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

Sims didn't have to pay the pig once during those first few weeks. The staff noticed that he was coming along. "Michael really wants to be here," Swanson said. "That shows."

For all his progress, though, the same flashes of anger, the insecurity, the bitterness that had gotten Sims in trouble before were still there. One dismal, snowy day in February, Sims was fighting off a wicked cough, and the arthritis in his knee was flaring up. John Fenner, the kitchen staff member who supervised the dishwashing station, called across the room: "Sims, go unload the truck."

"Man," Sims yelled back, in no mood to carry the big pallets of canned vegetables and other foods. "I did it yesterday. That isn't fair. I'm not unloading. No way."

The two men stared each other down.

"You're gonna do it."

"No."

Fenner sent Sims to see training director Tammy Williams, who sat him down in her tiny, windowless office just behind the dishwashing machines. She looked him sternly in the eye. When a supervisor says to do something, you need to do it, she said.

It isn't fair, Sims explained, I just unloaded the food yesterday. Why are you guys always being so tough on me?

"Michael," she said. "The reason he asks you to do so much is because he knows you can handle it. He knows he can depend on you."

Locked Up Again

In March, it was time to start looking for a job. Swanson showed them how to prepare a résumé and to go through newspaper classified ads and pointed out fliers on the bulletin board.

"We can't just hand them a job," he explained. "They have to work for it, understand that getting a job is their responsibility, not someone else's."

Several trainees landed work selling hot dogs and peanuts at Washington Nationals games; others interviewed with catering firms. Sims had lined up a couple of interviews. Then one day he went to his regular appointment to check in with his probation officer. As they were talking, Sims described later, two D.C. police officers entered the office.

There has been a paperwork problem, the probation officer explained. Virginia authorities never got word that he was in a drug treatment program, so as far as they were concerned, he was in violation of his probation. A bench warrant had been issued for his arrest.

Sims was incredulous. He stared at his probation officer and cried. As the police officers cuffed him, he begged his probation officer to tell his family and the staff at D.C. Central Kitchen what had happened.

"Please," he recalled telling her, "Tell them that I didn't screw up this time."

He was depressed and angry. He wondered if it had all been for nothing -- getting off drugs, memorizing his lessons, getting to class on time. Sims said that in the D.C. holding cell, as he waited to be picked up by Virginia corrections officers, a guy told him he had some heroin; would Michael like some?

"It was tempting," he said later. "Awfully tempting."

But he thought it through -- Swanson and the counselors who had helped him, the family members he had let down all those times. "I told him, 'Nah, I don't use anymore.' "

It was dark most of the day in Sims's tiny cell at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail, and many of the guards remembered him from two years earlier. He passed the hours reading paperbacks by Dean Koontz and Michael Crichton. He wrote letters to anyone who would listen, as his public defender tried to straighten out the mix-up. Expecting to be released at any time, he didn't try to get any prison jobs.

"I'm lonely," he said one day in early summer, slouching in a chair in the jail's visitors area. He wore a plastic ID bracelet and a prison-issue uniform that looked like dark green pajamas. He moved more slowly and spoke more softly than he had at the kitchen. "I was working so hard. I felt like I had finally put my past behind me. I just don't know why God is doing this to me."

A few weeks earlier, his class had graduated from the Central Kitchen. Not being there is what hurt the most, Sims said.

After four months, a judge agreed to release him. Sims moved back to the Safe Haven treatment center in Washington, where he was assigned a small apartment on North Capitol Street with a roommate. He had $42, a bag containing his clothing and old papers, and half a pack of cigarettes.

The next morning, he was back cooking.

Swanson gave his blessing for Sims to rejoin the latest training class, which was already underway. Soon he was joking around with the staff, with the ease of someone reunited with old friends.

Swanson gradually became uneasy when he saw Sims relaxing on the job. It brought back two-decade-old memories, when he was addicted to alcohol and painkillers. He worried that Sims's sobriety, like his own, was less guaranteed than it might appear.

"You're slipping, Michael," Swanson told Sims one day in October when he saw him outside, relaxing. "Get back to work."

"I can't afford to take my ease," Swanson said later. "All the weaknesses that made me who I was 22 years ago are still there. It could come back at any time if I'm not vigilant. Michael is the same way. He has to stay focused. If he goes back to his old ways, it won't start with having a drink. It will start with him becoming lazy and taking all the things he's achieved so far for granted.

"That's why I'm so hard on him. And the truth is, he gave me permission to ride him this way. He never said it explicitly, but by the way he interacts, the way he responded, he made clear that he wants me to push him to keep on the path he is on."

