Got a message today via some tin cans, and dig this, there wasn’t even any strings hookin’ ’em up. They helped me recall that it was behind bars, amongst 400 cons, that I enjoyed the best Thanksgiving of my life. Me and the other guys, we filed in from the yard, those of us who weren’t in solitary, and got in a big ol’ line outside the dining hall. As we filed through the chow-line, we go to take as big a helping as we wanted, ’cuz I guess even in the calaboose, Warden Viglietta recognized the need for overindulgence on that day of all days.
We had plastic plates just brimming with pressed turkey and sweet potatoes and green beans. After a brief interruption when one of the new guys tried to swipe a cleaver from the kitchen, Joey “King” George got up on a chair and he recited a passage from Pilgrim’s Progress. “A man there was, though some did count him mad, the more he cast away, the more he had.”
Then man, we just all dug in. Joey King’s punk Junior The Weatherman got a jug of applejack that he’d been fermentin’ since the Fourth Of July, and we passed it along under the table, spikin’ our cider when we were free from watching eyes. I remember that “Dog” Hanson even got a little wacked on the stuff; he stabbed a guy just for pinching his yams. Little Billy Boner tried to get a round of Christmas carols going, even though it was a month early.
The mellow sweetness of a pumpkin pie off of a prison spoon is something you will never forget.