All or Nothing (14 page)

That night I walked down the highway for hours until I found South Beach Park, which had a running trail, high scrubs, ficus trees, and tons of mulch. I lay down on the cleanest patch of grass I could find and stared up at the stars until I fell asleep. The next morning I awoke to the nudge of a rake in my hip. It was the park ranger, wanting me out. I was covered in mosquito bites, dirty, and hungry. I needed to find work.

I walked to a restaurant called Pranzo's in Mizner Park, but before going in I went into a Burger King. In the bathroom I splashed my face, combed back my hair with my wet fingers, and did my best to scrub the dirt out from underneath my nails. The chef at Pranzo's was a nice guy. As I was talking to him I had to hold myself back from scratching the mosquito bites that lined my torso and back from sleeping in the grass. I told the chef that I needed a job and had fallen on hard times. He was impressed with my previous work experience and found a spot for me. “Be here at three today,” he said.

It felt good to stand behind the line again that night. The restaurant's biggest sellers were Spaghetti Carbonara and Rigatoni with Caponata. My imagination immediately perked up. The caponata was too sweet. I wanted to add more vinegar and maybe some pine nuts, but I was too distracted to even try talking to the chef. I had to find a place to sleep that night.

After work I walked around looking for options. At another 7-Eleven on Dixie Highway, I approached a couple of guys who looked to be in their fifties. One of them was hunched over with a filter dangling from his lips as he scoured the ground for discarded cigarette butts. The other guy was tall and thin and smelled, quite literally, like shit. He didn't say a word; he just growled. “Where do you fuckers sleep?” I asked.

“I'm Ralph,” said the one who talked. “His name is Bobbie ‘the Flame' Tucker.” I introduced myself. “Why don't you sit down, kid?” Ralph asked. As we talked he handed me a beer. After a while we got up and walked to a meter room in the parking garage of a nearby shopping plaza. It was home to an industrial-sized Dumpster. Bobbie pulled out four huge Burger King French fry boxes and laid them out neatly on the floor. This was his bedding.

The next day I was awake at 6:00
A.M.
and didn't have to be at work until 3:00. The waiting game was a killer. I walked into a deli across the street to apply for a job. The manager handed me the application, but I only got as far as the section that read, “Address.” I couldn't fill it in. The manager and I started talking, and it turned out that he and the entire staff were in recovery, living in a halfway house just up the street.

“One of my guys just gave notice,” he told me. “You can start in two weeks.”

Over the next two weeks I hung out with Ralph and Bobbie the Flame and some of their homeless buddies. One night we were sitting on the embankment next to the train tracks. It must have been ten or eleven, not the middle of the night but late enough so there weren't a lot of people out. Bobbie was on the other side of the tracks, and as the lights started blinking to indicate a train was coming he started walking toward us, limping as usual. Just as the guardrail was closing, a car sped underneath it and drove into Bobbie. It ran right over him and just kept going. I was horrified, but one thing I learned being on the street was not to get involved in shit. In shock, I just took off before the cops showed up.

On the day I was set to start work at the deli I walked in around 7:00
A.M.
There were two guys behind the counter, one who looked barely seventeen, and another who was short and burly with a few teeth missing. “You must be the new guy,” he said with a thick New York accent. “I'm Joey.”

I walked behind the counter and surveyed the scene. The place needed a fucking cleanup. I spent the next four hours scrubbing the floors, organizing the fridges, and cleaning the slicer. It was a good first day at work. On my way out to go to Pranzo's, I saw two of the guys from the deli smoking cigarettes. One of them started to curl over and close his eyes a little bit. I knew that look too well. “What the fuck are you on, bro?” I asked him. “I want some.”

“Nothing, man, nothing,” he insisted.

“Bullshit,” I spat out. “What is it? Percs? Oxy?”

“No,” he said finally. “Methadone wafers.”