"I don't know," Sims said one day during the lunch break, staring down at his plate. "Sometimes it just feels like they ride me so hard. I know they're trying to help me, but I just wish they would leave me alone sometimes."

A Link to the Past

In the fall, Sims again started looking for work. Most of the graduates were planning to work at catering firms, restaurants and cafeterias at government office buildings. But Sims had other ideas.

"I want to work with people like me," he said. "I want be around people who are struggling with the things I've been struggling with. I mean, one day I'd really like to be a substance abuse counselor. They've helped me so much, I'd like to help people too."

He prepared a new résumé and landed two jobs. One was for 20 hours a week with First Helping, an arm of the Central Kitchen that delivers food to places in the District where homeless people gather. Sims handles the food while a counselor chats with the homeless people, hoping to coax some into shelters or drug treatment programs.

The second job, cooking at a halfway house for recently released prisoners, also offered reminders of his past. The evening before his first day cooking at the halfway house, he went onto the balcony of his tiny apartment.

"I'm nervous," he said, as he took a few puffs on a cigarette, then saved the rest for later.

At 7 p.m., he went to his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at a nearby community center. On the way home, he stopped at a takeout restaurant where the cashier took his order from behind a bulletproof plexiglass barrier: Fried croaker, fries, grape soda.

Sims tossed all night. When his alarm went off at 5:30 a.m., he slid on the black pants he wore most days and a black D.C. Central Kitchen T-shirt. He went onto the balcony to smoke the other half of last night's cigarette and made a cup of coffee. Then he made his bed, sat in his chair for a bit to collect his thoughts, and walked out the door.

There was a slight chill in the fall air that morning, making Sims's knee stiff. He limped slightly during the 10-minute walk to work. "I know I can do this," he said during the walk, as if trying to convince himself. "I have to be able to do this."

He showed up for work under a pale blue sky. Twenty minutes early.

Tired but Smiling

He was supposed to get off at 3 p.m. Instead he limped out of the halfway house at 5:15. His knee ached. But he was beaming.

Why so late?

"If I leave at 3, then I leave the food in the refrigerator and they microwave it later for dinner. But if I stayed longer, I could serve the food hot. And there were french fries for dinner, and fries are just no good when you reheat them. The guys really like it when they get their dinner hot, so I stayed late," he said, the words tumbling out.

"Also, that's two hours more pay," he said, grinning.

As he walked along New York Avenue, stopping every few minutes to rest his knee, Sims rehashed the successes and failures of the day. He put too much pepper in the scrambled eggs; one of the guys complained. Lunch -- hot dogs, which he served up with a salad -- went fine, though he decided he was going to ask his bosses to get better lettuce. "They want the guys to have some vegetables with every meal, but then they only have iceberg lettuce, which doesn't have any nutrients in it." They should get something greener, like romaine, he argued.

"I feel pretty good about -- oh, shoot." He scratched his head. "I left the snacks locked up in the cupboard." He thought about a minute. "It's OK. The staff have keys to it, and the guys won't let them forget about their snack."

Sims was bone tired but walked four blocks to the New York Avenue Metro stop. He took the train to Fort Totten, transferred to another train and hopped on a bus at the Greenbelt Metro stop, all to go to the mall.

"My little nephew, it's his birthday. Well actually, it was his birthday a couple of days ago, but I promised him I'd send him something."

Sims walked to one of the booths in the middle of the mall. He found some rhinestone-encrusted dog tags. He asked some nearby kids which one would excite his nephew the most. They excitedly recommended a variety that lit up with scrolling blue text. He paid $40 for them, about half his day's pay.

"My family stuck with me through me making a lot of mistakes. I want to be there for them now," he said.

Graduation: 'I Belong'

At the end of October, Sims put on his late brother's khaki suit and headed to his graduation. An hour before the ceremony, Swanson announced that Sims would be the class speaker, surprising even Michael.

The prospect of facing a roomful of 100 people made him clam up and pace nervously. Then the class started rehearsing for the dance they would do as the entered the auditorium at Georgetown Law Center. As the Usher song built to a strong baseline, Sims, the pear-shaped guy with a bum knee, started dancing more enthusiastically than any of them, raising his arms, dipping his knees and flashing a broad smile.

"I'm not as nervous anymore," he said.

His niece Tracie Bass was there. So were Remona Jackson and Sylvia Brown, friends from his original class at the kitchen.

Sims took the stage.

"I felt at home in the kitchen. I felt I belong," he said. "My whole thing is no matter what is put in your way, you have to keep going forward. There's people in the kitchen you can talk to."

When the ceremony was over, Sims went home. His shift began at 7 the next morning, and there was a lot of work ahead.