Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories from Behind Bars (6 page)

11. Now place the fluorescent orange concoction on your prepped tortilla and roll it up, folding the bottom first like a burrito.

Y
ou might think that inmates are a bunch of angry, smelly men. And sometimes we are. But I will say this, we do attempt to keep clean—for our own benefit as well as those around us. When we’re in a lockdown, cellmates might have to spend weeks, even months, in the cell together. We don’t go out or get any air at all and we get only one shower per week. But there is a convict rule that is strictly enforced—by the convicts. Everyone takes a daily birdbath.

While your cellmate stays out of your way on his bed, you fill the sink with water. You can even use the toilet water if you must, but that can be kind of depressing because most of the plumbing is interconnected and you can get some unwanted surprises as a result. Some of the guys will put up a makeshift curtain of bed sheets. Once the sink is filled, use a bowl or cup to pour water on your body. Soap up the major spots, rinse off, and clean up all your mess as a courtesy to your cellmate.

On a very hot summer day, this is done throughout the day. You do what you can to stay cool and clean. There’s no telling how long you’ll be locked down.

Ingredients

1 pack chicken flavor Ramen

1 cup of boiling water

2 tablespoons lime juice

½ cup of shredded rotisserie chicken

2 tablespoons salsa

1 tablespoon chopped cilantro

Salt and pepper

1. Crush the Ramen in the wrapper and empty into a bowl.

2. Add the water, cover, and let sit for 8 minutes.

3. Drain the water, add the seasoning, mix well, and set aside.

4. In a separate bowl, add the lime juice, chicken, salsa, and cilantro. Mix well.

5. Add to the bowl of Ramen, mix well, and season with salt and pepper to taste.

T
here’s always that one officer who takes his job too seriously. This is the guy who goes that extra inch to make the inmates’ time as difficult as it can be. A supercop will search your cell and “accidentally” knock over your TV, or make obnoxious sexual remarks about your girlfriend while you’re with her in the visiting room. This is the kind of shit that will get a CO stabbed or killed.

Then there are COs who get along fine with the inmates, who just want to finish their eight hours of work and don’t mind what inmates do so long as we’re following their program and not causing chaos on their shifts. One officer in particular, let’s call him Officer Diaz, was like that. He would want us to “clean the yard,” as we’d say. He would give us information on child molesters and snitches, and then turn a blind eye as we rolled ’em up—and out of the prison yard. Some would get badly beaten; some left in body bags. It was a system not many in the free world would understand, but it worked.

Just a few months after my release, some of my homies and I were at a local club when I ran into that very officer. The homies with me were also ex-cons and looked more intimidating than me. He didn’t recognize me at first, then his eyes lit up like he saw a ghost. I simply said, “What’s up, Diaz?” He was looking pretty nervous. Any other inmate would have had a field day with the opportunity to get his hands on a CO outside of the legal system, but I didn’t. I remembered what kind of officer he was. I just kept walking by him, winked my eye, and smiled. He smiled back, nodded his head in a form of respect.

Ingredients

2 packs beef flavor Ramen

1½ cups boiling water

1 can or pouch (7 to 11 ounces) ready-to-eat Sloppy Joe

1 summer sausage (about 9 ounces), chopped, or 1 can (9 ounces) Vienna sausage, drained and chopped

