| Chapter Nine |
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| Written by Mike Johnson |
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Chapter 9
Probation It wasn't really a big surprise that I came up "dirty" again and that was the last straw from my TASC officer. A few days after the UA I Received a phone call from her and was asked to come in ASAP. I prayed that she just wanted to chat or talk about the weather but her reason for calling me in was just as I had suspected. Busted!! "Mike," She said, "you have failed 5 UA tests and this most recent one was your last chance. I have no choice but to turn your case back over to the County Attorney." As she was saying this my life flashed before my eyes. They say that when a person is facing certain death that their life flashes before their eyes, and to me, this was just as bad as death. I thought about the first time I had ever lied as a child and how it made me feel so bad I confessed to my mom with tears in my eyes and never lied again. I thought about the time I had told my son, with pride and conviction, that I had never been in trouble with the law. I also thought about all the times I had told my students and my own children, "don't do drugs!" Yet, here I stood, a drug addict, hypocrite, and liar. When she finished her little statement all I could manage to say was, "I want to quit, but I just can't!" "Mike, if you wanted to quit, you would!" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "So it’s that easy?" I thought to myself. She went on to tell me that she had been more than lenient and had no choice now. it was out of her hands and regardless of how she felt personally, she had rules and guidelines she was obligated to follow. "Please!! Just give me ONE MORE CHANCE!" I pleaded. "Mike, I have already given you more chances than I should have. You could have been free and clear if you had just stopped smoking crack and gone to the meetings. Instead, you are now going to have to face the criminal courts again." "So, what do you think will happen?" I asked. She assured me that I would not get jail time but I would most probably get "probation." How long, she didn't know, but it would certainly be longer than the original 12 months that I had been assigned to TASC for. Before leaving her office I apologized for not following the rules and for wasting her time. Her final words were, "Mike, I know it’s hard, but the bottom line is this; if you want to stop bad enough, you will stop. Nobody can do it for you." I left her office with the fear of God in me. Thoughts of handcuffs and mug shots filled my mind. "Why didn't I just do what I was suppose to do?" I pondered. "Now I am royally screwed. How will I explain this to my family?" 18 months probation. $2500 in fines and 100 hours community service was my sentence. The $6,000 I had paid my lawyer finally came in handy. This time I really did need it. The judge originally wanted to make an example of me because of my past as a school teacher. His initial sentence was 36 months probation, $5,000 in fines, and 500 hours of community service. My lawyer somehow negotiated my sentence down to what I got. The sentence was based on the fact that I had failed TASC. I was charged with a class 4 felony for drug possession and a class 6 felony for drug paraphernalia. Once again, since it was my first offence, I was told that if I completed probation successfully, the class 4 felony would be dropped completely and the class 6 felony would be dropped to a misdemeanor. Although I was happy that I wasn't going to jail, I had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that I would always be considered a convicted felon. This meant I could not vote or have a passport. The loss of rights didn't bother me as much as the simple fact that my character andintegrity had just been destroyed. For the next 18 months I would have the task of trying to re-build what crack had destroyed, or so I thought. Probation is described as: "a trial period during which your character and abilities are tested to see whether you are suitable for work or for membership. My character and my abilities as father,husband, son, friend, and human being were now on trial. A trial that would last at least 18 months. All I had to do was stay crack-free so I passed the weekly UA tests, go to another rehabilitation program, and complete the community service. Although I felt about as low as I had ever felt, I realized that I had just dodged another bullet. I had been caught with crack and a crack pipe six months prior and wasn't even taken to jail. I was allowed to resign from my teaching position instead of being fired. I was initially given TASC instead of probation or jail, and now I was only on probation for 18 months. I was beginning to think I was bullet proof and although I was on probation, I started thinking I could probably use crack every now and then and get away with it. All I needed to do was figure out how to get it. My TASC officer had told me that if I wanted to stop I would. I guess I didn't really want to stop all that bad after all. In spite of all the things I had lost so far, I still wanted to use crack! The first weekend I reported for community service I was assigned to work with a group of other felons cleaning up this old vacant lot. There were around 100 of us and only two supervisors. The majority of the people working had been doing this for a while and spent most of the time just bull shitting and complaining. They talked about drugs, jail, and partying. I couldn't believe my ears and I became very flustered when I noticed that I was the only one actually working. The supervisors didn't seem to care and as the day went on,the conversations grew increasingly negative. These people didn't seem to be concerned that they weren't doing their job. They didn't seem to mind talking about buying and using drugs right in front of the supervisors. It became very obvious to me that I wasn't the only one who planned to keep using even though I was on probation. This should have made the job easier due to the relaxed atmosphere, but it only exasperated the fact that I felt completely out of place. Most of these guys had been to jail or prison at one time or another and as such, their conversations were built on prison lingo and gangster mentality. Another problem was that I kept meeting people that would ask me why I was on probation. When I told them they would laugh. I soon found out that all the other workers had much larger and more severe sentences. I felt like a kitten in a dog pound. As the day came to a close, I resolved in my mind that I would find another alternative for community service. There were actually many different service opportunities and I needed one where I could work alone and not have to hear all the war stories. The next week I signed up to work for the City of Mesa. This particular job allowed for me to work alone and basically un-supervised. I would start at 6:00am each day and work until 2:00 pm. All I had to do was walk the streets in a two mile radius and pick up garbage. This was exactly what I needed as I hated having to work with other people, especially when those people talked about prison and crack houses all day. Sure I was still planning to use but I didn't need to hear all the stories about using, getting busted and sent to prison. Working alone also gave me the option of listening to my MP3 player while I worked. Music has always been very important to me and listening to it made the time go by much faster. The only bad thing about the area I was working was the fact that there were crack houses on every block. I could smell it around every corner and from time to time I would find broken crack pipes laying in a gutter. This just made me want it more, so I started to plan how I was going to get it again. It didn't take me very long to find a crack house that I could buy from. I wasn't bold enough to try and buy it while I was working my community service, but I would go back later in the evening when the sun went down and make my purchase. It was so weird to pass by these crack houses during the day while in "community service" mode and pretend I didn't know it was a crack house, then go back at night when I was in "crack-head" mode and walk right up to the door. I always feared I would run into one of the "residents" of the crack house during the day when I was working. It bothered me because I feared that if they saw me picking up trash with an orange vest on during the day, and recognize me from the night before, they might think I was a cop staking out the place. Fortunately, this never happened. After a few weeks, I would become bold enough to purchase it while I was working community service. What became great about this was I had found all kinds of great hiding places for my rocks while doing the work. I would buy the rocks during the day while working, hide them in a very good spot, and then go back at night and get them. It was very tempting to use it during the day while I was on the "community service" clock, but I was able to resist. Well, for a while anyway. |
