VINCE

And my friend continues with his Coffee Monster story…

A huge man with a long white beard labored into the cell with his belongings jammed in a sack over his shoulder. Just climbing the stairs to the unit had made him out of breath and dripping wet.

He looked like Santa from hell. He even had little snowflakes all over his clothes, hair, and beard but for some reason the snow was brown! It turns out that his giant container of instant coffee crystals had burst in his sack and completely covered his clothing, bedding, hair, shoulders, shirt, pants, arms…everything… He left a trail of coffee that had mixed with his dripping sweat and made brown mushy foot prints and piles.

When he slung the bag off his shoulder and shook out his shirt, it polka dotted the whole room, including my bed and sheets, with coffee. He looked at me like he didn’t know what to do next. He asked how much longer I’d be on the toilet. Turns out he’s Russian and speaks very broken English. All I could yell was, “Let me wipe my ass!”

At that moment they delivered lunch to us; the lunch room was being used for another purpose that day. So, instead of starting to clean up, coffee monster sat down and started to eat his cold fish sandwich, one foot away from me as I am cleaning my ass.

I finally got clean, but I couldn’t really move because he was so fat, you can’t get around him in the cell. I didn’t want to get near him anyway because he was totally brown and wet. It’s in his eyebrows for feck sake. I just stood there watching him eat then asked, “Are you gonna try cleaning this up?!” He pretended not to understand and said, “I think I do clean it up.”

“No, no, you didn’t clean it the fuck up! There’s coffee hand prints on the walls! There’s piles of coffee mush on the floor. My bed is covered in coffee!”

He took some toilet paper and made one swipe across the floor, still holding his half-eaten fish sandwich. A CO walked by and I told him we needed a mop. He said he’s get us one. He didn’t. We sat there with the tension rising while the coffee and sweat dried all over the room and him.

Probably an hour passes. I’m stuck. I couldn’t sit on my bed or touch anything. He kept trying to make conversation like nothing was out of the ordinary. I kept saying, “just shut up.” Eventually a swamper came by and gave us a mop and new bedding. It took the rest of the day to clean.

Coffee Monster was 400 pounds and they gave him the top bunk. So every time he got into his bed, it was a big sweaty, moaning, breathing, flapping mess.

So he decided to spend most of the day sitting at our desk, which when you’re as fat as him, puts you 1.5 inches away from me at all times. I eventually had to hang a towel from the between our faces just to escape him. I sat on my bed, pissed off, a towel hanging 6 inches from my face, with his fat head 6 inches on the other side of the towel doing nothing. Literally just sitting there all day unable to see my TV, unable to read English books. He just sat there looking at a towel with an angry dude behind it.   About a week later, he got moved to a different unit. One without stairs, and he got a bottom bunk.