I started in the jail kitchens washing dishes, like everyone else. The night shift C.O. would open my cell door at 5am and I’d have a grand total of 30 seconds to follow him out the pod door with the other dishwashers. Enough time to pull on the white kitchen scrubs. Not enough time to take a piss.
Ricky Tottley would stumble out of the cell next to mine and squint at the clock on the wall. He was losing his vision and there was nothing he could do about it until he got sentenced and joined me in prison. You could get a pair of glasses there.
Charlie Cornwhistle1 would come down from a cell on the tier above, full of laughter, “Tottlin’ Tottley can’t see and he can’t even fuckin’ walk anymore. C’mon Ricky, we got some dishes to wash.”
We’d make the 5-minute walk down to the kitchens, then take turns using the only toilet available before joining the assembly line, scooping food onto trays, and stacking trays onto carts that would go out to all the pods in the jail. If there were some leftovers we could eat them. If there were too many leftovers then we had to store them for tomorrow.
As soon as we were done eating we had to wash every single tray that we had just loaded and stacked. In our next assembly line I would dump all the trash from the trays into a big trash can and stack them into racks. Cornwhistle would give them a rinse with a sprayer and push them into a big dishwashing machine. Ricky would pull them out and re-stack them onto big rolling racks so that they could be loaded with food again a couple hours later.
At the far end of the dishwasher room there was a closet that was usually locked - inside was a water heater and a mop sink. On one occasion I remember walking into the dish room and Ricky and Cornwhistle were nowhere to be found. The closet on the far end was open, so I walked in and found Cornwhistle squatting in the corner behind the water heater. I startled him, he yelled “oh”, and I walked out. I didn’t know what he was doing and I didn’t wanna know.
After 2 more seemingly endless shifts and a nap, my buddy Clint offered me a cup of coffee. He was the head cook and had just stolen a bunch of coffee grounds from the kitchen storage room. Coffee that was meant for use in the C.O.’s break room. He’d put the grounds in a clean t-shirt stretched over a cup and pour boiling water over it. I’m pretty sure he also burned the shit out of himself.
I joined Cornwhistle and Ricky at a card table.
“Welp. I got caught chokin’ my chicken today,” Cornwhistle told Ricky as I sat down2.
I waffled uncomfortably, “I mean, I didn’t see anything and I wasn’t gonna say anything. You gotta do what you gotta do,” I said.
“I just have a thing about doing it in public places,” Cornwhistle continued.
Ricky’s face was red and he was nearly in tears, “we don’t need the details man.”
The door to the pod opened with a POP and the on-duty C.O. walked in.
Whew! Smells like Starbucks in here.
In phases 1 and 2 there were always at least 2 C.O.s in every pod at all times. In phase 3 we were often left alone with the cameras, but they would still make their rounds.3
Nobody in the pod knew that his comment was a warning, so the next day when we went to work, they tossed the cells and found the coffee.
Clint went to the hole along with probably 5 or 6 others who had evidence of coffee in their cells. It felt so innocent when Clint handed me that cup of coffee the day before, I would’ve felt like a complete fool if I went to the hole for it. I was lucky not to get caught.
On the plus side, I got promoted to head cook!
Over the next few weeks I learned how to chop onions by the dozen, Ricky learned to put either Fruit Loops or bananas in the cake batter - whichever he could get his hands on - and Cornwhistle… well, he kept going in that closet.
One day he approached me kinda quiet and said, “ay man.”
He looked to his left. He looked to his right.
“If I was to - hypothetically - make some hooch4, would you want in on it?”
“At what cost?” I asked.
“Nothin man, Ricky and I got too much of it. Also, I don’t really have a thing for masturbating in public - I just made that up cuz I didn’t trust you yet.”
Not his real name but I promise you it's just as ridiculous.
Cornwhistle was in for selling heroin. If he was a sex offender we wouldn’t have been sitting at the same table. “Fuckin chomos” is a phrase he would often use to describe child molesters.
Wine.