Free All or Nothing by Jesse Schenker

narcotiques you need a doctor’s prescription,” she said, but that didn’t deter me. “Where’s the closest doctor?” I asked her, and she informed me that there was only one doctor in the whole town. She gave me his name, and I immediately went to his office, which was inside a quaint little house.
    I lucked out—the doctor was willing to see me. Knowing this was my only shot, I put on the performance of my fucking life. I told the doctor that I had severe spinal problems and back pain and that my doctor back home had put me on morphine and OxyContin. The doctor tried to examine me, and every time he touched my back I screamed out in pain. I could’ve won an Oscar for that performance, and the doctor bought it. But they didn’t have the pills I was talking about in Europe; they sold different drugs. The doctor finally wrote me a script for a medication that was basically the equivalent of Percocet. The best part was that he included three refills.
    I grabbed the script and ran back to the beach. Fred was sitting on the floating dock in the middle of the Mediterranean. I started waving to him like a madman, shouting, “I fucking got it!” He swam back to shore, and we went straight to the pharmacy to fill the script. We each popped two of the pills and went to a local hamburger joint on the beach, waiting for our bellies to get warm. But these pills weren’t what we were used to. They were a time-release formula that worked very differently. An hour went by and nothing happened. We didn’t feel anything. Another hour passed and still nothing. At this point we both thought the pills were bogus. Then all of a sudden . . . whazam! At the exact same moment we both started to feel the telltale tickle. The warmth and the sensation of complete peace and serenity that came with it overtook us.
    From that point on we were like two pigs in shit. For the next two weeks we carried the script with us from city to city and refilled it when the pills ran out. The funny thing is, though, we didn’t want to refill it. For some reason, right after scoring we decided that we wanted to kick our habit. I guess having the safety net of the script made us feel confident enough to try. We didn’t want to admit to each other (or to ourselves) that we were hooked, so we tried to deny it by waiting as long as we could take it to score.
    By the time we got to our next stop, Rome, we were dope-sick and miserable. When I had told the guys at work about my trip, one of them told me about an amazing underground restaurant in Rome that was full of locals. Fred and I went there our first night in Italy, looking to distract ourselves with a good meal. This place gave a new meaning to the term “family-run.” The mother, father, and grandmother were all cooking in the kitchen while the kids ran around downstairs. None of them spoke any English, but it didn’t matter. I ordered their specialty: Tripe Parmesan, which was fried pig stomach baked with a classic tomato sauce and homemade cheese. I ate every bite of the amazing meal along with delicious homemade bread dipped in good olive oil. But I was so dope-sick that as soon as I got the food down, it came back up and went all over the table. The family who owned the place started cursing at me in Italian. They quickly ran over and folded up the whole tablecloth with our used plates and my vomit inside, the whole time yelling at us to uscita —to “exit.”
    That was enough for me to give up on trying to kick the pills. I filled the script, and the rest of the trip was a drug-fueled orgy of food, booze, sex, and of course pills. Fred and I went from Rome to Florence, which was the city that had the biggest impact on me in terms of food. Fred and I met a group of South African girls there who took us out to small hole-in-the-wall places that tourists didn’t know about. They always told the waiters that I was a chef so the