Flatten Clean

Tammy tells our creative writing class that two laxatives cost a dollar from the commissary at the county jail. “They rip us off any way they can,” Tammy says. “They want us to get fat,” Tammy says. “I can’t wait to get out of here so I can afford to eat a whole box in a single day and flatten myself clean,” Tammy says.

Flatten myself clean, I jot down in my notebook. I’ve never heard my hunger described that way.

Jail is one of the few places where you don’t see cookies in the employee break room, where there aren’t a multitude of muffins and candies and a sweaty homemade Chex Mix to avoid in the weeks before Christmas. There are food deserts and food swamps and food apartheid to describe large swaths of America, but I think of the jail as a food island. Everything must be brought in, nothing can perish, nothing can leave, it’s all exorbitantly expensive.

I am always hungry when I leave the jail. Thirsty. I realize at the jail the luxury of a cough drop or a stick of gum. At the jail, I’m reminded of how lazy I am about throwing a mint in a pocket and forgetting it. As I enter the building each week to have my school supplies searched before heading up to the classroom, the correctional officers always find something like a broken hard candy at the bottom of a canvas tote, a forgotten and crushed package of free saltines left in the front pocket of a book bag.

I apologize, knowing that my failure to remember the crushed crackers could mean classes are cancelled.

In the ten years I’ve been teaching creative writing at Allegheny County Jail, I’ve never visited the cafeteria, even though it is the first major area I pass after being searched and allowed to enter the main body of the building. The group that provides Allegheny County Jail with most of its food service is called Elior. It’s an international catering and food service conglomerate that earned about six billion euros in profits last year. They employ over one hundred and twenty-five thousand people around the world and serve about six million “guests” a day, though using the term “guest” in reference to a man locked in a cage, eating with a paper cup or his hands because he isn’t allowed utensils, feels worse than euphemistic. There is something disconcerting about imagining myself eating in this place. After all, I am allowed to leave. As my students remind me constant

ly, if they had even half a chance, they’d never drink another cup of fake coffee or eat another bologna sandwich. On the other hand, my aversion to eating here also feels shameful, like I am judging my students because the idea of sharing their meals makes me nauseated. I know it’s the same kind of food that I’ve been eating my whole life in cafeterias and hospitals and airplanes and campsites. But here, the taint of cages feels like it poisons the lunch trays.

One afternoon during class a correctional officer brings in a half-pickedover deli tray. He leaves it on my desk, and as students enter the classroom, he holds his arm out straight, hand flat: stop.

“The juveniles had a graduation today and this was left over,” he says. “Have at it. Nothing leaves this room. Nothing goes back up to the pods.” Food island. Swept in from an event, nothing can leave. Students crowd around the desk, plucking thin slices of turkey and orange cheese off the wilting lettuce garnish. I am wide-eyed, witnessing for the first time something that seems at least half-normal.

The CO must think that I’m considering taking my turn at the deli tray, too.

“Don’t eat that stuff,” he says to me. “That’s the food we feed the inmates, believe me, you don’t want any. That’s for the animals.”

I pretend not to hear.

That was nine years ago, and yet whenever I pass by the rare room at the jail where people are gathering around food, I remember. At the time, I was appalled by the correctional officer’s ability to speak about a group of people in front of them, and with such a disparaging and dismissing tone. In retrospect, it is a perfect example of the naivete that lots of volunteers have when they start teaching at a jail. It should be obvious that jails and prisons don’t have the same standards for civility, manners, or social graces that govern the outside world, but it’s shocking when you’re a person who has had the privilege of being treated with dignity even when you might not deserve it. I can’t imagine living my daily life with people talking about me in front of me, as though I were an animal. It is a whiteness, this kind of shelter.

I was sure that this kind of attitude would never feel normal, that the callousness would never be contagious, that my ability to come and go would inoculate me from the culture in the correctional system, that I would always remember that the deli tray looked like every other deli tray I’d ever seen at a cheap reception. That no one in this place was an animal.

