night at 10:00 my roommate asked me if he could borrow my car so he could drive to Miami to score. I said yes, adding, âIf youâre not back in three hours, Iâm going to report the car stolen.â When 4:00 A.M. rolled around and he was still nowhere in sight, I stayed true to my word. I found a groundskeeper and told him that my car had been stolen. About an hour later my roommate had been dropped off by the police. The car was wrecked. Apparently they couldnât wait to get high, so they shot up while driving and drove headfirst into a palm tree. I stuck to my story that heâd taken the car without my permission, and my insurance ended up covering the cost.
By month six, I graduated from Challenges and moved on to Incentives, a halfway house in Boca Raton. It was run by a couple of guys who were former heroin addicts from New York. They had relocated to Florida for their recovery and were both twenty-five years sober. Those hard-core guys would have done anything to help me get clean. At Incentives, everyone had to work, and I landed a sweet gig at a happening new Asian fusion restaurant in Boca Raton. I was responsible for the pasta station, cooking modern variations of classic pasta dishes with an Asian flare.
One of our signature pastas was Lobster Bolognese. Instead of the tomato sauce, spaghetti, and ground beef in a traditional Bolognese, I made lobster bisque with red chilies and Korean pepper flakes and served it with potato gnocchi and a whole Maine lobster. Right away I was back into it, getting to work early to cut the carrots, onions, and celery for the bisque and take apart the lobsters, preserving each claw so that it would look pretty perched on top of the dish. Another dish I loved to cook was a Thai pancake made of equal parts coconut milk and rice flour, whisked together into a batterlike consistency. I cooked the pancakes in small cast-iron pans, folded them up like tacos, and then stuffed them with rock shrimp and bean sprouts.
At this time a lot of chefs were bringing ingredients from Southeast Asia into the States, turning Asian fusion cooking into a big trend, but even before the culinary world was saturated with this style of cooking I enjoyed learning how to use classic techniques with new ingredients. I heated up sesame oil until it was smoking and then poured it over a piece of raw fish, loving the sound of the sizzle when the hot oil hit the fish.
But as much as I enjoyed working at the restaurant, I also wanted to get high. Soon I found a way to smuggle in OCs through my old coworker Dan. Once I had the job I moved out of the halfway house and managed to convince my parents to rent me an apartment. âIâm doing really good, and Iâve got a job,â I told them. They were so relieved that I was clean (or so they thought) that they rented me a nice apartment on Verde Trail in Boca.
At the new restaurant I hooked up with a guy named Ya-Ya who was a badass cook. We worked the line together, but he ran fucking circles around me. He was like an acrobat, grabbing hot sizzle trays with his bare hands and using his fingertips to flip over softshell crabs that had been cooking at 350 degrees in the deep fryer. Ya-Ya topped off his culinary gymnastics with a profitable side business dealing cocaine. It didnât take long for him to persuade me to give it a try.
One night when I knew everyone else had left work I went into the restaurantâs bathroom and dumped out some of the coke, using my driverâs license to form a single straight line. I rolled up a dollar-bill and put one end in my left nostril. Using my right index finger, I closed my right nostril and snorted in as hard as I could. Almost immediately, my nose and throat went numb. It was well past 2:00 A.M. when I left the restaurant, but I felt full of energy. Soon I had a new schedule of getting by on blow during the week and looking forward to weekends with my OCs.
It didnât take long for
By month six, I graduated from Challenges and moved on to Incentives, a halfway house in Boca Raton. It was run by a couple of guys who were former heroin addicts from New York. They had relocated to Florida for their recovery and were both twenty-five years sober. Those hard-core guys would have done anything to help me get clean. At Incentives, everyone had to work, and I landed a sweet gig at a happening new Asian fusion restaurant in Boca Raton. I was responsible for the pasta station, cooking modern variations of classic pasta dishes with an Asian flare.
One of our signature pastas was Lobster Bolognese. Instead of the tomato sauce, spaghetti, and ground beef in a traditional Bolognese, I made lobster bisque with red chilies and Korean pepper flakes and served it with potato gnocchi and a whole Maine lobster. Right away I was back into it, getting to work early to cut the carrots, onions, and celery for the bisque and take apart the lobsters, preserving each claw so that it would look pretty perched on top of the dish. Another dish I loved to cook was a Thai pancake made of equal parts coconut milk and rice flour, whisked together into a batterlike consistency. I cooked the pancakes in small cast-iron pans, folded them up like tacos, and then stuffed them with rock shrimp and bean sprouts.
At this time a lot of chefs were bringing ingredients from Southeast Asia into the States, turning Asian fusion cooking into a big trend, but even before the culinary world was saturated with this style of cooking I enjoyed learning how to use classic techniques with new ingredients. I heated up sesame oil until it was smoking and then poured it over a piece of raw fish, loving the sound of the sizzle when the hot oil hit the fish.
But as much as I enjoyed working at the restaurant, I also wanted to get high. Soon I found a way to smuggle in OCs through my old coworker Dan. Once I had the job I moved out of the halfway house and managed to convince my parents to rent me an apartment. âIâm doing really good, and Iâve got a job,â I told them. They were so relieved that I was clean (or so they thought) that they rented me a nice apartment on Verde Trail in Boca.
At the new restaurant I hooked up with a guy named Ya-Ya who was a badass cook. We worked the line together, but he ran fucking circles around me. He was like an acrobat, grabbing hot sizzle trays with his bare hands and using his fingertips to flip over softshell crabs that had been cooking at 350 degrees in the deep fryer. Ya-Ya topped off his culinary gymnastics with a profitable side business dealing cocaine. It didnât take long for him to persuade me to give it a try.
One night when I knew everyone else had left work I went into the restaurantâs bathroom and dumped out some of the coke, using my driverâs license to form a single straight line. I rolled up a dollar-bill and put one end in my left nostril. Using my right index finger, I closed my right nostril and snorted in as hard as I could. Almost immediately, my nose and throat went numb. It was well past 2:00 A.M. when I left the restaurant, but I felt full of energy. Soon I had a new schedule of getting by on blow during the week and looking forward to weekends with my OCs.
It didnât take long for
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