Dead America, part III

III. Back to San Antonio and into a situation
that I could neither want nor foresee with
nothing but a few pieces of luggages
and even more broken hopes
and dreams.

We arrived in San Antonio, which I had lived in previously while in a court appointed rehabilitation clinic 3 years prior, to the site of Louis. He had moved back the year before after dropping out of Full Sail. After moving back in with his parents, he had dropped back into the weed smoking jobless life style that he had grown accustom to before moving to Florida. After picking us up from the bus station and dropping us off at the house we had found, we set up our stuff in a room adjacent to the office and then spent the night watching television and resting from the 20+ hour trip there.

San Antonio hadn’t changed much since the first time I had come here in 2001. I was 17, and had been in and out of rehabilitation clinics and youth treatment facilities for drug use, criminal behavior, and just all around being an overly rebellious teenager whom my parents could no longer handle on their own. After a violation of my probation (which was spent by simultaneously running away from home and being arrested for breaking and entering) I spent a month in the Pulaski County Jeuvenille Detention Center (which, all in all, is where I had spent a combined total of about 8 months of my teenage existence), the judge decided that since I had been to about every youth center in Arkansas, it was time to think of other options. Laurel Ridge in San Antonio seemed to be the best option. I was ordered to go for treatment and get my GED, since I had previously been expelled from school. The time spent in San Antonio was spent well. In December of 2001, I attained my GED and three months later was deemed fit for society by my psychiatrists and therapists. (On an interestingly infuriating side note, it would have been sooner, but upon going back to Arkansas for a home visit, I was drug tested and the results were positive. I had recently been put on a new medication, and tried to tell my p.o. that it was the medicine. There is no way that that medicine can test positive. Our phameceutical technicians tell me that that is impossible. About a month later, the people from Laurel Ridge call her and confirm that it was in fact the medicine that had made my urine test positive.)

The first thing on our agenda was to find jobs. This was more difficult than it appeared as, like in Florida, we did not have a vehicle and lived on the very outskirts of town. This of course meant that any conventional job would have been next to impossible to find, and if we did find it, next to impossible to keep. There were no busses that ran anywhere near the house, and our roommate was less than obliged to give us a ride anywhere.
We began planning our eventual move out of the current area and to find a job. We did some apartment hunting, which brought back the dillema that I had faced in my first trip to Florida: in order to get an apartment, I needed a co-signature from my father. I don’t think I have to spell out the outcome of that conversation.
We eventually found a job working for a small out-of-the house bookstore which included indexing and cataloging the growing number of books. This was right before we left San Antonio to come back to Arkansas.
The problem with that job wasn’t the fact that there was no real way they could keep track of the work we were doing, but the fact that not only did they accuse us of trying to cheat them out of money, they refused to pay us for the work we did do. We wound up leaving with about $25 in our pockets.
The time before that was spent pawning things here and there to make ends meet food wise, but when it came time for rent, we were in over our heads. After a month of not being to pay our roommate, we eventually came to the conclusion that we should leave.
We arrived back in Arkansas after a short bus trip and were greeted by Heather’s mother. It was now time to get this thing we called life on track and first thing was first: we needed a place to live for the time being, and needed a job. 2004 was drawing to a close, and 2005 was dawning on the horizon. It was to be a new year with fresh opportunities. It was almost the year that never was.