Out Of The Slammer And Into The Fire Part 2

(See below post for part 1)

There are some things I did learn about Mitch that I can tell you. One of his dealers ran off with something like 80,OOO dollars and left him owing 60,000 to someone who probably would have killed him had he not got his money. Mitch owned a Bentley which he sold and before he went to prison, he paid off all of his debts. He was considered “upstanding” in “the business” and had not burnt a bridge. The whole reason for Mitch driving pot back East was a desperate attempt to come up with the money to pay his debts in the first place. Mitch fit the profile (weighed-down rental car, out of state plates) and was pulled over with no other probable cause.

Mitch was in college when he discovered the lifestyle he was to live for over fifteen years. He fancied himself a character in a novel- a bit of smelly old Pan, a bit of Dionysius, a whole bunch of Dudley Moore playing “Arthur”. He was well read and very bright. He took classes in poetry and the classics. He played the guitar admirably and sang passably. He was a great cook. He loved his role as the character everybody was happy to see. When Mitch blew in, hundreds of dollars were burned for any reason whatsoever, if it meant a good time. Mitch had no credit cards and no credit, even, but he had stacks of 100 dollar bills he loved to splay out like a fan and toss down like playing cards.

When I met Mitch, all this had been stripped from him, and you could actually see him struggling inside of himself to reinvent himself. He was like the NFL player whose career ended too early, or like a kid whose circumstances forced him to grow up in a short amount of time.

I continued to give Mitch work here and there as he had no other income. He got a job selling boats on commission, but it was the end of the season. He sanded things for me, dug holes, did some pretty shitty labor work which had never bothered me because I loved the exercise. A few months passed, and Mitch was nearing the end of his parole check-ins, and the idea of it all was exciting for him in ways I can only imagine.

Mitch had to go in twice a week and pee in front of his parole guy, filling a small jar. Any substance abuse (alcohol was OK, it was legal, after all) and his parole was violated and he would have been arrested and sent back to Chicago to finish out his sentence, which was another eighteen months, I think.

But Mitch had been home long enough to have been invited by old friends to come down to “The City” for a visit. My construction laborer was picked up in a paid-for Limo out of his one-room apartment with a loft, and driven into the city to see some old friends. Something about the ride down in the car and the excitement in the city and the good times swirling around Mitch, made him forget his new place in the world and remember his old place, and by eleven that night Mitch had grabbed a mirror being passed around and snorted himself up a long line of coke.

The effect was virtually immediate- “Oh shit! What have I done?”

You can’t run to a bathroom and stick your finger down your throat with a white powder you just sucked up your nose. It doesn’t work. It’s in there and you had better start packing, because a pee test was coming- the last one, mind you- on Monday and this was Friday night. Suddenly, Mitch was not having any more fun and the reality shook him and turned his face a pale-freckled white and in a matter of only a few minutes, Mitch had gone from party party Mitch to a nervous wreck, a true nervous wreck, a man facing another eighteen months in a prison that had done some bad things to him already.

He showed up to work on Monday on time and looking like a man who had not slept. I teased him about partying (I knew he was going out on Friday) and he told me what happened. He was sucking down juices by the bottle-full as much as he could tolerate, hoping to wash the coke out of his system before the test. He was pretty worthless to me as a worker because he kept having to go to the bathroom as well as the fact that his mind had been obliterated by worry.

His friends all told him that the flushing system would do the trick but Mitch, facing prison, was not so confident. The weight of it all made him sit down outside on a gravel driveway and put his face in his hands. I went out and sat next to him, and he talked, and I listened.

He made deals with a God he didn’t believe in. He made deals with the devil, as well. He promised the universe that if he got through this, he would give up even beer. He’d be a clean and sober and dedicated man from here on out. Everything would be different. Everything. If the universe would just let him slide past this one mistake, just this once, he’d be a force of good and never would he add stuff into his body that made him act silly and happy.

He left at 2pm. To make the 2:15 appointment. At 3:15, he was back, an enormous smile on his face, his shoulders elevated, his chest and belly dancing before him and his arms dancing around like rubber snakes…
“What the hell happened?” I asked him. I knew he got through it, but I couldn’t figure out how.

“He forgot! He forgot! He forgot!”

“What?”

“He forgot to make me pee in the jar. He forgot! He forgot!”

“He forgot?”

“He forgot! He made me fill out a bunch of forms for release, and then he was supposed to make me pee one final time but he forgot!”

“You didn’t pee?”

“I DIDN’T HAVE TO PEE!”

“That’s amazing!”

“I DIDN’T HAVE TO MOTHER FUCKING PEE!”

“The universe was looking out for you."

"You're darn right it was!"

"What’re you gonna do now?”

“Oh man, I gotta pee like a fucking racehorse! I’ll be right back!”

Mitch tromped into the house we were working on in an elevated state of joy and relief and inflated bladder pressure. I sat down on something and just thought about what had transpired. One moment, a man was going to jail for another eighteen months, but due to the absent-mindedness of another man, he was free to pee where he pleased. My god. Sometimes, it all was just a miraculous mishmash of happenstance, wasn’t it? I sat there and had a profound moment of my own.

Or tried to anyway.

Mitch poured out of the house in a jovial Mitch mood. He raised an arm to put it around my shoulder like a drunk friend preparing to stagger home singing…

“COME ON!” he sang. “LET’S GET OUT OF HERE AND GO GRAB A BEER! ON ME!”

It sounded good so I went, and we had a grand old time celebrating in a bar where Norman Greenbaum sometimes hung out on Friday nights…

(to be continued...)