All or Nothing (16 page)

When she showed up an hour later, she was everything I wanted her to be, with long, silky dark hair, clear porcelain skin, and massive gravity-defying tits. “I'll do anything for two hundred,” she told us. We put the money on the nightstand, and she started taking off her clothes. Gibson and I just sat there like fucking zombies. I was half awake, scratching my face, as Gibson started hitting the pipe again. Watching us, she quickly got dressed, grabbed our cash, and made a beeline for the door. “Dude, what the fuck? We just got robbed,” Gibson said, but he didn't even bother to move. I got up slowly and stumbled toward the door, but she was already gone.

Getting robbed is a way of life for junkies. We're always either robbing someone else or being robbed by them. I shrugged it off and shifted focus back to getting laid. Rifling through the phonebook, I called about thirty different numbers, but they were all routed to the same location. Half an hour and twenty calls later, I heard a girl in the background say to her friend, “These crackheads keep calling.” Eventually we just gave up.

As the first rays of dawn trickled underneath the drawn shades of our hotel room, we finally ran out of crack. We called a taxi and said, “Take us to the worst fucking neighborhood.” The cabbie took off without saying a word. A few minutes later we pulled in to a massive forty-lane gas station and truck stop. The cabbie pointed in the direction of a trailer park. “Keep the meter running,” Gibson said, handing over fifty bucks. We walked down a narrow path through tons of shady shrubs before approaching a brightly lit trailer with a dented red pickup out front. Outside of the trailer a group of guys sat around drinking beers and smoking cigarettes.

“We're looking for some hard,” I told them.

“You a narc?”

“We just want crack,” Gibson said impatiently. Finally one guy got up and disappeared into the trailer, then reappeared thirty seconds later holding two small sandwich bags.

We got back in the cab. “We're looking for a hooker,” I told the driver, and he handed me a card with a name and number scribbled on the back. As soon as we got back to the hotel we called her up. “What are you into, honey?” Her thick, raspy voice sounded like it had been dipped in syrup. An hour later she knocked on the door. She was probably in her thirties but looked a decade older, with a drawn face earned by years of hard living.

After getting a condom from one of the machines in the lobby, I went back to the room to find Gibson in the bathroom doing a hit. The smoke wafted into the bedroom. We started having sex, but I was so fucked up that I kept losing my erection. “I'm charging double,” she said. There was that line again. “Just take the money and get the fuck out,” I told her. We were in Orlando for only three days, but we made at least three more trips to the trailer park to score. We managed to blow through the entire ten grand and had no way to get back to Fort Lauderdale. Finally we hustled a ride with Natasha's sister and her husband in their beat-up blue minivan.

After getting back from Orlando, I knew I needed to chill. I hadn't slept in days. “Let's just get some sleep and start over,” I told Gibson, but he was like the Energizer Bunny. He just wanted to keep going. “I need to score,” he replied and was out the door before I could say anything.

With Gibson gone, I sat down on the bed and closed my eyes. I had been on the street for more than a year. Every morning I woke up not knowing if I would live or die, whether I would eat anything that day or find a safe place to sleep that night. My body was thin and pale, my arms a patchwork of track marks, abscesses, and collapsed veins. Even my ears were permanently deformed from sleeping on concrete and Chattahoochee rock. But my soul was in far worse shape. For years I'd been lying, cheating, and stealing from everyone I had come in contact with. I had no integrity, no genuine relationships, and not an ounce of respect for myself. This existence was wearing me down.

For me, addiction was never really about the substance. It was about the stuff that lay beneath the surface—the tension and anxiety that I'd tried to escape by peeling the wallpaper off my walls as a toddler and later by creating something spectacular in the kitchen. But drugs were the very best escape from myself. Until now. It had once been exciting to chase the next high, but the fun was long gone now. Every time I thought I had hit bottom over the past few years, another trap door opened and I fell further still. But now I knew with absolute certainty that if I kept using I'd wind up either dead or put away for life. There was no further to fall from here.

