Hard Time

After two terms and a total of 10 years in prison, Mark Cook doesn’t think freedom is much to celebrate. For one thing, his feet hurt--he never walked so much in the joint. For another, it’s harder to stay clean.

Sure, drugs were everywhere in prison, but prices were less tempting. That’s the other thing about the outside: Temptation. On skid row, where Mark lives, temptation is like oxygen. Sidewalk tents double as brothels, brown-bagged bottles swish and crackle through conversations, cellophane packets flash between handshakes.

Mark is on parole, and the odds are against his staying on the outside. More than 70% of California’s parolees return to prison within three years. This losing battle takes place every day, everywhere in Los Angeles County, where there are more parolees--40,000--than Los Angeles Unified School District teachers.

Why is it so hard for parolees to stay out? The challenges abound: Illiteracy, crooked friends, lovers who stir the heart to anger, empty bank accounts, employee background checks, poor social skills, old habits. There are bills to pay, trouble to dodge and addictions to curb. Often parolees reenter society with nothing but pocket change, the clothes on their back and a rap sheet.

For Anthony Bunche, who just completed a 14-year sentence, freedom is a wasteland of long-forgotten friends and dead loved ones. For Lydia Lopez, parole is the scarlet letter that scares off employers and jeopardizes her family’s finances. For Stephen White, arrested when he was a high school football star angling for a scholarship, parole shines a harsh light on stunted dreams and squandered potential.

For Mark Cook, a 41-year-old thrice-paroled felon, liberty has been nothing but a temporary respite between prison terms.

His hotel room on skid row, a 10-by-10-foot cube with a view of an alley wall, isn’t much better than his old cell. He sees the same faces he saw in Susanville and Folsom and Corcoran and County. Guards don’t stand in the hallway, but a parole agent can come by any time to toss his room for contraband.

Inside, guards and gangs imposed stability, discipline, order. Mark knew how to get things, whom to trust and whom to avoid. He knew where his next meal was coming from, and when. A few white T-shirts and a gray sweatsuit were a wardrobe. A haircut was simply a shaved head. Even the clouds had a sturdy concrete frame.

Outside, Mark is talking on a pay phone and suddenly some drunk throws a crate at him. Or he’s doing well, lining up a truck-driving course for himself, and then the county threatens to cut off his benefits--and then the bus drivers strike, stranding him.

In prison, where half of all inmates are illiterate, Mark often read three novels at once and earned a reputation for knowing his way around appellate law. These days he is reading a donated pulp novel he found in the hotel lobby. News reports about the Kursk, the sunken Russian sub, are just coming out and have inspired him to read a submarine thriller called “Kilo Class.”

“I wanted to know what they’re going through, to get into the mind-set of the guys in that sub to see if I would be calm and hang on to the end, or whether I would kill myself trying to get out. You could get out, but you can’t come up too fast because of the pressure. Even if you opened the hatch and escaped, you would probably die.”

Rising too fast. That’s what Mark wants to avoid. Think about today, they tell you in prison, because you screwed up yesterday, and tomorrow is a long, long time away. But outside, tomorrow counts. Planning is essential: You have to get food stamps, line up a place to lay your head, make appointments with doctors and counselors and social workers and parole agents. Outside, the clock starts ticking again.

Like most at-risk parolees, Mark’s criminal record stretches back to his youth. He has few job prospects (80% of the state’s parolees are unemployed) and, at best, a gossamer safety net of family and friends with plenty of their own challenges. And like 85% of California’s parolees, he has a substance-abuse problem.

So far, he’s surviving. His meager county benefits pay rent at a hotel with clean carpets, a security door and vinyl couches in the lobby. Most of the clientele are older addicts and parolees. Skid row, with its collection of social service agencies, nonprofits and cheap hotels, has more parolees than anywhere else in the state.

Mark could have been off parole by now if he had been able to stay straight and make his appointments with his agents. Now his supervision will continue until April, if all goes well. Mark wants to do better this time, and he thinks he can--but he’s not sure.

Neither is Lupe Sanchez, Mark’s parole officer. Sanchez carries one of the toughest caseloads in his downtown parole office. These are the absconders, the gangsters, the violent felons--”high-control service” cases.

Sanchez became a parole officer in April 1998, after four years as a prison guard in Delano. He has seen cons like Mark before: well-intentioned, intelligent, hard-working--and bound to fail.