Like lots of food-sensitive/high-stress environments, men lose weight in jail and women gain weight.

“They serve us nothing but carbs,” Hannah writes in an essay.

“It’s a tray full of constipation,” Maria includes in a poetry assignment about anger.

“I just try not to eat at all,” Shannon says. “I’m about to get out of here, and I don’t want my man to drop me as soon as he sees me.” “Thank god there’s no one to impress in this place,” Diamante sighs. “I’ve never looked so puffy.”

I have been on a diet for thirty-two years. My first official diet began at five, when I worked with a very nice dietician named Robin who taught me to pull the skin off fried chicken and always eat the fruit cup first. Since then, I have tried Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Slimfast, Nutri-slim, low-fat, low-carb, low-sugar, bulimia, cocaine, intermittent fasting, and Atkins. My favorite diet was “The Milkshake Diet” which consisted of buying one extra-large milkshake each Sunday morning and slowly consuming it (and only it) as the week dizzily stumbled along.

My relationship to food is the most complicated relationship of my life, one that far surpasses the complexity of my relationship to heroin, alcohol, sex, or truth—all of which are exceedingly complex. I have paid thousands of dollars in therapy, purchased dozens of self-help books, diet plans, prepackaged meals, shakes, powders, laxatives, teas, flushes, cleanses, pills, and juices.

I’ve been going to twelve-step meetings since 2005 to help support my recovery from drug abuse, but I’ve shared much more about my feelings toward pie than I have about pills.

I know from my own life and from meeting hundreds of other women in recovery that those of us who end up shooting heroin and smoking speed are very likely to have had eating disorders, too. There are lots of studies to prove this, and the term that researchers use to describe the relationship between an eating disorder and a substance use disorder is comorbidity. It is an accidental poetry that feels dangerous and true in my life. The ways I have been trying to kill myself have always been coupled. When one surfaced more, the others might recede for months or years, shadows lingering on the edges of my body, misshapen casts of who I might have become, who I once thought I was. And then, the two will trade places: comorbidities like parents with joint custody of my hunger.

This toxic relationship to food is another thing that should have been obvious when I first started teaching at a jail, but like so many other things, it didn’t occur to me in those first few years. I initially thought I might be a useful teacher in an environment like a jail because I had experience with addiction. When you use drugs, your body is a crime, your time is a crime,

all day every day, you are offending. I thought I’d have something in common with at least some of the people I’d meet.

I didn’t realize that the peace and confidence I had come to possess around my recovery from heroin didn’t translate to my relationship with food. I didn’t yet understand that all the dysfunction in my life came from the same loneliness: booze, shopping, sex, work, heroin, diets. They are all the same game of Whac-a-mole I’m anxiously attacking. It wasn’t addiction that I had in common with my students. It was hunger.

When women in my classes at the jail start telling me about the various incarceration diets they’ve concocted, I’m jolted into myself. This is something I would do in jail. I’d figure out a way to stay on a diet. I’d find a way to prove that no amount of captivity is stronger than the kind I impose on myself.

“They wanna put me on a feeding tube, let ’em. I’ll figure out how to put some damn MIRALAX in that tube, you watch me,” Tammy says at the beginning of class.

I am slogging through a particularly difficult class at the county jail with a group of women who are half-interested in writing, but mostly coming to class for the free notebooks and a chance to occasionally convince me to put on some music videos.

It is the Fall of 2018—two years into a Donald Trump presidency. Things are different than when I began the work. I find it harder to show patience with the misogyny that’s laced through all of my classes—men’s and women’s alike. It’s always been here—the thick cloud of sexism that drives the prison system. But now, for the first time, I feel threatened by it rather than pity for it. I’ve never known if our program could make a real difference in people’s practical lives outside of the prison walls, but now I often feel not just healthy ambivalence, but despair. It’s made me a worse teacher and a less compassionate one. It’s made me dread the teaching that used to be the guiding motivation for my work as an educator. I resent my students, especially the ones like Tammy. I later find out that what I’m experiencing is called Trauma Exposure Response, but when I meet Tammy, I don’t know that term and what it looks like. Instead, I just know that I dread seeing Tammy each week.

