All or Nothing (20 page)

After a while we sat down, and one after the other my father, mother, and sister shared their anger and hurt. My parents told me how relieved they were when Sam told them I'd been arrested. Before that, every night they'd listened in fear for the phone to ring with the news that I was dead. My sister told me that after I left she was so devastated that she couldn't eat. I had really fucked up her world. For once, as I listened, I was completely genuine. I didn't feel like I had to talk a lot or manipulate anything. Instead, I listened to everything they said, and then I apologized, taking full ownership of my behavior. For the first time in my life I didn't defend myself to them or concoct any wild stories. “I'm clean just for today,” I told them.

I saw my parents again once I earned the right for a leave from Turning Point. They picked me up on a Sunday afternoon. As we pulled up to my childhood home I asked my parents to stop at the end of the driveway so I could bring the empty trash cans up to the garage. I wanted to show them that I was different, that things would be different from now on. While I was there, I made sure to never be out of their sight. I even asked for their permission to use the bathroom. When we talked, they wanted to know where I had been and what I had gone through. It was uncomfortable for me to talk about this, but Ms. Schumacher had told me that I needed to say it and they needed to hear it, so the truth came out little by little.

The only thing I was afraid of then was that the allergy, the desire to get high, would return. Every inch of my parents' house served as a reminder of the things I had said or done in the past to get high. But instead of dragging me back there, being home only motivated me even more to push forward with integrity. In therapy I had learned to take my parents off the pedestal and stop expecting them to be perfect. They were human and had their own baggage, just like everyone else, but they loved me and had done their best to give me a good life. Most important, I'd stopped worrying about how I fit into their belief system and started focusing on doing the right things for me.

By month four at Turning Point, I finally earned the right to look for a job off the grounds. I got a bus card and headed straight to Big City Tavern on Las Olas Boulevard. Big City Tavern was one of Broward County's better-known restaurants. I spoke with Jeff Haskell, the executive chef there, explaining that I was in work release at Turning Point. “Be here at nine tomorrow,” he said.

The next morning I showed up at 7:00. It was Jeff's day off, so I was working with the sous chef, Jared. First we toured the kitchen. “This is your station,” Jared said, pointing to the restaurant's massive grill. Every day from 11:00
A.M
. to 3:00
P.M
. the orders poured in, sandwich after sandwich of chicken, burgers, and fish. On most days we did 300 covers. There was a printer above my station, and every time an order came in I ripped off the check and put it on the rail. But eventually I got so busy that I stopped looking at the checks to see what the customers had ordered. I just started piling salmon, hamburgers, and chicken breasts on the grill, figuring I'd be right more often than not. If I just kept firing food, I knew that eventually I would need whatever I was putting on the grill. Over time I learned that grill like it was the back of my hand. The right side got really hot, so I put things there that I wanted to char or crisp. The middle of the grill was slightly cooler, so I used it to toast buns and put things there if I didn't want them to cook through.

After work, my apron was always covered in a mixture of sweat and seasoning. I looked down at the printer paper collecting on the floor. Over the course of my shift, the entire roll had printed out, stretching out over 250 feet to the kitchen's back door. Soon I picked up a couple of night shifts, which were even crazier. From 5:00 to 10:00
P.M
. the grill got hammered with orders for filet mignon, strip steaks, and trout. My complete and utter focus in the kitchen had returned. The orders kept coming in, and I found immense satisfaction in turning them out one after the other. This quickly became my new high.

Thanks in part to my busy schedule of work and therapy, my six months at Turning Point passed quickly. After “graduating,” I moved into a halfway house on Federal Highway with fifteen other recovering addicts. I remained focused, working all day and attending meetings at night. Once a month I checked in with my probation officer and took a urine test, and in between my probation officer popped in unannounced to check up on me at work or at the halfway house. I was very careful. Other cooks offered me a ride to or from work, but I always said no. I didn't know what was in their pockets, and if I was caught in a car with someone carrying drugs, I knew I'd get arrested for breaking my probation. My caution paid off. After a year my probation was terminated early for good behavior.

At this point my parents still weren't really involved in my life, but we saw each other occasionally and talked on the phone. I was very careful with them, always walking on eggshells, because I didn't want to say anything that would ruin the relationships we were just starting to rebuild. Soon I found that it was good to spend time together so they could see firsthand how I was living, rather than having to take my word for it when I told them about it over the phone. In the past I had always used words to manipulate my family, and I didn't want to risk them thinking that I was going down that road again. I wanted to show them my integrity with actions rather than words.

I worked up the nerve to invite my family to dinner at Big City, figuring that seeing me in my element was the best way for them to know how I was doing. When they agreed, I reserved the restaurant's nicest table and made sure we would be taken care of by our best server. I even bought a suit and tie. At dinner I didn't want to seem self-serving, so I asked about their lives, and when they asked me questions, I simply answered. It felt amazingly liberating to have nothing to hide or prove, and we were able to enjoy being together in a way we never could have in the past. I looked around the table and told them honestly, “I'm so grateful that we're all together again.” At the end of the night I made sure to buy dinner, my way of showing them how determined I was to make my own way.

It had been so long since we had any semblance of a normal relationship; we were starting over from scratch. Slowly we built a new relationship. We started talking once a week, then twice a week. At first we saw each other once a month, and then it was twice a month, and then three times a month. Eventually we started to get comfortable around each other again, joking around and talking about music and sports like we used to. I was going to a lot of meetings, and they were attending Al-Anon meetings, so we had those new ways of connecting too. Just as I was really getting into food again and putting all of my energy and passion into building my career, little by little I got my family back.

