Free All or Nothing by Jesse Schenker Page A

restaurant’s chef would come out and talk to us, but I wasn’t really a chef. I was just a kid who wanted to be one. When the chefs came out, the girls translated for me, and I learned how passionate these chefs were about the ingredients they used and about making sure they were locally sourced.
    One night we ordered a dish with veal head and the chef came out beforehand to show us the head. Then he proceeded to tell us in broken English all about the farm where it was raised, which had been run by his family’s neighbor for several generations. He explained that because the chickens used the land first, their feces fertilized the soil. Then the veal ate that grass. We could have walked from the restaurant to the farm—that’s how close it was—and the chef told me that he wouldn’t use anything from more than ten or twelve kilometers away.
    Another night the girls took us down a back alley in a quiet, residential neighborhood to a restaurant called Il Latini. Everything was dark and silent until we turned the corner and suddenly saw a guy holding a clipboard, calling out names, and forty or fifty people waiting to go inside. When we finally sat down, hanging overhead were dozens of hams that were sliced and thrown down on the table with fresh melon. We ate ribolita, a traditional Tuscan soup made with kale, savoy cabbage, leeks, carrots, celery, red onion, white beans, and tomato and thickened with whole wheat bread; wild boar cooked with tomatoes, red wine, and chocolate; and a delicious Florentine steak. I had never seen these simple, hearty dishes in the United States, but they were just part of a normal day in Florence. Through the debauchery I took all of this in and saved the menus from every restaurant I ate at.
    On our last night in Florence, Fred and I went for a walk past the train station to the city’s only McDonald’s, which was a known hangout for hookers. We saw one girl who was tall and thin with dark, flawless skin, wearing a trench coat and nothing else. I took her back to the hotel, but I was so wasted that I couldn’t come. She was servicing me in the bathtub while I looked at a porn magazine, but no matter what she did, there was no way it was going to happen. “I’m going to have to charge you double,” she told me in disgust. Amazingly, this wasn’t the last time I would hear that line. It’s embarrassing but true—dope dick is real.
    As soon as the girl left the hotel room we bolted for the train to Montpellier in the South of France, which was leaving in less than an hour. It was night, but we were too high to sleep on the eight-hour train ride. The time of day meant nothing to us on that trip. The hours blended into each other in a haze of drugs and sheer momentum. In Montpellier, we stumbled out of the nightclubs at four or five in the morning, when the bakers were just showing up to work and starting production. On the walk back to the hotel the streets were suffused with the sweet smell of fresh pastries.
    One night in Montpellier we went to an American nightclub that was blasting Nirvana and had a Chevrolet coming out through the roof. We were already strung out on pills and immediately started throwing back tequila shots and smoking hash. After a while I couldn’t stay awake any longer.
    â€œDude, I’m fucking done,” I told Fred. “I’m going back to the room.”
    â€œOkay, I think I’ll stay a little longer,” he replied.
    â€œCool, bring back some chicks,” I said, but I was mostly joking. I went to the hotel and passed out. The next thing I knew Fred was shaking me.
    â€œJesse, wake up!” I rubbed my eyes, put on my glasses, and looked up. Fred was standing at the foot of the bed surrounded by five women. None of them spoke any English, but they understood ménage à trois quite well.
    The final stop on our trip, and also the wildest, was Barcelona. On the train ride there