17 nights with Marshall or Christian or Patrick
Part I: September 23, 2007
His name was Marshall or Christian or Patrick. I couldn't remember which to save my life. Of course, I meant him no disrespect. God, no. I was so frustrated and embarrassed that I eventually asked if he wouldn't mind me calling him by an easier-to-remember nickname like ‘MCP.’ He obliged and we never spoke of it again. I sometimes wonder if MCP ever really knew how much his many small kindnesses meant to me.
MCP was a round, jovial fella with a preternatural stare and composer-like abilities with nighttime. His decision to work the graveyard shift all those years was no accident. MCP was quiet by nature and thus craved the calm and tranquility of long nights. Paradoxically, he also loved to talk, telling long, drawn-out, splendidly detailed stories. Taunting MCP with the perfect mix of questions and curious inquiry was like turning on a machine — he could go for hours and hours. That was the whole point. Anything to crowd out the dark quiet and desperate loneliness of nighttime.
After our first few nights together, we fell into a purposeful routine. By then I'd figured out the subjects MCP most delighted in exploring — his enduring love for professional baseball, especially his beloved Philadelphia Phillies, American and British history, very specific food preparations, and his childhood summers in rural Pennsylvania. Night after night, I nudged and cajoled him along with questions about the latest mishaps on the Phillies pitching staff, his unwavering commitment to ketchup over mustard on hot dogs (this one we debated intensely), and why as a boy he far preferred lake swimming to pool swimming. MCP would get lost in these stories and carry on for hours and hours like a child at play with his favorite toy. Most times, I hung on his every word, bathing in his kindly southern inflection. Other times, I only pretended to listen. With my face pressed into the cool linoleum floor, sticky from an ungainly mix of tears, vomit, and thick, foggy snot, I may have been there in body, but I was somewhere else entirely in both mind and spirit.
It was only after MCP completed his midnight room and hall checks that we could retake our respective positions and resume our nightly banter. He always sat just inside his small, dimly lit office, leaning back at a 45° angle on his squeaky office chair, swiveling from left to right and back again. I always sat on the floor just outside his office in the cooler, darker hallway. Places like this have rules, and this was one of them. Sometimes I sat with my back pressed to the opposite wall, my arms wrapped bear-hug style around both knees, pulling them into my chest and releasing them in a rocking chair motion — FORWARD-BACK, FORWARD-BACK, FORWARD-BACK — for hours on end. Other times I sat cross-legged, my arms dangling like wet ropes from both shoulders, bending at the waist and arching back up again like a yo-yo in prayer — UP-DOWN, UP-DOWN, UP-DOWN — over and over and over.
Though MCP was at his masterful best at calming my chaotic mind with his captivating, no-nonsense tales, even this soothing magic proved no match for the relentless rebellion my body waged throughout the seventeen interminable nights we spent together. My bones throbbed with a persistent ache. My skin crawled as if burdened by an invisible army of insects. My muscles spasmed, twitched, and burned. Drenching sweats and bone-chilling shivers alternated in a furious, arrhythmic dance. This was an agony I'd never known distilled to its purest form. It was impossible to sit quiet or still. By the second or third night, any comfort I'd ever known or experienced was a long-distant memory. In this state of hellish misery and pain, only the hypnotic rhythm of my own rocking, the soothing cadence of MCP's voice, and his ever-calming presence offered any semblance of relief.
Every day, the slightest hint of fading daylight plunged me into an insidious dread. I was already anticipating the torment of the long night ahead, and with it, the gnawing fear that MCP would tire of sacrificing his quiet nights and Phillies broadcasts for my sake. I fixated on the inevitable moment when he'd end our all-night talk and story sessions and banish me to the solitude of my room. True to his word, that moment never came. In fact, MCP always insisted it would be me, not him, that would end our all-nighter sessions. "Sooner than you think, young man, sooner than you think. You will choose the quiet of your room and comfort of your bed over that cold, dirty floor." This was inconceivable to me. By now, MCP had become as vital to my survival as my reasons for coming to this place.
I never met anyone like MCP before. His patience and innate goodness knew no bounds. He was as a benevolent, stoic mountaintop with a whale-sized heart — unshakable, imperturbable, kind to the core. Beneath his towering presence lay a deep loneliness which saddened me and an unyielding strength I deeply respected. He was tough and stubborn when it came to the rules. A stickler. Maybe out there you manipulated and outmaneuvered your way around everyone, but in here, at least from 11pm to 6am, five days a week, you were in MCP's house. His house, his rules. Those who mistook his kindness for weakness and his provincial nature for an easy mark quickly learned how ill-conceived this thinking was, but that's a story for another time. MCP's personal boundaries were as inflexible as his commitment to the rules. Chief among them — your gauntlet, your walk through the fire, was never going to become his gauntlet. This was more than mere professional distance, it was a lifeline for all involved. Still, MCP never begrudged you your gauntlet, nor did he ever diminish or judge your struggle or past experiences. With his life mission crystallized into a simple mantra, he'd often tell me that his job was to empathize, not pathologize, to guide and support you through a challenging, "tempor-every" time in your life (I'll return to this in a minute) — a creed he lived with an unwavering conviction.