Sitting there, I had what felt like a moment of clarity. I remembered my dad telling me years earlier, “Drugs or family, Jesse. You can't have both.” At the time it had been a no-brainer. I needed drugs to survive, and I didn't give a shit what my dad thought. But the truth was that I missed my family. I missed being loved and cared for, however imperfectly, and most of all I missed caring even the slightest bit about myself. My heart and my conscience, which had been clenched so tightly in the grip of addiction, were slowly starting to return.

I woke up the next morning to the sound of kids playing in the motel's hallway. I could barely move from the bed. I was hot and sweating profusely, as if my skin was on fire, but I also felt incredibly cold. My stomach cramped intermittently with a sharp, stabbing pain that felt like someone was poking it with the tip of a paring knife. Razor blades raked my skin as every muscle in my body twitched uncontrollably. I needed to purge, but I didn't have the energy to even lift my head.

Of course, I knew the one thing that would make me feel better, but for once I didn't want to find someone to rob, scam, or hustle to get money to buy drugs. The hours of insanity suddenly didn't seem worth it for just a few moments of pleasure. I knew that after I scored I'd be right back here in no time, dope-sick and needing to start the whole tortuous process over again. I was on my hands and knees, writhing in pain, and without thinking about it I found myself uttering a plea that sounded like a prayer. I begged whoever was listening to help save me from sinking any further into the quicksand my life had become.

I had toyed around with getting clean a million times before, but I knew this time was it. I was ready to surrender, prepared to choose family over drugs. For years I'd done everything I could to get high, and now I knew I'd do anything to get clean. I picked up the motel room phone and called my parents' house. My mother answered, but when she heard my voice she hung up before I could utter another word. Right away I called back. This time my dad picked up the phone. “Jesse,” he said. “I can't help you. Go to Broward General.”

I hung up the phone, sobbing uncontrollably. I was twenty-one years old, broke, sick, wanted by the cops, and unwanted by my family. Inside, I was filled with a combination of torment, rage, and mostly pain. To this day I don't know how my parents found the strength to do what they did, but they saved my life.

Fond

Fond
: The roasted bits of meat left at the bottom of a pan when sautéing at a high temperature.

I
knew I had hit bottom, but I didn't know how to climb back up yet. My body needed drugs to survive, and my brain didn't know any other way. I had already surrendered, but before I could turn things around I continued to go through the motions of one more fall.

Less than twenty-four hours after returning from Orlando, Gibson and I were back where we'd started—broke, dope-sick, and desperate for cash. Gibson had disappeared hours earlier in an endless pursuit of crack. Meanwhile, I still had some stolen jewelry, tools, clothing, and other odds and ends we'd nicked, and I needed to figure out how to pawn them. I knew the jewelry was my best bet. On the streets even kitschy costume junk moves fast, and I had a couple of bags of big gaudy necklaces, brooches, and dangling earrings made of metal and glass. I collected my stuff and slowly opened the door, careful to look both ways. Instead of checking for cars before crossing a street, I was doing a visual sweep for cops before leaving our motel room. It had been hours since my last fix and the tweak was in full effect, following my every move. I needed to walk around and get out of my head.

I made my way down the street, past the cast of sketchy characters who inhabited the Florida night, until I reached the gas station. This was a favored harbor for derelicts, addicts, oddballs, and a group of teenagers who regularly loitered out front listening to music on their stolen iPods. The gas pumps, partially sheltered under a pavilion of cracked plastic and shorting fluorescent lights, never seemed to be working. The station owner, a squat Indian guy with a thick, neatly trimmed beard, was always calling the cops. They'd sweep in, bust up the crowd, and leave, but like clockwork everyone would come back as soon as the cops were gone.

