Starve — Or Find a Side Hustle in Prison

Shortly after being locked up, Chris discovers he’ll need to find a side hustle in prison to survive. It’s not long before he comes up with an idea — and has more business than he knows what to do with.

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

My cellmate, Taz, danced about, a stark contrast to how I felt. With earbuds in and Metallica jamming, his voice shrieked as he belted out lyrics.

“Shit,” I muttered. “I’ve got 50 more years of this?”

I don’t remember why Taz was locked up. What I do remember is his hands shoveling chips into his mouth without a care in the world.  Ruffles BBQ chips, to be exact. Like a bird on a branch, I peered at him from the top bunk. I had no money. All my worldly possessions lay crammed into the short, netted bag at the end of the bunk. None of it was food.

“You want food?,” Taz shouted through broken English. His hand thrust the black and red chip bag within my reach. I hesitated. My stomach yowled. 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 that time had stolen from him sprang life-like from his arms. Scaly red-green dragons clawed across his chest. Mermaids hauled back heavy chains, restraining toothy eels on either leg. He was a sight to behold.

In the days that followed, I discovered that no one from the outside supported Taz financially, yet he lived like a king. How, I wondered, was this possible?

Each night when 10 p.m. came,  Taz eyed the guard’s post from within the cell. The moment the guard departed, allowing another guard to come on shift, he sprang to action.  With experienced hands, he filled miniature pill bottle caps with colored liquids. He slid the cell chair into the corner, dropped into it, and waited.

Rat-tat! Rat-tat! Taz clicked open the cell door, and two scheduled guests flowed in. The first was his customer, Cali, from down the range; the other Taz’s “six-five,” which is a lookout, who took a position within the shadowed corner of the cell.

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

Taz did freehand work from memory. If you could imagine it, Taz brought it to life. Soaring eagles flashing razor talons, a skull with crossbones, even some of the dumbest stuff I’ve ever seen, that you wouldn’t catch me dead with. “Anything the customer needs,” he had once said. I suppose this was one of the reasons cons sought him out and respected him.

The other reason? Taz had hands. He reminded me of that movie character in a fight scene. Soft-spoken, diminutive fellow, but try him and you would live to regret it. He would even warn you beforehand, “You do 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. My account balance read zero. 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 in the unit, scrubbing toilets. From morning to evening, I mopped up after men who couldn’t hit the urinal if their lives depended upon it; scrubbing all manner of DNA from the toilet seats and the floor.

Each time I considered this being my existence for the next five decades, I weighed clocking out of life altogether. Let the world win. “Maybe,” I remember thinking, “I’ll get lucky and be able to start over 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 feasting in the neighbor’s trash can!  At commissary, every dime of my $17 went toward hygiene for the month. If I was fortunate, I would have enough to buy a bag of chips after spending my slave earnings. 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 went about arranging caps of colored liquids on the metal desk.

“What? Hungry? No,” I said.   Goddamn I was hungry.

“Taz help you.” The motor to his homemade tattoo gun whirred to life 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 at the side of his head. “You help me with my legal work. I help you.”

“I don’t know.” I was horrified that 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 allowed 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-scrawled letter to his judge, as to why he should be released early. I read it carefully and shook my head.

“Are you kidding me?” I griped to myself. “The damn thing reads like some five-year-old wrote it!” I skulked down into the bucket seat of the plastic chair. The clock ticked slowly onward. An eternity passed.

I sat up again. The cursor to the Microsoft Word document blinked impatiently. “You can do this, Chris,” I encouraged myself. “You can do it.”  I forced myself to write the entire letter on the screen as Taz had written it. Then, I painstakingly stitched together sentences from phrases in his broken English; I crafted paragraphs from those sentences and meaning out of the paragraphs.

Done! With document in hand, I struck out to find Taz.

The cell door banged shut behind me. Taz glanced up, and the whirring of the tattoo gun died off. I thrust the paper out to him. He wiped his hands, and carefully took the letter. I stood holding my breath. The wild pounding of my heart thundered in my ears.

“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, and shared it with the six-five. “You do good job, Moni,” he said, calling me by my nickname, which is a respectful play on my last name. 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 out to type letters for them, and to help them 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 from the laughter. “You can’t just quit. This isn’t the street, young man.”

“I don’t care.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, I don’t care.”

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

“Fine. You’ll still need to find someone to replace me. I’ll still have quit.”

Behind the desk, the exhausted leather chair creaked beneath the sudden shift in his weight. Beady eyes lit upon me from within the round pudge of flesh. The unlit tobacco pipe pressed in between his thick lips. This happened whenever he was angry or thinking. He never smoked from it, at least none of us ever witnessed it. He picked up the phone 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. 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 perched atop the bunk, peering down at Taz like a bird on a branch. I dug another handful from the bag of Ruffles BBQ chips between my legs. I fished a can of Coke from the netted bag of food at the end of the bunk and washed the saltiness down.

The tattoo gun whirred.

Christopher Monihan #310612

Madison Correctional Institution

P.O. Box 740

London, OH 43140-0740