I was walking back from the chow hall with my friend when we entered a long hallway that leads to our housing pods. The floors had just been mopped.
“I hate the smell of lemon cancer,” I said, referring to the California Prison Industry Authority cleaner used to clean the hallway.
“Lemon cancer,” my friend said, with a laugh. “That’s refreshing.”
“Well, the fake lemon scent makes it healthy,” I replied. “Healthy cancer.”
No matter how you clean it, the truth is, prison stinks. Metaphorically and literally. Everything in prison smells funny, horrible or weird.
In the morning I wake up slowly. I hear the noise of other prisoners gathered by the closed door of our pod, waiting to be released to the chow hall. As people wait, I hear dozens of conversations at once — “the din,” I like to call this buzzing chatter.
When the din stops, it signals that our pod door has opened and my peers have scurried to chow. I crawl out of bed and wobble myself upright, encountering the first random smell of the day.
Is it lemon-scented cancer? Is it an unidentifiable rotting smell? Is it mildew and the sweat of 200 men? Or could it be hash browns? Once a week, it’s hash browns. (I always pray for hash browns.)
On the way to chow, I walk through a second smell: the prison “piss field,” the gravel area that doggies in our prison dog training program piss on. It smells like fresh, morning dew. By fresh, I mean fresh urine and by dew, I mean dog doo, and those smells are combined with rotting urine from previous days.
When the sun goes down, we are greeted by an assault to the nostrils of minty manure from God knows where. We are in Southern California, on the border of Tijuana, Mexico, which has an epic sewage spillover problem with San Diego. We smell that spillover sometimes, too, when the wind blows right.
I have inquired about the smell with guards and prisoners. In the words of famed philosopher (and stand-up comic) Dave Attell, I’ve asked, “What’s that smell?” But nobody seems to know.
Prisons have poor ventilation systems, so smells creep in through our cell vents, too. I put my prison blanket over my head in an attempt to mask the smell, but that never works. The blanket just smells like prison and a pungent chemical-delousing agent.
Recently I facilitated my Criminals and Gangmembers Anonymous group. The room smelled like a locker room full of feet. It made me long for the stench of lemon cancer. But I settled for opening a door to air out le stank.
Maybe the Prison Industrial Authority should start making industrial-strength lemon air fresheners, too.