The Calls I Didn't Return | Chapter 6

"So," he said, "why aren't you answering your phone when prospects call you?"

"Good to see you," I said.

"You too."

Small talk has never been a strength for either of us.

A few days earlier, Michael Santos had walked out of federal prison after 25 years. The Bureau of Prisons moved him into a halfway house in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, where he would serve the final year of his sentence with an ankle monitor.

I flew up to see him. We met at a McDonald's a short walk from the halfway house.

I went straight to my defense.

"Look at what I was going to sell," I said. "I've been doing well speaking and sharing the Lessons From Prison story. It just doesn't feel right taking some guy's money to talk about how to shop in the commissary or get a better prison job. It feels kinda dirty, you know, scammy."

I had seen enough junk sold online to people who were scared and uninformed. I didn't want to be lumped in with the people making guarantees or calling themselves fixers.

"So instead of showing them a better way, you leave them to the guys you call dirty," Michael said. "That's one way to protest."

He went back to his fries.

Michael had spent 25 years listening to excuses and rationalizations from men like me. There was nothing original about mine.

"Okay," he said. "You don't like the prison-consulting industry. I don't disagree with you. Guys who served a year or two in a camp asking other people to do what they haven't done. People claiming to be fixers while selling something that provides little value. They're charlatans. You're not telling me anything I don't know."

I sat there.

"So let me ask you again. Why aren't you picking up your phone?"

A number of men had called me before surrendering to Taft, the same federal prison camp where Michael and I served time together.

They knew him through his writing and his book, Inside: Life Behind Bars in America. Most people preparing for federal prison knew Michael Santos.

When they arrived at Taft, Michael would ask if they had found me.

Some said, "I called him. I read his book. He never called me back."

Before answering, I thought about changing the subject.

Are you enjoying your first Big Mac in 25 years? I've always preferred the small cheeseburgers. The Big Mac is just too much. Three pieces of bread? Come on.

There was no wasting time with Michael. Within about 90 seconds, I felt as if we were back in the prison quiet room. I was trying to explain myself, and he kept returning to the question I didn't want to answer.

"I don't want to get pulled into something I don't feel right about," I said. "You know how I used to joke in prison, 'The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.' Oscar Wilde. If I pick up the phone, I'm tempted to sell more than I can deliver. So I let it go to voicemail."

"Wilde?" he said. "You're building your ethics on a man who stiffed his creditors and died broke in a cheap Paris hotel room?"

He went back to eating.

All I could think was: How the hell does he know these things? Paris? Broke? Come on, man.

I did 18 months and came home with a few good lines. Michael did a quarter century and knew the actual stories behind the people who wrote them.

Every time I tried something clever, he backed me down like Shaquille O'Neal did to Chris Dudley before dunking on him and shoving him out of the way.

"You tell people to stop rationalizing," Michael said. "You're still doing it. Now you quote dead philosophers."

"When I was a stockbroker, I chased money," I said. "After prison, I didn't want to become that person again. I run as far away from it as I can."

Michael didn't argue.

He looked at my wrist.

I followed his eyes to my Rolex.

Then he looked at my Ferragamo shoes and Canali suit.

"Yeah," he said. "You're running."

The Rolex

When I first came home from prison, I lived below my means. I spent many Friday nights alone in a bookstore, reading for hours. I told myself I had no interest in returning to steakhouses, expensive clothes or the lifestyle I had as a stockbroker.

By year three, some of it had returned.

The Rolex. Ferragamo shoes. Canali suit.

I had some story for all of it. I was speaking to corporations and universities. I needed to look professional. The clothes were different this time because I purchased them with money I earned honestly.

There was some truth in that.

I also liked the watch!

I had turned both versions of myself into flattering stories. First, the stockbroker who deserved expensive things. Then the former prisoner who had risen above expensive things, while wearing a Rolex.

Calling consultants dirty gave me another flattering story. I wasn't afraid to answer the phone; I was too ethical.

That sounded better, I could sell that!

The truth was less impressive. If I answered, someone would ask how I could help. I would have to give an answer and then deliver on it.

Speaking was easier. I walked onto a stage, told my story, signed books and left. People applauded and told me I was brave.

A frightened defendant on the phone wasn't calling to applaud or feed my ego.

I Wasn't Doing Nothing

Those three years were not empty.

I had been speaking, writing and building the Michael G. Santos Foundation. I secured a grant from the California Wellness Foundation and helped distribute Michael's courses through prisons, jails and programs for at-risk youth.

Michael was still incarcerated. I could handle phone calls, organize the materials and push through bureaucracy he could not address from inside.

He gave me credit for that at McDonald's.

"You raised money," he said. "You got the courses approved and distributed. You helped move the materials into places I could not reach."

