The z-wave device is one I purchased from HomeSeer. It is basically a pi with zwave and wireless module. It listens by default on port 2001. So the USB stick side is already operational. Others have had success in getting it to work. I believe that my problem is that my hass.io is a Docker image and I am running the socat on the debian host. I think that is preventing hass.io from accessing the usb device. I think there is a way to have the hass.io docker image use a --device flag to pass the /dev/znet or whatever symlink that gets created back to hass.io.
Here is an example of a docker hub container that has socat already built in and should work. I am going to try that next.