Tammy is young, twenty-eight. And she remembers me from the last time she took this class—almost exactly ten years ago, which would have been at the very start of the program, when I was the age she is now. She describes that time as “my first time at an adult facility,” marking the sad timeline of her life by the institutions that have defined it:

Ten: She is expelled from public school after being made to sit with her back to the chalkboard for all of fourth grade.

Eleven: She is put in a youth home after being picked up as a runaway, having escaped her rapist stepfather.

Twelve: She has her first child in a hospital where a social worker is the only person to witness her labor. That child is put into foster care. Tammy too is put into foster care, in a different home.

Fourteen: She is arrested for prostitution; the man who is pimping her becomes the father of her second child.

She is telling us this story in manic fits and spurts, with the kind of stuttering, wild vocal contortions that make it almost impossible to redirect or interrupt the monologue. She speaks with the ultra-formal institutional diction of a woman who has spent most of her life trapped inside systems described with the bureaucratic and legal euphemisms that sound heartbreaking laid next to the other coded language she’s fluent in: Pittsburgh streets. The high/low tragedy of language.

In addition to the institutions she’s a part of, she also marks her life by weight.

“I got real fucking big after my first child,” she says. “But Sonny liked me that way—there are a lot of men who only want to have a fat whore”—she narrows her eyes—“you’d never know it from the way people talk, but men—a lot of them—want to fuck fat women.”

She eventually had lap band surgery, developed diabetes, had two more kids, one of whom she had while at the county jail, and left the pimp. Tammy is here because she’s refusing to go to inpatient treatment for her eating disorder. She’s sitting in a county jail, away from her children, refusing food, about to be forcibly fed by tube, because she was caught shoplifting laxatives and was then discovered to be buying massive amounts of illegal diet pills online.

Tammy can tell you which Family Dollar has the maximum strength laxatives and which has the bullshit off-brand. She knows how many boxes you can buy without getting suspicious side-eyes and how to time eating a boxful of laxatives a day and still maintain the ability to walk.

“I just pop ’em,” she says. “Five, six at a time, but you never want to eat more than eight. Eight was always my limit for maxing out in a single fistful.” I loathe Tammy. I loathe the way she has made her eating disorder more important than her children. I loathe the way she describes the Family Dollar like a trap house and the “big, ole orange pills” as though they are stamp bags of the best brand of dope. I loathe her for making my eating disorder so serious and looming and criminal. I loathe her for telling me how similar we are.

Tammy is the extreme extrapolation of my own eating disorder, the person I might become if I didn’t have the shelter of manners and civility and a lifetime of people being kind to me, treating me with that same dig

nity of whiteness. Tammy annoys me in part because she doesn’t listen to other people, is a terrible interrupter, and never does her homework. But she also annoys me because she embodies all the worst parts of the jail. I don’t know how she’d avoid that, since she’s been in jails and group homes and prisons and halfway houses since she was ten. How does a woman avoid institutionalization when her entire life has been defined by them? Still. It’s annoying because she has a learned helplessness that means she takes little accountability for her actions. She holds fast to the pettiness and arbitrary rules that make people small and narrow-minded. She is the ultimate bulimic: let me have my cake, eat it too, and never feel any of the consequences. In food, in life, in prison.

I understand that I want-it-all-and-none-of-the-consequences attitude because of my own bulimia. I’m thirty-seven years old, and while most of my other friends have long grown out of their high school dieting obsessions or brief, college bouts with a short-lived eating disorder, mine has marched through my life with the consistency of almost nothing else. It’s embarrassing to be thirty-seven and occasionally making myself throw up at a crosstown all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. Having an eating disorder has none of the euphoria or street cred of a heroin habit. It isn’t as culturally acceptable as a drinking problem. The most frequent portrayal of the condition is in Lifetime movies starring washed up white ladies who are hospitalized because they’re such overachieving perfectionists, delicate and about to disappear. Anorexia is the disorder of choice for media representation of eating disorders.

