Wild Man Makes Prison Hooch

Wild Man – My large and fearless raving partner from my hometown. One of the main characters in my jail memoir. He looked out for me in the jail when we first went in. Sentenced before me, he ended up having various adventures in the prison system.

In Wild Man’s previous story, he arrived in the prison system from the jail system, and immediately smashed the head of the whites in his dorm. The Aryan Brotherhood made Wild Man the new head of the dorm, and authorised him to brew hooch.

“What are the ingredients for hooch?” I asked Wild Man.
“You get fifty oranges, five pounds of sugar, and yeast from the kitchen,” Wild Man said.
“Stolen?”
“Of course.”
“Can you tell the public how that is all stolen from the prison kitchen?”
“For the oranges, I had youngsters use socks. You get a sock, put a hole in it, get a four-inch-long piece of string and tie the sock to your boxer shorts. You put five oranges in each sock. One in five youngsters will get stopped coming out of the chow hall, but that’s a necessary sacrifice. The most the guards do is say, ‘Throw those oranges away, and stop being stupid.’”
“How about the sugar?”
“The baker in the kitchen has access to a good amount of sugar. I tell him I’ll give him five bottles of hooch for five pounds of sugar, two big bags basically. He puts it all in cling-film, which he makes the size of sausage rolls. Before the chow hall opens, he tapes it under the tables where the heads of the whites and their torpedoes [goons] sit. If you look under the tables, you’ll see it, but for the naked eye there’s nothing there. When the heads walk in, the white boys give the heads hugs, and generally creep up their arses, meanwhile the torpedoes are grabbing the sugar and passing it to the youngsters. The youngsters have on really baggy pants. Now nine times out of ten, the guards will pat you down for weapons going into the chow hall, but not when you’re walking out. It takes a week to get all the stolen stuff together.”
“Then what?”
“Back in the dorm, I get a couple of watchouts. These are guys who go to the toilet and back pretending to piss while really watching what the guards are watching. If it’s all safe, the youngsters start peeling the oranges. They rip the peel into little tiny shreds and flush it. You can’t put the peel in the trash because the nightshift go through it with little torches looking for drug paraphernalia and shit. They flush four oranges worth of peel at a time, otherwise it blocks the toilet up.”
“So when it’s all peeled?”
“You put one plastic trash bag inside a laundry bag and that laundry bag inside another trash bag. You also need a storage box. You can get one from the store for $1.50 for legal papers and shit. The best is the plastic box you get only if you’re on a top bunk. The bottom bunk has shelves, but the top has a plastic box. You put all the oranges in the bag you’ve made from the three bags. You have youngsters heating water with stingers.”
“Explain to the public what a stinger is.”
“It’s a piece of metal with an electric element that heats water up. Campers use them. For fifty oranges, you need twenty-five bottles of water to make twenty-five bottles of hooch. You put sugar in with the oranges. People come with water and pour it in the bag. You give it a good mix. For yeast, you put two cinnamon rolls in hot water and rub them. They flake into nothing, and you can extract the yeast from the dough. Then you get a pen, take the ink out, so you’re left with a hollow tube, which is the breather basically. You ruffle the top of the trash bag, put the pen tube in, and someone ties the bag while you hold the breather. Then you slowly push the bag down in the box, so its deflating through the breather, and put the lid on the box. You put some legal pads and clothes on top of the box, shove it under the bunk bed, and leave it.”
“How does it turn to alcohol?”
“It’s so warm, where the bunk beds are situated, the wall actually sweats. You put the box near the wall, but you have to be careful not to put it up against the wall or else it gets the box wet, it deteriorates, the bag hangs out, and the cops see it. One-and-a-half days later, you check on it. There’s a reaction of yeast, sugar and oranges. It foams up, smelly, and the bag expands. The breather stops the bag from blowing up. Every half hour it blows up so you have to burp it. You undo the string, take the pen out, and push the bag down. Someone walks round spraying hair gel or the whole dorm stinks of hooch. You pop the inside trash bag. All the pulp and shit gets caught in the laundry bag, and the hooch flows through to the outside trash bag. You can actually keep the pulp in a jar to kick your next brew off, then you don’t need yeast.”
“It’s amazing how organized it all is.”
“You wait for 10pm headcount, and lights out. Then the youngsters come round with empty soda bottles, which they fill from the batch. They wipe the bottles down, and only fill them to the label, as every three hours they have to burp the bottles or else they blow up. It’s still cooking, so the youngsters have got to wake up every three hours to burp the bottles. To do this, they slowly undo the cap. It rises up fizzy, and lets the gas out. It takes three more days. Once you can’t burp it no more, then you’ve got hooch and it’s really good.”

Coming soon: The story of how Wild Man’s first batch of hooch got the whole dorm drunk, and almost triggered a race riot. And how Wild Man failed to pay the Aryan Brotherhood their full share of the hooch they’d authorized, and was summoned once again to explain himself to the head of the yard.