All or Nothing by Jesse Schenker Read Free Book Online Page A

wash my hands or blow my fucking nose. I was only interested in separating people from the contents of their medicine cabinets. I quickly found that neurotic Jewish mothers had the best stuff. I often found little cases filled with an assortment of unmarked pills. Sometimes I had no idea what I was taking, but that little fact didn’t stop me. If I got worried, I called the Poison Control Center and pretended to be a parent whose kid had accidentally swallowed a pill.
    â€œCan you help me? My son just swallowed a blue, oval-shaped pill with a line through the middle.”
    â€œSir, that’s an anti-inflammatory. You can relax.”
    Once I saw what that single oxycodone could do, it became my singular mission to find opiates—Percocet, Darvocet, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, or morphine. I wasn’t picky. These were my new drug of choice, my go-to way of filling the void and finding peace. Nothing relieves emptiness like opiates.
    In eleventh grade I started attending Atlantic Technical Center and Technical High School, a massive place just ten minutes from my parents’ house with thousands of students spread out over twenty different buildings. Housed in one of those ugly pink buildings was the Culinary Arts Program. Five mornings a week I attended classes there from 7:15 to 10:45. Then I’d drive over to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for academic classes from 12:00 to 2:40.
    Most people think of Atlantic Tech as a place for students who have zero interest in college or academics and just want to enter the workforce, but the culinary program was a little different. My classmates there ran the gamut from housewives looking to pick up a new skill to older men who were on their third career. There were also plenty of kids like me, outcasts and misfits who naturally gravitated toward food. I connected with those kids in a way I never could have with the kids at my regular high school.
    Jim Large was one of those kids who I clicked with right away. We met in my first course, “Sanitation and Safety.” The nutritionist who taught the class was young, probably in her mid-twenties. She taught us things like the difference between simple and complex carbohydrates and safe food-handling procedures. I’d already learned a lot of this material from my McDonald’s training, and Jim already had a gig cooking at one of the better restaurants in Coral Springs that I’ll call Savannah. Despite the fact that he was short and chubby with stringy blond hair and glasses, his job and the fact that he had a car—a brand-new, bright yellow Jeep—made him a big deal around campus.
    One day when I finished my shift at McDonald’s and was walking out back, Jim pulled up in his Jeep. “Jump in,” he called to me. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
    Jim took me straight to his boss at Savannah. “I got an opening for a dishwasher,” he said. I accepted the job right away. It was the perfect opportunity to watch, learn the line, and study the cooks. And it paid $7 an hour, 50 cents more than I was making at McDonald’s.
    My time at Savannah was baptism by fire. On my first night they were already short a cook. Jim approached me, looking a little nervous. “Can you help fry the calamari?” I was barely sixteen and I was manning the fry station at one of Broward County’s hottest restaurants. Keeping up wasn’t a problem. As I stood over the fryer that night with flour caked to my fingers and sweat pouring off my brow I learned something about myself: I wasn’t just passionate about food—I was good at this.
    But I was hired as a dishwasher, so after I fried my last calamari at midnight I made my way over to the dish pit, which was piled three feet high with dirty plates, pots, and pans. The garbage was overflowing, and huge globs of uneaten food littered the floor. It was disgusting, and I had to clean it all up. It was my