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

dealer we met there offered to sell us heroin, but by the time he took off with our money we realized he had ripped us off. Whatever we snorted made us both sick and didn’t even get us high. We sat at Bulldog’s Café for hours, smoking weed, drinking beer, and strategizing how to score some pills.
    Before taking that trip, I had never even considered paying for sex, but there was no way I wasn’t going to take advantage of Amsterdam’s active (and legal) sex trade. Besides being dope-sick, Fred and I were both missing our girlfriends—we needed something to distract us. And who could resist the windows advertising a 50 GUILDER SUCK AND FUCK ? We walked around for maybe an hour and a half, looking at all the prospects, before I finally settled on one blond woman. She had a nice smile and gleaming white teeth and was wearing an orange bikini. I walked over to the door. “What’s up?” I asked her.
    â€œFifty guilders for a suck and fuck,” she replied with a coy smile.
    â€œAre you naked?”
    â€œThat’s twenty-five extra,” she told me.
    I realized I’d better make sure I knew all the fine print, so I started asking about positions. Finally I asked her, “How about one hundred for everything?” She agreed, and I thought I had covered all my bases, but once I got inside she told me that the deal was only for twenty minutes. “That’s not good enough,” I protested. “I need thirty minutes.”
    In response, the woman started laughing. “Everyone says they want thirty minutes,” she told me, “but they always finish before fifteen.” I took that as a challenge, but I ended up losing twenty guilders because I was done in less than five.
    Fred and I made our way to the South of France, stopping first in Paris and then moving on to St. Raphael, a beautiful coastal town on the Mediterranean. On the trains, we chain-smoked cigarettes and watched the graffiti pass us by. We could barely appreciate how beautiful St. Raphael was because we were so dope-sick and miserable, but I was able to appreciate the town’s amazing food markets.
    At all the restaurants I had worked at in Florida, we ordered what we needed from vendors and the food came already broken down. We never saw an actual butcher or even a whole animal. But at the French markets the butchers sold directly to the customers, and their products were incredible. I stopped at a butcher’s stall and stared in awe at a simple chicken, amazed by how small and white it was. In America the chickens were huge and yellow because they were stuffed from a diet of corn, but in France they didn’t manipulate the soil or the animals in any way. I moved on to a vegetable stand and without thinking reached out to touch a beautiful purple eggplant, but the farmer quickly slapped my hand away. He took so much pride in the produce his family grew that he insisted on handing the eggplant to me. This was the first time I really thought about sourcing ingredients and where the food I cooked with actually came from.
    Despite our surroundings, Fred and I were having a hard time getting by without a steady supply of pills. One afternoon we sat on the beach, staring out into the turquoise water. Out of nowhere Fred jumped up and announced, “I need to sweat this shit out.” He pointed to an enormous floating dock maybe a mile from the shore. “I’m going to swim to that dock,” he told me. As I watched Fred start swimming I knew I didn’t want to sweat it out with him. Instead, I became completely determined to do whatever I had to do to get us drugs.
    I immediately left the beach and walked to the nearest pharmacy. I asked for the pharmacist and made up an elaborate story about losing my luggage and the pain medication that I desperately needed along with it. The pharmacist didn’t speak much English, but she got the gist of what I was saying. “For