“Crack is so hard,” Sanchez says, shaking his head. “With Mark, it’s just a matter of time.”

Sanchez’s parolees are an elusive, wily bunch, quick to anger and prone to lie. State law requires parole agents to conduct monthly home visits to the most dangerous parolees. Sanchez visits them early in the morning to verify their whereabouts and to search their homes for drugs and weapons.

Sometimes when Sanchez is at home with his young son, the television news will cut to a car chase. Sanchez will stop what he’s doing and think: “Man, I hope he’s not one of mine.”

One morning Sanchez drives to the mid-city area to check in with Demetrius Sean Pickens, a repeat drug offender who has been out of prison for two months. He isn’t home, but just as Sanchez is about to leave, Demetrius drives up in a blue Cutlass. Sanchez tugs on the locked passenger-side door. “Open up, Pickens,” he shouts through the tinted window. “I’m gonna search the car.”

Demetrius, who has stopped in the middle of the road, starts to drive away. For a moment, Sanchez doesn’t know whether to run after him, shout or pull his pistol. But Demetrius isn’t going anywhere; he’s just getting out of traffic--and buying a few seconds. As he inches along the curb, Sanchez sees him hastily shifting around in his seat, hiding something. Sanchez strides over to open the door and Demetrius steps out, dropping a lighter and a thick marijuana cigar under the car.

Sanchez starts patting Demetrius down. He’s suspicious, but he doesn’t see the marijuana lying on the asphalt.

“Why’d you drive away?”

“I was just parking. I didn’t want to get hit.”

“Where were you?”

“At school, dropping the kids off.”

“I came the other day. Where were you?”

“Oh. Me and my wife ain’t getting along, man. I go out and she’s like, ‘You sleeping around, you cheatin’, you doing this, you doing that.’ I don’t fight, I just leave.”

“You know you’re s’posed to tell me when you go anywhere.”

Demetrius’ pockets are stuffed with more than $600 in folded bills. He’s been working for his father’s landscaping business, Demetrius says.

He’s been dealing drugs, Sanchez thinks.

Parolees have a fraction of the civil rights most citizens enjoy and can be arrested at any time for almost any reason. Their bodies, cars and homes can be searched virtually without provocation. That makes them ideal sources for police investigators, who routinely round up parolees for questioning on cases they are working.

Parolees’ movements and associations are strictly limited. Access to weapons--be it a hunting rifle in the basement or a Swiss Army knife on a key chain--is a violation. Any crime, no matter how minor, is a violation. About 14% of all parolees go back to prison with a new felony conviction. Depending on the conditions set by the state Parole Board, having a beer or skipping an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting may be a violation, as is a tainted urine sample or a missed appointment with a parole officer. More than 80% of all parolees sent back to prison have committed technical, not criminal, violations.

Rifling through Demetrius’ papers, Tupac Shakur CDs, receipts and new tennis shoes, Sanchez never notices the joint at his feet, but he does find a 2-week-old citation for marijuana possession in Demetrius’ glove compartment. That’s enough for Sanchez to arrest him.

Mark pays a visit to his social worker, Jordan Davis, at his skid row office. He finds Davis with a phone at his ear and three bedraggled men sitting in his office--one is fresh out of solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison. All will be homeless tonight unless Davis helps them.

An AME pastor from Perris, Davis has been doing this work for 25 years and still is thoughtful enough to hand out two business cards, “in case you lose one.” He wants to hear what the parolees have to say and is not going to say a lot until he does. His tightly kinked hair is jet black, his face smooth, patient, dispassionate. If the stink of these men perturbs him, he does not show it.

“We give parolees a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth chance to regain the things that have been lost,” says Davis. “When they come in here, I try to make them understand: Punishment is over. This is rehabilitation.”

As he talks, Davis hands things to passersby--food stamp applications, General Relief forms, vouchers for this and that, bus tokens. His desk drawer is a cornucopia of coarse bounties.

Anthony Bunche, just off a bus from Pelican Bay, is unimpressed. Davis has found him a room in Mark’s building, but Anthony, a squat, brooding man convicted of manslaughter, wants out of skid row.

“Well, I can’t put you in Beverly Hills,” Davis says, handing him an application for housing. “But I can get you something better than where you are now.” Anthony grunts and takes the paper.

“Don’t let all this get to you,” Mark counsels Anthony. “You can make it, but you have to have the right attitude.”

