Jarrett places his notebook and pen on the tabletop, and a bald man in a blue, buttoned-down collared shirt and shorts approaches.
“Got your laptop?” the bald man asks.
“I had a lot going on this week; I didn’t get any Mp3s done,” Jarrett says as another man approaches and hears the news.
“I’ll catch you when I get back” the second man says and walks outside.
Giant posters of the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Principles frame a big screen television along the wall on the far side of the dayroom. Jarrett can’t make out what film is playing, but its sound competes with multiple ongoing conversations. Some people eat at conference room tables. A cup fills with ice from the soda fountain.
The place is now a meeting room for sobriety, but it used to be a warehouse with big bay doors. “That’s where I lived for four months,” Jarrett says. “Now you guys get rooms two to a room.”
When men arrive at The Extension, they must surrender their cellphones. For most men that means giving up their only access to music. When Jarrett told me years ago, when he first entered the program, that he would lose his phone, I made him a mix of songs I knew he would like, and I added them to an inexpensive Mp3 player with headphones.
Jarrett is shorter than when we met more than thirty years ago, the result of at least one major car crash and back surgery. His hair looks like someone combed through with a white marker, highlighting his grey.
He smiles big and hugs hard.
Looking through the tall windows facing the courtyard, he tells me, “A guy fell out over there last week,” pointing to the bench in the smoker’s pavilion. The man needed five doses of Narcan to reverse the opioids in his system, and he left for the hospital on a ventilator.
A man in pajama pants rocks in a chair while puffing a cigarette through a hole in his N95 face mask.
Jarrett lights his own and introduces himself to a new arrival.
“Welcome home,” he says, handing the man his notebook.
“I tell them to write their name and five or six of their favorite artists,” Jarrett tells me. The following week, he will bring an Mp3 player loaded with the songs the man requests.
“It’s yours until you get your phone back or leave the program,” he tells him.
He also tells them, when they inevitably question his generosity, that someone once did the same for him and it really helped.