A Hand Up In a D.C. System Full of Letdowns

"I quit just about everything I ever tried to do," he said.

He eventually moved to New York, where he worked as a nurse's assistant at a hospital. He still remembers an evening in 1983, when he was at a bar where someone offered him cocaine. Sims tried it. "It was a kind of pleasure I had never experienced," he said. "It was so intense, such an upper."

Before long, he was stealing urine out of patients' bedpans in order to pass drug screenings. He was fired, then moved to crack cocaine as his illicit substance of choice and began drifting around the East Coast. Drug use led to homelessness and desperation, then to jail time, after which he would sober up for a while -- but only for a while.

His Virginia rap sheet is a study in petty, and sometimes not-so-petty, crime. April 1997: drunk in public. May 1997: drunk in public. October 1997: urinating in public. January 1998: cocaine possession. December 2000: shoplifting.

"I was a terrible shoplifter," he said recently. "I got caught every time I tried it."

December 2000: breaking and entering. It was a TV store, where he was looking for electronics he could pawn for drug money. That's the one that put him in Hampton Roads Regional Jail.

His brother died in 2002. The family didn't know where Michael was. His niece Tracie Bass found him by searching a Virginia Department of Corrections Web page. The warden told him that night after dinner, and Sims mourned in his cell, never having felt so alone.

After being released later that year, Sims was clean for a while, but he soon started using drugs again. He was caught by the periodic urine test that was a requirement of his probation. To avoid having to go back to jail, he entered Safe Haven Outreach Ministry, a drug treatment facility in the District. After several intense weeks of detox, the staff, noticing that he liked to hang around with the cooks at the facility, told him to look into D.C. Central Kitchen to get on the path to a job.

So on a frigid morning in January 2005, two months removed from his last hit of crack cocaine, Sims sat down in a dank basement of a homeless shelter, squeezed among shelves of dried pasta, canned tomatoes and every other type of bulk, nonperishable food that D.C. Central Kitchen could wrangle from its corporate donors. In a short quiz on the application, Sims correctly indicated that the statement "Improperly washed hands can cause a food-borne illness" was true, offering evidence that he could read well enough to hold down a cooking job.

On the first day of class, Jan. 24, Swanson stood in front of the 35 new trainees. There was scattered coughing. A few people stared down at the table in front of them. Sims stared Swanson dead in the eyes.

"Not all of you will be here 12 weeks from now," said Swanson, his voice full of gravel. "But I promise you that if you do all that we ask, you will be able to get a job. You will have to work hard. But great things await you. Great, wonderful things."

In his cluttered office a few hours later, Swanson discussed the outlook for the class privately. "I used to think I could tell which ones will succeed and which ones won't. Now I realize that's just not true. We'll do everything we can for them, but in the end, they're the ones who have to show up and do their work and act right. I can't predict who will be able to do that and who won't."