How I spent my first Saturn return
(Spring, 1974)
Part Two: work
(This follows Part One: sex.)
I had two jobs. On weekdays I worked for the State of Alaska, in a federally-funded program I had helped get off the ground, The New Start Center. Our job was to help ex-offenders return to life after incarceration. My job title there was Clerk-Typist III and those who planned the Center envisioned it as a secretary’s job without the secretary’s pay.
It is true that I did all the clerical work my boss and our clients required, including preparing resumés for the clients’ job searches. In addition to that, I spent most of my time doing the work of a job developer, finding employers willing to hire ex-cons. The rest of my work on that job ranged from being an advocate for the ex-cons with social service agencies, getting them clothing, housing, whatever they needed to resume a “normal” life on the outside, to counseling them and driving them to interviews.
That was my second job. My first job in Alaska was “just” a weekend job: for forty-eight hours each weekend I was the sole staff member on duty at Open Door Klinic, a free clinic serving the medical and social service needs of indigent street people. The nurse practitioner and social worker had weekends off. I answered the crisis hotline, did first-aid when necessary, kept the coffee pot filled, trained and supervised a few part-time student volunteers, and dealt with whatever came through the door. Late one Sunday night, one particular walk-in client rocked my world, shook up my reality big-time.
Craig was co-facilitator with Theresa of the Family Rap therapy group where I was learning how to spill my guts. He had it so together, I thought. He “worked” in group every session, getting it rolling, setting the scene for the rest of us to chime in and dump our own emotional baggage. He’d start out kinda low-key, talking about whatever issues had been giving him a rough time. Then he would move into talking about how he felt about things and on into nonverbally-enhanced expressions of his feelings, crying, screaming, emoting from deep in his gut. When he had gotten it out he would listen attentively to everyone else. He was good at picking up on the telling cues that indicated evasion, defense mechanisms and such, and he was quick to confront them. Everyone there benefited from his expertise, his focus, his honesty and his insistence on our honesty.
I was in my little fishbowl of an office tacked onto the front of the house, on the phone with one of my regular clients, using techniques learned from Craig to help her talk about her issues, when he walked in. It was the first time I’d seen him there, first time except for a big overnight marathon group therapy session for New Start clients in one of the center’s conference rooms, that I’d seen Craig outside the regular group. At first, I thought it was a social call. Craig straightened me out fast. He wasted no time getting down to business.
He had walked out of Family House, left the residential heroin rehab program that had helped him put his life back together. It had been his life for the two years that he was going through the program, and then after graduation he had gone to work for the foundation as a trainer and facilitator for three more years. His bridges were now burnt; there was no going back. He was there to talk it out with me. He blew me away by telling me how impressed he was with how “together” I was… this, coming from my chief therapist and major role model, was wildly unanticipated, right out of left field. If this man I looked up to and admired was looking up to me, coming for help, where did that leave me? It threw me for a loop, more than any crisis I handled in my year at Open Door.
As the day was dawning, after he’d done spilling his guts, he was helping me tidy up the Klinic for the day shift. He said he needed a place to stay. He had walked away from Family House with only the clothes he wore, and that was all he owned in the world. I told him he could sleep on our couch until he completed the other arrangements he had been talking about. I phoned home to let Charley and Hulk know we would have a houseguest. Since they were both preparing to head out to their construction job, I gave Craig my key and the address. He went one way, toward my little basement apartment near the Park Strip, and I went the other way, to another Monday at New Start Center.
Few jobs in such similar fields (both “social service”) could differ as much from each other as those did. At Open Door, it was casual dress. We were urged to dress, talk and act as much like peers of our clients as we could. Although it was officially forbidden, unofficially that injunction to blend in and mingle included smoking dope with those who hung around the Klinic. There was an old pickup camper parked beside the building, and the man who trained me as his replacement introduced me to it and the little group of street people who used it regularly as a smoking room. Once, when a Native man fresh in from the village reported our little dope circle to the Klinic’s director, my predecessor/trainer and I were called in for a conference with Kevin. He asked if the man’s accusation was true. My trainer denied it; I followed his lead. Kevin excused us and life went on.
The state job required a sociocultural tightrope walk. Mike (my immediate boss, the Community Counselor) and I had to earn the trust of our convict clients and co-exist with the parole officers, bureaucrats and politicians above us in the office pecking order. I also had to be able to make a good personal impression on the potential employers I approached on behalf of my clients. I’d change out of my casual weekend wear of jeans and moccasin boots at the clinic on Monday morning and stuff them in my gym bag. Then, in my trendy skirt or pants suit and my low-heel pumps or high-heel office boots, I’d walk a few blocks to the Center. At the end of the day I’d walk two blocks to a health club, get into tights and leotard for a workout, and then back into the hippie clothes for the long walk home. What with all that changing of metaphorical hats, the switching of roles, the subterfuge and institutional hypocrisy, I was having serious issues around the question of just who I was and what I was doing there.
Every chance I got, I dove into my metaphysical studies. My Tarot cards were always in my purse and I consulted them daily. They kept telling me that I was in a period of transition and initiation. They said everything was changing, but they were mute when it came to any clue as to what it was becoming. That, I knew, would be up to me. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to make of my life. I pored over the books of Alice A. Bailey, of Dion Fortune and other metaphysical writers, looking for a clue. I tried to get back into meditation as I had done in prison, but there was too little time and too much distraction. I chased the Light.