“Shit,” I said. This was music to my ears. “Hook me up.” He gave me the number of a girl who had a script and would sell them for $20 a wafer. I called her that Friday as soon as I got my first paycheck from the deli. I had two jobs and no place to stay, but I literally cared more about having drugs than even a roof over my head. Weeks passed. I worked at the deli during the day and at Pranzo's at night. In between I went to see movies or found a way to score. I ate at work, so I never had to worry about food, but at night I slept outside, swathed in a blanket of newspaper. Before going to sleep on a bench or in the bushes, I'd take a methadone wafer and then chain-smoke all night. I often woke up with cigarette burns covering my chest.

After two months I was fully addicted again and stopped showing up at Pranzo's. My check from the deli didn't amount to much, and I was hurting, so I took to panhandling outside of fast-food restaurants, where there was always someone coming in or going out. One day I was outside a Burger King, not having much luck, when a Latino guy started talking to me. I told him a sob story about losing my job and getting thrown out by my parents.

“Walk with me,” he said. As we walked he told me that his name was Julio. He had come to the United States illegally from Nicaragua after the civil unrest and had gotten by sleeping near construction sites until he made his way in the States. “You can stay at my place,” he said. “How's a hundred dollars a month?” It all sounded a little too easy, but I wasn't in a position to argue. Julio's apartment was small, just a couple of rooms, but it did have a balcony with a sweet ocean view.

“I don't have a mattress for you,” Julio said, “but you can sleep in the bed with me and my roommate Juan.” Right away, I knew exactly what he was looking for. Sure enough, after the three of us climbed into the apartment's only bed that night, I woke up to find Julio practically on top of me. I jumped up and turned on the light.

“Dude, that's not fucking happening,” I told him.

“I just want your ass,” he replied calmly.

After that, I set down some pretty firm boundaries. “I will sleep on the floor in the living room,” I told him, “and I'll give you a hundred bucks to do so.” Julio never came on to me again. I acquired an air mattress to sleep on in the living room. I did learn a few tricks from him and Juan, though, particularly where men would go to solicit sex. Juan introduced me to his friend who was basically a pimp. He set me up with a location and told me that most of the older men were looking for young kids like me.

After I'd been standing in my spot for just a few minutes, a dark car approached. I walked over and found a man inside who was at least fifty years old, wearing a business suit and a platinum wedding ring. “Fifty,” I told him. He nodded in response. I got in and closed the door. “Put the money in the center console,” I said. He already had the cash in his hands. Then I said, “Pull your dick out and pull your pants down around your ankles.” I moved over as if I was about to give him a blow job, waiting for him to close his eyes. Then I grabbed the money and ran. Looking back, I could see that he was pissed, but he couldn't come after me with his pants down.

I met Gibson at the deli. He had just finished serving five years in prison for armed robbery and was a stone-cold crack addict. I was shooting a little cocaine and taking the methadone wafers when I could get them. During breaks I fixed in the deli's bathroom. One night Gibson approached me and said, “I want to get high.”

The girl I had been buying the methadone wafers from had been telling me that crack was the way to go. One night she drove Gibson and me to Oakland Park. “Just wait here,” she said after parking the car. A few minutes later she came back carrying a clear bag filled with something resembling soap shavings. Getting in the car, she reached under the driver's seat and produced a pipe, a hollowed-out tire gauge, a lighter, and a copper Brillo pad, which crackheads use for filters. She lit up, took a hit, and passed the pipe to Gibson. As he took a hit I looked into his eyes. He was done. With one hit, he morphed from a nice, easygoing guy into an absolute destroyer.

My turn. I placed a large piece of crack in the top, holding the pipe carefully so it didn't fall out, then lit the pipe and slowly inhaled. The rock crackled slightly, making a sound that reminded me of cold milk hitting a bowl of Rice Krispies. In my lungs the smoke was slightly unpleasant, and it smelled like burned rubber or an electrical fire. When I blew out the smoke, the sensation hit, an intense, euphoric rush like sticking my head out the window of a fighter jet. It was as good as shooting coke, but cheaper and easier to get. And it took less than a minute for the magic to kick in.

