The first two times I was arrested, I went to the Mountain Brook jail. If you are going to go to jail, and I do not recommend it as a hobby, Mountain Brook is not the worst place to start. It is the jail equivalent of a bed and breakfast, minus the breakfast, the bed, and the option of leaving.
They brought me meals from the Piggly Wiggly in Crestline. Big, hot, crispy chicken fingers. I mean actual chicken fingers, not something requiring a forensic examination to determine whether it had ever been acquainted with a chicken. Somebody in Crestline had fried them with care. I could taste the care. It is possible I was also tasting my own tears, but the batter was excellent.
And I had the place to myself. No cellmates sizing me up. No shouting through the walls. No negotiations over cake. Just me, the quiet, and a basket of chicken fingers. The first time I stayed one night. The second time, five. Five nights is long enough to get thoroughly acquainted with your own thoughts. I would not describe the introduction as warm. My thoughts and I have a complicated history.
If jails had an online rating system, Mountain Brook would get four stars for the food alone. I would have taken off one star for the ambiance and the general sense of personal failure.
Then they transferred me to the Jefferson County Jail. That was a whole different ballgame, and I had not brought a glove.
I should explain my combat résumé. I had wrestled in eighth grade and was, technically, a wrestling champion. I feel obligated to clarify that this was gym class, not the Olympics, and that my opponents were mostly boys named Trent. I had also been through fraternity pledgeship at Delta Kappa Epsilon at the University of Alabama, which involved a certain amount of mental and physical hazing. So I was not entirely unfamiliar with intimidation or discomfort. I had simply never been punched in the face.
That was different. And it scared me.
Gym class has rules. Even pledgeship has a structure, however strange. Somebody is watching, and at some point it ends with everyone eating pizza. In Jefferson County I did not know the rules, and I was not sure anybody was watching. Nobody was ordering pizza.
I was involved in two fights there. I do not like describing them as simply getting beaten up, partly out of accuracy and partly out of vanity, which survives almost anything. People fight. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you learn something you had no interest in learning. I will let you guess which category I fell into. Here is a hint: it was not the first one.
What stayed with me was not some story about how tough I was. It was the fear. One minute I was a man who had never been punched in the face. The next minute I was a man who knew exactly what that felt like. There is a difference. It is not just the sting. It is what it does to your sense of safety. You start watching hands. You start listening differently. You sleep lighter, if you sleep at all. Your body remembers even when your mind would very much prefer not to.
I want to be careful here. It would be easy to turn those fights into a war story, starring me as the battle-hardened veteran. That is not what happened. What happened is that a middle-aged man who had lived a fairly comfortable life landed somewhere violence could break out over almost anything, and he was scared. Fear is honest. Pretending you were not afraid is the dishonest part. Plenty of men in there were afraid. Some hid it behind anger, some behind jokes, some behind silence. I tried all three. None of them fit.
Fear narrows the world. In Mountain Brook, I had time to think about my life and my choices. In Jefferson County, I mostly thought about the next hour. Where to sit. Who to avoid. When to keep my mouth shut, a skill I had neglected for fifty-some years and had to learn on an accelerated schedule. Long-range planning becomes a luxury when your main goal is getting through the afternoon with your teeth.
I prayed a lot in those days. More than I had in years. I am not proud that it took a jail cell to get me back on my knees, but I am not going to pretend otherwise. Sometimes God lets us run out of options so we will finally remember Him. I had run out of options. He was still there, apparently having waited the whole time without once checking His watch.
I also think about the men I fought with. I do not know their stories, what they had lost, or what they were afraid of. I do not hold anything against them now. That is not me being saintly. It is just that I have had time to see them as men, not monsters. Hurting people hurt people. I have been one of those people more than once, though usually with words, which leave fewer bruises and last longer.
Part of what I learned is humility. I had a certain picture of myself, and that picture did not survive the first punch. Part of it is compassion. Fear makes people do things. It probably made the other fellow swing. And part of it is gratitude. I walked out. I am writing this. God kept me, even on the days I could not feel Him there.
Looking back, I am grateful for the Mountain Brook chapter in a way I could not have been at the time. It gave me a few quiet nights before the storm. It reminded me that people can treat each other with basic decency even inside a jail. The officers there were doing their jobs, and did them decently. A hot meal is a small kindness, but small kindnesses leave a mark. So does their absence. I learned both lessons one right after the other, like a double feature nobody bought tickets to.
I think about the men who never get the Mountain Brook version, whose first night locked up is a crowded floor and a fist. Jesus said when we visit the prisoner, we visit Him. I never really understood that until I was the prisoner, hoping somebody out there remembered I was in here.
I will say this much. I will never look at a plate of Piggly Wiggly chicken fingers the same way again. I still order them. I just say grace a little longer.
“What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.”
Psalm 56:3 (KJV)
— JC
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