the door. He stood there, naked except for a thin gold chain dangling from his neck, mumbling incoherently. He was tweaking out of his mind.

I walked past Don and went inside. There was a pit bull barking in the far corner of the warehouse and the floor was covered in dog shit. A young woman was lying on a small wooden coffee table, passed out. She was maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, and was completely naked. I quickly grabbed my stuff and split.

This whole time I had been on probation as part of my sentence for narcotics trafficking. It had been months since I checked in with my probation officer. In the eyes of the law, I was a fugitive.

Brad worked during the day fixing roofs, and since I was now out of a job, I went along with him. My first order of business when we arrived at a job was always to check the medicine cabinet for any drugs I could score. Brad and I got high every day together. One day we were out on a job when Victor's wholesaler, Carson, called me and asked if I wanted to run for him. It sounded like a good deal. I'd get drugs and money. I said yes right away.

Carson gave me a car and a phone and I started as his runner. I dropped off drugs and collected money from dozens of buyers every day, and in exchange Carson gave me drugs. Everything was copacetic until one Sunday. Brad and I were still coming down from the night before when there was a knock on the door. It was Carson. By his feet was a small gray safe. “There's heat on me,” he told me. “You need to look after this.” I looked at the safe, knowing it was full of money and drugs. What else could have been in there? “Don't open it,” Carson warned.

The minute Carson walked out the door I called a locksmith, who got the safe open. I threw him an extra $50 from the safe so he would look the other way. Brad and I took the rest of the safe's contents and went on a major binge, staying home for days just shooting cocaine. We started hallucinating snipers in front of the apartment and helicopters circling overhead. All we did was get high. We drove to Miami to score with Carson's money and pulled into the gas station to fix in the bathroom on the way there. When I got back to Brad's car, I carefully placed my needle and spoon in one of his tool kits.

There was a knock on the car window what seemed like moments later. I was asleep in the front seat with no idea how long I'd been out. I looked up and saw cops. They had just found Brad in the bathroom with a needle in his pocket and arrested him on the spot. Brad begged the cops to leave me alone. He knew I was on probation and somehow convinced them that I wasn't involved, saving my ass in the process. I left the gas station with his car and bailed him out the next day. We went right back to our daily binges.

I was no longer running for Carson, and we had already gone through all of the drugs and money in the safe, so I needed to get a job. I landed a gig at Max's Grille in Mizner Park. Max's was a South Florida institution. It had been around forever, and every South Florida chef who was anybody had started out working for its founder, Dennis Max. It was always crazy busy there; a thousand covers a day was the norm. I worked the salad station and the vegetable station and was basically the bitch. I made plate after plate of sautéed spinach and bowl after bowl of the Caesar salad that came with the prix fixe dinner special. Once 5:00
P.M
. hit, that printer would not stop. Ticket after ticket came spewing out, and we'd get slammed. I had a hot pan on the stove next to a huge pot of water and a ladle. Every time an order came in, I put a huge bunch of spinach into the pan with a little bit of butter. Then I added a ladleful of the hot water so it would sauté down quickly. There was a reach-in refrigerator on the wall holding the romaine lettuce, so when an order for the Caesar salad came in, I could reach into a door right next to my head and grab what I needed. I did this roughly five hundred times a night.

Every night before leaving work I called Brad and asked, “Should I stop off and get some dope?” I don't know why I even asked. The answer was always the same. An hour later I'd show up at Brad's place with dope and leftover food. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes were still his favorites.

Sometimes when Brad and I bought drugs together, we couldn't even make it home without getting high. The Holiday Inn right off Commercial Boulevard and I-95 was our favorite place to stop. One night we made our way to the bathroom with some heroin that was dark brown and the consistency of bird shit. Brad did two bags, but I stuck with one. “Fuck,” Brad said from his stall. “I should've done one.” Suddenly, I heard a thump. I dropped to my knees and peeked under the stall. Brad was just lying there with a needle sticking out of his track-marked forearm and his pants down around his ankles. The stall door was locked. I was high, but somehow I managed to crawl underneath the stall to try to wake him up. No response. I slapped him across the face. Still nothing. I ran from the bathroom to the front desk.

“My friend is passed out in the bathroom,” I told the concierge. He called 911, and five minutes later security entered the bathroom. They injected Brad with something, and he immediately started vomiting before they took him off to the hospital.

Of course, by then Carson realized that I had robbed him blind. I had been ducking his phone calls, but I knew that wouldn't buy me much time. That night, when Brad was in the hospital, Carson came knocking. I opened the door not knowing what to expect, and took three hard punches to the face that knocked me over the couch before I came crashing into an end table. He grabbed everything he could get his hands on—the computer, TV, stereo. When I picked Brad up from the hospital, I told him what happened. That was it for Brad. He wanted out. He moved back in with his mother, leaving me alone in the apartment.

All of my money from Max's was going to buying drugs, and without Brad there to pay the bills, there was soon no hot water or electricity. An eviction notice wasn't far behind. For a month I became a squatter, sneaking in and out of the run-down apartment. When I was there, I holed up inside and shot up crushed pain pills.

Every few days I snuck out and took the bus to the new bar where Claire was now working. She fed me, gave me drinks, and tried to make sure I was okay. There I met a waitress named Tonya who was looking for a roommate and said I could bunk with her. My first night there Tonya said, “Jess, I'm going out for some coke. You cool with that?”

“I hope you don't mind,” I said, “but I like to shoot it.”

Tonya and I fell into a routine of doing coke together: she'd snort it and I'd shoot it, and then we'd spend the rest of the day hanging out and listening to music. Before long I quit working at Max's. I was always dope-sick and couldn't make it in. But they still owed me my final check. I told Tonya that I'd make good on the rent as soon as I got paid, but she never saw a dime. It didn't take long for her to kick me out.

I took that final check from Max's, scored some dope, and used what was left to rent an efficiency on Deerfield Beach. This was the place of last resort, just a small step above a cardboard box. My room was tiny, the walls were paper-thin, and the bed was covered in stained nylon sheets. Cops were always stopping by and arresting people for assault, domestic violence, or murder, and even for running a meth lab out of one of the rooms. I couldn't believe the shit that was going on around me.

I spent my first two days getting high and the next five coming down. Detoxing was hell, but I had been through it before. I was out of money, alone, and feeling pretty desperate when I called Sam. He rode over on his motorcycle and couldn't believe how I was living. He took me to the store to buy groceries, and then we sat outside for hours, drinking beers by the empty swimming pool. A week later I couldn't pay my rent and got kicked out.

It had been a year since I'd seen or heard from my parents. In that time I had bounced around from place to place, but I had never actually slept on the street. But this time I really had no place to go. I was officially homeless.

Entremets

Entremets
: A small dish served in between the main courses of a meal.

I
stood outside of a 7-Eleven on Deerfield Beach, broke and alone, with nowhere to go and without a friend in the world. I can't say I didn't deserve it. My need for drugs had so consumed me that by then I had lied, cheated, and stolen from every friend and family member I had. Every time someone had tried to help me, I'd bitten the hand that fed me.