As I stand in Medical Module, waiting to process to my first locked cell, I remember one piece of advice a nun gave me before my jail sentence began. She was the former chaplain at Century Regional Detention Facility in Los Angeles where I was sentenced to 90 days for three misdemeanors committed while drunk and high. Someone I knew gave me her number.
“She’ll help you, I’m sure,” this acquaintance said.
I called her. I am Jewish, but in the six-week run up before the start of my sentence, I would talk to anyone about the unimaginable experience I was about to have.
“Take the bottom bunk if you can,” the nun said. “The jail is colder than a meat locker. The top bunk is coldest.”
When I am assigned a cell in Medical, my first step to permanent housing, I make a fast walk of it for the bottom bunk, heeding the nun’s advice. At 5’4", 104 pounds, the icy refrigerator that is jail has penetrated into the sinews of my body. The bunkie I will share this 5 x 10 locked concrete cell with is right behind me. I can feel her breath. She too is racing for the bottom bunk. I get there first and claim the lower, warmer metal plank of the bed. But immediately I feel terrible that I have won this small victory because it comes at a cost to her.
I lie there, guilty.
My bunkie is a beautiful 20-year-old heroin addict who is kicking. No sooner has the cell door been shut and locked and she is shitting and throwing up. I am not upset by this. I have been there. I understand. Only six short months ago, I was doing the same thing. Now I am blindingly sober in jail, serving my time for the consequences of my drug and alcohol use.
Melissa and I are exactly the same height and weight and coincidentally live in the same neighborhood “on the outs.” She is second generation Cuban, 33 years younger than me. I will be the minority in jail because I am white, because I am older and because I am Jewish.
As I lie on my metal slab, shaking with cold, I pray even though I am not religious. Still, prayer is habit, from an earlier time. Please show me that this gets better. Please. All I can see are the horrible orange jail lights shining grimly outside on the concrete building. At least the lights tell me it is night — but of what day, I no longer know. I have never felt more alone, more devastated, in my entire life. Never before. Never after. Not even in the worst part of my addiction, when I was isolated and dying, did I feel this alone.
Both Melissa and I are shivering. She has the added burden of being dope sick, jumping up repeatedly to vomit. Between these episodes we talk. I am needy. To feel real, I must talk to someone. Anyone. I would have talked to Vlad the Impaler if he were my bunkie. “What is it about the quality of blood you most admire?” I might have asked.
“Are you an addict?” Melissa asks.
“Six months clean and sober,” I say. I feel the un-blunted cut of this sobriety as if I am being eviscerated from the inside out. Everything is too bright, too loud, too frightening, yet I am determined to walk through this without drugs or alcohol. Before, I would have picked up over a broken shoelace.
“I’m sorry for the . . .” She points to the toilet where she has just had diarrhea.
“Oh no . . . I’ve been there . . . ”
“Yeah,” she says. It is hard not to hear a world in that word. Longing. Regret.
She is the sweetest girl with the tiniest voice. She is soft-spoken in a way that makes me think she had long ago learned not to make too much space for herself in the world. I need to keep talking to her, to alleviate the bleak sense of isolation. She tells me she is here on a warrant, that she hopes to go to court the next day and be released. She prays that they don’t make her spend the weekend in jail before she can see the judge. We both know they will.
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We are silent for a long time. Then I break the silence.
“I’m afraid they will call you first and I will be alone.”
“Don’t be afraid,” she says. Years later, I still hear her voice exactly as it was.
But the fear of being alone with my thoughts is unshakeable and will follow me throughout my incarceration. The loneliness is palpable. A center-in-your-stomach loneliness, a motherless loneliness, one made worse because, like all of me, it too is shackled. It can’t take a walk. It can’t be soothed by love. It is there to fend for itself.
Astonishingly, in that moment of prayer when I dispassionately wonder if I will be able to live one more second, Melissa, in her sweet, tender voice calls out to me: “Can I come down and get under the covers with you?” I hear her fear of my possible rejection as she asks. “I’m so cold and sick.”
I need no convincing. My relief is so intense that it feels like air filling up inside me. Such intimacy is against the rules — and I suspect such an act of kinship, too — but we are two small, lost people in a cold place, so I say “Yes.” And it is like I’ve just averted death, as if a piano falling from the sky just landed an inch to the left of me.
She crawls in beside me, and with the presence of another human being, my suffering is lifted enough that I am warm and not wishing for death for the first time in days. I sleep. She does too. Her body next to mine; between us, our shared sadness. But there is also something else. Something I don’t recognize. It is impossible to name it because the word “hope” can’t find its way through this morass of pain. But it is there, small and white, and it will grow.
