In jail, I knew one number I was willing to dial. My friend Billy’s.
There are different ways to disappear. You can run away. You can hide. Or you can get arrested and transferred to the Jefferson County Jail, which accomplishes both without requiring any planning on your part.
I had not gone anywhere. I was a few miles from my own kitchen. But as far as the outside world was concerned, I might as well have been on the moon. At least the moon has better visibility.
My phone was confiscated. Somewhere along the way we stopped remembering telephone numbers. We outsourced our memories to little glass rectangles. Without mine, I made a remarkable discovery. I did not know how to call anybody.
Meanwhile, people were trying to find me. They called. They kept running into bureaucratic walls. Please hold. Your call is important to us. It was not.
It is a strange feeling to be surrounded by people and still be completely alone. I had effectively disappeared, without the benefit of a witness protection program or a new name. I would have liked a new name. I had some ideas.
Then came the losses that never show up on an inventory sheet. While I was locked up, two men who mattered enormously to me died. Neither one got a goodbye from me.
One night a friend from my childhood showed up in a dream. I had not thought about him in years. There he was, as immediate as a visitor, telling me everything was going to be all right.
As soon as I could get to a phone, I called Billy. During that call, Billy told me my childhood friend had died four days earlier.
Four days.
I believed it was a sign from God. I still do. Somebody else might call it coincidence. I am not here to prove a supernatural event in a court of law. Courts have not been especially receptive to my arguments.
Then a message came through the jail system. A friend from the recovery community wrote to tell me my longtime AA sponsor had died.
A sponsor is somebody who has walked part of the road and agrees to help another man find his footing. Sometimes that means listening while the same fool tells the same story for the nineteenth time and insists that this time the problem is definitely everybody else. I was frequently that fool. He listened every time.
I wish I could say I always listened back. I am taking more of his advice now, a little late, which I suspect would make him laugh. The value of a guide is not measured by how perfect the guided turns out. It is measured by the willingness to keep showing up. He kept showing up.
I could not go sit with the people who loved him. I could only sit with it, which is what jail mostly offers: time to sit with things.
So here is my advice, and it comes in two parts. The first is practical. Memorize some phone numbers. Write them down on paper. It sounds old-fashioned. It may also be the thing that keeps you from vanishing.
The second is harder. Invest in your people before you need them. Billy answered because he had been my friend for years, not because I called him for the first time from a jail phone. And say the good thing while the person is still here. Thank the sponsor. Make the call. Perfect moments tend to show up on an ordinary Tuesday while you are busy thinking about something else.
Since getting out, every conversation with someone who tried to reach me has taught me something. I had not been forgotten. I had only been unreachable. Forgotten means nobody is looking. Unreachable means people are looking, and the walls are in the way.
I hear that dream differently now. At the time I thought “everything is going to be all right” was about my jail cell. Now I wonder whether it was also about him. It does not mean nothing painful will happen. It means despair does not get the last word.
Jesus said God knows the number of hairs on our heads. In my case that is a declining figure, and He has had to update the count regularly. But nothing about us is lost to Him. He knew my cell, my floor, my fear, and every prayer, and He never once put me on hold.
To the friend who knew me when we were boys, and to the sponsor who walked beside me: thank you.
“If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.”
Psalm 139:8 (KJV)
— JC
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