His release date had finally come around and my friend was getting sprung from the joint.

The can, the pen, the clink.

I was there to pick him up when he walked through the bland steel door and into sunlight. He stood in front of that door a moment blinking at the wide world around him, a man whose earlier existence consisted of cinder block and bars. To me, he looked like a canary who has flown from its cage and now sits on a window sill, barely believing the expanse of things outside.

He walked to my car carrying a simple plastic bag that contained his civilian possessions: two T-shirts, a pair of jeans, some sneakers and a toothbrush. No more inmate orange or black slippers. They had been left behind in a heap when he was booked out of jail and marched through a door that ground on its cogs.

Freedom, baby.

I was curious, so as he climbed into the car I asked him, “What did you miss more than anything?”

Before the words were out of my mouth, my friend was clawing at the dashboard for a pack of cigarettes.

“A smoke,” he said. “God, a smoke more than anything in the world.”

He smoked two as we drove through the city, eyes glazing over with each puff as though the chemicals he inhaled contained deep secrets instead of carcinogens.

“What else?” I asked him. “After you finish smoking all my cigarettes, what do you want next to celebrate your liberation.”

“Booze,” he said. “A tall can of beer.”

I reminded him that it was ten in the morning.

“I don’t give a crap,” he said. “For all that time, I was forced into a sobriety that was so stark, it was like Super Sobriety. All that clarity. In a place like that, you don’t want clarity but there’s no escaping it.”

And just like that, within a half hour of release, my jailbird friend had returned to the vices that had contributed to his trouble to begin with. He had served his time for a probation violation on the heels of an assault charge. He had been drunk during both offenses.

“I’m aware of that, Mother Theresa,” he said when I pointed out the irony. “But listen. I’ve been under the nonnegotiable rule of men with the legal authority to tell me what to do and when to do it, all day and all night. When to wake, when to eat, when to go to sleep. If I can reclaim some of my freewill by rifling smokes and downing one damn tall boy, I’m going to do it.”

He didn’t buy one damn tall boy when we stopped at the store. He bought six.

“Now that we’ve resurrected your soul at a corner store,” I said, “what’s next on your freedom wish list? Big fat steak? Quarter pounder and fries?”

He pondered it over another smoke and a long haul from a beer.

“Food’s lousy in the cage,” he said. “Atrocious, really. But you know what? You get used to it. It fills your belly and fuels the body. No, what I want right now is space.”

“Space? Like the final frontier? You want to be Capt. Kirk?”

“Idiot,” he said. “I mean physical space. I want to go to a meadow and roam alone. Or walk the streets at midnight when there’s nobody out. You see, the toughest thing about getting locked up is the inability to escape from the people around you. Every day, you wake up with these people, sit at a crowded table to eat breakfast together, crowd around tables with them to play cribbage. Everywhere you go, there they are. You go to bed at the same time and all night long you hear them, mumbling in their sleep, snoring, screaming at the guards. The same faces and same voices over and over. Did you know that in a scientific study, mice deprived of privacy went completely insane?”

I wondered how a scientist could tell if a mouse was insane but didn’t bring it up.

For the remainder of the ride, my friend extolled the beauty of open spaces and the joy of making choices — even bad ones — without permission from burly county employees. He spoke almost in verse about the irreplaceable nature of freedom like a man who has lost and regained something sacred.

“The joint changes you,” he said as he got out of the car with his drooping plastic bag. “You never get used to it.”

Deep thoughts from the recently freed. My friend claimed to have experienced a sort of rebirth through the temporary elimination of personal freedom. And do you know how long he spent inside the cinder block walls with locks on all the doors?

Three days. Three measly days to sleep on a cot, eat bad food and ponder his crimes. Three days that must seem like an eye-blink for seasoned cons.

Later in the summer, I saw his name in the police notes. Another assault and another short jail stay. There was a drunken driving charge toward fall, and a driving while suspended at the start of the new year. On and on it went, and the sentences grew longer. Three days became 10, and 10 became 30. Before I stopped following his travails through the court listings, he was ordered by the court to spend 120 days behind the bars he insisted had so transformed him.

I guess my friend got used to it after all.