There were many lines at the camp. The meal lines, the shower lines, the pill lines, and the most important lines, the ones not to cross. But the lines blurred often, especially in the mess hall, designed for seventy-two inmates, but servicing one hundred and twenty-eight. Seats were currency and inmates bequeathed them upon release. It took me two weeks to finally find a seat. I finally found one between Nicky Roast Beef and Jack. Primo sat across from me next to Dr Death. Not ideal but I was happy to find it. Nicky Pizza told me about it.
“Little Mohammed is leaving tomorrow. You should grab his seat.”
There were two Mohammeds in the camp. I never learned why they were called Big Mohammed and Little Mohammed. They both looked average size to me.
“Can I do that?”
“Sure, you can. Just be there for breakfast before anybody else and it’s yours.”
I arrived early and claimed my prize. It felt like a winning lottery number. It’s the little things that are big things in prison. In the summer, we could sit outside in the visitors’ area on picnic tables. No seating there. It was okay to poach. The tables and seats in the mess hall were institutional and minimalist. They looked like something designed for an elementary school dining hall. Oval-shaped tables with stools attached. You sat shoulder to shoulder and your knees ended up snuggled up under the tabletop. You had to be careful not to nudge the guy next to you. There were lines at every meal. It was best not to cut in. Some tried, but rarely, usually a new inmate. It was never a good outcome. You took your tray and then waited again for cutlery (plastic) and water. Then a straight line to your seat. You had to eat quickly, and everyone did. Just stuff it down, carry your tray, dump the refuse in the garbage, put the tray on the counter, the plastic cutlery in the pan with the water, your cup in the holder, put an apple or banana in your pants if the CO was back in his office, and exit.
Breakfast was quiet and never crowded. Six A.M. service tends to stifle much conversation. It was a polite table. Nicky Roast Beef always finished first. He was late-sixties, thick salt and pepper hair and a hard Greek accent. He was in for tax evasion. The story was that his small take-out in the South end of Boston grossed two million a year. That seemed like a lot of roast beef sandwiches to me. But many guys ate there over the years and Jack confirmed the number.
“Good morning, Nick,” was the most I ever said to Nicky Roast Beef.
“Goo mawning John,” he’d answer and back to his oatmeal and banana. Bananas were a treat at the camp. Kitchen workers stole extras and gave them out to friends. Nicky always had an extra one in his locker.
A few more of those from the others and that was the end of conversation most mornings until Jimmy arrived. Jimmy worked at a family company that sold seafood internationally. He had been good friends with Jack. They also owned some restaurants. Jimmy was a principal and head of sales. I never knew what actually happened except he was in for wire fraud and some kind of financial malfeasance. There were a lot of us. Jimmy was the quintessential salesman, full of stories, personality and fun. He had been in the main prison for a few months when he arrived.
“No fuckin way you want to get transferred there,” he said. “This place is the Four-Seasons compared to that.”
“That bad?” I asked.
“Shit yeah. But I learned a lot of things there.”
“Like what.”
“Restraint. Most important lesson in prison. Restraint. I come across as easy-going here. But believe me, I was a pain in the ass in my old life. Doesn’t work here.”
Jimmy transferred to the kitchen when Eddie left, and he showed a lot of restraint there. He knew nothing about baking, but he taught himself somehow. He was always joking and making light of everything. He gave no shit to the staff or anyone else. He’d give me a fresh muffin during my shift.
“Heh Big John. You look like you eat too many salads.” And he’d slip it on top of the washing machine so the CO wouldn’t see it.
But one day, he crossed a line and showed us his teeth. Shaw, a surly black guy who was in kitchen maintenance for a while, had a problem with the TV in the mess hall. There were two TVs there. Usually set to news on one and sports on the other. Shaw would turn the sports TV to a black talk-show when he arrived in the kitchen. The rest of us just put up with it. Jimmy too. Except one day he called Shaw out.
Shaw was in the mess hall taking a break. The kitchen TVs hung from the ceiling. There was no remote for them. A pole from a broom lay in the corner under the TVs to change the channels. Jimmy came out and without saying a word, grabbed the pole, shut off the TV and went back to the kitchen. Shaw just sat there for a minute like he couldn’t believe what happened. I was washing trays and was the only guy to witness this. Finally, Shaw reacted and stormed into the kitchen after Jimmy. The CO was in his office and never came out.
Shaw didn’t touch him but went nose to nose while everyone stopped in still-frame.
“Heh, you little fucker. I’ll waste your fucking white ass you do that again.”
