Cheap Thrills

If you want it bad enough and know the right people, you can get anything you want in prison — for a price. The currency of choice where I am incarcerated is stamps. For two first-class stamps you can buy a cookie stolen from the kitchen. For five you can have your laundry washed and folded. For a full book of twenty you can get a hand-rolled cigarette made from the used chewing tobacco that the guards spit into the trash.

In the prison economy I am lower-middle-class. I don’t have three or four ex-girlfriends who send me money, but I do have friends and family who support me, and I earn nearly twenty dollars a month as a chapel orderly.

I try not to spend my limited funds too freely. I don’t buy much from the kitchen, but there is one temptation that I can’t resist: cinnamon. At home it is my partner’s favorite spice, and all of the cookies and muffins I baked for him were pungent with it. I would go to a specialty store and purchase cinnamon imported from Vietnam for five dollars an ounce. In here four stamps gets me a full sandwich bag of cheap cinnamon that’s probably packaged in one-pound containers, but when stirred into my coffee or my oatmeal, it still makes me think of him.

Because you can’t buy it at the commissary, cinnamon is contraband. During a shakedown, if a curious guard should take the time to sniff the contents of that bag in my locker, my stash would be confiscated, and I would have to wash a few windows as punishment. But for the brief thrill that I get when I take that first sip of coffee with cinnamon, it’s worth the risk.

Paul J. Stabell
Ashland, Kentucky

I was seventeen. Reed was fifteen but looked much older. I hadn’t had much sexual experience, just a handful of necking sessions with boys who didn’t seem to know what to do with their tongue once it was in my mouth.

Reed was not my usual type. In addition to his being younger and (I thought) less sophisticated than I was, we had different backgrounds and interests. He got in trouble a lot with his parents and at school. He smoked on the sly, ditched classes, and cursed like a truck driver. But he also had wavy hair, perfect teeth, baby-blue eyes, and an ass that looked great in Levi’s. He taught me how to masturbate him to orgasm while he did the same for me, often standing up in the dusty garage of an old, abandoned house. His manner was rough. He might order me to “take off your panties before I rip them off.” He must have known the effect this had on me. I told Reed to keep his mouth shut about our trysts, but his friend Ben smirked every time he saw me, so I think he knew plenty.

Reed was a jerk most of the time. He had little respect for anyone, especially authority figures. He wasn’t even that nice to me. My best friend, Pam, the only one I told about Reed and me, thought I was making a big mistake. I knew it was foolish to be infatuated with someone less mature and outside my social circle. (I was a snob in those days.) My brother despised Reed, referring to him as “the uncultured swine from down the street.”

Every time Reed and I finished a groping session, I’d tell myself it was the last. But my body betrayed me whenever we got close. If our eyes met on the bus or in the school hallways, and he mouthed the words Meet me tonight, I’d always nod yes.

I am now alone and in my forties and haven’t seen Reed in many years. Every now and then at night, before I fall asleep, he crosses my mind, and my hand wanders between my legs in an attempt to re-create the heady sensation of that first thrill.

Kathleen
San Diego, California

Charlie and I met one Saturday in a park downtown. I went there as a volunteer to hand out sandwiches, and he came to eat. After I gave him his sandwich, he pulled a near-empty billfold from his back pocket and produced a coupon for a free turkey. “I want to give something back,” Charlie said.

I redeemed the coupon that afternoon and brought the frozen turkey to the soup kitchen. The next time Charlie came there to eat, I took him back to the freezer to show him the bird, which would feed thirty people.

I got in the habit of talking to Charlie on Saturdays in the park. He’d once had a good job loading trucks at a food-distribution company, he told me, but then it had shut down. “I’m depressed,” he said, whiskey on his breath.

During the week I started walking through the park on my way to work. I’d often see Charlie on a bench by the goldfish pond. “How’s it going, Charlie?” I’d say. “Hang in there.”

One morning, wrestling with my usual angst about my life’s purpose, I sat down with Charlie.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I’m depressed,” I said.

His eyes widened. “You?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“When I’m sad, I sit here and watch the pond,” Charlie said.

I accepted his invitation. While we sat on the bench, and I became late for work, a great blue heron circled the pond and landed in the shallow water at our feet. 

“You made my day,” I said to Charlie.

He grinned. “Glad I could help.”

Amy Malick
Hartford, Connecticut

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