A Taste of Fall

With a gentle knock, my friend Beau hesitantly brings his face to the narrow window of the cell door. His timing couldn't be much better; the movie I was watching just ended. I wave him in.

He's holding his mug, the same transparent plastic kind that everybody in prison owns. Amber liquid sloshes around inside. "Get a cup," he says with an excited smile. "You'll want to try this."

I turn off my TV and eye his mug with skepticism. For just an instant, I fear he might be trying to give me alcohol. I've gone decades without drinking any of the blinding trash-bag booze that some prisoners ferment under their bunks, and I'm not interested in trying the stuff now. Even though Beau doesn't have substance use issues, I have trust issues and can't help but wonder....

Beau grins, almost conspiratorially. He says, "It's hot apple cider."

I'm confused, that's the only word for it. There's a thriving black market for contraband foodstuffs here, but cider isn't something I've ever known to exist inside the prison fences. It just isn't the sort of innocent thing people here usually crave.

"Well, it's kinda apple cider. I made it. It's fantastic."

A little warily, I retrieve a cup, which he proceeds to pour two fingers of his concoction into.

I take a whiff. It smells like cinnamon. Cautiously, I sip.

He reads the perplexity on my face. This beverage is surprising, to say the least. We don't have access to apple juice, nor to fresh apples in quantities enough to crush for drinking. This so-called cider is something else. Either I'm delusional or it's a passable stand-in for the real thing—hot, tart, sweet, and appropriately spiced.

"I know, right?" Beau enthuses. He takes a swig and smacks his lips with delight. "Tell me that doesn't taste like camping and hikes through the woods and trick-or-treating. It's actually powdered lemonade, honey, cinnamon, and butter. Butter is key. It rounds out the flavor, adds richness."

This stuff is good. Beau's usually pretty successful at engineering interesting recipes. Maybe that comes with having a degree in organic chemistry. We stand in my cell, letting this cider's pleasant volatility entice our olfactory systems.

I try to think back to my childhood and autumn nights with family friends who lived out in the country. They always had hot apple cider on hand, and we'd sit beside a bonfire, our faces warm, our backs cold, as we nursed Styrofoam cups of scalding sweet liquid. I remember once burning my tongue and the roof of my mouth on it, so that I couldn't taste anything for days but still drank the whole cup and went back for seconds, afterward. Is Beau's "cider" actually similar to that cider, or can I simply no longer recall cider's flavor?

"Don't overthink it," he says, "just enjoy it."

So I release my weak grip on the past, and my lame philosophical fumblings, and take another sip.

There's More to Reentry Than Toilet Paper

Some people just don't recognize a good thing when it's presented to them. Case in point: this week's uninvited guest at the ERDCC Reentry Center.

Slouchy and bald, with thick glasses and a long, gray goatee, a little pear-shaped man trundled into the Reentry Center on Tuesday and asked to use the restroom. It was a warm, sunny day in Bonne Terre, and most of his housing unit was outside, enjoying its daily recreation period. The guard at the Reentry Center's front desk said he could enter as long as he signed in.

Why didn't the man just use the toilet at his house? It would've saved him from walking at least twice as far as he did. Unfortunately, the guard didn't think to ask. The man scribbled his name on the sign-in sheet, did what he wanted to do, then returned to his recreational activities on the yard.

That afternoon, without being released by the staff running his house, our visitor inexplicably returned. He once again signed in, once again went into the restroom, and once again left without apparent incident. This time, the guard reported the event to my boss.

Such behavior would probably seem odd no matter where we were, but ERDCC is a place where strangeness thrives, settles in, raises kids, sends them off to college, celebrates their astonishing success, then retires and opens up a snazzy, circus-themed Airbnb. I'm saying the weirdness here manages to operate at a particularly advanced level, while simultaneously being kind of vanilla (which is weird in it's own way, but that's beside the point).

Still, my boss is a former captain with twenty-one years' experience in corrections. He understands the difference between weird and weird. These restroom goings-on had captured his notice. Reentry is his domain, and he will abide no fuckery.

He checked the restroom. Every roll of toilet paper was gone. We had ourselves a TP thief.

The Reentry Center's Wednesday activities include a 2nd Opp class, the Global Leadership Academy meeting, and Anger Management. That morning's bathroom visitor wasn't enrolled in any class, presentation, or program, but he nevertheless finagled a way out of his housing unit and showed up in our building, asking to use the restroom for a third time in two days.

The moment the man signed in, my boss abandoned the spreadsheet he was working on, sprang from his desk, and beelined for the suspect. It wasn't much of a conflict. The man was caught red-handed and quickly surrendered the stack of paper towels and two flattened rolls of toilet paper he'd stuffed in his socks.

