The Unexpected Hustle

The heavy thud of the cell door banging shut behind me barely disrupted from my mind when the hunger pangs struck. I’d been an involuntary guest of Madison Correctional Institution for less than six hours and I was already starving.

My cellmate, Taz, moved about in stark contrast to how I felt. With earbuds in and Metallica jamming, his voice shrieked as he sang along. Shit, I thought, I’ve got 25 more years of this?

I don’t remember what Taz was locked up for but what I do remember is that he was eating from a bag of BBQ potato chips. Ruffles BBQ potato chips, to be exact.

Like a bird on a branch, I peered down at him from the top bunk. I had no money. All my worldly possessions lay crammed into the small, netted bag at the end of my bunk. None of it was food. 

“You want chip?” Taz shouted in broken English. His hand thrust the bag within my reach. I hesitated; my stomach growled. 

I grabbed a handful. 

Taz reminded me of the Painted Man in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Tatted gazes of loved ones’ time stolen from him sprang life-like from his arms. Scaly red and green dragons clawed across his chest. Mermaids hauled back chains restraining toothy eels on either leg. He was a sight to behold. 

In the days that followed I discovered Taz had no outside financial support, yet he lived like a king. How, I wondered, was this possible? 

Each night at 10 p.m. Taz eyed the guard’s post from within the cell. As soon as the guard departed and a new one came on shift, he sprang to action. His hands moved deliberately filling small bottle caps with colored liquid. He slid the chair into the corner, dropped into it, and waited. 

Rat-tat! Rat-tat! Taz clicked open the cell door allowing two men in. His “customer” was “Cali” from down the range, the other, Taz’s “six-five” lookout who took up position from within the shadows of the cell. 

The whirring of the homemade tattoo gun became a familiar rhythm. Fashioned from throwaway parts of everyday junk — motor from a cassette player, the empty tube of a click pen, sharpened section of a guitar string — and he was in business. The secret to his comfortable prison life. 

Taz freehanded images from memory. If you could think it, Taz brought it to life. Soaring eagles flashing razor talons, skull with crossbones, and even some of the dumbest crap I’ve ever seen but you wouldn’t catch me dead with. Anything customers wanted. 

This was one reason why he was sought after and respected by cons. The other reason? Taz had hands. He reminded me of that movie character in a fight scene. Softspoken, diminutive fellow, but try him and you would live to regret it. He’d even warn you beforehand, “You not want this.” Words that fell deaf to the dumb who took him at face value. We who knew him sat back and enjoyed the street fighting tutorial which inevitably followed. 

Taz notwithstanding, this didn’t solve MY problems. I still had no money. I had no one from the outside supporting me. Friends scattered like field mice, and family disowned me in anger and disappointment. 

At the time I earned $17 a month slaving the unit scrubbing toilets. From morning to evening I mopped up after men who couldn’t hit the urinal if their lives depended on it, scrubbed all manner of DNA from toilet seats and floors. Each time I considered this being my existence for the next few decades, I weighed clocking out of life altogether. Let the world win. Maybe I’d get lucky and reincarnate as a tiger or a shark somewhere. 

My stomach constantly ached. During count times I fought hunger pangs while listening to Taz devour bags of junk. He was like a honey badger in the neighbor’s trash can feasting!

At commissary I spent every dime of my 17 bucks on hygiene for the month. If I was fortunate I would have enough to buy a bag of chips after spending my meager stipend. I once made a bag of chips stretch all month. It sucked ass. 

“Hey man,” Taz suddenly said to me one afternoon. “You hungry?” He angled the cell chair in the corner and placed his tools on the metal desk. 

“What? Hungry? Nah.” Goddamn, I was hungry.

“Taz help you,” he said. HIs thumb clicked the motor on the homemade tattoo gun and it whirred like a dentist’s drill. He clicked it off.

“I can’t draw.”

“No, man. You not draw.” 

“Okay, well, what do you suggest?”

“You smart. You very smart.” His finger pointed, tapped the side of my head. “You help me with my legal work. I help you.” 

“I don’t know,” I said, horrified Taz thought I was smart enough to be a lawyer. “I don’t know anything about the law.”

“No,” he grumbled. “You not have to. You type. I do everything, you take and type and make good for me.” 

Rat-tat! Rat-tat! Taz let the first customer in. Behind him followed the day’s six-five.

“Okay,” I said. 

Taz gave an approving grin. The tattoo gun whirred to life and the six-five faded into the shadows …

The next day I found myself in the law library with Taz’s chicken-scratched letter to his judge as to why he should be released early. I read it thoroughly and shook my head. You kidding me? I thought. The damn thing reads like some 5-year-old wrote it! I skulked down into the bucket seat of the plastic chair. 

The clock on the library wall clicked dumbly onward. Eternity passed. 

I sat up again. The cursor to the Microsoft Word document blinked impatiently. You can do this, Chris, I told myself. I typed the entire letter onto the screen as Taz wrote it and then went through and made sentences out of his broken English; paragraphs out of those sentences; and then purpose out of those paragraphs. Done. With document in hand, I struck out to find Taz. 

The cell door banged shut behind me. 

Taz glanced up at me and the whirring of the tattoo gun died off. I held the paper up to him. He wiped his hands dry and carefully took the paper. 

“This good,” he said to the letter. “This good!” The smile cracked across his face until it overtook everything. “This good!” He offered the letter to his customer, shared it with the six-five. “You do good job, Moni,” he said, calling me by my nickname. The other guys echoed his sentiment.

I exhaled. 

Taz paid me $20 for that letter. Twenty dollars! I made a month’s worth of pay for five hours of work. 

Unexpectedly, word traveled. I suddenly had convicts seeking me to type letters for them, and to help fill out standard forms. Within a month I had more business than I had time to fill requests. 

“I quit,” I told my unit manager. 

“You quit what?” he said, bemused. 

“I quit my porter job.”

His chin jiggled when he laughed aloud. “You can’t just quit. This isn’t the streets, young man.” 

“I don’t care,” I said. “I still quit.” 

His chin stopped jiggling. “Excuse me?”

“I said, ‘I quit.’”

“You’ll do your job,” he bellowed, “or I’ll throw you in the hole!”

“Fine,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “You’ll still need to find someone to clean up other people’s shit and piss. I’ll still have quit.”

He leaned back in the big leather chair behind the desk and crossed his arms. He eyed me. He put the tobacco pipe to his fat lips. He did this whenever he was angry or thinking. He never really smoked from it. At least, none of us witnessed it if he did. 

He uncradled the phone handset and I steeled myself. I assumed he was calling for the Yard Dogs to cuff me and drag me off to the hole.

“Hi Beth, it’s Stanley,” he said into the mouthpiece. “I’ve got Monihan here in front of me and he says he’s tired of being a porter. Uh huh. Yeah. Have you had any problems out of him? I see. 

Thank you.” He cradled the handset. 

“You’re on the reclass list,” he said to me. “When you go to reclass you can choose another job. Now get the hell out of my office.” 

Back at the cell I sat on the top bunk peering down at Taz like a bird on a branch. I ate from a bag of Ruffles BBQ chips. I reached into my netted bag of food at the end of the bunk and fetched a can of Coke to wash down the saltiness.

The tattoo gun whirred.