Out Of The Slammer And Into The Fire

Mitch came in the room with his head down and his eyes averted, everything hidden beneath a ball cap that really didn’t suit him. I was still working on his loft when I swung my legs over the side of it and forced him to look up. He looked scared, Mitch did, and he looked defeated. Laughter came out of his mouth as he talked, but you could tell it wasn’t real.

I had been asked by a pair of friends to convert a garage behind one of their houses into a small rental. It was for "friends", which meant I was working on my own, for cheap, doing the labor as well as the carpentry. They wanted the space in a hurry because a friend of theirs was getting out of jail, and they wanted to help him out if they could.

The famous Mitch. The wild one. The cyclone of fun that blew in and out of people’s lives, spreading around the money he made mostly from selling coke, treating his friends to wild parties with strippers and clowns and ponies for the kids.

I had heard all about Mitch from my friends, though I had never met him. He had been living at his parent’s house back East while his lawyer-brother did his best to keep him out of jail. It was hard to argue, in the best of circumstances, that 300 pounds of high grade Marijuana in your trunk was for “personal use”. So after a year at his parent’s house, Mitch spent two years in a Chicago penitentiary. All in all he had been gone from the area almost four years, and I had been in the area less than three.

The Mitch I met while working on his loft was not the Mitch I had heard about. Two years in a prison for felons near Chicago had turned his confidence into cowardice. He had trouble even meeting my eyes, which for most people, was not hard at all. He had trouble trying to find traction on the ground again for a purpose in life. He was disoriented. He had no real skills other than a personality people wanted to sidle up next to- and that had been squashed by the clanking of jailhouse doors and the true evilness of some inmates Mitch had to face on a daily basis.

So I hired him.

Well, OK, so I told my friends to hire him. I wasn’t ready for Mitch, and yet here he was. It seemed like the logical next step and so we all took it.

Mitch was a hopeless worker in the sense that he had no clue how to work. But he was also eager to just keep himself moving, to be productive with a job of any kind- something he could point to as he went in to talk with his parole officer.

Mitch told me a lot of things I can’t tell you.

As he worked for me, he talked and I listened. Some of his stories were really quite incongruous with the man standing in front of me, humping dirt with a shovel.

A few weeks passed and Mitch got a visit from his old girlfriend. “Coke Whore” was a term I had seen used frivolously by many. This girl was Thai and English and stunning and showed up in black boots over her knees and a black mini-skirt that looked like a belt. She either had naturally perfect breasts or had them naturally filled with coke money. She had that look on her face that said “I AM ALL THAT,” and she was too. You took one look at her, and you were horny- you really had no choice in the matter. She basically personified the "idea" of sex.

She came around to see if Mitch was the Mitch she used to run with. She found him living in a garage converted into a single room apartment in the backyard of someone else’s house. The inside was all done, and there were a few issues to deal with on the outside. I came round the afternoon this girl had paid her visit, and passed her in the narrow alley between the fence and the front house. When I got to the back, Mitch had obviously been crying, though his face looked somehow more relaxed than it had been.

He asked me to come in and look at something he broke.

“You broke something?”

“Well, yeah… a few things, sort of…”

I went in to the small room with the loft and the kitchen beneath it. I knew this room intimately, as I had been here almost a month. There was a big hole in the sheetrock in the shape of an ass. The kitchen counter where there had been an overhang had cracked and tilted. The glass on Mitch’s antique and expensive coffee table was now in three pieces. There were quite a few of Mitch’s things tossed all over the floor, and Mitch was a tidy man.

“What the hell happened in here?” I teased.

“It had been awhile.”

“I bet. What was so wrong about using the bed?”

“We did.”

“And you did ALL THIS?”

“She was here awhile.”

“Holy Jesus. I bet you’re both gonna be sore.”

“I already am.”

“What’s with all the red-eye then? You were crying.”

“Wouldn’t you? Didn’t you see her?”

“Yeah. I saw her.”

“She… wanted to be with me again… and I had to tell her, I couldn’t afford her.”

“Oh brother!” (I say that when I hear stuff that just seems a bit radical to my ears).

Mitchell got a big grin on his face. “But did you SEE HER?”

“I saw her. Yeah, OK. I’d cry too…”

(To be continued...)