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would incorporate into my career as a trainer. I would tell fighters under pressure the truth, even though they didn’t want to hear it, because I knew they needed it and would know the difference. The ones who were going to make it would actually want to hear it, would know that they could trust it—both the criticism and the praise.
    That first Sunday, I went to chapel, and afterward Brother Tim stopped me and said, “Why’d you come to church?”
    â€œI wanted to go to mass,” I said.
    â€œNo, you didn’t. You came because you wanted to show me you were a good guy and get my approval.”
    He was right. He had a way of puncturing your pretenses that made you trust him. He was teaching me things about human nature.
    â€œSo how are you doing?” he asked. “Are you all right? You need to make a phone call?”
    Everything in prison is a kind of currency. He was using the fact that he had a phone in his office that I could use to further build trust and let me know that he cared. With other guys, he might use the currency of the phone for something else. If there was someone he saw who shouldn’t have been in Rikers or who couldn’t defend himself, Brother Tim would go to the guy who ran the quad, the inmate with the most juice, and he’d make a deal with him. He was smart. He’d say, “Look, I don’t want this kid bothered,” because he knew the kid would be raped otherwise. He’d say, “I’m going to let you make five calls a week,” and the guy would make sure that nobody bothered the kid.
    Of course, it didn’t always work. He said to me on more than one occasion, “Teddy, some people travel through here and it changes their lives. Some, it ruins their lives.” There was one kid who was in for shoplifting. A frail, skinny kid, who’d slipped a couple of albums under his sweater and been caught walking out of a record store. Before Brother Tim could do anything to prevent it, the kid got raped. It was terrible. The kid’s bail was only fifty dollars, and when Brother Tim discovered that, it just killed him. I mean, this kid was ruined, he was never going to be the same, and for what? Fifty bucks? Brother Tim did get the kid out afterthat, he paid the bail—which is something he did routinely, despite the fact that he was making almost no money—but not too long after the kid got back home, he was found in the vestibule of his building, dead of a drug overdose. “Your mistakes sometimes you never get over,” Brother Tim said. “I see that here.”
    I got out of Rikers, but I stayed in touch with Brother Tim. He lived with the Franciscan friars on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. I’d go visit him, and take him out to eat at these Italian restaurants on Carmine or Bleecker Street. He looked like a dockworker, a guy out of Hard Times.
    He’d wear this blue wool cap, and his clothes were what was made in prison or what someone gave him. He was an orphan himself, this guy who cared about all these godforsaken unfortunates. I remember at one of these restaurants we went to, he pocketed the silverware, and then went, “Oops, guess I lost control of myself, Teddy,” and put the silverware back on the table. “Gotta get out of my old habits.” It was funny, but it was also like he was making a show of having been there himself; he was saying, It’s easy to slip back. You have to be disciplined.
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    L IKE A LOT OF PEOPLE, B ROTHER T IM WAS WORRIED, WHEN my father finally paid my bail and I got out, that I would slip back. It was a genuine concern. I was back home, waiting for my trial to start, and I was facing a lot of years—ten years with the two felonies—and yet even with all that going on, it didn’t seem impossible that I would do something else to compound things, that I still didn’t get it.
    Another guy who was concerned was my childhood friend