Let The Phone Calls Begin

Forgot to mention this yesterday because I was so kephlempt over the whole windshield wiper debalicle but at around 630pm or so, the phone rang in the store.

I was in the back getting zen by playing a round of COD so Chief answered the phone.

He comes in the back and I joking asked if it was our infamous customer G who asks “.. what time are you open to?” every single time he calls regardless of whether it is day, night or afternoon.

G usually doesn’t get off the bar stool much so I can see where his confusions may lie.

At any rate, Chief said it wasn’t G.. it was Weed. Calling collect from the country prison. Apparently, since he didn’t have bail posted, they moved him out to county.

Not that ANY jail / prison :: I really don’t know the difference :: is a picnic but this particular one has a bad reputation.

Hmm.. wonder how tough Weed is going to be WITHOUT being all strung out on Percs!

Anyway.. the whole collect call thing.

They have a system regarding the phones. The person on the OUTSIDE needs to set up an account with this company out in Cali and deposit money into it that’s linked to your phone number.

When the inmate dials your phone number from INSIDE.. the number maps through this system and bumps up against your account. If there are available funds, the call goes through. If there aren’t available funds OR if you didn’t open an account then you get a message that whoever is trying to make a collect call but you really can’t do anything about it because you don’t have an account.

There are alot of things wrong with this system.. in fact, the first time Weed was arrested Chief went on a tangent about how all the inmates families should file a class action suit against this company and the state because there had to be some kind of rights being trampled on in regard to the families.

First of all, you can’t map the account to a cell phone. Only a lan line.

It’s one phone number per account so if you wanted to list your home phone number AND your work number you would have to open two seperate accounts each with a 50.00 minimum.

Only certain phone carriers will allow you to do this. So if you have something like MagicJack or Cavallier or something you can forget about it.

Oh.. and when you cancel the account? Forget about getting the balance of your account refunded. We’re STILL waiting for the 60.00 they owe us.

Chief’s point last year was that having to go through the whole family member being in jail is hard enough … and in some cases, already causes a financial impact on the family.. suppose you didn’t have a LAN line.. suppose you didn’t have a credit card to open an account with? Suppose you didn’t have the 50.00 minimum to open the account?

And I guess their stance is, “.. hey.. if your loved one didn’t break the law.. get caught.. and wind up here you wouldn’t have these problems.”

At any rate .. getting back to last night.

Chief tells me that it was Weed calling collect. He reminds me about the whole phone thing that I just explained and said that he wasn’t going to set up another account. Been there, done that, still owed money he said.

I just shrugged. Not to sound insenitive but I was in the middle of a really, really good round of COD. I was kicking virtual soldier butt!

Fast foward about another half hour :: maybe less :: and the phone rings again. I asked him if I should answer and he said, ” Go ahead. It’s probably Weed again and it won’t go through anyway.”

So I answered and sure enough, the autotron voice said:

You have received a collect call from [Weed saying his name} an inmate at [prison name]. If you would like to accept the call, press 1.

So just for the hell of it, I pressed 1

The autotron message said:

You do not have an account which would allow this call to be completed. To open an account, please dial 1-800-***-**** or if your completely disgusted and feel as thought the person on the other end is a complete fuck up who wouldn’t know the proper way to live if it bit them on the ass, please hang up.

Okay. so that part is made up.

I have to admit.. cause it’s all about honesty here.. when I heard Weed say his name, I felt a little pang in my heart. He sounded young.. and well, I won’t say naive or scared… but desperate. Maybe that’s the right word. He sounded desperate.

I can see now why parents give in all the time and understand why they have a hard time seeing what is so obvious to everyone else… because as much as I do not have to be emotionally or parentally attached to him.. I am.

I flashed back to the first time he as arrested. He was still involved with the Goth Girl and her mother, The Saint.

The Saint was / is a social worker for the state so that just made her know everything about everything. A fact that she would tell you :: by vocal tone :: all the time.

She condoned her daughter’s drug use and drinking because she was under the false assumption that being her daughter’s FRIEND was much more important then being her daughter’s MOTHER. Sort of like the Crack Whore but with a job.

I think The Saint believed that Chief and I were a bunch of low-lives who didn’t provide anything for Weed. How many times did she tell me that “the poor kid” didn’t have a jacket so she had to give him one and HOW MANY TIMES did I have to tell her that he has four jackets hanging on the front porch, he’s just too damn stupid to grab one as he waslked out the door?

