One day per week, from 6:15am to around 8am, guys line up with empty, heavy-duty mesh laundry bags to scoop their Commissary orders from a metal shoot into their bags while COs scan items and bark orders — at the customer and the incarcerated clerks. Each unit has their “Commissary day”, with some units combined, and there can be hundreds of guys waiting, and only 2 windows. The clerks (incarcerated guys) pre-shop the orders, but nothing is scanned until you show up… which is not universal across the BOP or state prisons, I’m told, where they scan everything and just hand you (or deliver) your order.
But we stand and wait… which lately has been fairly painful, but is a good time to catch up with friends, and wave hello to your buddies from other units walking in full uniform and steel-toed boots to their Unicor jobs (14 cents an hour to sew military apparel, etc.)…
It’s, G-d willing, as close to a soviet bread line, as I’ll get.
There are strange rules, like you have to return your used batteries in-order to buy new ones, which you need to power the radios and reading lamps, unless you get a guy to hack parts from an old tablet into them and make them rechargeable (there are a good number of guys here with impressive electronics skills who fix headphones, radios, lights, etc.). If you want to buy more than one book of (20) stamps — mailing a small USPS box takes 2 books, there’s no ability to buy and print mailing pre-paid labels here — you need a written and signed “cop-out”
from your unit team, because you might be using stamps to pay guys for things otherwise. And there are limits.
You can buy 10 tuna, unless they are short, then 5 (and f*ck you Teman for asking if you can get more of the one type of fish in-stock because you keep kosher and can’t buy the 19 non-kosher protein items — but I keep trying!
Persistence!)
The commissary crew is a bit annoyed by the Jewish guys because they’ve left them with an abundance of kosher stuffed cabbage MREs. Buying a stuffed cabbage at 6:30am on a Federal prison compound just has a delightful absurdity to it. It reminds me of a Mel Brooks line in the 2000 Year Old Man.
“At your age, I imagine your system is quite sensitive.”
“Extremely sensitive.”
“What do you eat?”
“Just cool mountain water. 10 degrees below room temperature.”
“Just that!?”
“Just that! … That, and a stuffed cabbage.”
“What? How is that allowed on your diet?”
“I gotta live a little.”
There have been weeks when they’re out of (or short on) all the fish and plantains and rice and all I’m left to eat with days left to the end of the week is a box of MRE stuffed cabbage the officer pushed me into buying (I feel bad — if we don’t buy them out they will give the Jewish guys a hard time when we need to order stuff for Passover or Purim, the next year). So there I am, with just a cup of coffee to take down the hunger pangs… “Just that, and a stuffed cabbage!”
Anyway, another delightful oddity: The guys can buy ice cream — up to 4 pints of Hershey’s Ice Cream, “king cones,” or strawberry frozen fruit bars for the lactarded. Per the resident Glass House commissary experts, guys who run “stores” and trade goods for stamps, frozen yogurt was a thing but people complained it was too expensive at $7 and “ruined it for everyone.”
BUT there’s no freezers in the cells, so all over the compound, before 8am, you’ll see grown men sitting on a step, pounding a tub of Cookies & Cream, or whatever flavor they had in stock… a little bit of bliss in a hard, gray world…
I get a kick out of it each time.
Everything really is backwards here.
Ice cream, the BOP breakfast of champions.
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