What does strength mean to you? Is it muscles? How much someone can lift? How hard they can hit? Maybe it’s the bendability to breakability ratio of the human soul? How much a person can endure and still rise above it. No muscle will ever be stronger than the soul. And Jaymes L. has a strong soul.
Jaymes ‘Grizz’ L. grew up in sunny Santa Monica, with his parents holding him by a leash—literally. His parents named him Jaymes with a Y to avoid having him nicknamed ‘Jimmy.’ Because in their words, “Jimmys went to jail.” He told me this, having come to Beit T’Shuvah directly from jail.
Despite how he seems today, Jaymes was always a shy kid. Kept to himself, sheltered, and struggled to find a group of his own. The one lesson that was instilled in him throughout his life: strength over everything. Strength was the inheritance. Partly because his father was a stoic man—”he showed me so much through his actions. Less words, more actions. His mother was firm, but loving—one of thirteen kids raised in a poverty so total that a stranger brought a turkey every Thanksgiving and the older children fed the younger ones saltines and tap water. She kept Jaymes indoors. Kept him close. Kept him from the streets she’d grown up on, and the boy she sheltered grew up so timid it was hard for him to look anyone in the eyes. He grew his hair to cover his face. He cried easily. He was, by his own account, really emotional. So he picked up a pair of clippers and started cutting his friends’ hair in high school—badly at first, tufts like tumbleweeds rolling across the football field—because he understood something even then: it was the only way out of his shell. “That gave me all my social skills.” Two people looking at each other through a mirror. Talking as he worked. “They always tell me the truth. Maybe because they’re looking at themselves.”
He was the middle child who got to be every child. Younger brother to two older sisters, then older brother to a boy born seven years after him—the brother he raced home to make laugh. The brother who was, in his words, “my everything. I love him so much. I still do.” He played football and ran track. He ran with a group of misfits who weren’t cool but whom everyone knew, the kind of kids who would pull pranks, including but not limited to, smuggling live chickens onto their high school campus only to watch the security guards chase the birds around the yard. Underneath all of the jabs and laughs sat the lesson his father lived: be tough. Not make money or be a success—protect people. Be the one who doesn’t break.
The first drink came at homecoming, his senior year, one of the rare nights he was allowed out. And for a moment he forgot every problem in the world. He forgot why he was shy in the first place. After that, more drinking followed—like a shadow follows a body—it got him talking to girls, got him loud, got him the reputation of the wild guy, the tough guy. After high school, he worked as a security guard at a bar, the perfect place for a brewing alcoholic to start their journey. But this wasn’t where it all really started. That was when he was 26 and his whole life began to fall apart.
His father, his superhero, was diagnosed with cancer and asked his son to move in with him. For two years, Jaymes watched the strongest man he knew wither away before his eyes. His dad would sit in a small apartment with the television off and the lights low, in too much pain to do anything but sit, and he wouldn’t let his son do a thing. “He didn’t want me to see him sick…My hands were tied. I couldn’t do anything except wait and wait for something that was terrible.”
When his father passed, Jaymes inherited his medicine cabinet: fentanyl patches, lollipops, everything you could imagine. Despite his father dying of smoking-related lung cancer, Jaymes picked up the same habit. Nicotine addiction was so strong within him, that he would break open his Zyn pouches and snort the pure nicotine powder—looking for any realease. He was broken. Once the fentanyl was out, he started on cocaine, on pills, on whatever would fill the space where his inner power used to be. “I felt hopeless,” he says of watching his father fade, the face sagging, the body that had been a temple reduced to skin and bone. His addiction was now totally off the rails, seemingly unstoppable and fueled by grief.
Jaymes searched for meaning in the bottom of every booze and pill bottle he could find, but ultimately found spiritual connection by getting a dog. You see, Jaymes is a dog lover. I know we all love dogs, but Jaymes LOVES DOGS. In particular, Penelope—his forty-pound chihuahua mix, black and white, a little chunky, who came running when he called her “Butt” because she always had butt problems. When she died, the floor went out from under him. “People talk about a god-shaped hole. I have a dog-shaped hole on my heart.” That was the center of the meltdown. The beginning of the end.
One day, on more drugs and alcohol than his body knew what to do with, Jaymes too out his gun. His grief and pain had overtaken him.
He fired once into the ceiling.
Bang.
Drywall rained on him as he fired again.
Bang.
The tears welled as he waved the gun around his apartment.
Bang.
He put the barrel of the gun in his mouth—tasting his fate.
Click.
The gun jammed.