My usual routine consisted of panhandling or talking to random strangers, basically doing anything to rustle up a couple of bucks. I spent hours sweating people for loose change or odd dollar bills that I could combine to buy a bag of crack. Over time I had become an expert at reading people. I was a cognitive contortionist, concocting a story that I somehow sensed would earn me sympathy with whoever I was talking to. On a typical night I'd come up with ten different versions of myself. To an overweight young woman, I was the gentleman, opening her car door for her and bombarding her with compliments that I hoped she would exchange for a few bucks and a hot meal. Other times I'd hone in on a soccer mom, telling her a heartbreaking tale of my abusive father who spent his days beating the crap out of my helpless mother and me. For a trusting old lady, I'd go into high gear, often overplaying the sympathy card. “I was thrown out of my house with just the clothes on my back,” I'd say. “If you could just give me twenty dollars for a train ticket to my aunt's place in Orlando, I'd be forever grateful.”

Like a falcon searching the sky for pigeons, I assiduously surveyed my surroundings, waiting patiently as I looked for an opportunity to swoop in on that one vulnerable person who seemed ripe for the taking. All I needed was one. Getting at least one person to listen took work, but I always managed to grab someone's attention. While being a white, Jewish boy from a nice neighborhood made me stand out with dealers, here it was an asset. People tended to trust me, and cops didn't give me a second glance because I was such a “nice-looking” boy.

This wasn't my night. Hours passed and I had nothing. Now the station was strangely deserted except for one old black guy who had taken up residence on a metal newspaper rack in front of the convenience store window. I guessed that he was about seventy, tall and thin, wearing untied, tattered yellow construction boots that nearly engulfed his lower legs. His close-cropped hair tapered into an unkempt, blazing white beard that contrasted exquisitely with his dark skin. It was late. He wanted something. No one came to that gas station to fill their tank.

“What's in the bag?” he blurted out in a raspy voice that sounded like he'd consumed way too much alcohol. I didn't answer, but he motioned for me to follow him anyway. I had nothing to lose. With my bag of jewelry in hand, I followed him north from the gas station, past an unbroken stream of graffiti-covered walls, liquor stores, pawnshops, and run-down bodegas. After a while, I turned back and watched the Fort Lauderdale skyline as the last sliver of civilization faded from view and pieces of Martin Luther King Boulevard started falling into place.

This was an area of Fort Lauderdale that even the cops avoided. Dealers and hookers carried out their business here in broad daylight. At night, a cacophony of gunshots, sirens, helicopters, and anguished screams rang through the streets like some sick ghetto lullaby. The last time I'd been here I saw a tall muscular guy with a massive scar on his left cheek pounding the crap out of some poor woman, a crack whore probably. She just lay there in the fetal position, letting out agonizing groans as he punched and kicked her again and again. But I needed to be here. This was South Florida crack central.

Another hour passed. I was still trailing the old black guy. By now I was getting desperate to get out of there, but I had to see this through. I was exhausted and utterly dope-sick. I needed drugs, and I needed them now. We walked a few more blocks before hooking up with a guy who ran a small but profitable after-hours business trafficking stolen goods from a window on the side of his house. The funny thing was, the house looked perfectly normal. There were toys, soccer balls, and a little red tricycle in the front yard. But if you walked to the side of the house and knocked on the window in a certain way at a certain time of day, the guy would answer. Everything was done in code, and it was clear that the old guy had been here before.

I'd come across a lot of guys like this over the years. I'm not proud of it, but stealing was my thing when I was on the streets. It's how I survived. Besides taking things from people's cars, Gibson and I would go to trailer parks, bust in, and tear an air conditioning unit out of the wall. Then we sold it for fifty bucks. Other times I set my sights on retail stores with outdoor displays that ran on the honor system. There I found high-end saw blades, nuts, bolts, dimmer switches, and copper piping. I must have filched thousands of dollars' worth of stuff from those displays. Security was nonexistent back then. I even lifted tools that I then used to commit other crimes. Large flathead screwdrivers and heavy mallets were perfect for breaking into those huge lock-boxes we found in the back of pickup trucks belonging to contractors. They were always filled with expensive equipment. Contractors are tough guys, but we grabbed their stuff without batting an eyelash. The going rate when selling this shit was $30 for a $500 saw. It wasn't fair, but to us $30 for an hour's worth of escape was a good deal.