½ medium-size onion, chopped

1 jalapeño chile, chopped

3 or 4 hamburger buns, split open

1. Crush the Ramen in the wrappers and empty into a bowl. Set aside the seasoning packets.

2. Add the water, cover, and let sit for about 8 minutes.

3. Drain off excess water.

4. Combine the Sloppy Joe, sausage, onion, and jalapeño in a large microwavable bowl.

5. Cover and microwave for about 5 minutes, until hot.

6. Add the Ramen and seasoning. Mix well.

7. Place the open buns on plates. Cover with the Sloppy Joe–Ramen mixture.

by Taryn Manning

I
t was 4:00 a.m. in the Valley. I was on my way home from a party, looking forward to fixing up some Ramen, when I saw the lights flashing behind me. That’s when my trip started going south. D.U.I. was quickly assessed. By the time I got booked and sent to County, I had missed blanket call by 5 minutes. I was in a very short dress, freezing, mad, and still kind of drunk. All these other girls were under blankets. All I could see were piles of women with the blankets pulled all the way over their heads. They all looked so comfortable, like they were at a big slumber party. Still, I was freaked out, and I started thinking,
Oh my God, who’s under there? Are they going to hurt me?
And to top it off, it was freezing. So I politely called out to the cops, “Excuse me? Excuse me!” Then this voice, one of the guards or one of the women, barked out, “SHUT UP! You missed blanket call, so you are going to freeze. Get used to it!” I can still hear that voice yelling at me while I was shivering, my dreams of Ramen so very far away.

Taryn Manning
is a fashion designer and actor who was critically acclaimed for her roles in the films
Crazy/Beautiful
,
8 Mile
,
Hustle & Flow
, and for her role as Pennsatucky in Netflix’s
Orange Is the New Black.

Ingredients

2 packs Ramen (any flavor)

1 cup boiling water

1. Crush one pack of Ramen in the wrapper. Open both packs and empty the crushed Ramen into a bowl. Save the second square of Ramen for another use. Set aside both seasoning packets.

2. Add the water to the crushed Ramen, cover, and let sit for about 8 minutes.

3. Sprinkle both seasonings on top and stir. The seasoned Ramen, like a seasoned prisoner!

by Frankie Meeink

O
nce you’ve finished your Soup in the Hole, save the Styrofoam cup and let it dry. Remove the bottom of the cup. Poke a pencil or pen gently through one side of the cup to make a handle. Using the handle, place the larger opening of the cup to your metal door. Put your ear against the smaller hole at the bottom. Form a seal between your head and the cup, and the cup and the door. You now have a stethoscope that you can use to hear the electronic doors being buzzed throughout the segregation building, which allows you to know if the turnkeys (guards) are coming.

We would always have magazines tied with shoestrings that we could pass up and down the whole cellblock, flinging them from under one door to the other. Hidden inside the magazines would be drugs, a single cig, or just a coded message from one gang member to another. If you missed the other guy’s door you could pull it back to try again. You could not let the guards see this—so that’s why we had the Styrofoam stethoscopes. We could hear the guards coming two or three doors ahead of our cellblock, so we had time to pull the magazines back in.

Frankie Meeink
is the author of
Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead
, an activist, a board member with the organization Life After Hate, and the founder of Harmony Through Hockey, an organization that works to promote tolerance.

Ingredients

1 cup hot water

1 Cup Noodle (any flavor)

1 beef-and-cheese stick (such as Slim Jim)

1. Because there’s no boiling water in the Hole, get hot water from the sink, as hot as you can get it. Pour the water over the Ramen, cover, and let sit for about 5 minutes, until the Ramen is as soft as you like it.

2. Break the beef-and-cheese stick into bite-size pieces. Add to the soup and stir well.

by Shia Labeouf

I
have been incarcerated five times. The first time I was only nine years old. It was in Pacoima, California. I was arrested for stealing a pair of Nike Cortezes from a local shop and held for six hours. The second time I was eleven, in the city of Tujunga, California. I was arrested for stealing a Gameboy Pokémon from Kmart. That time, too, I was in a substation for about six hours. The third time I was twenty, in Van Nuys, California. I got into it with my neighbor and spent two days in jail. While I was there, I at least understood that being in jail is not the move. It sucks ass. The fourth time I was in Chicago and I wouldn’t leave Walgreen’s, so I was taken to spend the night in jail. For some reason, I had the best sleep ever. The most recent time was 2014, when I was twenty-eight and in New York City. I went to see the play
Cabaret.
I didn’t behave very well during the performance and ended up spending twenty-five hours or so behind bars. While there, I did have a terrific egg sandwich.

When I’m nervous in my creativity, I think of my failures in life and in art. Thinking about my screwups loosens the grip of fear. It’s freeing to fuck up and to recover.