Be Safe by Doug Weaver

Author:Doug Weaver [Weaver, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: uploadable
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Published: 2017-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The female section of the Cri- Life dining room, between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. – at least five nights a week – is home to a ritual that the facility Administration members tacitly allow the mostly Hispanic gang- bangers who’d landed in Cri- Life directly from extended stays at various California prisons to hold: Spread, which is the monosyllabic equivalent of Sacred Banquet, suggesting not the verb “spread,” but rather a noun that encompasses the panorama of sustenance and its attendant serving vessels that’s “spread” over the surface of a tabletop and is available to all those who’ve been invited to partake, necessarily excluding any person of the female variety because of the ritual’s provenance, which is the pretty much all male brand of penitentiary inmates, not to mention that pesky Non- Com rule that’s pretty much omnipresent in the Cri- Life ether.

“Spread” actually consists of one of the long folding dining room tables that’s been covered with paper plates and plastic spoons, all of which are symmetrically laid out to showcase the main event: a concoction of Ramen noodles and softened macaroni that’s been mixed together while inside a large, black, heavy- duty plastic trash bag with hot tap water and generous amounts of ketchup and/or Tabasco sauce and/or salsa and/or about a quarter pound of salt and pepper and/or – depending on its availability, a whole jar of mayonnaise, and/or about a hundred thinly sliced canned hot peppers. This trash bag is somehow sealed shut and shaken by two or more said gang- bangers simply because it’s too unwieldy for one guy to handle, then emptied into a large plastic mixing bowl. The trash bag is then discarded, apparently, because it’s only plastic. There’s an essential and charming bit of willful blindness that defines “Spread”: Charity.

The spreaders – the guys putting on the banquet – have talked themselves into believing that this offering of food is somehow a charitable sacrifice of jealously hoarded foodstuffs to be distributed to those less fortunate, even though shortages of food at both state prison, the birthplace of the ritual, all the way to Cri- Life, where it’s continued, are about as rare as paid- off BMWs tooling around the palm- lined avenues of Beverly Hills – even forgetting the most obvious fact that the food used in Spread is owned by the institution, which renders the only commodity capable of being provided charitably the good intentions of the spreaders, that and the time it’s taken to prepare and showcase it. The intentional use of the plastic trash bag in which to mix the various ingredients of the feast locates Spread on the same level as faithful reenactment of any number of historical events, like people dressing up in Pilgrim suits to share early American Thanksgiving dinner with Indians, who shoot turkeys with bows and arrows and who eschew any newfangled European devices for food preparation in favor of what’s traditionally been used by the natives.

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