The Etiquette of Falling Apart: Faith, Hope, Love & How I Lost Them
Chapter 1: Waking Up is Hard to Do
“My best unbeaten brother
This isn't all I see
No, I see a darkness
No, I see a darkness
Oh, no, I see a darkness
Oh, no, I see a darkness
Did you know how much I love you?”
— Will Oldham
Waking up in jail for a second consecutive day was harder than I had prepared for.
Actually, I wasn’t prepared at all. That was a part of the problem.
It was a Tuesday morning — March 3, 2015 — but without clocks or windows, knowing the actual time was difficult.
An overhead light flickered and buzzed, leaving a dirty, yellow film on the tables and bunk beds below. Even in the short time I’d been there, I’d learned something about this light: it never went off.
After my arrest on Sunday night, I’d spent hours in and out of a temporary holding cell downstairs. The ground floor was like junior jail; the place actors playing police might take a kid to scare him straight.
The ratio was different down there — more cops; fewer inmates.
There were people doing paperwork.
I had been allowed to make a phone call.
After that, I’d sat on a concrete bench and hoped to God that someone, somewhere, was trying to get me out of there.
The cops brought other people in and out — some teenagers who appeared to be high; a drunk old man; a few folks who seemed to be regulars — but eventually, I was alone.
I’d never been inside a jail before, much less arrested. I didn’t think I belonged there. In my mind, it was only a matter of time before the police realized this too, but the minutes were slowly turning into hours.
I was beginning to feel claustrophobic.
When an officer outside the holding cell called my name, I thought my time had come. Some order must have been restored. I would be free to go. This was a relief.
Instead, I was handed a pair of jailhouse scrubs and pointed toward a small changing room with a door that didn’t lock. As I pulled the faded orange shirt over my head, I could smell the sweat of men who'd worn it before me and the bleach that couldn't quite eliminate it. With nothing in between my skin and the rough fabric, that smell mixed with my own sweat and fear. It would become my smell.
My clothes, the ones I’d come in wearing, were cataloged, placed in a plastic bag, and vacuum-sealed like props in an infomercial.
I felt my chest tighten as I watched it happen — the machine sucking the last bit of air from around my khaki pants and button-down shirt — but from someplace just outside my body.
It all felt like watching someone else’s home video; the kind that’s poorly shot and slightly out of focus. I knew and kind of liked the guy on the screen. I also felt bad for what was happening to him but was powerless to do anything to help.
Loud voices punctured the fog and shook me from my bed on the top bunk.
The ratio was different up here — more inmates; fewer cops.
Breakfast was being served again, and by guards who looked like they would rather be doing anything else. The trays of nondescript meat with gravy, toast, and jelly packets were handed out one at a time.
There was no use in trying to tell the guards I didn’t belong there. The words had bubbled up the day before, but I’d stopped them before they passed my lips. It was pointless. No one thought they belonged here.
For their part, the guards didn’t have the authority to do much. Their job was to feed me, count me, and make sure nothing too unusual happened on their shift. Whether I belonged here or not was none of their business. I was an ID number. At most, a last name.
Getting up for mealtime was mandatory, and all of the other men in my unit seemed excited about the prospect. I did what I’d done the day before: took my tray from the guard, left it on a table, and climbed back into bed. Waking up was required but eating was not.
My appetite had disappeared when I was arrested and food — especially this food — didn’t interest me.
I covered my head with the blanket and prayed to die. My eyes flooded with tears and I could feel my shoulders shaking, but I didn’t dare make a noise.
Most of the other men in my unit seemed non-violent, but I had seen enough TV to know the perception of weakness should still be avoided.
The officer who’d escorted me from the holding cell up to the unit two nights earlier seemed to realize it was my first time, and he’d offered what, I imagine, seemed like good advice. “Keep your head on a swivel,” he said. “One of these motherfuckers is bound to come after you.”
And so I sobbed silently, felt my hold on reality slowly coming undone, and tried to make my body shut down once and for all. At that moment, if I could have willed my heart to explode and allow the gentle relief of death to set in, I would have. I desperately wanted to disappear.
