All or Nothing by Jesse Schenker Page A

me to need more, though. A little bit of coke during the week just wasn’t cutting it. One day at work I was dope-sick. My pupils were dilated, and I felt nauseous. Every few minutes I had to run to the bathroom. I noticed Doug, the sous chef, watching me, and thought I was about to get in trouble for using on the job, but instead Doug approached me when I was in the walk-in gathering vegetables. He closed the door behind us and handed me a needle and a small bag of heroin. “You know what to do, right?” he asked.
    â€œOf course,” I said.
    â€œOkay, you owe me,” he said. “Get straight so you can get your ass back to work.”
    I had never shot drugs before. The Buprenex I’d gotten at the pain clinic was injected intramuscularly, not into the vein. Heroin was a whole new experience. I went into the bathroom and found an empty stall. I put the heroin in the same spoon I used to baste fish and mixed it with water. Putting the lighter to the bottom, I let it simmer for just a second. Then I tore a piece of cotton from a cigarette and threw it in the spoon. Mesmerized, I watched the cotton absorb the speckled brown liquid before I placed the needle in the spoon and carefully drew the liquid into the syringe, making sure to remove any lingering air bubbles. I rolled up the left sleeve of my chef’s coat. There was no need for a tourniquet; I had veins that would give any junkie a wet dream. I jabbed the needle into my forearm, watching the blood snake into the syringe.
    Pushing the plunger into that single vein was perhaps the most gratifying experience of my entire life to that point. In an instant, my whole body softened; years’ worth of tension lifted right off me. From then on, I alternated. Some days I did heroin, and on other days I stuck to OCs. But there was no doubt about it. The worm had turned. There was no going back from here.

Ballotine
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    Ballotine : A boned chicken or duck thigh, stuffed with ground meat and other ingredients, that can be shaped like a sausage or re-formed to look like the leg, often with a clean piece of bone left in the end. Tied together to hold its shape and sometimes stitched up with a trussing needle, a ballotine is cooked by roasting, braising, or poaching.
    S oon I was shooting up every day, but I still didn’t really know the ins and outs of intravenous drug use. No one had handed me a manual to consult. I had to learn as I went. Doug gave me some pointers. “Save your cottons,” he told me. “When you run short on dope, you can rinse the cottons and squeeze out the last little bit of drug.” From then on, I stored my cottons in an old cigar box that I kept on my night table. When needed, I loaded them into the barrel of a syringe, drew in water, and squeezed until they were dry. I squirted the contents onto a spoon and used a new cotton to draw the smack into a syringe.
    But one thing Doug never warned me about was cotton fever. Sometimes cotton fibers break off from the filter, and if they’re dirty or carrying some bacteria that makes it into your bloodstream, you’re fucked. Most addicts don’t make it a point to carry sterile cotton balls or Q-tips. A clean filtered cigarette can do the trick, but most of the time you have to find a cigarette butt on the ground, in an ashtray, or from the garbage, which I did all the time.
    I got my first taste of cotton fever one night about thirty minutes after shooting up. It whacked me upside the fucking head like I was on day two of the world’s worst flu. My ears started ringing, and I felt a vicelike pressure on each side of my head. Sweat started oozing out of my every pore, and I began shaking uncontrollably. Then came bone-numbing chills as my temperature spiked to 105 degrees. I filled my bathtub with scalding hot water to try to warm up, but nothing helped. I just started shaking violently and vomiting nonstop. Thankfully, after a few hours it simply