Then he paused and said, "Yet when one man under indictment calls you directly, you let it go to voicemail."

That was, well, how do I say it, an important distinction and one I knew was coming.

I'd built a foundation, secured a grant, gotten Michael's courses into institutions he couldn't reach from inside. None of that was hard compared to picking up the phone and telling one scared man what I could and couldn't do for him.

At night, especially around 2 a.m. when I woke up and couldn't fall asleep, the excuses sounded even worse.

I heard lawyers' voices in my head:

"Consultants are dirty."

"They scam people."

"They prey on vulnerability."

"They play lawyer and get in the way."

They did not mean only the other consultants. They meant me too.

I hated being viewed that way. Rather than give anyone a reason to think differently, I stayed away and told myself I would address it when Michael came home.

Or when I got married.

Or when life settled down.

Years earlier, I copied a line from Montaigne into one of my prison notebooks (my favorite book of all time is Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer):

"We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn."

I didn't understand it in prison.

Sitting across from Michael, I did.

I condemned an industry I might enter. I talked about responsibility on stage and avoided it when someone called. Somehow, I still found a way to feel correct about both.

The Easier Audience

"Since you left Taft, you've been on planes talking about ethics," Michael said. "Why is that easier than answering your phone?"

"I don't know."

"Of course you know. On stage, they clap. They wait in line so you can sign Lessons From Prison. The man on the phone will press you. He'll ask how you're going to help him. You won't be able to default to Hegel, Thoreau, Wilde or Nietzsche."

He ate another fry.

Dude was on his game, not distracted by freedom. I knew this was coming. No interest in placating me or engaging in "happy talk." The Straight-A Guide was not a collection of buzzwords to him, as it too often was for me.

For 25 years in prison, he had listened to men like me talk about when they would do something.

After sentencing.

After designation, when they reached the camp, when they got to the halfway house, home confinement.

The date always moved.

Mine had moved for three years.

I delayed in part because I told myself I was waiting for Michael to come home, so we could build something together. The truth is I was waiting for him to provide me cover, to lean on him in a way I could not while he was in prison.

Clover

My niece Clover was born on January 22, 2009, while I was at Taft. We share the same birthday.

When she was about two and a half, I took her to a movie at the Topanga Mall with my mom and my sister-in-law, Sunny.

For an hour before the movie, Clover and I walked through the mall holding hands. People smiled at us and assumed I was her dad.

I liked that feeling more than I wanted to admit.

I knew I wanted to become a father one day, not an uncle who dropped in between flights.

By then, Sandra and I had been together for about a year. Not long after the McDonald's meeting with Michael, we would get engaged.

I couldn't spend three weeks every month flying to corporate events and still become the kind of husband and father I wanted to be.

Sandra had a lucrative career at a Fortune 500 company. Before I flew to San Francisco, we discussed the trade.

I would reduce the speaking travel. My income might drop. We would live on less if necessary.

"If we have to live on less for a while, we'll live on less," she told me.

We were looking a few years ahead, not only at the next conference check.

That was the other reason I went to San Francisco. I wanted to know whether Michael was interested in building a consulting practice with me while he continued teaching and advocating for reforms.

What We Would and Would Not Do

"JP," Michael said, "we are not going to ask people to do what we have not done and documented."

We would not guarantee a sentence, prison placement or release date. We would not give legal advice. We would not pretend that serving time made us lawyers.

We could show people what we had done.

Writing, preparing plans, documenting progress. Creating something a probation officer, lawyer or judge could evaluate.

If someone didn't want to do that, we could not do it for them.

Michael checked the time.

"I've got to get back," he said.

We stood, shook hands and hugged. Through all of it, his toughness, his drive, I loved him then and still love him. I can't fully put into words the influence he's had on my life. Somehow my daughter knows. She feels it, like the Force.

After we hugged, he walked toward the halfway house in the Tenderloin District, ankle monitor on, curfew ahead of him.

I walked toward a taxi.

On the way, I kept thinking about the men who told Michael, "I called him. He never called me back."

People in trouble had reached for me. I had gone dark, a trait I still have.

When I returned to Los Angeles, I sat in front of a camera and filmed a video called Why I Went to Federal Prison.

The lighting sucked. The editing was worse, and I looked and felt puffy.

I stayed up most of the night teaching myself enough to post it on YouTube.

Chapter 6 Reflection Journal

Montaigne wrote that we are divided within ourselves, believing and disbelieving, condemning something we cannot release. What do you condemn while remaining attracted to it?

I said I had moved beyond money while wearing a Rolex, Ferragamo shoes and a Canali suit. What object would make someone question the story you tell about your values?

Speaking to an applauding audience was easier than returning one frightened man's call. Which audience do you prefer because it asks nothing from you after you finish talking?

Part Two: When an Identity Falls Apart.