Jimmy didn’t push back, walked away and, fortunately, Shaw went back to the mess hall and turned his program back on. Shaw was serving his last year. Guys don’t want to scuttle their release. Especially long-termers like Shaw who was in for twelve years. That was the end of it. The whole episode didn’t make sense and Jimmy never talked about it. Something about it I admired, but it didn’t change any of my ways. If anything, I just committed to low profile all the more. It didn’t make me feel any better about myself though. It’s almost an oxymoron in prison. Feeling good about yourself. There were a lot of moments like that. Opportunities to reframe the narrative about yourself. Do something heroic. Defend Jimmy. Confront Shaw. But nothing like that ever happened. I just knew I let everyone down in my former life. So much money lost, lives shattered, especially people I loved the most and those who most relied upon me. It didn’t seem like I could ever make up for that. And the worst part was, I didn’t even try.
There are two sittings at lunch: one for the kitchen staff and one for the camp. There’s more life at lunch. Mostly complaints and prison jawboning: who got sent to the SHU, was sick, got fired, denied release, who crapped in the shower (that happened often; not great for the orderlies) or who was being released. But the same routine: eat in ten minutes and get out. I ate with the kitchen staff. Mostly with the older guys. Bill was always pitching the value of his release to all the investors he had impacted. Bill was the inmate about my age who I saw shoveling snow the first day I arrived. We were both in for the same kind of malfeasance. Bill had a private investment company that was faltering, and he used the company’s funds for his personal expenses. The principals of the company discovered his misallocation of funds before he could complete the turn-around, and he was arrested. He was sentenced to twenty-four months. Then his wife left him and his son, a lawyer in Boston, sided with his mother, so Bill entered prison abandoned. His sister and daughter still supported him and visited from time to time. He seemed to be managing it all but I’m sure it was more to him than he let on. In prison, everyone keeps their real feelings inside. Steely is the pose to survive in prison.
The company was still operating after his imprisonment. He believed that if he were released, he could navigate the company back to profitability and repay all the money his investors lost.
“I did an analysis,” he said. “It makes no sense for the government to pay for the costs to imprison me when I could be out there repairing things. Help them sell the company or some assets. I know I could make a difference.”
He even wrote a letter to the judge saying this. But he never mailed it.
“Bill, no one gives a shit about your proposal. I know you don’t want to hear it. Everyone is angry at you. Same with me. They just want us to be punished. That’s the goal. Not what you want to hear. Me neither. But that’s the bottom line.”
“I know,” he persisted. “But it makes no sense.”
“It’s not about sense. And actually, it does make sense. People lost money because of us. They hate us. Makes a lot of sense.”
Dinner had two sittings: 3:00 pm, known as “short line” (limited number of inmates) and 4:00 pm, after count for everyone else. Dinner is early so the staff can leave at 5:00. There’s a real din at dinner. Workday’s over. Guys are hungry. There’s a lot of trading and sharing at dinner. Crazy Lou would lobby others who declined that day’s offering. Some days he’d devour two or three trays. All meals were served in dimly colored orange trays, with four compartments that didn’t relate to anything that was served. Menus at all federal facilities followed the same protocol. They were revised every quarter. Individual quarters never varied, but they were rotated to give inmates the impression that there was an effort to provide variety. Overall, the menus were aligned with the national pyramid of a healthy diet. But there were a lot of surprising spicy Spanish dishes such as tacos and enchiladas, cheaper substitutes for bread or rolls, and other sloppy offerings to disguise the miserable cuts of meat. The lunch menu was more predictable, the same offerings every week. Thursday lunch, baked chicken, was the camp favorite. But Friday’s fish was the worst. It looked like nothing you could recognize. Jimmy captured it all: “This is the only fish in America that never swam in the water.”
Menus: Breakfast was oatmeal on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Tuesday and Thursdays were grits (least favorite), and Saturday and Sunday were scrambled eggs, or on occasion, hard-boiled eggs. The scrambled eggs were cooked hours in advance. Everyone agreed the food sucked. But there were enough palatable meals to make meals the center of gravity of prison camp life. You’d hear guys passing in the halls, or chatting at their bunks and asking, “What’s for dinner?” And almost as soon as dinner was over, there were inmates in the small kitchen in the dorm, cooking something in the microwave from either stolen food or purchased from the commissary. There was always the scent of something cooking there almost 24/7.
At dinner, even in a prison camp, there’s the same ritual to welcome the end of the day: workday over, another day down. Sometimes there’s another line to drop off your tray. There’s a kind of drumbeat as guys empty the leavings on their trays, a signal to all that time is up. You have to slam your tray on the refuse container to get everything off of them. The dishwashers hound you if you linger at meals. It’s not that they care. But the COs are pushing so they can leave. Sometimes it causes a stir. One night, Tony was the dishwasher, and the CO was pushing to end the service. COs go home right after the food service, so they push the kitchen staff to finish cleaning up. The Cod Father was taking time to finish up and was the last one remaining. Tony had cleaned all the other trays and was waiting for the Cod Father. Tony shouted a couple of times, but the Cod father ignored him. The Cod Father, (Carlos was his real name) was mid-sixties, thin and balding with a crackled, continual scowl. He was a legendary fisherman who had recently dominated the “groundfishing” industry in New England. “Groundfish” refers to haddock, flounder and cod. Hence, he earned the title of “Cod Father.” He was an immigrant of Portuguese origin who emerged from hardscrabble beginnings to dominate fishing on the East Coast. His flagrant overfishing almost singlehandedly destroyed the industry. His investigation and prosecution were a high-profile event and resulted in his company’s forced liquidation and the termination of his license. He had such a high profile that many of the inmates (most were from New England) were acquainted with his crimes.
