Mark Fitz fidgets as he talks about how he broke down a couple of days after he was let out of prison.

The stress of being out after spending much of the past 25 years in prison was making him anxious.

He went to the Lancaster County Community Mental Health Center to see a psychiatrist.

“I just knew I needed help there before I could get help with anything else because I was starting to lose it,” said Fitz, who says he has bipolar disorder. “I knew I needed some kind of psychological help.”

When he got there, Fitz said, he started to wonder what he would tell the people inside.

“I sat in the park across the street from the place crying for about an hour,” he said. “Then I go inside the place and I broke down in there and it’s like, ‘Oh, this is as embarrassing as hell.’”

He went in and got an appointment for the following week, he said, and wondered what he’d do until then.

Fitz, 45, was paroled Aug. 21 from the Lincoln Correctional Center, where he spent the last few months of an eight-to-15-year sentence for attempted robbery.

He walked out the door with a check for $100, a few pieces of clothing and two notebooks filled with ideas for inventions. He had plans to stay at a halfway house and look for work.

When he got to the halfway house, he said, the first thing the manager did was take the $100 toward $450 monthly rent.

He said he was surprised and angry — when he got hungry and found out he had to provide his own food, a towel if he wanted to take a shower and money to do laundry.

“They do absolutely nothing,” he said. “They give you a place to stay and that is it. Nothing else.”

Fitz lasted three days there, and said he was kicked out because he wasn’t finding work, which, he said, he can’t do because he needs to have surgery on his foot.

An attorney for Summit Care and Wellness, which advertises the halfway house as transitional living for people recovering from drug or alcohol addiction, said he could not comment about clients.

Before and after leaving, Fitz said, he went to community agencies looking for help. But a week after his release, he felt like he was running out of options.

He wound up at the People’s City Mission on the advice of his parole officer, but said he has “a very high degree of antisocial behavior” and can’t sleep there.

“It would flip me out,” he said. “I have to do everything I can just to hold it back. I’m sure eventually, once everything levels out, that will subside.”

Fitz said he sneaks out at night and sleeps in unlocked vehicles.

He’s frustrated, he said. His parole officer should know he can’t stay with other people — it’s in his file. Fitz’s parole officer said he could not talk about offenders under his supervision.

Jim McKenzie, adult parole administrator for the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services, said an overwhelming majority of men and women leave prison without jobs, but they do have a plan.

“We don’t set anyone up to fail,” McKenzie said. “That’s the last thing we want to do.”

Parole is meant to help people learn to become self-reliant, he said, and his office keeps a directory of service providers for offenders.

“Parole officers take a look at the level of functioning of an individual (offender),” McKenzie said. “If they can function on their own, then they’re expected to go out and look for those resources.

“We don’t take their hand — we provide them with guidance.”

Fitz doesn’t see that he’s getting much guidance.

“Parole officers have an oath they’re supposed to take … promise to help the parolees as much as possible,” he said. “ … All they do is try to get you back in prison.”

He carries around a list of places he says he’s gone. He dismisses them all, claiming they can’t or won’t help him.

He’s been in prison five times, he says, and if he doesn’t get help soon, that’s where he’ll wind up again.

“I just know next week I’m going to prison,” he said Friday, “or I’m going to leave, unless I can find something by Monday.”

Mike Heili, a chaplain at the City Mission, said Fitz needs to understand that finding the help he needs takes time.

“The world’s not coming together as quickly as he’d like it,” he said. “I think the fear’s just paralyzing him right now.”

Fitz has been in prison at least five times. He served two sentences in Florida, from 1982 to 1983 and August 1991 to November 1991.

He was in prison in Pennsylvania — he’s a native of Pittsburgh — most of the time from 1992 to 2002.

At the end of that sentence, he was extradited to Nebraska to serve a sentence for robbing a grocery store in Lincoln in April 1997.

He spent about a year in solitary confinement at Tecumseh State Correctional Institution — at his request, he said.

“I just have a real problem living with other people,” he said.

During his time in Nebraska prisons, Fitz said, he worked hard to improve himself.

“I bet I easily read 100 different self-help books.”

He also filled two notebooks with ideas for inventions.

He was able to do all that, he said, because he started taking medication for bipolar disorder about nine years ago.

Before then, “My thoughts were just … flying. I couldn’t isolate a thought.”

In Tecumseh, he said he contacted a patent agent from Invention University with an idea for a hair-care product. But he had to put his ideas on hold because he couldn’t develop a prototype in prison, he said.

“I know I have a really good future ahead of me,” he said. “I have all this stuff with these inventions  … and I know I’m going to do well with that.

“But I have to get to a certain point where I can do that.”

Lincoln Police Chief Tom Casady’s never met Mark Fitz, but he’s pretty sure he’s met a lot guys like him.

“The average citizen thinks someone who commits a hold-up, they’re going to be in prison a very long time,” Casady said. “Our average citizen is wrong.”

The truth is, most people who go to prison get out.

“This guy sounds to me pretty typical,” Casady said. “It’s a common phenomenon in career criminals — complete, total narcissism, completely self-centered. …

“It is a problem. Your options are limited when you’re penniless and released from prison,” he said. “And when you’re suffering from some kind of personality disorder, you’re pretty much out of luck.”

But being out of work shouldn’t be among the problems, he said.

“There really are jobs available for people who are ex-cons. The problem is, they’re minimum-wage jobs … and a narcissist doesn’t want to that. A narcissist wants everyone to provide for him.”

When Fitz showed up for his appointment at the Lancaster County Community Mental Health Center on Wednesday, he learned it had actually been on Tuesday. The receptionist had marked an X next to Wednesday on the appointment card but wrote in Tuesday’s date, he said.

He then learned he’d have to wait several weeks for another appointment.

“All I needed was a prescription,” Fitz said. “I find it hard to believe a psychiatrist can’t take two minutes out of their day to write a prescription.”

He left prison with a two-week supply of medication, but took a higher dose than prescribed because of anxiety and depression, he said, and he ran out early.

He left the mental health center, but went back minutes later and demanded the name of the man who, Fitz said, had failed to explain why they couldn’t help him that day.

He knows he was belligerent, and he knows his size — he’s a broad 6-foot-5 — intimidates people.

When Fitz got back to the City Mission that afternoon, he got a call telling him he could see a doctor the next day.

He didn’t go.

“I was mad,” he said. “I’m not going to appease them.

“I realize I should go. … I’m being stubborn, but I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of cleaning it up. I know it doesn’t make sense, but nothing seems to make sense any more.”

He said he’s angry and defensive because he’s trying to protect himself and the self-esteem he’s gained through medication and self-help.

“It’s extremely fragile, and I’m protecting it.”

Finding a place to stay and medication, dealing with a foot he says hurts all of the time — each worry in and of itself might seem minor, Fitz said.

“But when you stack them all together, and then stack it on top of me and put yourself inside of me, of everything that’s going on with me, the anxiety of coming out of prison and all that — it’s overwhelming like hell.

“I’m very cold right now — I mean in my mind. I’m leaning toward the good side, but if I go off toward the other side, I’m going to dive and push off.

“And I don’t want that to happen. I really, honestly don’t want that to happen.”

Reach Hilary Kindschuh at 473-7120 or hkindschuh@journalstar.com.