Jail isn’t a hard place to make that happen. Prison must be even easier. After less than 24 hours in, I began to feel for sharp edges on anything — the tables, bunk beds, chairs — made of metal. The thought that I could cut myself quickly, then hold my arms against my chest until I got back in bed, played on a loop in my head.
At the same time, I realized I may not need to do anything to hurt myself. There were times when simply being in confined proximity to other desperate men — some who, I learned, had been locked up for months waiting for their next court date — felt like it might be enough.
Fights broke out with some regularity. Threats weren’t uncommon. Intimidation was normal. I was a fish out of water and I knew it. So did everyone else.
I was sitting at one of those metal tables on my second day, staring blankly at the small TV mounted on the wall. A few tables over, a group of men were passing the time playing cards. It was one of those activities that could shift from light-hearted to explosive within seconds.
“You gotta fresh cut.”
I heard the words but didn’t understand they were directed at me until the speaker repeated himself. “I said, you gotta fresh cut.”
I panicked. “Excuse me?” I said, immediately worried that I’d somehow broadcast my suicidal thought process. He and the other guys at the table laughed at how clueless I was.
“Your hair — you must’ve got it cut before you came in. You got money?” The unit was eerily quiet and every word we spoke seemed to hang in the air for dissection.
“No, I don’t have any money,” I told him, immediately aware that I may have confused a statement for a question. Every man at the table stared at me.
Not knowing what to do or say next, I looked back towards the TV.
“But you gotta fresh cut,” he said one more time. The whole table laughed in approval.
I nodded and tried to smile, unsure if I was in on the joke or the joke itself. In moments like this, the line between a joke and a threat felt murky at best. Should I laugh? If my face is too serious will that be misconstrued? Was keeping my head down the best policy, or should I project strength?
I felt the sweat trickle down my back and wondered how this had become my life.
All of it — the collection of people, places, and things I casually referred to as my life — had changed two nights earlier.
I had been standing in the driveway with a bag of groceries in each hand when a pair of sheriff’s deputies parked their SUV in front of my house. Even though I knew why they were there, I still couldn’t believe it.
My body ticked through a short list of options and picked the only reasonable one. The blood that had been pumping through my arms and legs just seconds before now raced toward my heart. My feet felt glued to the concrete. I froze.
It was the same sensation I’d experienced four days earlier when the phone in my pocket started buzzing. The call was from a number I didn’t recognize, but I knew the area code. Those three digits were enough to make me nervous, but not enough to initiate full-blown panic.
I took a deep breath and told myself it was probably the wrong number.
When a voicemail notification popped up, I Googled the number before I listened to the message. I wanted to gauge just how worried I should be.
The call had come from the police department in my hometown.
I walked down the hallway, to the single bathroom near the back of my office building. I locked the door behind me, then played the message.
She was a detective.
She said she was investigating a crime — one I may have committed while working for a medical practice. Of course, it was the same one I’d been fired from four months earlier.
She wanted me to call her.
She said it was urgent.
My whole body turned cold. I dropped to my knees, prepared to vomit, but couldn’t. When I finally stood up, I splashed some water on my face and looked in the mirror. None of this was good. I knew that much.
But I also tried to convince myself it was something that could be resolved. I thought I knew the truth, and I felt confident in my ability to answer whatever questions they had for me.
Keeping this to myself seemed, at the time, like the best idea.
I never considered calling a lawyer.
I didn’t tell my family.
I carried on with whatever work I’d been doing before the phone rang.
A few hours later, I left the office to get lunch with a half dozen worst-case scenarios playing in my head.
The rational part of my brain knew I was in trouble, but I tried to will reality into submission with a wild mix of positive thoughts and unearned confidence. This strategy wasn’t new to me. I knew it well.
By the time I parked my car, I’d convinced myself to return the detective’s call. Maybe I could leave a message and we’d end up playing phone tag until this whole thing resolved itself.
Instead, she answered on the first ring.
