At first, work had its own difficulties.  To begin with, there was the matter of being accessible by phone.  After breakfast and collecting my bag lunch, I’d leave the halfway house on the 7am van, which would take us to the light rail station (arriving around 7:20).  From there I’d take the rail to Union station and catch a bus, which I could get off right across the street from work.  Timing, however, was the issue.  There was no way to arrive at close to my 9am start time.  So I’d arrive closer to 8:30, which absolutely nothing to do.  I usually had a paperback which I would try to read, but I would find myself harassed by beggars every few minutes as I stood by the store.  If I was lucky, they’d just ask for money and I would say no.  If I was unlucky, they’d engage me in conversation.  “Do you work here?  What’s in the bag?  What do they pay?  Can I get part of your lunch?”  I couldn’t be overly rude, because these same people would walk by morning after morning.  I didn’t have a key to the store at this point, so I’d be stuck standing there until my boss arrived.

His schedule was not a very dependable one, which caused me quite a bit of grief.  Because I had to be accountable for my whereabouts at all times, it was my job to call the Halfway House when I arrived at work.  But, since my boss often wasn’t there on time, I was unable to do that.  Instead I’d wait until about 9:15 and then call using the payphone on the corner, explaining that I was at work but that I could not yet get in.  The staff would tell me to call again when I was actually inside the store.  Then I’d go back to waiting.  Sometimes he’d show up about that time, right after I’d wasted 50 cents on the call.  But often he’d pull up at 9:30 or later.  Once he had someone else drive down to let me in after 10am.  On days like that I’d have to call the Halfway House from the payphone a second time, letting them know I was still stuck.  Generally the response was that I could wait until 10am but then I’d simply have to forget work and come back.  “We can’t have you wandering around Dallas.”  Of course, most of my fellow clients were doing just that, all day long, with their fake jobs and with the cars they were driving without authorization.  But me?  I was a problem, since I had a REAL job and had to wait for my boss to let me in.

The Halfway House was supposed to call your workplace about once a week to “spot check” and make sure you were where you were supposed to be.  As usual, I got dealt the heavier hand; they called an average of four times a week, and a few times they would call more than once a day.  I got the feeling that the reason I was singled out – as in other circumstances, such as always being searched when leaving he chow hall in prison – was that I wasn’t going to make a big stink about it or give them a hard time.  So because I tried to be agreeable, I was a favorite target for the staff; they had a quota of calls to make, so why not knock one off that quota by taking the path of least resistance?  My boss didn’t seem to mind, but then he’d bug me about after they called.  He just liked to complain, really.

The other problem with work, for the time being, was that I had to go to mandatory group meetings twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  These would require me to take the bus from down the street to downtown, run 3 blocks (because I had only about 2 minutes to make the switch), and transfer onto another bus which would take me up to the counseling location.  It happened to be only about a 5 minute drive from my house, but with the bus system it was a real pain in the butt.

Worse, my boss (who was the only other person who worked at that location, if you remember), had a habit of taking long lunches.  Sometimes I’d be sitting there staring at the clock, knowing that if he didn’t show up within a minute or two I’d miss the bus and be late for the meeting.  I couldn’t just leave the store, because I had no key!  If I did, I could just lock it up and take off…but in these cases I had to panic and count the seconds.  Occasionally I’d have to run off so quickly that I wouldn’t be able to call the Halfway House to say “I’m leaving work and heading to my group meeting) which was mandatory every time I moved from one place to another (they had a phone at the therapy center which rang directly to the halfway house, so that part was easy).  If I forgot to call, I had to find a payphone along the way and call from there, otherwise I’d be guilty of not being accountable for my whereabouts, and I’d potentially have passes or other privileges taken away (or worse if I was a repeat offender).  Fortunately I always kept a supply of quarters in my pocket for these pay phone calls.  But what a beating the whole system was!

There was one occasion when I completely forgot to call from work, on a day when I was coming back to the halfway house directly.  I realized once I got on the van at the train station and we were heading back.  This was the one and only occasion that I remember when the fact that I obeyed the rules and didn’t cause trouble paid off.  When we showed up, the staff member who signed me in asked if I had called to say I was leaving work (they had a system where they moved your file from one place to another based on what you told them when you called, and my file was still in the “at work” area).  I made the only choice I thought appropriate: I looked at her and lied to her face.  “Yes ma’am, I certainly did!”  “Well, do you remember who you talked to?”  “I’m almost positive it was you, ma’am.”  She just shrugged her shoulders and assumed she’d forgotten to move it. 

As irritating as these work-related hassles were, I didn’t have much reason to bitch.  After all, it only took two weeks of working before I was able to secure my first 24-hour pass…which meant spending the night at home for the first time since I’d left in November 2003!  Usually someone with a stable job could get a 48-hour pass, but because I worked six days a week that wasn’t allowed.  The 24-hour pass was pretty simple: you had to give them what your schedule would be, in advance.  If you wanted to go to dinner or a store or anything, you had to put it on the pass request, including address and phone number.  But one thing you couldn’t do was go to someone else’s house.  This actually was amusing for me, because the first 24-hour pass I had was over Mother’s Day weekend, and Heather had planned for me to go to her mother’s apartment with her.  My case worker told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to do that (lucky me!).  The only catch was I had been joking about not being allowed to go there since Heather first brought the subject up, so now that I found out I REALLY wasn’t allowed to go, I felt I needed proof.  So, I asked my case worker to write a simple note.  He looked at me funny, and I  explained why I needed it.  “What do you want me to write?” he asked, and I told him what to put down, which he basically copied word for word.  I still have that note (although I’m not sure why), and it appears below:

Heather didn’t want to believe me when I told her that my joking had turned out to be prophetic, but the note was enough to convince her.  So while Heather was forced to go off and spend time with her mother, I’d be able to sit around the apartment and relax.

In preparation for the pass, and for the eventual switch to home confinement which I was looking forward to a month or two down the road (getting to actually LIVE at home, while still under the supervision of the Halfway House), I ordered a separate phone line in my name.  It wasn’t allowed to have any features: just tone dialing.  No call waiting or call forwarding, because if they called to check on your whereabouts they wanted to know that you were truly home.  And since you had to provide them a copy of the telephone bill, they’d know if you even tried a one-time usage of services like that.  A staff member also came by and inspected the apartment, making sure there were no guns, drugs, or alcohol on the premises.  With those tasks completed, my first pass was approved, from 6pm on Saturday May 13th 2006 until 6pm on Sunday the 14^th.  I couldn’t go directly from work: I had to travel back to the Halfway House, sign in, and have Heather pick me up.  But from there, we’d go back to the apartment, and I’d get to fall asleep, and wake up, with my arms around the women who had so patiently waited for me to come home; the woman I wanted to marry and spend the rest of my life with.

There was one more thing I was looking forward to, almost as much: seeing Tigger, my cat.  When I left in 2003 she was already 16 years old, and I never in my wildest dreams imagined she’d still be living (at age 19) when I came home three years later.  But she’d been a good companion for Heather, keeping her company on lonely weekends, and her health had not been a problem at all.  So with the big day approaching, I had two major questions in my mind: first, would Heather and I find it easy to slip back into the magical “nation of two” we’d experienced in the time we spent together before I left; and second, would Tigger recognize or remember me after spending the last three years with a woman she hadn’t known for very long prior?  I hoped the answer to both questions would be yes, but all I could do is wait to find out.