Bulimia is a little less appealing to depict on film. Splashes of vomit streak the screen, a red-faced, swollen woman enters the room after retching and continues to eat, stuffing herself all over again and then shits herself into hemorrhoids. It isn’t a pleasant or polite thing to discuss. It’s shameful. You don’t even lose that much weight, instead yo-yoing between normal-looking and strangely bloated. Bulimics end up looking pregnant after eating normal meals because their bodies are so used to either extreme fullness or a holy empty.

I have learned, because I understand the polite and civil ways of society, to keep these things to myself. I understand that it makes people uncomfortable to know their friend or colleague has a problem like this, especially when so much social life takes place around food. I once made the mistake of telling a friend I struggled with bulimia and every time we went out to eat afterwards, he asked if I was going to throw up. We don’t socialize anymore.

But Tammy threw that kind of silencing shame away.

Jail does a lot of things to people, and one thing is it lays bare your worst shame.

Once you’ve been caught doing something shameful, there’s a certain freedom in no longer having to silence it. Like the twelve-step saying goes: our secrets make us sick. That idiom presumes that once a secret is out in the open, we address it. But someone like Tammy doesn’t have any interest in changing. Her secret is out of the bag, and she’s embracing it. That’s why I hate Tammy: she’s exposing me. I don’t want to change either. I just haven’t been caught. I have the privilege of silence.

People in all of my classes, men and women, always want to write about food. It’s the first topic I bring up in any writing class, whether in a jail or at a university. Food has the ability to create bonds in a classroom like few other things.

It doesn’t matter how diverse a group of people might be, bring up pizza or chili or birthday cake and people have opinions. There are ways to disagree about food without taking it personally. Your distaste for beans in chili doesn’t make you a bad person, it just makes you wrong about chili. Food is also something that everyone has a personal expertise in. Describing experiences in relationship to meals is natural for people, and food is an easy road to accessing memory. To describe food requires a writer to engage with sensory detail, and readers have an obvious and accessible entry point into the subject matter. Food is also so easy to read and write about because it is the most human of experiences. It’s something that defines civilizations and cultures. It’s perhaps the most human thing about us.

Which is why it’s the job of the prison system to use it as a weapon. When the correctional officer looked at me all those years ago and told me not to eat the food meant for the inmates, he was telling me you’re more human than they are. Don’t stoop to their level.

If you don’t control what a person eats, you’ve overlooked something that will make her free.

The first assignment I give pedagogy students is to teach a ten-minute lesson on anything except creative writing. In the past, people have taught origami and Manhattan-making, massages, and how to pick someone up at a bar.

Holly, in her second week of graduate school, teaches the class how to make “the best nachos in the county jail.”

She brings in food items available in commissary and makes her Allegheny County Jail famous nacho cheese dip, which includes pickle juice. The only ingredient she couldn’t find on the outside was a specific kind of spicy

pickle that’s sold in the commissary. Adding the juice of that spicy pickle to nacho cheese sauce gives it a complexity and depth, she tells us. Holly starts grad school after twenty-five years of smoking crack behind dumpsters, shooting dope in trap houses, almost being killed turning tricks. One of my goals in working inside the academy is to bring more people to our classrooms, people like Holly who have life experience that could change our classrooms in ways that are hard to predict.

Holly registers for my pedagogy class in the master’s program because she wants to teach creative writing in jails and rehab centers. When she fills out the initial clearance paperwork, she attaches a letter alerting the warden that if she’s inadvertently left something off her clearance form, it’s only because there are too many arrests to count, she doesn’t know where one begins and another ends.