"I was gonna let it go," my boss told him. "but you got greedy. I mean, hell, you already got me for three rolls this morning!"

The man smiled and corrected him. "Four."

"Get the hell out of here," my boss laughed. "If you come back in here, I'll write you up for being out of bounds."

The guy was lucky to not get a conduct violation and a bill for the cost of what he stole. A roll of toilet paper costs 95¢ at the canteen. If he's stealing it, he probably couldn't afford the wholesale price the state would charge him for it. It's a little sad—but also ridiculous.

Prison's Awful Acoustics

The prison soundscape was far worse in decades past. Between the slamming gates and the jangling keys, the rappers and the howlers, the aggressive disputes and the lustful whoops, there was no escape from the penitentiary's auditory assault. Most cells had at least one wall made up of bars, making the whole housing unit a sonic space shared by upwards of 100 men. Modern prisons tend to offer residents the luxury of a solid steel door, but their inhabitants are still awash in a great deal of noise.

Before coming to prison, I'd never experienced high-volume culture. I didn't know that playing cards could be popped. I took for granted that people didn't incessantly beat on random surfaces for fun. I had no concept of a casual shout. I might've seen a lot in my pre-imprisonment world travels, but it seems that my life prior to this life-without sentence was still somehow sheltered.

Back in the nineteenth century, prisons were places of maximum quiet. No one spoke, except in official communication with guards (called "keepers") or with the prison's religious advisors. You'd labor without making a sound. You could practically hear a flea jump in a neighboring cell at midday prayer. Oppressive stillness was believed to spur the prisoner to search his soul and, ultimately, repent. Spoiler alert: it didn't work.

Neither did abandoning those tyrannical silences, though. Once the carceral system ditched that deeply flawed model of imprisonment, chaos reigned. Guards' radios beeped and squelched. Intercoms blared. Communication across the yard or between locked-down cells became a simple matter of verbalization. "Kites," the written notes that prisoners "fly" to one another, remained in use, as did sign language—but why scrawl or signal messages when you could shout to their recipients directly?

Memories of life at Missouri State Penitentiary still abound for prisoners who did time there before it closed down. They recall a maddening, twenty-four-hour-a-day cacophony, running the gamut from TV laugh tracks to the sounds of real-life forcible rape. There was no getting away from it, they say. All you could do was fight fire with fire: crank up your own radio, start reading aloud, or sing at the top of your lungs.

The aural unease inflicted by my own imprisonment has been mild by comparison. Yes, I was once earwitness to a neighbor being stabbed. I also endured countless deafening dining rooms, and in the last of my years at Crossroads, blogged about the torture of what I termed "aggressive whistling." Worst was my time in administrative segregation—a cumulative three months of my wingmates' all-night shouting and incessant metal banging—which gave me an acoustic experience close to the hell that people survived at MSP.

Nightly lockdowns today usually bring hours of quiet. This is disrupted only by guards' occasional radio traffic during walkthroughs, and by cooks and bakers leaving for their 3 AM kitchen jobs. Unbroken sleep is possible, at least theoretically. In the daytime, however, all bets are off.

One man in my wing does daily aerobic laps past cell doors with his ear buds in, subjecting everyone to his caterwauling. "I can't help it," he insists. "I got the music inside me." We roll our eyes and abide his off-key singing because, despite being regarded as a pest by nearly everyone here, he's recognized for being quite stupid and therefore not able to comprehend the concept of impulse control.

A quartet of comparatively compos mentis card players bellows obscenities amongst themselves, punctuated by verbal gunshot noises—for hours. When that no longer amuses them, their ringleader adds honks and abrasive car alarm effects to the mix. Sometimes one of them starts to scream, then modulates his larynx to create uniquely maximalist laughter, the likes of which I've (thankfully) never previously known.

Beyond these auditory offenders, the wing's volume reliably crescendos after recreation periods. Ballers continue their on-the-court disputes in the shower, shouting across the wing, from one stall to another, about who had better layups or three-pointers. Anyone trying to have a phone conversation in the midst of this often gives up and retreats to their cell.

Frustratingly, no one with sufficient clout to mute these uproars ever does so. Prisoners don't need or want absolute silence, but volume caps would be nice. Conversations I've had and overheard over the years imply that a majority of us would welcome occasional interruptions over the intercom, telling the noisemakers to turn it down a notch.

While awaiting the realization of this pipe dream, I plug my ears and remind myself: circumstances could be worse. They certainly have been before.