Super Bowl Sunday in prison, or “the Big House” as we call it, is always a tense time. Rumors fly that guards will use any excuse to lock us down, cutting off TV access and preventing us from watching the game. This year, despite a few surprise searches, we managed to avoid lockdown. I guess we should be grateful, though they could always find a reason if they really wanted to.
Let’s break down the numbers: two dorm buildings, four wings per building, eight cubes per wing, and four “campers” per cube. Each inmate gets a bunk, a locker, and a plastic chair. There’s one TV room per wing, but it only fits about ten chairs. Do the math, and that’s 32 campers vying for ten seats.
This setup creates chaos before the Big Game. It starts when we return from the mess hall at 5:00 pm. Everyone scrambles to carry their chair to the TV room, trying to reserve a spot. Luckily, this being a camp, the “chair-saving system” held up pretty well. We only had one angry camper who, at the last minute, decided a fight wasn’t worth the time in SHU (Special Housing Unit/solitary confinement). By 5:30, the camp was buzzing. The phones were all in use, gamblers trying to place bets through friends and family on the outside. There was also a smaller, internal betting pool, but with limited winnings, it wasn’t as popular. Others were focused on a different kind of prize: food.
Prison food is generally awful, but inmates are incredibly resourceful, especially when it comes to culinary creations. Anyone who’s been locked up for a few months has their own prison recipes, usually involving commissary items combined with things saved from the mess hall. These carefully mixed ingredients create surprisingly delicious dishes. Usually, there’s always someone in the wing cooking something, but on Super Bowl Sunday, every cube had a recipe going. Everything was for sale; it was like a bizarre bake sale.
By game time, things settled down. The game itself was a blowout, which meant less yelling and more occasional taunting of the Chiefs fans. Lots of Eagles wings were “flapping” (hand gestures and trash talk). The talk of the TV room was a delectable cheese concoction one inmate had made. He claimed the secret was two scoops of peanut butter mixed with crushed-up wafer crust. It was gone before I could even offer a bid. I, however, was offered some of the best stromboli I think I’ve ever had. I’m not sure of all the ingredients, but it involved sausage, rice, and cheese baked inside tortilla shells. It made my night.
It wasn’t as exciting a night as I’d anticipated. The game’s lack of drama probably had a lot to do with that. At 9:30, we have our final count of the day, and it’s usually my bedtime. I wasn’t about to change my schedule for such a crappy game, and neither did half the TV room. I read a few chapters of my latest murder mystery novel and was asleep by 10:30 pm.
That was Super Bowl Sunday in the Big House.
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