“Man, I just got out of the pen--14 years,” Anthony says, puffing his chest. “All this here is Little League.”

A few days later, Anthony’s bravado has descended into gloom. He is 43, and everything is harder than it was before. The world seems strange, hostile and, most of all, indifferent. He has seen people beaten to a pulp, sodomized, stabbed, strangled, humiliated. During his incarceration, he buried his grandparents, his mother, his father, his younger brother--and who cares to hear his story?

He sets out in the morning fog (Anthony insists it’s smog) to get an identification card from the Department of Motor Vehicles. He needs it if he is to receive food stamps and disability payments, but he’s not happy about it. He knows his Social Security number--why can’t that be enough? All of this walking and waiting under fluorescent lights in tiled lobbies for county benefits seems a lot more like benign punishment than “general assistance.”

But he knows it’s not just the world--it’s him, too. “I can’t function like I used to when I could get everything taken care of in a week’s time. Getting out of prison is like waking out of a deep sleep--or half waking.” He even crosses the street like a sleepwalker, against the light, with tires screeching and horns blaring--after all, nothing moved that fast in prison.

At the DMV a woman tells Anthony his name has been purged and his Social Security number is no help. All Anthony has is the inmate number on his photocopied rap sheet, which he unfolds and places on the counter.

She scans the crinkled page--burglary, grand theft auto, battery on a peace officer, manslaughter--and her eyebrows arch. “Hold on a sec,” she says, stepping away. “I’m going to get my supervisor.”

Frustrated, Anthony leaves.

The bus drivers are on strike and Mark, who had hoped to take courses in Montebello to become a trucker, cannot get to the school. So he spends a lot of time sitting in the lobby of his building, looking out of a vast glass wall that separates him from the sidewalk.

In a city derided for its lack of public space, skid row is public in the worst way. Mark cannot walk down 5th Street past San Julian without seeing an old man weeping, or someone cursing at their boyfriend, or two lovers huddling together in a portable toilet, or an addict leaning back on a wall, letting the smack flow through.

“I don’t want to end up like that,” says Mark, watching out the window. “Down here I get the opportunity to see a lot of my associates that I done time with or programs with. I see ‘em doing well, hanging out. Next time I see ‘em they’re dirty, smelling bad, living so foul that even jail looks good because you can get a clean mattress.

“I don’t want to end up like that. No, thank you.”

Mark has started to go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings again--this time one run by his friend Houston Ruff, who also goes by his Muslim appellation, Hasan Abdu’l-Salam, or “Servant of Peace.” Hasan, 68, was a junkie for 35 years before he kicked. Mark bunked with him at L.A.’s Harbor Lights drug-treatment program after they both were released from prison in 1997. Hasan had just come off a four-year sentence for hawking heroin. Hasan liked Mark, “but I knew he wasn’t beyond it, you never are.” Mark went back to prison. Hasan, a tall, slow-moving man with waled wrists and dim eyes, has been clean for three years--”praise Allah.”

Part of recovery, according to Hasan, is service to your fellow man--so says the Holy Quran. “ ‘Verily man is in loss,’ ” he recites, “ ‘except such as have faith and do righteous deeds.’ ” So he takes Mark for a ride in his old gray Volvo one sunny afternoon. Hasan completed parole last year and moved out of skid row to a nice apartment in the Crenshaw District. He takes Mark there, lets him look around the big bedroom and attached bathroom, lets him stand out on the balcony, lets him know that Allah provides and that skid row is just a crumb of mortar in the illimitable universe.

Later, at Hasan’s Islamic addicts’ support group meeting, just down the street from Mark’s hotel, the faithful trickle in from the night streets. There is an angry mother who lost her children to the county. There is a quiet, trembling man. There are two other men with Jheri curls, their plastic shower caps like shining turbans. Mark is a Christian, but he doesn’t think Jesus and Muhammad have much to argue about when it comes to cocaine. After prayers, Hasan asks if anyone would like to share. Mark stands.

“I’ve been down in this area many times in the last 12 or 13 years. I’ve built myself up and let myself go. I fell on my face many times before and I don’t want to do it again. I even know a couple of guys in this meeting who started out with me years ago and have stayed clean while I keep going round and round. I’m scared I’m going to fall again. I just wanted everyone to know how I feel. That’s all I wanted to say.”

Fear Allah, Hasan tells him, “but don’t keep looking back because you won’t see the mistakes in front of you.”