My skills in the kitchen didn't go unnoticed by Chef Jeff or the partners of the Big City Restaurant Group, which owned several local restaurants. They were opening a new place in Coral Gables called City Cellar, which was basically an upscale wine bar. I was offered the position of sous chef. Now I was next in line after Jeff. Delegating was new for me, but it felt like a natural evolution. I was determined to lead by example, walking in every morning at seven and just going for it. No task was too menial. I cleaned the grill, scrubbed the walk-in, and even took out the garbage if I had to.

At City Cellar we made slightly more complicated dishes—Veal Scaloppine with Mushrooms, Grilled Lamb Shank with Parsnips, Glazed Duck Breast with Risotto, and Scallops with an Apricot Glaze. I did everything: flipping vegetables, throwing filets on the grill, tossing Caesar salads, and even pushing pizzas in the brick oven. On some nights Jeff and I knocked out 100 covers by ourselves while the other cooks just watched us in awe.

Jeff had every Sunday and Monday off, and on those days I was put in charge of the kitchen. Determined to kill it, I took advantage of my freedom in the kitchen by playing around with the specials, always pushing the envelope. One night I came up with a duck breast that was a play on saltimbocca. Instead of veal, I used duck that I pounded out thin, adding sage and a rich duck glaze. It was tender and delicious, and the customers loved it. I started experimenting with the polenta we served, rolling it out and mounting it with mushrooms and truffles before putting it in the fryer.

When I first started at Big City Grill, I kept to myself and focused solely on my work and recovery. It was my first real job in almost two years, and I was determined to do things right instead of being tempted by the other cooks' partying. But City Cellar was different. I was in charge. As I grew more secure in my role there and in my sobriety I built relationships with the other chefs. We shared war stories of our time in other kitchens.

I may have been clean, but my addictive behavior never went away. The longer I worked the program the more I was able to find a healthy outlet for my obsessiveness: food. I had started collecting restaurant menus as a kid, and now my collection had exploded into literally thousands of menus. In the kitchen I told the other chefs about the work Charlie Trotter and Thomas Keller were doing, along with a dozen other chefs I admired. Without drugs to spend my paychecks on, I bought cookbooks instead, devouring at least ten new cookbooks each week. My favorites were Andrew Dornenburg's masterful
Culinary Artistry;
Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky's
The Elements of Taste,
which redefines the idea of “taste” and gave me a whole new perspective on creating and characterizing food; Ferran Adrià's
El Bulli,
which raises cooking to an art form; Jacques Pepin's
La Technique,
which exquisitely but simply illuminates the fundamentals of cooking; and Michel Bras's
Essential Cuisine,
which sent my head spinning the first time I opened it.

Over time I built up a small library, and I studied these books the way a medical student pores over an anatomy text. The guys at the restaurant gave me shit for it, but I didn't care. I found the same peace within the pages of those cookbooks that I had first felt cutting vegetables at Nana Mae's feet.

When City Cellar had a new refrigerator delivered, it came in a huge wooden crate. The next day I came to work and found that Jeff had put a sign on the crate that read
JESSE'S COOKBOOK COLLECTION—DON'T TOUCH
.

Jeff may have made fun of my obsessiveness, but he saw that I wasn't talking out of my ass when it came to food. I was fast and skilled and, most important, passionate. The way he listened when I spoke and began to solicit my advice told me that I had earned his respect. Soon I could tell that we had crossed a new threshold in our relationship. We were no longer merely an employee and employer; we were colleagues.

Soon after starting at City Cellar, I moved out of the halfway house. I rented a beat-up studio in Miami in the back of a little house off Forty-Seventh Street. It was smack-dab in the middle of Little Haiti. Some of my neighbors had taken the entire backseat out of a Cadillac and placed it on the sidewalk in front of their home. They spent all day out there, playing dominoes. When I passed by, they offered me drugs. “No thanks,” I told them. “I'm good.” It may sound strange, but I loved that apartment and felt completely at home in that neighborhood. It kept me grounded and allowed me to keep to myself, which were both key to my recovery.

While I was living in Miami, I found out that my uncle Bruce in New Paltz had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. I flew up to see him in the hospital. Lying there, thin and pale, he told me how proud he was of me for getting clean. His death only a few months later was devastating. Thank God I was so involved in the program; I needed all of the support around me to come through experiencing the full weight of grief in my early sobriety.

By then I had earned enough money to buy a well-used Toyota Tercel. I opened a bank account and even paid for car insurance. When the Tercel died, I leased a brand-new Suzuki Forenza. I was finally approaching my life like a responsible adult, and I did it all on my own. It was the first time I felt proud of myself for something other than cooking.

After a while my parents came to visit me in Miami, but as soon as they got off I-95 my mom started freaking out. “Why would you want to live here?” my mother asked before she had even gotten out of the car. In the past her comments would have angered me, but I stayed calm and reminded myself that she still didn't know the details of everything I had been through. The studio in Little Haiti was a palace compared to some of the other places I'd called home. Slowly I grew to accept my mother for who she is. I was more determined than ever to create my own world.

Bain-Marie

Bain-marie
: Also known as a water bath or double boiler, a bain-marie is a container filled with hot water to heat materials gradually to a fixed temperature or to keep them warm over a period of time.