Read Online All or Nothing by Jesse Schenker - Free Book Online

argument was simple—I was attending culinary school by day and cooking at restaurants by night. By then I’d gotten really good and had been promoted to the front of the line at The Seawater Grill. For once I was honest with my parents about my intentions. “I don’t want to go to high school,” I told them. “I’m passionate about cooking, and I’m good at it. Why don’t you just let me get a GED?” My parents gave me no resistance and were completely understanding about my decision. “Just be the best chef you can be, Jesse” was all my father said.
    Once I dropped out of high school, I focused on cooking even more. At school I was studying “Baking and Pastry” with Chef Steve, learning how to make all sorts of quick breads, Danish, cakes, pies, and tarts. I never had much of a sweet tooth, but when I made puff pastry for the first time, laying down layer after layer of dough and getting my hands covered in grease in the process, I fell in love and gained a whole new appreciation for fresh baked goods.
    Meanwhile, I felt that I’d learned just about everything I could from working at The Seawater Grill and was eager to move on. Jim was working at Graffiti and felt the same way. We talked to Chef Steve, who said we should be working at the best restaurant in the county, an award-winning café I’ll call Smith’s in Pompano Beach. Smith’s was run by a well-respected celebrity chef. Jim went down there and got a job immediately. He was always ahead of the game, but I was younger and lived farther away. For my seventeenth birthday, I begged my parents to make a reservation at Smith’s. I’d called numerous times, but the chef either wasn’t there or didn’t want to talk to me. This time, when we got there, Jim was in the back making salads, and he introduced me to the chef. He must have admired my persistence because he told me to show up for work the next day at three o’clock.
    The job at Smith’s paid only $7 an hour. It was less money than I was making at Seawater, but a step up on the career ladder.
    I was put in charge of a dish called Cav Pie, one of Smith’s signature dishes. It was basically a layer of sour cream covered with onions and four different colors of caviar. My job was to put the mixture into a mold so that it resembled a pie. Then I cut it into small wedges, put it on a plate with toast points, and passed it through the window to the grill cook. For the dinner shift, everyone would sit down at the same time and I’d quickly get slammed. But there was a fire inside of me to be the fastest, best cook they’d ever seen. I figured out little tricks that helped me go faster, like cutting the ends off the bread and putting it in the toaster ahead of time, so that when the order came through all I had to do was cut the bread. On my first night I was knocking out the Cav Pie so efficiently that the grill cook looked at me in awe and asked, “Damn, kid, are you pre-toasting the bread?” In less than six weeks I was up on the line cooking alongside him.
    But as my addiction to OxyContin grew, my performance at work suffered. I started coming in late and leaving early, or showing up to work dope-sick on days when I couldn’t get any pills. I started out strong at Smith’s but eventually became the weak link as I started letting my addiction get in the way of my career.
    Jim and I were doing some crazy shit. We were popping all sorts of pharmaceuticals—whatever we could find, really. If we couldn’t get ahold of anything we wanted, sometimes we’d drive through the ghetto in Fort Lauderdale and pick up some cocaine. A handful of times we wound up getting crystal meth, instead, but had no idea until taking a bump and experiencing the worst burn imaginable shooting up into our brains. An hour later when our brief euphoria transformed into discombobulated pacing, we realized that