Criminal history is a misnomer for parolees. Their crimes are always lurking in someone’s database, haunting their hopes and channeling their futures. Ten years ago, police caught heroin addict Lydia Lopez and her boyfriend clinking down a Van Nuys side street with two suitcases full of candleholders, china and silverware. “We’re looking for a room to rent,” Lydia told the officers.

Lydia suffered through withdrawal while she was in jail--and found out she was pregnant. When she got out three years later, she swore off drugs. Lydia even tried to erase the names tattooed on her arms--names of men who used to shoot her up (she never learned to do it herself). She stroked off one name with a thimble.

Since then Lydia, 41, had married a good man and hidden her past from her 10-year-old son. He knows nothing of that kind of life and even participates in his school’s DARE drug-prevention program. “I call him mi pequeno policia, because he was always telling his uncle not to drink beer or smoke cigarettes.”

Life is good, Lydia says, but money is short, so she finds a job with a home-care service for the disabled to supplement her husband’s wages as a mechanic. They pay her $10 an hour, with benefits and a gasoline allowance. Lydia and her husband buy a used car so that she can keep the job--running errands for sick people, driving to their homes to help them take their meds, keeping them company.

Then the agency checks Lydia’s background and fires her--two months after her start date, nine years after completing parole.

How will they afford the $300-a-month car payment? The couch they bought on credit? Food for her boy? Lydia is so upset that she forgets her son is home as she calls a friend with the bad news. “I kick drugs, I go to prison and I still can’t get a job. Do they want me to starve?” She hangs up. In walks her little policeman.

“You’ve been to jail, Mom? You’re a criminal?”

“My stepmom and sister were up north,” says Mark, swallowing hard. “I thought he was going to spend some father-and-son time with me. But he had girlfriends. He gave me a skillet of cold creamed corn and rice and put me in the Ford Hotel on skid row. That was the first time I was down here. I still remember the room. It had a dirty brown bed, one of those lightbulbs at the end of a naked cable, a concrete floor and a brown locker with a sink. There was no TV, no radio or nothing. My father told me he would be right next door, but he wasn’t there.” Mark was 16 years old.

He moved in with his mother, but she always nagged him to buy her Ripple. He refused once, and she went out to find a drink on her own. She came back wretchedly drunk, smelling obscene, carrying a six-pack of beer. Who gave you that? Mark asked her. Nobody gave it to me, she said, cursing him. “I worked for it.”

At 17, Mark joined the Army against the wishes of his mother and was shipped to Germany. To drive her point home, his mother killed herself. Mark drank too much after that and caroused with the local girls. He missed guard duty and went AWOL a couple of times. He received a general discharge.

In 1984 he returned to Los Angeles and went home with a woman. She happened to live at the Ford Hotel. Lifting a glass pipe to Mark’s lips with shaky hands, she instructed him: “Pull it slow.” Orgasmic euphoria swarmed through him--and then dissipated, far, far too quickly. So they went to a park where young mothers hid dope in baby strollers under their sleeping children. “We did that for six or seven hours--all night long.”

In October 1988, Stephen White was a star running back at Grant High School in Van Nuys, a ladies’ man, a B-student and a serious contender for a San Diego State football scholarship. He also was a soldier for the North Hollywood Boyz.

Police officers searched Steve’s bedroom a day before Grant’s homecoming game and found under his mattress a type of shotgun known as an elephant gun. Ballistics tests linked the weapon to the fatal drive-by shooting of rival gang member Jose Lopez Maldonado six weeks earlier.

CRASH anti-gang officers arrested Steve as he returned to campus after lunch. He was sitting in the Men’s Central Jail when his classmates voted him homecoming king.

Twelve years later, Steve walks out of Lancaster State Prison a 29-year-old paroled murderer. His mother, Jackie White, is waiting for him. They embrace, crying, smiling. They drive to an IHOP for his first steak in a decade. He also orders orange juice, milk, hash browns, a heaping omelet and pancakes. Jackie sits across from him, afflicted with an excruciating joy. They talk a little, but whatever they say is nearly drowned out by the questions roiling in her mind. What do I buy him for his birthday? Why does he have to shave his head like that? Who will employ him? Will he marry? Will there be grandchildren? Will he survive? Is my boy broken?