Though Holly and I both smoked a lot of crack and shot a lot of dope, the consequences of our drug addictions were very different. I never spent a night in jail. I never walked down East Ohio Street ready to jump in a stranger’s car in the hopes of getting thirty bucks.

I compromised my body in dozens of different ways. I only dated drug dealers—doing anything else would have been counterproductive. I made transactional moves in all of my relationships. I didn’t drive across town unless there was a free bag involved. I didn’t give away free booze when I was behind the bar until I saw the double tip. I didn’t talk to you unless there was something I got from it. And if I thought there was something to gain, I would charm and flirt and talk my way into you. I logged everything in a long ledger of my mind. You do this: drugs. You do that: more drugs. Tally, tick-tick, tally, all day long.

But I was not transactionally fucking people for cash. It’s a line I highlight to create a distance between us. It makes me feel safer in my recovery, more secure that my life will move only forward, a linear march of achievement and progress.

One of my strengths and shames is my ability to code-switch. I am deeply invested in the notion that I might know someone for years before revealing to them that I had a heroin problem. I never lead with dope or recovery. I want my heroin habit to be a jewel of friendship, something to reveal as a way to show intimacy, a treasure that a person earns after gaining my trust. Holly uses her ten-minute teaching demonstration to let us sample her pickle-infused cheese dip. She explains to us that her diabetic condition allowed her to manipulate her mother for more commissary money. It allowed her to manipulate guards into more lax eating restrictions. I cringe as she uses a plastic spoon to stir in the pickle juice. Witnessing Holly is similar to the feeling of watching the Hutchison sisters perform at the middle school talent show. They danced to “Kokomo”—except they

couldn’t dance, or keep rhythm, or understand why their uncoordinated, prepubescent hips were being mocked by a gym full of twelve-year-olds. I am embarrassed for her. And I am ashamed that I am embarrassed of her willingness to be so unabashedly herself, that like Tammy, she is so willing to lay bare her life in ways that I have been taught are reckless and awkward.

I think about telling Holly that she should moderate, that she should be strategic in her revelations, that she should be more like me, that she should get a different handshake.

But Holly’s nachos sit with me, as nachos tend to do.

Holly’s nachos teach me something, which to my credit and hers, is part of the reason I give the assignment in the first place.

For Holly, a woman for whom the consequences of addiction were so profound, there is no point in code-switching—it’s counter-productive to her life’s mission and position. She is forty-seven years old and has lived most of her life hanging onto a crack in the sidewalk, hoping not to be swallowed whole. If she doesn’t say it first, someone else will. For Holly, being open about her addiction and the consequences of it are the only way to survive, are the only way to make sure she never goes back. Holly teaches us to make those prison nachos so that she never has to eat them again.

The juvenile detention center in town asks our program if we can begin teaching classes at their facility, and I am touring the complex on a spring afternoon. In the cafeteria, the tables are like any other school cafeteria: long, with benches attached to either side, except in this cafeteria one bench is flipped up and one bench is flipped down.

The administrator giving the tour points it out. “During meal times, youth face the same direction. There’s no conversation, no eye contact. Sadly, it’s a dangerous time for us because of the large groups.”

The detention center boasts that the children are growing an herb garden, the product of which is used in the meals. Meals during which they’re unable to comment upon the freshness of the basil or the tanginess of the cilantro.

When I think about the fundamental question of whether the corrections system is broken and failing or if it is working just as designed and intended, I consider the herb garden.

If the goal of prison is to make us better human beings, more functional human beings, less violent human beings, to decrease the harm in the world, then surely its design would facilitate people practicing humanity, engaging in the rituals that define us. Surely a practice around nourishment would be part of the system. If that is the goal, the system is broken and failing.

But if the goal of prison is to punish people by denying their humanity, then we are succeeding. We have built into the system, at every turn, at every meal, ways to diminish our humanity. For many of my students, it seems like hanging on to their humanity is the ultimate mark of having survived incarceration. The secret spicy pickle juice added to a cheese dip may help to remind someone that she will leave this place eventually. She has to keep practicing what it’s like to eat on the outside.

