Out Of The Slammer And Into The Fire, Part 3

(Part 1 and 2 are posted below)

After Mitch had been released from parole custody, you could see his personality balanced on a fulcrum. Where he was at in his mind really wasn’t a good place, and he had so many options to choose from it made him teeter and wobble and want to talk about himself a lot.

One of the reasons I’ve always been granted so much luck in life, is because I am a good listener and I like people’s stories. If you have interesting ones- like Mitch- I’ll happily grant you all the air space you need and let you orate until your lips hurt and your brain feels emptied and you start wandering around inside the bottom of yourself.

People are attracted to that, and they’ll want to be near me in times of great confusion. I’ll work, I’ll nod, I’ll ask questions at appropriate moments and I’m not too shy about asking rather pointed questions that fly right to the vital organs and explode.

“Ever think about the kids who stayed up all night and cried because their parents were up all night on cocaine and Bourbon fighting and screaming at each other?”

“Wha?”

“When you were selling, did you ever go to the clinics where all the addicts lined up for their methadone?”

“I never sold heroine.”

“Still, did you ever sit in a room full of coke-addicts who lost everything and everyone because they happened to be in that percentage that couldn’t handle the drug?”

“They made me sit in on those meetings in jail.”

“Do you ever feel partially responsible for the lives ruined by the drugs you sold?”

Like that.

I would press Mitch sometimes when he started glamorizing his past life (which WAS glamorous, for the most part) while he wore cheap leather work gloves and helped me dig out around a foundation or wore a dust mask and helped me by sanding back doors and windowsills and cabinet faces and what not…

It was like Mitch was trying to rediscover what it was he believed in, and I was his sounding board. He wasn’t suited to doing construction labor, but he kept coming back, earning his laborers pay, while word of mouth kept me way busier than I really wanted to be, as I was filling the niche between dragging in a handy neighbor, and the contractors who had to charge double to make up for governmental requirements.

My jobs were usually four or five days long, and my customers were always somebody that knew somebody that knew me. My job was really an interesting way to “network”, as I went to the homes of people who knew people who knew people I’ve known.

People can’t pretend to be something they are not when you have to roll their bed out of the way to look at missing baseboard, for example.

“Oh my! Look at the toys!”

So as a carpenter of that ilk, you get to know people pretty quickly.

Mitch always had to be a lie, though, while working for me. He didn’t look or act like the laborer sort, and people were rightfully suspicious of him with his eloquent manner of speaking and his knowledge of many subjects one would classify as “snobby” if one were from the trades.

Wines. Fancy restaurants. Jazz. Classical literature.

“Shut up Mitch and take that toilet outside…”

Mitch would tell people he was working with me in order to build his own house next year. It was a dream of his and people soon grew to like Mitch and admire his noble pursuit and I would just not say a word about it but it was funny as hell to me anyway.

All this while- though I was much less impacted than Mitch was and outwardly you couldn’t really tell- I was suffering from a really brutal depression of my own. Something had gone chemically wrong in my body, set off by a few striking events and the same loss of self-image Mitch was experiencing, though to a lesser degree. Fifteen years of traveling had gone by and for some reason, the fact that I was now “home” struck me pretty hard. I too felt a bit trapped and boxed-in and unsure of where or what I should do next.

(to be continued…)