He achieved legendary status upon arrival. He had a loud gravelly voice that penetrated across the entire dorm. You could hear him from one end to the other. He was continually complaining or holding court with every demographic of the inmate population. Motherfucker this and Motherfucker that constantly blared through the dorm. And if not complaining, he could be found telling tales to a crowd of inmates about his incredible rise: how he started as a low-status cleaner of the “catch,” that he was especially good at cleaning and boning and, in fact, he loved doing it. Tough, fearless, and frugal, he saved his pennies to buy his first boat. Then, during a particular period of economic disaster, when everyone had bailed, he purchased a vessel portfolio that resulted in his emergence as the dominant player in New England.
He was an incorrigible smoker. He had cigarettes smuggled in every week and was able to sneak in his smoking while walking the track. In fact, he never really walked the track; he only did so to get in his smokes. His gravelly voice was evidence of his habit. It sounded like someone with significant nodules on his throat. It was a penetrating croaking whenever he opened his mouth.
He was a frequent purveyor of the “a la carte” menu, and he was outrageously open about it. He was that way about everything. Even his smoking, although masking it while on the track, he didn’t seem to care if he got caught. There was not a hint of remorse in him about anything. The COs were cocksuckers and motherfuckers, and I’m sure so were the IRS agents, his prosecutors, the warden and any other law enforcement or institutional representative. He was a model of pure self-aggrandizement and personal enrichment. Apparently, his family continued to support him; he always had many visitors on the weekends. They arrived in groups, and you could see them listening with apparent deference as he held court there too.
I never engaged him. He befriended one of my bunkies for a time. They played cards almost daily and played with relentless aggressiveness. I could just never get myself to break the ice with him. I sensed that he wanted to reach me. One morning, I almost connected with him when he was cleaning the small dorm kitchen. That was his only job at the camp. I was in there by myself, my tea in the microwave. But I passed on it. I don’t think I missed anything by doing so. You feel bad enough about yourself in prison. I didn’t think he’d lessen the burden.
There were only a couple of us left in the hall. Finally, Tony came out from the kitchen and confronted him.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
The Cod Father stood up and got nose-to-nose with Tony.
“Go fuck yourself motherfucker. You want to mess with me. There’ll be a funeral here.”
Fortunately, Steve was still in the camp and jumped in before the CO noticed the fracas.
“Tony, get the fuck back in the kitchen,” Steve said.
Tony went back inside, and the Cod Father walked his tray back. But later Tony told Steve and me, just before final count, that he was going to cut the Cod Father’s balls off.
Steve had seen lots of these confrontations and just laughed it off. But Tony had a reputation of being a hot head. He was always brooding most days. I was concerned.
“I don’t think Tony will do anything,” Steve said. “Let’s hope that the Cod Father standing up to him will end it.”
Fortunately, that was the end of it. For Steve and the Cod Father anyway. Tony kept bringing it up with me when we worked together, how he was going to kill “that motherfucker,” the Cod Father, and “cut his balls off.” But it never happened.
Then there was the Commissary, the other source of prison food. Steve used to call it Christmas. Commissary is the prison store. Every Thursday, the commissary truck arrives right after lunch. The truck pulls up. Guards from the main prison distribute the goodies: snacks, ice cream, tacos, rice, soups, tuna in bags, batteries for the radios and comfortable clothes for non-working hours: t-shirts, sweatshirts, sneakers and even underwear. The truck backs up in front of the camp, filled with paper bags with inmates’ names. Inmates stand around waiting for their name to be called. A lot of waving to get their bag first. It never seemed to help. There’s a rush in the halls and the dorm. A rare moment of energy and joy. Celebration. Guys paying off debts, services, trades and the like. An actual din in the dorm as guys devour their ice cream and treats. I never missed getting the ice cream. An entire pint all by myself. When you’ve lost 30 pounds, you can eat as much as you want. And at seventy-eight, there’s not a lot of future to worry about your diet.
But it wasn’t Christmas for everybody. My friend Bill had very little money in his commissary. His son and wife were estranged, and he didn’t want to tax his sister and daughter. On commissary day, I’d find him in his bunk reading, head down and no treats on his locker. So, I always bought a container of lemon ice for Bill. It was cheap and almost as good as the ice cream. It was sad to see him always huddled in his bunk alone on Commissary Day, reading as if he wasn’t aware of all the celebration around him.
“Heh, thanks John. Much appreciated.” Then I’d go back to my bunk and eat my ice cream. But I always felt guilty eating it. It felt like a betrayal. Worst part is that I ate it anyway. Every last bite.
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