I was enamored of the concept of the work I was doing. The work itself was another matter. Crisis intervention put me in position to save lives, help people come back from the brink of suicide, find them shelter from abusive partners, help them express and work through their fears and despair. In practice, the frustration of dealing with those, immersed in magical thinking, who expected me to wave my wand and make their troubles go away, was incredibly burdensome. That disillusionment was at the core of the social service burnout we all experienced, and was our favorite topic for our venting sessions after the immediate business was disposed of at each Open Door staff meeting.
New Start Center presented similar contrasts between the ideal and the actual. It is all very well to talk about rehabilitation while reminding a prospective employer of his civic and social responsibility to provide opportunities for ex-offenders to go straight. My own prison experience put me in a good position to empathize with my clients. I knew how hard it is to start a new life, how impossible it is to resume the life that had been destroyed by incarceration. What I hadn’t realized until I was there in that job was how potent a force psychological institutionalization is, how difficult it is for someone who has lived in enforced inactivity and submission to authority for years to become self-motivated and responsible. The ex-cons were just as irrationally dependent on me to do the impossible as were my street-people clients at the Klinic.
A couple of my professional-ex-convict social service colleagues and one of my female New Start clients (Carla, for whom I arranged with Catholic Charities for the purchase of a blender she needed to process her food due to a digestive problem) solved the existential dilemma for me. The weather was warming up. Days were lengthening gloriously. Hulk and Charley were both making good wages building houses for the ex-convict-owned-and-operated Re-Construction, Inc. I had decided that when my Open Door contract was up in June I would quit. I had given my notice and we, the staff, had started interviewing potential replacements. The state job paid better, and it would give me weekends off to spend with my two guys, who also had weekends off. Then came the one-two punch.
Mike, my boss, was out of the office. A pair of ex-cons who had been involved in the formation of Re-Entry Concern Foundation, the parent corporation of the construction company, came into the office. Both of them were involved in AA and Al-Anon. She worked in social services not directly related to parole and probation, and volunteered at New Start, taking a lot of the driving and leg-work off my hands. He, if memory serves, was a motivational speaker and did theft-prevention seminars for businesses, teaching them the tricks to watch out for. Professional ex-convicts they were, as I said, and as I had become.
Re-Con, as we called the foundation, also administered a fund that had been collected for us by the Jaycees at Palmer Correctional Center. It’s purpose was to provide small emergency loans to ex-offenders who had urgent expenses related to their re-entry to society. Mike and I had asked the Jaycees to help us with it after the incident with Carla, when she had been deprived of proper nutrition for several days after her release as we searched for a blender for her.
My recall of the exact order and details of events is flawed. There were some details I never learned. What I do know is that the ex-con couple conned me, in Mike’s absence, into cutting them a check on the emergency fund account, which they somehow used or altered to clear out the entire account. Then they disappeared. The Re-Con con was their final act, apparently, on their way out of town.
I felt absolutely sick when I learned what had happened. Mike jumped into damage-control mode, covering his ass for the benefit of his state superiors and trying to reassure the Jaycees that if they continued to contribute to the fund their money would be safe. My buddies in the therapy group, which was being facilitated by Theresa with some help from others of us older members after Craig’s departure, helped me work through my shame and chagrin at being conned out of the cons’ money. It was a big storm for a little while. Then it passed.
Carla’s husband was one of Charley’s buddies from PCC. We saw them socially occasionally after they found housing and work. Carla and her husband were heroin addicts and were trying to stay off the junk. Carla, a former prostitute, had joined a new women’s therapy group that spun off from the original Family Rap group. She had my home phone number and called me sometimes to vent her frustrations, talk about her cravings for heroin, and get reinforcement for her efforts to stay straight. It was obviously a struggle for her.
One night she showed up at our apartment. She asked for a little bit of weed, just something to make it easier to do without the junk. Hulk, Charley and I had some, so we gave her about half of our stash, enough for maybe a joint, or a few little bong hits. It tided her over, and when next I saw her she was okay, still straight and feeling more optimistic.
That incident had been weeks in the past, was well behind me, faded to insignificance, when Mike came into the office one morning and confronted me anxiously: “Did you give Carla some dope?!?” Mike and his wife Mary and I had smoked dope together, so I had no reason to deny it. I admitted that I had, and explained the circumstances. Mike blew up at me: “How could you be so stupid?!?”
Carla’s parole officer had paid her a home visit and observed, sitting on a window sill, a little row of styrofoam cups with marijuana seedlings in them. When he asked Carla where she had gotten the seeds, she said they had come from me. That much wasn’t true. The wee bit of pot I gave her was well-manicured and seedless, but what did that matter in the greater scheme of things?
Following on the heels of my being conned out of the ex-cons’ emergency fund, it was the end of my career as a professional ex-convict. I was allowed to resign. That delayed the start of my unemployment benefits for six weeks, but kept an embarrassing firing off my record. And life went on….
I have, however, learned a thing or two about living in the subarctic woods. Today, after I picked myself up from a slip in the yard, I shifted to the flat-footed gait we call the Eskimo walk. The steps are shorter, but you end up covering more ground faster than you would if you were continually picking yourself up off the ice. My usual natural gait, the one I learned as a kid, goes heel-toe with long strides. I cover more ground more painlessly with the little waddling steps I learned by watching the Inupiat ladies.
Leonhard
We need not have bothered with the mutt and the kitty grit. Our procrastination worked in our favor this time. The neighbors had already scattered a variety of things to improve traction. We saw sand, gravel, ashes, kitty litter, Pro-Mix (the weed growers’ favorite planting medium), and potatoes. 
I’m the squeak).
Anyone who pushes through obstacles and adversity to display commitment and excellence is a hero to me.
Before my slippery trip to the outhouse yesterday, it was on my mind to share the above story with you here. What with all my slipping and sliding, it slipped my mind.
Recent Comments