The Saint issued another canonization on herself when she got Weed a job.

Let’s back track here.. although The Saint works for the state, her and her husband also park cars at the local sports arenas. They’re the annoying people wearing yellow vests waving orange flags and batons at you when you try to park in a lot.

Anyway.. they had their daughter working with them and so.. because Weed wanted to be around the daughter.. started working with them also.

But yknow.. The Saint took credit for getting him a job where Chief and I just allowed him to be a bum. She didn’t want to hear that Chief had been on Weed’s ass since he dropped out of high school :: with two months left to go.. idiot! :: because it was always about what SHE was doing and how SHE was putting him on the straight and narrow.

She could never accept the connection that it was HER daughter.. who she smoked pot with and condoned her behaviour.. that led Weed down the road he’s on now.

Let’s get one thing straight. Weed’s decisions are his. He has to own them. I’m only saying that Goth Girl was the one who introduced him to the world he’s now involved him. Up until her.. he may have smoked pot.. may have indulged in alcohol but nothing that interferred with school or the core base of friends he had had since childhood.

Anyway.. when Weed first got arrested he called Goth Girl :: who was a junior in high school at the time :: who called The Saint who called me at work. This was around 12:30. He got arrested at 4am.

NOTE: When Chief woke up again to get me and the kids up, B-Rad was coming out of Weed’s room and he asked Chief where Weed was. Chief was like, “… your the one that slept with him” and B-RAD said that the last thing he knew was that Weed went out to go get coffee at the convenience store at the end of our block and then he left.

What actually did happen was that Weed left the house at 4 am with no shoes .. intending I think to go to the convenience store .. but decided to rob stuff from cars first where someone saw him and called the police.

Anyway.. so to go off another ramp there.. but the whole thing is that when Weed was arrested the first time and we had to go through this whole phone service bull crap, the only number that Weed was calling was Goth Girl’s.

We had just had our phone number changed about 3 days before so I can’t blame him for not remembering that and we didn’t have the shop then.

Chief was desperate to talk to him. I kept asking Goth Girl to set up an account but The Saint wouldn’t let her.

I called The Saint.. maybe after the 2 or 3rd day that we found out about the phone thing.. and asked her bluntly whether or not she was going to set up the service. She called me back with a major.. major attitude :: I don’t do well with people having major attitudes as I tend to get on myself :: when I was on the drive home from work.

She said that she was ABSOLUTELY NOT going to do it.. it was interferring with her daughter’s school and she was not going to have her kid’s life screwed up because of this.

So the drugs and alcohol and binging and black outs and hard core partying doesn’t affect her school work, right?

She didn’t like that .. she began to relay EVERYTHING she has done for Weed.. culminating with “… and you didn’t even bail him out”.

That was it. I feel SO SORRY for the animals at the zoo because I was stuck at the obscenely long red light in front of it when I went off. I’m actually surprised that I didn’t bust my windshield.

I could tell you verbatim but I think you kind of get the gist of all my pent up frustration with this woman. I finished up by saying that SHE was keeping Chief from his son and that with everything she’s so ready to say “LOOK AT WHAT I DID” for.. she isn’t willing to do the ONE THING that only SHE COULD DO.

I hung up on her because I really didn’t want to hear anything from her at that point. But I called Chief literally in tears from being so angry… my voice horse from yelling so loud.

He was just as enraged. HE called her up.. got her answering machine and left her a scathing message that ended with him calling her the same foul 4 letter word that flashed letter by letter in a scene from the movie ATONEMENT.

Goth Girl wrote him a letter :: she who calls her mother a bitch :: and included our phone number.. we set up the service nad eventually Chief got to talk to Weed.

I don’t think either of us knew just how deep he was involved with his new world. And I know that Chief thought that this was going to wake him up. Chief faught so hard to get him into rehab and not sentenced to jail … faught so hard to get this removed from his record once he completed rehab and the community service and stuff he was going to get.

Did Weed appreciate that? Nope.

Did he he do nothing but bitch and complain about being in rehab and wished he was actually back in jail? Yep.

Talk about a smack in the face.