The conversation was brief and it included more statements than questions, but the detective did confirm that I was accused of stealing money from my previous employer.
She didn’t tell me how much money and I didn’t ask. I was trying not to appear too worried; too curious about any of it.
Eventually, she wanted to know if I would be willing to discuss these allegations in person. I didn’t hesitate. I would be glad to do whatever it took to put the situation to rest.
Again, the notion that I may need an attorney never entered my mind. Lawyers were for guilty people. It wasn’t until the end of our conversation, when the detective’s voice changed, that I felt my fears return in full force.
With more certainty than I was prepared for, she said the allegations against me were substantial. Because of that, a warrant had been issued for my arrest — right then.
Immediately, I felt like I was in a tunnel.
The interior of my car seemed to close in around me.
Lightheadedness kicked in, and I struggled to form a complete sentence.
I wasn’t sure how the conversation shifted from “We have some questions” to “We’re going to arrest you.”
In some ways, it felt like an elaborate prank, but one being taken much too far.
I was working in a different city then, for a new medical practice more than two hours away. The detective suggested I come to the station the following week, and I said I would. Even then, part of me thought if they could only look me in the eye they would realize what a big mistake — a terrible misunderstanding — all of this was.
The ridiculousness of that kind of willful ignorance didn’t fully hit me for a few more nights. I’d just returned from the grocery store, my hands full of plastic bags, when the sheriff’s department SUV pulled up in front of my house.
Police cars, especially ones parked in front of houses, weren’t common in our neighborhood. Although the fact that we rented our home felt like a constant source of embarrassment, it was on a nice street full of neatly-kept yards and well-to-do families.
We had lived there long enough to know the neighbors and to understand that they talked. Word inevitably spread. Whether or not anyone was looking through their windows at that moment was immaterial. I felt like they were, and I began working to diffuse the situation — whatever it took for these men to get back in their car and drive away without me.
In a desperate attempt to look like something other than an arrest was happening, I stood there smiling as if I knew the officers or had at least been the one to ask them to stop by. It all felt like a game of charades even as it was happening, but I leaned into it.
I tried to calmly and casually explain that I’d already spoken with a detective earlier in the week and arranged a time to turn myself in. I gave them her name, number, and the time and date of our conversation as confirmation. The officers didn’t appear convinced, but one called anyway to verify what I was telling them. I couldn’t hear what the detective was saying, but based on how the deputy was responding, I felt like I might win a momentary reprieve.
That feeling disintegrated as soon as he ended the call.
Any previous conversations didn’t change the fact that there was an active warrant for my arrest in their system. The cops in my driveway, the ones I’d stupidly tried to appear friendly with, had a job to do. They were going to do it.
Within five minutes of conversation, I had already broken my previous record for consecutive moments engaged with a police officer by no less than two or three minutes.
That didn’t cross my mind at the time, though. I could only think about the groceries and the need to get them inside. Hesitantly, the officers allowed it.
When I opened the backdoor and crossed the threshold into the kitchen, I could hear the faint voices of my children playing somewhere else in the house. My wife was standing by the sink glaring at me.
She had no idea, of course, what I had known for the last four days.
With what I knew was limited time, I quickly and quietly tried to put the best spin on the fact that two police officers were outside and had no plans of leaving without me. I explained the warrant but didn’t admit to knowing about it for days.
To downplay the seriousness of the situation, I focused on the detective’s interest in asking some questions instead of the deputies’ obligation to take me to jail.
Although I could tell my wife wasn’t buying any of what I was saying, I was mostly trying to convince myself. Between the detective on the phone, the cops outside, and the woman in front of me, I was 0 for 3.
No one else may have believed me, but to question my character, actions, or motives — especially when everything was on the line — felt like the single spark that would trigger the collapse of my identity.
I put the groceries on the counter, told my wife I’d be home shortly, and walked back through the carport.
In what I now realize was a dangerous mix of unfamiliarity and entitlement, I asked the deputies if I could follow them in my car. They weren’t prepared to let that happen, but they did decline to put me in handcuffs until we’d arrived at the jail.