What feels like a moment later, they call my name and send me out to whatever next hellish place I’m headed. I never see her again. Yet, for that brief moment when Melissa was asleep beside me, I understood what holy meant. I didn’t really comprehend, until a long time later and far removed from that place, that the God who I believed had abandoned me was still there and was not only answering my prayers, but saying them for me, too.
Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel was a Jewish mystic and prophet whose aim as a rabbi, in my opinion, was to shock people out of their spiritual complacency. For me, Heschel is one of the 20th century’s most brilliant writers. Of the many aphorisms attributed to him, one of my favorites is this: “Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.”
I can say with absolute assurance that no truer words have been written about prayer. And also, I can add that holiness is not what I thought it was; fitting in, doing good deeds, contributing to the fund, attending services.
Full disclosure here, I am not a religious Jew. I was not bat-mitzvahed. I was not schooled in the ways of Torah, though I did learn the very important edict; that you should not plow a field with an ox and a donkey yoked together. I only like Passover for the food and the company, and I rarely, if ever, go to services on the high holidays. I do not belong to a synagogue.
The last time I went to high holiday services was in rehab, four years ago, when a counselor managed to get me a ticket to Yom Kippur at his temple. I remember mainly three things about that. The counselor told me that if I saw him there, I was not to speak to him because of the HIPPA laws regarding privacy. Also, as I drove over to the synagogue via the rehab druggy buggy, the driver kept asking me questions about the Jewish holidays that I had few answers for. And third, that I was wholly alone, among people entirely surrounded by their loved ones.
I couldn’t comprehend at any level how to atone for the crimes I had committed and the wreckage I had rained down on my family and friends. I had fasted all day and was tired and depressed. The drugs and alcohol had only left my system a few weeks before, and I still lived under their weight. I can’t say the experience was holy, but I can say that I was grateful for the chance to listen to the rabbi tell the congregation that Yom Kippur is our chance to make our lives right with God and with ourselves.
Maybe, I thought, sitting there hopelessly sad and alone, there was hope for me. My blessings felt few and far between. Self-pity was a broad visor. I could not see around that awning of self-indulgence for a long time, convinced as I was that my suffering was worse than others. Since the myth in my culture — that Jews aren’t alcoholics and are somehow always impeccably lawful — still burned with a blazing flame, I also felt like a complete loser.
What I didn’t know at the time of that service was that I would be going to jail. That at my sentencing, I would go into a state of shock so profound that it would be months (about the time I met Melissa in medical and slept beside her) before I would break free from it and begin to see that dignity comes with responsibility, and self-respect is the measure of one’s ability to amend what they have done wrong.
What happened that day with Melissa was something far more profound than what happened that day in synagogue. I feel confident enough to say that there are few other religions that strive for such a unique sense of communal and individual holiness and decency as does Judaism. The high holidays ask us to renew ourselves, to clear our wreckage and to find a deeper sense of the presence of God in our lives. We call it T’shuvah, returning home to God, renewing our lives. But that dismal day in synagogue only made me feel guilty and alone.
In the four years since my experience in Los Angeles County Jail, the gifts in my life are too numerous to count. And while that night with Melissa is in the rearview, the miracle and holiness of it will never be forgotten. As I served my sentence, such instances of the miraculous did not stop either. Day after day, I came into contact with wonder. While jail is no ordinary place, I realized that it was through the ordinary and the pedestrian interactions with the other women there, that I found the divine and returned over and over to that holy place where my own sacredness lived.
I didn’t need jail to tell me I had made mistakes; I am not a base or ignorant person. I’m an addict, with a marker in my genetic makeup for addiction. I can’t help that. It will never go away, though, through no small miracle, I have put the worst of it into remission. Once in remission, I returned immediately to the woman of conscience I’d always been. The “punishment” of jail was totally unnecessary, as it is for most addicts who need treatment, not incarceration. I had long made restitution and amends before my sentencing.
But, it seems like I needed jail for another reason, and that the power in my life in charge of things like transformations and awakenings would not settle for anything that wouldn’t thoroughly wake me up. It was clear that I needed to be reminded – by bullhorn evidently – that my life is astonishing, that my synagogue was a jail cell and that holiness is not always found inside sanctified buildings but out in the real world, among ordinary people, and perhaps under Job-like suffering. I am clear the cages of my own inner prison needed rattling.
It is ironic that I found holiness inside Lynwood, where a nun, who also told me “never make friends with those people” would have me believe I’d find depravity. Did it not occur to her that I was those people? I don’t know that I would have ever had the insight that holiness is so often found in the pedestrian, had I not suffered so much. The risks for cliché are legion, but I would have missed this miracle in my life had I not seen the light in the darkness with Melissa that lonely night for what it was. The mystery and the wonder is that I wasn’t looking for it. I think this is where God resides, in that inexplicable paradox. “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement,” Heschel writes. “Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
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