And even though Chief knows that rehab doesn’t work unless you want it.. and Weed clearly didn’t.. he still held on to that hope that Weed would come of this realizing what he had done.. what he put his father through.. and where it was leading him.

Nope.

The day he wa released from rehab, Chief picked him up and on the way back to the house Chief told Weed that this was his last shot. Chief wasn’t going to bail him out or go to bat for him anymore. If he wanted to hang with the same crew and get into the same kind of trouble then he wasn’t going to help him again.

So far, he’s stuck to it.

UPDATE PART 5 – Bail and Release

Saturday started off with me going to the wholesale place. I really didn’t want to spend any money but knew that if I didn’t there wouldn’t be anything to really sell to make money. I kept it as lean as possible but still spent about 90.00.

Weed.. who had been given community service and who NEVER went to community service.. decided that on THIS Saturday, he wanted to go to community service. Jerk off.

But I took him… opened up the store and did the best I could to do things the way Chief does them.

It’s funny, I’m with him every weekend opening up but never realized just how much he did until I had to do it myself.. and remember what to do. The ins and outs.. how many rolls to put aside.. how to cook the bacon so it was just right enough for breakfast sandwiches. I was slow.. but he would have been proud of me and thankfully, I have really good customers’ that understood the situation.

By around 3 o’clock, I had all the bail money. I texted the lawyer to ask how I post it because no one at the police station would tell me and the courts were closed on Sunday.

While I was waiting for him to answer, the phone rang around 5 and it was Chief. I couldn’t believe it. I was so happy to hear from him that I sat on the floor under the slicers and started to cry. He told me what I needed to do with the bail money. That I had to drive up to the county prison after 8 that night and post it and he would be released.

So at 8, me and Bubba made the trip up. It took us about an hour and a half to get there. I knew where it was from when Weed was released and knew that you just basically sat in the parking lot until the prison guards told you want you needed do do.

We sat from 9pm until 12:45am. It wasn’t until then that the guard van had me follow them to the office building where they escorted me to the bail office and I posted bail. Then they escorted me back to the parking lot until around 4:30 when he was finally released.

I couldn’t believe that he was in front of me. I didn’t realize how much I had missed him and how much… even with all the bullshit that’s been going on.. that I loved him.

Understandably, all he wanted to do was smoke a cigarette and have a cup of coffee. He wouldn’t let go of my hand.

We stopped at a convenience store, got coffee and then because he hadn’t eaten anything real since Thursday, we stopped at an all night McDonald’s and had the best burgers we ever had in our lives.

It was on the ride that I found out that he hadn’t seen the warrant. I told him what was in it.. what it said.. who they were basing their summations on. We both knew Weed was somehow involved..

He said that all the uniformed officers were really nice.. that THEY knew he didn’t have anything to with what they were saying.. he said that the guards were really nice and that one of them actually let him use his cell phone. That he tried to gegt a hold of me but he didn’t remember the cell phone number correctly so he called his father. He said that while he was in the holding cell, the head detective came in to talk to him and he told him that he doesn’t sell pot, he smokes it. He asked who he bought from and he told them Harry. The detective came back with Harry’s picture and Chief id’d him. He said he knew Harry had had something to do with it.. that he was the only one hanging around the store that knew that Chief smoked AND he was asshole buddies with Weed AND with Eric, the guy who robbed our house.

It all fit..

The two anonymous informants with the same story COULD NOT be anyone other then Harry and his girlfriend Christine.

Chief reiterated that he didn’t want Weed anywhere near him. I told him that I made sure both Weed and the crack whore knew that.

Funny thing is, once Chief was released from jail and Weed had to stay at the crack whore’s, she completely changed her story and said that Chief WAS doing what they were accusing him of. She even went so far to say that “.. it even says so in the warrant.. that he admitted it to the police.”

Kids: see what drugs and a lack of education does to you?

That’s not what the warrant said.. and she knows it.

When we finally got home, I continued to fill him in on what was going on and whatever. He said that he hated the way they separated us. That one minute we were together and the next I was gone. That he was so worried about me and how I was handling things because he knew that he was okay but knew that I had no clue what was going on.

While he was in the hospital, they told him that he had on-set diabetes.. that he had a lung infection.. that he had high blood pressure and gave him a lot of prescription for a lot of things.

I can’t describe the feeling I had having him home but I also knew that this isn’t something that was going to go away.