Resident, patient, client — labels completely missed the point. We were all just people passing through. Here today, gone tomorrow — a transience MCP saw reflected everywhere in life. But despite his staunch philosophy of impermanence, MCP knew, and reminded us continually, that this in no way diminished the gravity of our situation. He knew full well the stakes — each one of our lives were, at the moment, quite literally balanced on a razor's edge between life and death, oblivion and rebirth — he just didn't believe the stakes required violins and melodrama. The hellish albatross of addiction had brought each of our lives to a dangerous precipice. What we did now mattered more than anything else. To this, MCP offered a sobering yet transformative perspective. Over the years he received word from the outside of hundreds of people whose lives were cut tragically short after they'd gone home. People he knew and came to care a lot about. I'd sit on the floor outside his office in the middle of the night quietly watching him go through an endless stream of email. Every now and then he'd blow out a big stream of air or bang a tight fist down onto his desk. His eyes shiny and reddening, he'd whisper to himself, but loud enough for me to hear, "I knew it. I told that SOB. But he knew better. Two little ones and ailing wife at home. Selfish b-tard..." his voice trailing off as he shook his head in sorrow, regret, and disbelief.
MCP believed it all started with what you did in here. This place, he'd tell me over and over and over, isn't about recovery. What you learn here, and what you choose to take from here, is about survival. If you grasp it, if you fight with every fiber of your being, you have a shot to overcome addiction and reclaim your life. If not, well, we all knew what that meant. MCP's hard-won wisdom, forged in the crucible of his work, imbued him with a magisterial charm. It was as if he, and he alone, held the keys to our survival, and in many ways, he did. For those of us lucky enough to cross his path, his unyielding belief in our capacity to survive and change wasn't just inspiring, it was a lifeline.
Despite my insistent belief that I was actually going to die on that linoleum floor one night, MCP never once mocked me, called me out, or tried to disabuse me of my beliefs. He replied to my every morbid curiosity in the same, consistently solid, maddeningly simple way. With panic rising in my voice, I'd ask him, Hey MCP, how many nights can a person go without sleep? He always replied in a voice as steady as an anchor and as simple as a nod, You'll sleep when you sleep, you will, you will. To my question, Hey MCP, what's the longest you've ever seen someone suffer through acute opiate withdrawal? he'd reply in the same flat tone, You're withdrawal will end when it ends, it will, it will. In time, MCP's unwavering and predicable responses, infuriatingly simplistic as they were, became a strange comfort. His assurances spoke volumes.
Sometimes when I worried that my panicked neuroticism and incessant fearfulness might drive MCP away, I'd inject some levity to soften the weight. Hey MCP, if the Phillies moved to Minnesota or Dakota would they still be your favorite team? Other times, I'd seek certain assurances by conflating my preoccupation with death with my desperate hope for rescue. Just checking, MCP, but you know CPR, right? But because solid is as solid does, MCP met my every neurotic fascination with the same practical responses — You'll feel better when you feel better, you will, you will; You'll see your kids when you see your kids, you will, you will; or You'll eat when you eat, you will, you will. I've already told you how angry his responses sometimes made me feel, but as the long nights wore on, I began to understand. MCP wasn't blowing me off, dismissing me, or negating my quandary. He was reminding me of the impermanence he saw in everything. He was assuring me and promising me, that this too shall pass. In time, I came to believe him. In time, I also came to realize that MCP wasn't there to soothe my ego, indulge my fear, or assuage my worry. He was there to help me, not please me. His consistent refusal to be drawn into my drama and confusion was itself a form of compassion. When MCP threw you a lifeline it wasn't so he could rescue you and pull you to safety. His plan, rather, was to keep you afloat long enough for you to find the strength to rescue yourself.
On our third night together, when MCP used the tempor-every portmanteau for the very first time, he didn't bother with an explanatory ad lib or self-congratulatory pat on the back. He didn't even acknowledge that he just used a word that doesn't even exist. He blew right by that and continued to talk and listen and smile and impart wisdoms in his maddeningly countrified way. He must have told me hundreds of times to stop sweating the small stuff because it's all small stuff and it's all tempor-every stuff. I wanted to scream every time.