We made small talk in their SUV, but once we were downtown the roles and rules were re-established. They were the cops. I was a prisoner in custody. They handed me off to the next responsible party in the chain of command and left, I assumed, to ruin someone else’s quiet Sunday evening.
That’s when I was put in a cell for the first time.
The sound of the cell door closing is always emphasized in movies and TV shows, but I never heard it when it happened to me. My back was turned. My mind was somewhere else.
What I did experience was a feeling, one that I’d never known so completely in the 34 years I’d lived up to that point: I would leave when they said I could, but not a second sooner.
All of the agency I’d walked around the grocery store with an hour earlier was gone. I was not free to go. I belonged to the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Department.
Just for a moment, I allowed myself the delusional thought that things couldn't possibly get any worse, but I was still wearing my own clothes.
I’d surrendered my cell phone and wallet, but I at least had an idea where they were. A police officer had taken them when I was frisked. That made sense.
I wrongly assumed someone would eventually read me my rights, but it never happened.
Instead, I was seated at one of three consecutive desks in an already cramped room. The deputy across from me never looked up as he worked through the stack of papers in front of him.
What was my age, weight, social security number, and marital status? Did I ever use drugs and/or alcohol, and was I currently intoxicated? In the event of an emergency, who should be notified? I answered each question before being taken back to the holding cell.
Without my phone or a window, it was becoming hard to keep up with the time. It felt late, but the cycle of people in and people out never stopped for more than 20 or 30 minutes.
Eventually, I was brought back into the same small office and pointed toward a few telephones hanging on the wall. This was my sole chance to make contact with the outside world and I wasn’t sure anyone would answer.
My wife picked up on the third or fourth ring. Although she was angry and confused, she called a friend who was working to figure out what could be done. The bail, they had learned, was set considerably higher than anticipated.
Nothing was going to happen that night.
I would need to be patient.
Back in the holding cell, and now dressed in the matching scrubs of an inmate, I began to panic. The best-case scenario, it seemed, would be spending the night right where I was. A handful of people had come and gone through the cell while I was there and no one seemed all that threatening. Other than that, I was mostly alone.
I didn’t realize it then, but it would not stay that way for long.
From the moment I’d been taken inside the jail, the thing I most wanted to avoid was having my picture taken. Even after being arrested in my driveway, and even as phone calls were being made and friends were learning what had happened, I still thought I could keep all of this under wraps.
No one in the wider community of people I knew had to learn these ugly details. Privacy after the fact wouldn’t cut it. I needed my reputation — or what I imagined my reputation to be — to remain intact. That wouldn’t happen if there was a readily available mugshot of me.
The next time an officer approached the bars separating us and called my name, I was slow to look up. “Come with me,” was all he said.
I was taken directly across the hallway. Each of my fingers and both of my thumbs were pressed into ink and rolled across glass and paper.
I’d only ever been through this once before, 12 years earlier in Nashville, Tennessee. At that time, it had been a job requirement — my first one out of college. I didn’t remember being nervous then, but this time the woman in charge of the process had to hold my hands down to keep them from shaking.
My brain bounced between unrealistic optimism and total astonishment — from Maybe it’s not too late to work something out to I still can’t believe it’s gone this far.
Right before being walked back to the holding cell, I was told to stand on a rectangle of tape and face the camera. This was the moment I had dreaded. There would be no way of keeping this quiet now.
I’d heard that some of the higher-profile folks in town would pay to keep their (or their children’s) pictures from being published, but I didn’t have those kinds of connections. I wouldn’t have even known where to begin. I stared into the camera incredulously and heard the shutter click.
Once I was back in the holding cell, I paced the floor and thought about the cheap weekly paper I’d seen in gas stations around town — the one with full-color mugshots, names, and the crimes they were charged with.
I remembered how I’d scrolled the local newspaper’s website just weeks before looking through the accused faces for anyone I might recognize. I felt sure that, within a day or two, people would be looking at me. MICAH CARVER, they would read, THEFT BY TAKING.
A nightmare! But a well-written one. Dang. I’m hooked.