Still, watching him scoop spoonfuls of eggs and potatoes into his mouth makes her breast throb with satisfaction. Just one thing: “Stephen, why don’t you use your knife and fork?”

He stops for a moment, then continues cutting pancakes with his spoon. “They don’t let us have ‘em in the clink.”

Steve remembers everything being bigger. He struggles to remove his 6-foot-3-frame--all hard ridges and balled muscle--from the IHOP booth. Cruising across the San Fernando Valley with his mother, streets, walls, houses, cars all look tinier somehow. He squirms in the seat and bumps his knees on the dash. They drive from shop to shop, trying to find jeans baggy enough and jerseys loose enough. Even the clothes, it seems to White, attempt to trammel him.

A day after his release, the older of his two sisters throws a party in his honor. Steve spends much of the night sitting alone on the stairs. His nieces, nephews and little cousins ricochet through the Palmdale tract home. “Too many damn kids,” he grouses.

So when his sister Angie asks him to come to the store with her, Steve is glad to go. Angie is an Army Sgt. 1st Class at Ft. Irwin and a self-described party girl. As a homecoming gift, she gives Steve a box of condoms. Speeding across the desert toward a Wal-Mart megastore, Angie is hyper with excitement, shouting over Lil’ Kim, peppering her brother with questions. Steve leans far back in his seat and stares out at the dust fields and bladed Joshua trees they pass.

“Can I take you to Las Vegas?”

“Naw.”

“Tijuana?”

“Can’t. I’ll get in trouble.”

“We got to get you on the Internet.” Steve stares through the windshield. “When can I take you out of the country?”

“About three years.”

“When you getting a job?”

“I talked to some dude . . . “

“You gotta get a job. You got two weeks to get a job. . . . You need any silver?”

“Naw, I like gold.”

“Yeah. Silver plays out, gold is always in style. Wanna go running?”

“Can’t. I get shinsplints.”

“I do want to take you on a bungee jump though.”

“Yeah, I wanna do that.”

“Are you excited now?”

“Not really.”

Steve gets a call on his mother’s cellular phone. Steve has been using it all day to tell his old friends that he is free. After a few minutes, he hangs up.

“You know, that cell phone isn’t something that you can just talk on for hours--it costs money.”

“But she called me.”

Angie pauses, then gently: “You never seen a cell phone, have you?”

While he was inside, the lawyers ate up his parents’ savings and destroyed their marriage. His best friend, Otto, whose name is tattooed on his right arm, killed himself playing Russian roulette. Another childhood friend got out on parole a few months back, earned his third strike and is now serving two life sentences. Then there is Sean Roberts, who has known Steve since they were in diapers, his brother in all but blood, the one who warned him: Chill. Focus on the grades. Get the scholarship. Don’t mess with the thug life, the drugs, the guns. Roberts, a husband and father of two children with another on the way, is about to move to Atlanta to work for a security equipment firm.

Meanwhile, Steve still feels 17 years old. He plays video games nonstop. His mother and sisters drive him to the mall. He bobs to the outdated thump of Boogie Down Productions and the decade-old outrage of Social Distortion.

And he still wants to go to that homecoming game he missed.

Steve recently acquired his driving permit and borrows a friend’s car for the occasion. His date to the game is a Grant Class of 1999 graduate he met in his mother’s apartment building, Heydi Hernandez. When Steve was rushing 12 yards a carry for the Grant Lancers, Heydi was 8 years old.

“Man,” he says, surveying the packed stands, “all these young kids make me feel old.”

By halftime, Grant High is ahead, 23-0, and Heydi, a former cheerleader, joins her old squad on the field. Steve goes to look for some familiar faces. He has to remind his old coach, Bill Foster, who he is. “What are you doing now?” the coach asks. Steve tells him about the plumbing job he just landed. “Nothing much,” Steve says. Then he sees Dean Dan Gruenberg, described by Steve as his high school “nemesis.” Before White went to prison, the Grant administrator caught him slugging another student in the head and stealing his skateboard. “Oh, yeah,” says the dean, smiling faintly. “The elephant gun guy.”

Mark is sullen, guilty. the bus strike has gone on longer than anybody expected and there seems to be no end in sight. He has found a job, 10 hours a week, unloading a food-bank truck at skid row hotels. It’s not enough though; mostly he is idle. He lifts weights in his room. He skips his Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He doesn’t go out for walks. He sleeps three or four hours a night and spends days watching television in the lobby. He breaks his vow not to have sex.

