Let me tell you about the lost year. It could have been far worse, but it still sucked.
I had been on drug court about a year and a half at that point. I lived in Trenton, NJ and rode a bike to my AA meetings in the middle of the night in the middle of the winter. I had to fight off the local hoodrats with a very large chain that was wrapped around my arm because I could not afford to give up my bike. That's how poor I was at the age of 51. I lived in the murder capital of US and I had to choose my apartment based on how close it was to the courthouse since initially I was walking to the courthouse. I couldn't afford the bike the first month.
Before that I was senior vice president Bank of America on Wall Street. Ladida.
So then I had to deal with home inspections and probation officers who would visit me and try to find what I was hiding. For the first year my probation officer was Disney princess beautiful. So of course she had to be the toughest meanest m*********** in the world to make up for that since all her guys were hitting on her.
One home inspection she grabbed a shot glass on my night table and put her finger in the liquid and put it up to her nose and sniffed hard. I told her not to do it. As she was doing it I implored, stop, do not do this,
She thought it was some type of alcohol next to my bed. Was a shot glass full of lube, reached in and dipped many times. I told her not to sniff it.
She told me to stop using shot glasses.
My judge was insane. Everyone says that, but my judge got reassigned and then fired. But I left his court and moved to a different county to get away from him. He was fired two months later.
Since I moved counties I had to get a new probation officer. She was the ugliest meanest b**** I've ever met. And this particular county used saliva tests, which are not reliable. I tested positive for methamphetamine immediately and then two weeks later. I was not doing meth or anything that should have triggered. They sent the test away for the real gas chromatography and it showed I wasn't doing meth. But this woman had it in for me from that moment forward and caused me as much pain as possible.
This woman was transferred out of drug court for being too mean. The judge just could not put up with her. So I got a new guy. A gung ho mucho m***********. I'm 5'7, he towered over me at 6,'2 to and all muscles. Naive. Raised in a strict religious household and then tried to impose those values upon me. A child.
This guy could send me to jail on a whim. My wife refused to stop drinking. Just because I'm the a****** who ended up on drug court does not mean that she should stop drinking.
I'm not allowed to live with a drinker. I'm not allowed to have alcohol in the household.
My wife told me to go f*** myself and she was going to have the tequila handy.
Hey, after 2 years of the alcohol sitting there I started drinking. Didn't affect me. I have a long history of professionals telling me I have no problem (really, I broke the shrink), but at that moment I started drinking heavily because my life sucked.
One day there was a home inspection. He had been my PO for about a year at that point and had never done a walk through. He decided it was time. This guy walked into my house and then down to my basement and then back up from my basement into the kitchen. The door between the kitchen and the basement steps had a hook on it. On the hook there were some type of plastic shopping bag. In the shopping bag was a handle of tequila. I managed to distract and swing the door and keep it out of his direct line of sight but I was so f*****.
And then for the first time in two years I was called in for a test that they were going to send away to check for alcohol levels as well as everything else.
I was f*****.
A month later my probation officer calls me in. This is serious Spanish Inquisition s***, I'm going back to jail.
Drug court is called into session. That means all the people going to jail get to sit in the jury box while all the people in the gallery come up and testify about their wonderful lives. Us in the jury box know we are f***** and we have to wait till it's all over. It takes 3 hours.
My probation officer came up to me before the start of the drug court and told me I wasn't going to jail. He wasn't that evil. He told me it was going to cost though.
The judge told me I was not credible. I had a story. It was a hell of a story. It actually meshed with the facts on the ground. But it wasn't enough. It kept me out of jail, but it cost me. I had to rewrite the drug court a pamphlet, that's 30 dense pages and my hands hurt. And then they extended my sentence for a year, turning two and a half years into three and a half years.
Here's the story:
As a drug court scumbag I was assigned to a job at a limousine company. I had to fill Cadillacs and limos and big SUVs with gasoline and then I had to wash them. Sometimes I might spend an hour or two inside a limousine and spray an ethanol based cleanser and then scrub. Ethanol is drinking alcohol. I spent a huge amount of time inside a limousine, not just one limousine but several since the day of the test my boss pulled them up and told me to clean them all. So there I am, with two or three limousines for three or four hours spraying half a dozen cans of this ethanol based cleaner while inhaling these fumes and then my po officer says show up for a test. This really did happen that day.
I am so f*****.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
The judge tells me I'm not credible which is pretty much a death sentence in this situation so I got to claw to get back to the point where I can graduate and get the f*** out of that state.
He added a year to the sentence, and then watched me closely. But I didn't end up in jail (again).