The only downside was that the high only lasted a few minutes. I spent the next few months chasing the feeling of that first hit. Soon I couldn't hold down the job at the deli and got fired. Out of money, I robbed Julio and all of his friends and got kicked out of the apartment. Gibson and I were on a run, stealing from motel rooms and even from drug dealers. Another trap door had opened, and I continued to fall.

Pressure Cooker

Pressure cooker
: A sealed vessel used to cook food in hot water or other cooking liquid. Because pressure cookers do not allow air or liquids to escape below a preset level of pressure, the steam inside from the boiling liquid permeates the food and heats it more quickly than other methods do.

S
ave for the low, incessant humming of exhaust fans that poured out a noxious concoction of gas and bacon grease from some hole-in-the-wall diner, an odd silence hung in the air as thick and heavy as any South Florida summer evening. Gibson and I had made our way back “home,” which in this case was a motel that sat directly across from the Fort Lauderdale Amtrak station. The motel's green-brick facade was stained and chipped, with boards covering many of its windows and graffiti adorning the walls. The motel marquee, rusted and weather-beaten beyond recognition, lay awkwardly on the sidewalk. Out back sat a dirty, leaf-filled rectangular swimming pool that hadn't been filled in years. Weeds choked the motel parking lot's cracked, scarred pavement, home to a couple of cars, lookouts, scantily clad prostitutes, forsaken drug paraphernalia, and a small militia of rats, mice, and palmetto bugs.

The motel was a melting pot of dealers, prostitutes, and addicts, mixed in with a few destitute immigrant families and one elderly couple who had moved in after losing their home. Some mornings I woke up to find a nude chick passed out in the front yard or a dealer bolting out the door with a gun barely concealed under his jacket. The nights were filled with the sounds of screeching brakes and blaring sirens. Coming down from my latest fix, I just lay there unable to sleep, listening to the regular assortment of shouts and arguments from neighboring rooms. Or I peeled open the curtains and stared out through the grimy glass of our partially shattered window and watched people rush to and from the station, wondering who they were and where they were going.

This was shit-hole central. It was pure chaos, and Gibson and I fit right in. After taking a hit, we would tear the fucking place apart, dumping out trash cans, searching behind the toilet, and ripping open sofa cushions looking for crack. I spent hours crawling around that dirty rug, tweaking out of my mind, searching for an imaginary piece of crack I was sure I'd dropped. There was never any crack, but one time I found pieces of soap, stuck them in a pipe, and promptly puked all over the floor. Crack looks like soap shavings, except it's sharp. I'd run through a bar of Dove in the blink of an eye.

By then I was shooting dope four or five times a day. I had to keep it up so I didn't get sick. My day-to-day struggle was to get straight, but of course once I straightened out and was feeling better I was back on the hunt for more.

The motel was awful, but we had paid in advance to stay there for two months. This felt like a luxury after sleeping on the street for over a year. The motel gave me the two things every addict needs: comfort and time. Every day we had to pull off some sort of heist so we'd have money to get high. Sometimes we hit up a laundromat and smashed the change dispensers. Other times we walked through a nice neighborhood, found an open car door, and took whatever was inside. I was always surprised by what people left in their cars—money, jewelry, credit cards, computers, cell phones—and we grabbed all of it.

But our biggest hustle was following dealers. We watched one guy's house for weeks, learning his habits—when he normally picked up his deliveries and when he got his cash. We knew exactly when he'd be getting home with his cash from the bank and showed up to his house to find his pickup truck in the driveway still running. Without wasting a moment, Gibson and I jumped into his truck and drove away, not stopping until we were miles from the house. Finally, we searched the car and found a bank envelope under the seat containing $10,000 in cash.