Like most things dealing with prison, there are ad hoc resources created for survival. When it comes to food, there are a wealth of prison-themed cookbooks:

There’s Prison Ramen, with a forward by Samuel L. Jackson and contributions by several Hollywood movie stars.

The Cell Chef is another. It includes a recipe for “prisagna” (prison lasagna), and is part of the Freebird Publishers catalogue, which specializes in prison publications. In addition to The Cell Chef, they publish an annual Inmate Shopper, which is essentially a catalogue of catalogues—a complete guide to the over three hundred companies that are vying for incarcerateddollars.

There are dozens more, easily purchased on Amazon. The industry that has sprung up around prison—not the formal prison industrial complex and its myriad partners—but the informal economies and small businesses that have been grown in the soil of emergent markets, is one of the most depressing parts of the system. The artifacts of the industry—the cookbooks and catalogues—reinforce the normality of prison, the true mass of mass incarceration, the same mass of mass market.

I am writing about Elior and prison cookbooks and Holly’s nachos because I am hoping to avoid Tammy and her eating disorder and mine. I am hoping that by studying statistics and braiding a complicated narrative, I can make my own story less prominent. I am hoping to erase Tammy and her shame and the desperate way she made me want to quit teaching forever if it meant I could avoid her.

Every week, I tell writing students that there is only one skill it takes to become a better writer: get better at telling the truth. That is all we can facilitate as writing teachers, in a hundred tricky and strategic ways. All elements of craft are about the same thing: mining and polishing the truth. Helping the reader to understand the truth of themselves via the magic of a good story about someone else. Yet, when it comes to writing my own story, I avoid the roots.

A writer in one of my classes tells me that he has worked on fire crews, the best job he’s ever had. His sister is in charge of fire operations for a swath of California. We talk about the majestic ways in which fires spread, the kinds of people who go into firefighting, their obsessions and desire to be near the flame. “You know, a root is a fuse,” he says. “That’s why a forest fire is so hard to put out. It’s not the trunks and the branches that are on fire. It’s the roots, and those roots spread like wires underneath the whole forest.”

I am trying to extinguish the fire of my branches without drenching the fuse of my roots. I am writing about Tammy and the cost of mass incarceration and the way in which systems theory permeates all of our lives, tricking us into thinking we have personal choice when really we might be a predetermined set of ready-made mistakes. All of that is to distract myself from the fuse, the root, the way in which Tammy and her stories and her exposure threatens me and the narrative I can tell about myself, the particular way in which I can cast light on the shadows of my story.

My students in jails and prisons have very little choice in how to hide from their mistakes. Their mistakes are laid out on the table before they ever enter the room. They are inextricably tied to their mistakes, and I instruct them to tell the truth. I give prompts about the sensuality of food, the ways in which a recipe is an inheritance, the ways in which a memory is actually a meal; prompts that say the way to truth is through the body and its hunger. We write and write and write, and when I leave the walls of the jail, I drive across town, find the Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet, listen to a podcast I don’t care about. I drown the truth of Tammy’s story under the weight of two dozen crab rangoons, a mountain of lo mein, fistfuls of egg rolls, a soup cup of sweet and sour sauce. I know I won’t run into anyone I know here. It is a cop hangout. They like to go through the line a couple of times before slowly returning to their squad cars. I never make eye contact. I like the restaurant to empty itself of the dinner rush before I head to the single stall bathroom with the gold leaf swan art framed above the toilet. I empty myself expertly. It is a gentle violence. It is comforting because it is so familiar after all these years, the way our hands can get us free, the way I can be two things at once: full and empty. The truth I am avoiding is this bathroom stall, the way I have always loved a secret, the way I have always wanted the same thing Tammy wants: I want everything and nothing at all, I want contradiction and paradox, I want to have my cake and eat it too, and never feel the consequences. I want to flatten myself clean.