There was this one time, in particular, when MCP's candid and absurdly unapologetic straight talk really got to me. Burned a fucking hole right through my brain. I'd had it. The only way I could think to retaliate, while also remaining in his good graces and not lose his late night patronage, was to resort to rhetorical passive aggression. But MCP already knew this move. Said he'd seen it many times before. He analogized it to a curve ball thrown as a strike, but meant to swerve deceptively, at the very last second, out of the strike zone. MCP wasn't swinging. In a game of balls and strikes, he'd happily take the ball and force you to think more carefully about your next pitch. MCP's game was process, not analysis. He knew that the best way to teach a person was to get them to teach themselves. No matter what you did to draw him in, MCP wouldn't analyze, opine, judge, or even react to a single anxious worry, concern, or thought. You could try, but you were wasting your time. I'm telling you, the guy had superhero-like gifts, just perhaps not the kind you've ever seen in any movie. He'd deflect and parrot your words back to you enough times, in enough ways, until you eventually came to see how wrong-headed and nonsensical your thinking was. MCP knew that telling you the score wasn't going to get him or you anywhere. Instead, he just kept on delivering the goods and let the goods do the talking. All the while, he'd just smile. This was the genius of MCP.
Sometimes when MCP was still in the early chapters of what I knew was going to be a very long story, my mind would wander. I'd think about what his family was like, what his neighbors thought about him, what he did when he wasn't working or watching baseball games on television. I also thought about what his shifts were like in the days and weeks and months before he first found me screaming on the floor of the closet in my room, jousting and swaying, full of fury, exhausted and slurring words into incoherent sentences, moved by a steady stream of tears and anguish and achey, flu-like pain agonizing every square inch of my body. Apparently, I'd just battled it out with some black tomcats with terrifying sharp green, demonic eyes, whose threatening presence I hallucinated out of the dark back of the closet just across from my bed. I knew that trying anything resembling sleep with that closet door wide open was a mistake, so why hadn't I closed it?
This terrifying break from reality on my third night as a temporary resident at the Caron Institute was my very first encounter with the man I'd soon come to call MCP. It was also the first of many nights that we talked through the entire night and the last of many nights he got to listen to his beloved Phillies games on the little transistor radio in his office. MCP was gentle and sweet and kind, but in very detached way that left little doubt that the detachment itself was responsible for preserving both his sanity and his deep and obvious love for his seemingly god forsaken job.
I've already told you that MCP was a big, round man who sacrificed much when he walked. As he roamed the darkened hallways of our unit late at night, he would waddle side to side, the ting-ting-clinkity-clink of the sixty odd keys he kept proudly attached to his belt at all times, smashing left and right and left again with each step, the sound rebounding off into the night and back again — PSSHT, step, PSSHT, step, PSSHT, step.
That first night when MCP finally succeeded in drawing me out of my hallucinatory state, helping me out of that closet bay and into the shower, and convincing me with a promise for which I made him cross his heart and hope to die that my young children back home wouldn't be orphaned, we made our way to his office for the very first time and established what would become our routine for the next 17 consecutive nights. That first morning after we met, and every one of the 16 mornings that followed, MCP would tell me that I finally fell asleep on the linoleum floor outside his office sometime before 5am. I never once asked and he never once told me how I ended up back in my room and in my bed where I woke up on every one of those 17 mornings.
Had I asked, MCP would have just smiled.
Part II: April 13, 2022
ADDED 15 YEARS LATER (APRIL 2022)
I was awakened this morning by the sound of keys jingling. It was early, 7am or so. Someone was walking around my house. In nearly the same moment that I experienced the threat of this stranger's presence, I also experienced a feeling of great benevolence all around me. What the hell? When I suddenly remembered that just a few minutes earlier I'd heard someone knocking at the door, I finally put two and two together and realized it was the exterminator. Assuming no one was home when I didn't answer the door, he let himself in to do what exterminators do. Despite my relief, I couldn't shake the strangely familiar, odd sense that the sound of this person walking around my house with his keys jingling had a special meaning of personal significance to me. Then it hit me. Marshall or Christian or Patrick. MCP, my friend and angel, who I hadn’t thought about in years. I smiled.
While all these years later I can no longer hear MCP's voice and can only just barely make out his face, his patience and endearing kindness is forever seared in my memory. I can just about make out his billowy largesse, and of course, I'll never forget the sound of him doing his late night hall checks, that menagerie of keys set proudly around his waist, bouncing this way and that — PSSHT, step, PSSHT, step, PSSHT, step. The specificity of his voice may be gone, but I can still feel the baritone heft of it quieting my frightened, pained, and chaotic mind. I also remember, although sometimes I wish I could forget, the sheer weight of MCP's lonely life as it pressed me down harder onto the cold linoleum floor just outside his small, darkened office where he always sat swiveling on that squeaky office chair just under the shadow of the sole desk lamp lighting the small transistor radio — his prized possession — sitting atop the tall, office-grey filing cabinet just over his right shoulder. When I think of MCP my heart aches, but it also warms.
