After doing all of these things, it was only ten after ten. So I read, prayed, and ironed my clothes for the following day. At midnight, I turned the lights off. That’s when the ugly neon lights inside my head came on. I looked at the clock: it was twenty after twelve. I rolled over and tried to direct my thoughts in a single, more productive direction. The phone rang.
Saved by the bell.
“Hello,” I said, my voice sounding much sleepier than it was, probably because I hadn’t used it for several hours.
“This the chaplain what work at the Potter Prison?” an elderly black woman’s voice asked. I could hear a loud television and a dog barking in the background.
“Yes, ma’am, it is. John Jordan.”
“This is Miss Jenkins. I’m Ike Johnson’s aunt.”
“Yes ma’am. I’m so sorry about Ike.”
“Thank you. We’re planning the funeral and wondered if you would do it.”
I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say. I just continued to listen to the background noises. I picked out another one. It sounded like wind blowing into the phone, but it was intermittent. She must have had an oscillating fan.
“We not really church peoples,” she continued. “And Ike’s grandma, Miss Winger, said you was the nicest white man she’d ever spoken to.”
I had spoken to Grandma Winger earlier that morning to tell her that her grandson, the one she had raised like a son, had been killed. At the time, I thought he was killed while trying to escape. She refused to believe it. She said that they were coming to visit him this Saturday, and he knew it. According to her, he liked prison and had no desire to leave. He told her that it was the best he had ever lived. I believed that, and it made me mourn even more.
“When are you planning on having the funeral?” I asked. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Saturday, if you was able to make it.”
I was silent. The light from my clock cast a green glow at a fifteen-degree angle on part of the bed, the back wall, and the ceiling.
“Listen, Preacher, we know Ike was no good. We not asking you to say stuff that ain’t true.”
“Good, because I couldn’t. And about Ike being no good, I’ve never met anybody that had no good in them.”
“Well, he was close,” she said.
“God loved him,” I said.
She was silent. And then she said, “You really believe that? You just saying it?”
“I really do. Sometimes it’s all that I do believe, but I never seem to be able to shake it. Probably because I need to believe it.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. I had said too much again. I often found myself telling strangers what I needed to say, though what I needed to say was often very personal and painful and often made them feel uncomfortable. I went to confession wherever I could- wherever it was safe and anonymous.
“Can you do it Saturday?” she asked, her voice sounding slightly desperate.
“Yes, I can. I will.”
“Thank you, Preacher.”
“You’re welcome. Good night,” I said after she gave me the time and place of the funeral on Saturday in Tallahassee.
I rolled over after hanging the phone on its cradle and stared up at the ceiling. It hadn’t changed. The wind outside caused the aluminum of the trailer to bend in and out, sounding like a whip cracking. I looked at the clock to watch the minute change. It seemed to take far longer than sixty seconds.
I sat up and looked at myself in the mirror on my dresser against the wall across from the foot of my bed. It was dark, but enough light came in the window from the streetlight and in the door from the bathroom down the hall so that I could see myself in shadow. It looked artistic, like a low-lit black-and-white photograph. I lay back down and looked at the clock again. Everything I had just done took less than a minute. I decided to get up and work on my funeral sermon for Saturday. My thinking was that the challenge might exhaust me so I could fall asleep.
Preparing the funeral sermon of a stranger killed under suspicious circumstances was challenging. I grew weary, but I still couldn’t sleep. At one point it got so bad, in fact, that I went into the den and watched nearly an hour of infomercials. I had to do something about this.
On my way back to bed, I stopped by the bathroom-mainly for something to do. Looking in the mirror, I discovered that I looked as tired as I felt, which wasn’t good. As I turned to head back to bed, I noticed a small pile of clothes near the shower. It was about two day’s worth. I smiled as I thought of how Susan hated that. Having that thought gave me a strong urge to leave them there, which I only overcame because if I left them in reaction to her, she would still be controlling my life. I bent down, scooped them up, slinging one sock between my legs as I did. When I reached for it, I saw something that froze me in sheer terror.
On the back of my left leg, there was a cut about two inches long.
I dropped the clothes and bent down even farther to take a closer look. It wasn’t very deep, but it was deep enough-deep enough for AIDS-infected blood splattered on it to get into my bloodstream.
My heart, racing up until this point, seemed to stop altogether. I grew faint and nearly fell over, but was able to catch myself on the towel rack. Suddenly, I had the urge to jump into the shower and scrub the cut.
I did. In the shower, I inspected my body for other cuts and scratches. There were none. At one point, I stared at the violent scars on my upper body. It would be tragically ironic to survive a gunshot wound to the chest, a knife wound to the abdomen, and then die of a narrow two-inch long cut to the leg.
For the rest of the night I asked myself one question over and over, When did I get the cut?
Please, God, let it have been today.
At two thirty I was lying on my side in bed with my eyes closed counting deer, each looking like a female version of Bambi. I could feel my exhausted body giving in to the approaching sandman. My breathing became heavier and slower, and I was actually on my way to the land of dreams, or so I thought. As it turns out, I was headed to the land of nightmares-the waking kind.
The nightmare began when I found the cut and continued when, for the second time that night, my phone rang.
“Hello,” I said after fumbling around with the receiver for a few seconds. I sounded sleepy again. This time I was.
“John John,” the voice said.
My heart started racing and I could feel the first of what I knew would be many waves of nausea coming over me. I wanted desperately to hang up the phone, but it was too late for that now. A new rule: From this point forward, I would not answer the phone after midnight.
“John John,” the voice said again. That voice was slightly slurred, slightly desperate, and very scared.
It’s amazing what can trigger a memory: a single smell, a song, or a voice. And this voice, above all others, triggered memories that I would pay to have surgically removed. It was the voice that haunted me at night.
The voice was the voice I heard within the sound of my own when I had been drinking. It was the voice of my mother, and she only called me John John when she was drunk. I hated her. I hated her for who she was, but I hated her even more for who I was. The fact that she had called at nearly three in the morning meant that she was in a detox center and wanted me to come and get her out. I didn’t know which detox center because I didn’t know which city she was in these days, but she had been in them all. When she and Dad had divorced, I had actually believed that she was out of my life, but like a recurring nightmare, she always forced herself back in and always at night.