The Struggle
It’s that time of year. Spring is in the air and the summer heat is around the corner. That means it’s time for one of the most intense prison rivalries to ramp up: Team Hot vs. Team Cold.
That’s right. It’s time to switch our units over from heat to air conditioning. You would think that as inmates we would be thankful for this luxury, but instead, it’s something to fight about. I wish I could tell you that I take the high road on this, but nope. I’m a hard-core member of Team Cold. I am one of the guys who wants to run the AC all summer and leave the heater off all winter with the windows cracked.
Team Hot, on the other hand, makes late-night stealth missions to shut the AC off in the summer and turn the heater on in the winter. Each of the twelve guys in our room falls somewhere on the Team Hot/Team Cold spectrum. Some stay neutral but most pick sides. In prison, we are told what to wear, where to go, and when to eat, sleep, shower, work, and everything else. We have control over next to nothing. Team Hot and Team Cold don’t want much. We just want to pick the room temperature.
In prison, when you are looking for a room or talking to candidates to fill a vacancy, the room temperature question is crucial. It makes it easier on everybody if we’re all on the same team. Every now and then, though, someone will tell you what you want to hear to get in. It sucks to realize they are on the other team.
Lately, the feud has been with JWCAR, who is a great roommate in every respect except he’s on Team Hot. My buddy, Chris Warren recruited him, and said, “He’s good to go, he says he likes it cold.” So last fall, we moved him into the bunk bed closest to the heater/AC unit.
As the winter months grew colder, so did the room. Each night we would go to bed with the heater off and the windows cracked. But by morning, more often than not, the windows were shut and the heat was on. It felt like a sauna with the fresh scent of man ass. Eventually, we identify the guilty party: JWCAR.
Chris didn’t want to give him up but Team Cold was having none of it. We jumped his ass as much about lying in the interview process as turning on the damn heater.
Team Cold is flexible in winter if the heat goes on on really cold nights, but summer is a totally different story. A few of us lived in the Kingsbury unit, the only building on the compound without air conditioning. I joined the drug program 18 months early, just to get out of the Kingsbury heat. I remember those three blistering summers: locked up in a brick building, unable to stop sweating, laying in bed shirtless with the world’s smallest fan blowing 110 degree air around. Falling asleep before midnight was nothing short of a miracle.
Now we have free cold air available at the flick of a switch. Hell, yeah, we’re going to use it. I say run that thing all day and night, but Team Hot does not agree. Instead of putting on sweats and using their extra blanket, they want to shut it off.
I’m definitely on Team Cold but I try to be cool about it. Some people take it to extremes. A friend takes out window panes in the dead of winter. I know someone else who watched the heater short circuit and did exactly nothing about it. There are often fights and verbal altercations. In our room, we keep it to harmless banter, but the struggle is real.
I know this all sounds petty, even ridiculous. But in prison, we can only choose so much, we have control of almost nothing. Team Cold and Team Hot are not just looking for a particular room temperature. They don’t just want to be able to sleep like they want to sleep. We want to be able to live like we want to live. And that just isn’t possible with twelve guys in a prison room.
In the meantime, I say, if you’re cold, put on another layer. I can strip down only so much. The other eleven guys, it turns out, are on Team Bergland Keep Your Clothes On.
Thanks for listening,
Noah
To my Greyson, My Promise to you | Morgan Molitor
Being Authentic | Noah Bergland
