All or Nothing by Jesse Schenker Page B

passed.
    In time, heroin took over everything. Most days I couldn’t even make it into work. I spent my days dope-sick, trying my best to cope. When I did show up, I was late and had track marks on my arms. “I have to do this, Jesse. You’re a fucking mess,” Doug said when he fired me. Pretty ironic, I thought, since he was the one who had introduced me to the stuff.
    The worst part was having to tell my dad I’d been fired. “What’s the matter with you, Jesse?” he asked.
    Feeling like I was out of options, I confessed. “I’m using again,” I told him.
    My dad immediately kicked into high gear. “We’re going to look after you here,” he said. “We’ll monitor you, take you to meetings.” My dad has always been a problem solver, a take-charge kind of guy. He figured he could just detox me at home, but he didn’t have any clue about the depth of the addiction I was dealing with.
    My dad called a doctor friend and got me a prescription for Percocet. Then he and my mom took me to a new therapist, Larry Kreisberg. Larry had a much harder edge than Alan and didn’t take any bullshit. During our first session Larry figured out that I was shooting drugs and got straight to the point: he demanded that I confront my parents. “You’ve got to tell them the truth,” he said. Then he told me that I was going to be drug-tested at home just like I would be at a halfway house or in rehab.
    During the car ride home I told my parents that I was shooting drugs. When we got home, they cried, hugged, and said that they couldn’t believe this was happening. But the evidence was all there. My arms were littered with track marks. When they moved me out of my apartment in Boca, they’d seen how filthy and roach-infested it was. Now they finally realized this was a serious problem, and they were determined to help me fix it. They kept me under their thumb more than ever before.
    At my parents’ house I had no job, no money, and a raging drug habit. I had to get creative in order to score. I asked my dad to drive me to a meeting, walked in while he watched me from the car, and then took off to meet a dealer after he’d driven off. After a few weeks I convinced my parents to let me drive myself to meetings. This gave me an hour to score and get back to the house. But my dad wouldn’t let me get a job, and I needed money. Little by little, I started taking our musical equipment to the pawnshop, eventually pawning my drum set and my dad’s guitars, amplifiers, and stereos.
    I found new dealers who met me at the Cypress Head gates to exchange money for drugs. One of those dealers, Trevor, was totally wild. He had done some serious prison time for driving under the influence and carrying a concealed weapon, but he always seemed to have a steady supply of OC. I learned how to shoot OCs by taking the blue pill and sucking off the time-release coating, leaving just the white pill. Then I carefully removed the cellophane wrapper from the bottom of a cigarette pack, dropped the pill into the cellophane, and took the bottom of a lighter to crush the pill until it was the texture of smooth powder. I placed the powder into a spoon and cooked it until it bubbled and there was a faint trace of steam above the spoon. I pushed the plunger down. Quickly, I became an expert. I could even drive a stick shift with one hand and fix with the other.
    While this going on, Larry was counseling my parents on how to deal with me. He encouraged them to join Al-Anon and told them that they needed to cut me off at the knees. They had to stop enabling me, he told them. I needed to feel discomfort to make changes. But I knew my parents couldn’t bear the thought of me experiencing discomfort, so I never believed they would follow Larry’s advice.
    When my parents went out for the night, I ransacked their closets. I found wads of cash in a shoebox. In my