At times like these, the things he missed haunt him. Once in a while a commercial flashes across the television screen and a sunny-faced couple will be buying a starter home or some furniture. Or a car drives past with two kids sitting in the back, a pair of parents up front. “I wish that was me sometimes, I wish I could have that--but it’s probably too late now.”

Mark promised himself he’d avoid sex while he’s on parole because he has trouble with women--or at least he causes them trouble. Sometimes he manipulates them. He has hurt women, too. “Even the wife I married while I was in prison: I used her for conjugal visits.” When he was paroled in 1997, he found a job as a security guard and met another woman: Anne, a churchgoing mother of two choirboys.

“I screwed that up, too.”

Three years ago, Anne-Sheridan Pollard saw the big man in the security guard’s uniform and thought, “Maybe he is a blessing.” She looked forward to their daily conversations in the lobby of the building where they worked. He was always there, sometimes working two shifts straight. A quiet, unassuming fellow, he was always polite, always concerned. His shirt was always clean. She liked him.

Raising two teenage boys in South-Central Los Angeles is hard, lonely work for a single mother. She was poor, yes, but the Lord is rich. She found an inner-city magnet school and after-school programs at USC and Cal State Los Angeles. One son was musical, the other artistic. Both sang in the church choir, made dinner and stayed home on Friday nights.

And here was a man to share her burdens. Despite all the celibate years she had plenty of love to give. They dated, and when she was sure this was a long-term relationship, Anne took Mark to her mother. He dined with Anne and her sons. The older one liked Mark right away; the younger boy was standoffish.

But all this good fortune nagged at her. “You’re a nice man, you’re clean, you’re a gentleman.” Her flattery was calculated. “Why don’t you have a family? Children? A wife?” A past?

After months of subtle probing, Mark’s story emerged. He was a felon. A parolee. In 1985, he had a woman, Diane McNair. They argued. He dragged her to a window ledge. It was three stories up. He dangled her by her ankles and dropped her, crippling her. They gave him three years for that.

Even after Mark gave his account, Anne wasn’t scared. “I am with the Lord,” she thought, “ ‘and no weapons born against me shall prosper.’ ” Besides, anyone could see that God had changed this man. Then money started vanishing from her purse. Mark disappeared, too, for days at a time. She paged him, but he never answered. Finally he started showing up at her house, in front of her boys, tired, filthy, stinking of crack vapor. She prayed to Jesus: Make Mark a man my sons and I can love. She wanted to help him. She was not afraid. But she had to know: What else did you do? Are my boys safe? Am I? Who are you?

Then Mark told her about 1990, about Rosie Marie Nelson. How she kept getting high, even as their lives unraveled. “If you smoke everything up,” he warned, “we’re going to end up on the street.” She promised to stop. But he came home from work one day and another man was in their bedroom. He had provided her cocaine; she had also provided. Liquor fired Mark’s fury as he chased the man out the door and slammed it shut. The man would call the police and later testify in court that he had heard Rosie rasp: “Mark, stop . . . don’t.”

By then Mark’s massive hands were clasped around her throat, pushing her back toward the bed, pressing her to the floor, bearing down with his full 230 pounds, planting his knee on her liver--fairly bursting it, straining his forearms, his fingers, his thumbs until her nose and ears trickled red. When the police came, Mark led them to her body.

“But, I would never hurt you, Anne.”

Anne ended the relationship a few months later. Then Mark broke into her house and lunged at her. Her strapping boys held Mark as she escaped, half-dressed and barefoot. Anne called police and then got a restraining order.

Mark eventually tested dirty for cocaine and was sent back to prison.

One recent morning, Mark’s parole agent, Lupe Sanchez, pays him a visit. The weather has cooled and a police crackdown has cleared the skid row sidewalks of most of the boxes, dealers and prostitutes. The bus strike will break soon, and Mark’s mood has brightened.

He is attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings again and is rereading the Bible--two of them, in fact. One is opened to the Old Testament, the other to the New. Sanchez has heard about a firm that hires parolees to lay fiber-optics wire. It pays pretty well, he says. Then Sanchez thinks again. “Thing is, the last time you were out, you had money and you kind of went south.”

“Yeah,” says Mark, grinning. “I think I’d better crawl before I walk.”

Sanchez is impressed with Mark’s mood, but he still wants a urine sample. A few weeks later, the results come back.

Mark is clean.