I've worked all day long trying to dig out as much detail and specific memories of the 17 consecutive nights MCP and I spent together fifteen years ago. Me dying and him assuring me I wasn't dying. Me convinced he'd choose his beloved Philadelphia Phillies games over hanging out with me all night and him never doing that even a single time. Me trying to persuade him my life was over, and him, wholly unconvinced, telling me it was just getting started again. Me asking him question after question after question and him telling me story after story after story. Me doing whatever I could to keep the quiet, darkness of nighttime at bay so it wouldn't crush me, and him safely assuring me I'd always have a friend to keep me company at night. Although I wasn't able to produce the technicolor version of MCP today, I did gather enough detail to be able to visit with him again, and that made for a special and meaningful day.
Most people think that our world spins and advances forward on the legendary performances of athletes, the charismatic talent of actors and artists, and the swollen pockets of corporate titans, but it's not true. Those people may have larger backyards and get more time in the sunshine, but they add little compared to those in the shadows. Those we rarely see and when we do we too quickly forget. Those doing the real work on the ground, filling in the many holes and missing pieces with their effortless selflessness, naturally paternalistic empathy and kindness, and genuinely heartfelt grand gestures of compassion. People like my friend MCP — real folk, decent, honest, and good. We all know that kind of authenticity when we see it and when we see it we all wish we were more like them and less like us. What they have is more precious than what most of us out here are looking for, but unlike those things, their version of real is not for sale. What actually makes our world spin and advance forward isn't who or what we think. It's people like MCP and those like him. The ones who give and care but ask for nothing in return. The ones with nothing to prove but whose very presence here makes things better than they'd otherwise be. The ones who leave marks worth having and remembering. These are the real heroes, the ones we should be pushing to the front of the line. The thing is, and we all know it, they have no interest in being at the front of the line. They're fine right where they are, and all of us, even if we don't acknowledge it, are better for their presence there.
Today, just before 5pm, I called the Caron Institute in Wernersville, PA to try and find MCP. I wanted to hear his voice and have a chance to say hello. I wanted to tell him I hadn't forgotten him like he assured me all those years ago I would. It wasn't until I was talking to an actual person at Caron that I realized my inquiry was perhaps a strange one. After explaining that I was looking for someone who worked there fifteen years ago when I was a patient, but that I didn't quite know his name — perhaps it was Marshall or Christian or Patrick — the person on the other end of the phone was obviously frustrated. After telling me that she wasn't permitted to give out any personal information of past or present employees, I finally spit out the specific reason for my call today. I just wanted this particular person to know that I reached out to say hello, that I've never forgotten him, and that I'd just spent the whole day trying to recall as many details as possible about the seventeen long, funny, and harrowing nights we spent together fifteen years ago. Like a lightening strike that explanation changed the entire vibe of our call. The woman at the other end of the line said that she too was a past patient at Caron, that she'd been sober now for 12 years, and that six years ago after bringing her best friend into treatment, a young women who has since died of an opiate overdose, she decided to volunteer at Caron to help as many people as she could. By this point the two of us were both emotional and full of rage, grateful for one another's sobriety, but infuriated by the ravages of the opiate epidemic and a system that continues to allow it to go unchecked. She promised to look for Marshall or Christian or Patrick and give him my message. I asked her if she wouldn't mind me writing something to him and emailing it to her. She agreed and so I did just that.
This is the message I wrote to MCP
Dear Sir. We met 15 years ago under rather unfortunate circumstances. I was a patient at Caron and you were the graveyard shift unit monitor for the length of my stay. I suppose the only chance I have of distinguishing myself from the thousands of people you've worked with and helped at Caron over the years, is that I could not, for the life of me, remember your name. I'd say the wrong name — was it Marshall or Christian or Patrick — and you'd gently correct me. Eventually you agreed that I could call you MCP and I agreed that you could call me whatever you wanted.
I sincerely hope that this message reaches you MCP. I want you to know that I have never forgotten you, nor have I ever stopped appreciating the many, many hours you sat with me over those 17 long nights while I went through the worse of my opiate withdrawal. I also wanted you to know that your unique and special brand of wisdom had a significant and lasting impact on me and my life. More specifically, I still remember and often tell others about your theory of tempor-every — EVERYTHING IS TEMPORARY— including my two children, who are now both grown. I know you’ll be happy to hear that save for one very short slip years ago, I’ve been sober since we last saw one another. Lastly, even though this isn't easy for a guy from New York, I also wanted you to know that all these years later I still secretly root for your Philadelphia Phillies. God bless and godspeed Marshall or Christian or Patrick my angel of grace for 17 nights fifteen years ago. To me, you will always be legendary and never, ever tempor-every. Thank you, thank you, thank you...