The next thing he remembers is the police arriving at his door. He was fully naked, his girlfriend hysterically crying in the corner of the room. The neighbors had heard the shots. Intoxicated and confused, the police took him directly to jail. He would later write to the detectives and thank them for treating him like a human in such a difficult state. He did not receive the same treatment in jail—where he spent seven months for domestic violence. Despite his girlfriend pleading with the court, the video evidence of him pointing the gun her direction was enough to send him behind bars.
Nothing that any of us have heard of jail or seen on TVwill ever truly prepare us for what it’s like in there. Jail does not soften a man. When Jaymes got there, men laid on top of each other in the summer heat with no air conditioning, horseflies the size of thumbs, open sores, a ceiling that bowed and leaked water no one was allowed to drink. Guards threw boxes of fruit cups into the dorm, and the men fought for them like pigs at a trough. Over the next seven months, Jaymes saw men die in front of him, one after another, white sheets pulled over bodies while the program continued like it was nothing but a Tuesday. They wheeled the bodies out. New bodies came in. “You’re just bodies in there,” he learned. And yet—this is the strange hinge of his whole story—he took it as a blessing from day one. “Where I was every day was worse than jail to me.” Outside, he had wanted to die every morning and didn’t know how to stop. Inside, something he’d lost flickered back to life.
Jail is about survival, but for Jaymes, he found there was a fraternal element as well “The common theme is I love finding my strength within a team, a pack, and now a community.” He had spent a lifetime believing strength meant the thing that doesn’t bend—and discovered, somewhere between his father’s deathbed and a concrete dormitory, that the strongest thing is the thing that bends and refuses to break. “It’s knowing that I won’t break because there’s someone I have to stand up with.”
He came through the doors at Beit T’Shuvah on a Thursday, paper suit and all, and felt the sun on the back of his neck for the first time in months—a sensation so foreign after lockup that it nearly undid him. People kept shaking his hand and saying “Welcome home,” and his first instinct was pure suspicion. By the end of the day, his guard had dropped. This place let him be what he is underneath all the armor: “a soul that doesn’t have to be on guard all the time. Someone who likes being in the company of others.” The mirror. He became a house monitor, the kind people bring their problems to, and he writes their troubles down in his book so they know someone is not only there but listening. He got a sponsor he was sure he’d resist and ended up loving. He started, slowly, to look at everything differently.
What cracked him open wasn’t a sermon, a song, or a group. It was the experience of being received. Early on, he made T’Shuvah to a staff member for something small—a mistake he had made, a sign he’d ignored—and instead of the wall he expected, the cold shoulder the world given him his whole life, he was welcomed, thanked, forgiven. If I am being totally honest, that moment, when he made amends, meant a lot to me too. Because I was the staff member who forgave him. I remember going home and telling my girlfriend, “You know that Jaymes guy? He’s something special! He’s really getting this recovery thing!” Because, and he says it better than I ever could: “To receive forgiveness is to get forgiveness, and to give forgiveness. It’s the receiving that completes the circuit of energy.” That single exchange rearranged how he saw the entire community. He started seeing it everywhere—in the counselors, in the residents, in the softer underbelly beneath even the toughest characters. He found it most undeniable in the moments no one stands alone during the Mourner’s Kaddish. That magical moment when a resident bolts across the sanctuary to stand beside a grieving community member standing solo, when the whole room rises for those who have passed. “No one stands alone and you physically hold each other. I’ve never witnessed anything like that and it happens every Shabbat.” A weekly call to action.
Everyday, Jaymes used to sit on the blue couch facing the stained-glass murals and read them one panel at a time, building a story out of the symbols, until he reached the last and found the line he can’t stop turning over: “The place where the repentant stand, even the most saintly cannot reach.” He understands now why that’s that line spoke to him so much. Because, when he looks at himself and the members of his community, he sees steel souls forged in the fire of addiction. All of whom, now live in recovery. But, it takes breaking to get there. Most people, never break enough to look at themselves thoroughly—never sit down and write out everything they’ve done and everything that’s been done to them. Only the shattered get to rebuild.
Now, Jaymes has found a new purpose in life: training dogs—to wake up and love the work, to feel a paw in his hand again. He’s in the process of finding an academy to go to and become a licensed trainer, as we speak. With all the lessons he’s learned, he’s bound to train them with a gentle hand and loving spirit. Because, he knows that toughness is not strength. Strength is standing up and with those who need you. Strength is to make amends when that road seems too foggy to drive. They call him Grizz for how he looks, but a teddy bear for how he acts. I don’t think either are true. Because Jaymes, the shy kid who couldn’t meet your eyes, now stands up for every pair that needs him to. That’s not grizzled. That’s not a teddy bear. That’s a guard dog who finally learned he was always meant to protect the pack. And I for one, feel lucky to be a grateful member of that pack. Because Jaymes L. has proved to me, you, and the entire world that he lives by one simple truth: No one stands alone. And now, neither does he.
