Hard Time (31 page)

Three out of thirty inmates collapsed from heatstroke in July. An emergency medical team extracted each person. In the day room, we wandered around dizzy, gagging on the hot foul air, clutching our chests, the worried looks on our faces reflecting our struggle to stay alert so as not to be hospitalised next.

On top of the heat, I was lovesick for Claudia. We were both depressed about losing our visits, and she was brooding over her charges. She turned to alcohol. She was difficult to talk to on the phone, as if she were a different person. For the first time, I wondered whether our relationship would survive my incarceration. She also revealed she had a stalker. She hadn’t told me previously because she thought I had enough to worry about. Her stalker had read the article about me in the
New Times
. He’d threatened to shoot her and to visit me at the jail. He’d also threatened Claudia’s mother, who’d called the police. Claudia was terrified. Trapped inside the jail, I felt helpless to protect her. Initially, I hoped he’d be arrested and end up in the jail with me. But when my anger subsided, I realised Claudia only had a stalker due to the crimes I’d committed. I felt responsible.

The heat and stress made it difficult to sleep, write and concentrate. Then chest pains began, accompanied by a tingling in my extremities. I submitted a request to Medical, not expecting to be seen but to document the condition in case I was hospitalised. The pains usually came on when I was reading. I’d have to put my book down and take deep breaths while clutching my chest until they went away.

Every day, I took multiple showers just to cool down for a few minutes. So did everyone else. The wait for the lone shower stretched to over an hour. Rather than stand in line, we placed our towels and boxers in a row on the metal privacy divide separating the shower area from the day room. Whoever’s boxers and towel were at the front went next. With the shower running all of the time, the tiny black flies that lived on the pond of scum and semen took to our towels. A quick belt of the towel against the wall got rid of them. We had one towel each, which we illegally hung out to dry on string ripped from clothing and sheets. But the guards enjoyed pulling our clotheslines down and threatened to ticket us for destroying county property. So our towels never dried. After each shower, I’d dry myself off as much as possible with a half-wet towel. I’d stink afterwards, as my towel used over and never allowed to dry was cultivating a fungus with an offensive mildewy odour. In our pod, the smell of mildew came on slowly at first, blending in with the usual smells. Smoke. Body odour. Bowel movements. Urine. The smell of mop water heavy on bleach. But by the time we were all taking showers every few hours, the mildewy smell dominated. After a few days of everyone complaining, the smell went away. But not really. We were just so used to it, it was less noticeable. I figured this out when I left the pod and returned. Upon re-entering the day room, the smell assaulted me. It faded over the next few days as I reacclimatised to it. After showering and towelling, the smell of my body repulsed me. Multiply that by 30 men and add it to the smell of the drying towels and all of the other smells and you can understand why the guards were reluctant to leave the control tower to do security walks. One guard said we smelled like a health hazard.

Our skin did not take kindly to being treated in this fashion. There was the worst outbreak of skin infections I ever saw in the jail. It looked like chickenpox until the bleeding started. Nearly everyone had it. After dotting my body, it attacked my chest with a cluster of purple-red rashes. It travelled, too. Not so much on my chest but clusters shifted on my limbs, and I’d wake up amazed by their overnight migrations. It itched like crazy. I scratched my limbs constantly but learned not to scratch my chest, as the scabs there detached and bled too much.

‘It’s just a heat rash. There’s nothing we can do about it,’ the guards kept telling us, ignoring our demands for cooler air.

Adding to Joe’s discomfort was an inguinal hernia extending into his scrotum, trapping fluid in his scrotal pouch. Even though an inmate had died in the past year from a strangulated hernia, the medical staff declined Joe’s request for an operation. The condition made Joe urinate every few hours, disrupting his sleep and mine. Whenever the roar of the toilet flushing woke me up, I had to battle the heat and itchy skin to get back to sleep. I’d tell myself,
Don’t itch. You’ll only make it worse. Give yourself a good scratching when you wake up in the morning.
I actually looked forward to scratching in the morning. The first scratch of the day was always the best.

Joe taught me how to get seen by Medical. Most inmates put in one medical request and waited for the outcome. But Joe likened a medical request to a lottery ticket. The more lottery tickets you entered, the greater your chances of winning. He was putting in a medical request every day. I copied him. We soon ran out of forms. To get more we had to cajole our neighbours into requesting them from the guards during security walks. I started to receive daily rejections from Medical, but then one of my requests proved Joe’s theory.

A guard extracted me and escorted me up several flights of stairs to Medical, where the air blew mildew-free and much cooler than in the bowels of the jail.

I was weighed and asked a few questions by Nurse Shavonne, a jovial African American about the size of a blimp. ‘I really dig your accent. Will you say something for me?’

Amused by her request, I searched through my repertoire of English phrases. ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.’

‘No! Not that. Will you say, “Do you think I’m sexy, baby?”’

I giggled and did my best impression: ‘Do you think I’m sexy, baby?’

Nurse Shavonne laughed so hard I feared for my safety. Not realising I’d just passed some kind of audition, I hoped she was done with me. But she insisted on us taking a tour of the Medical Unit. In each room, she said, ‘Listen, everybody! Go on. Go on, Attwood.’

‘Do you think I’m sexy, baby?’ I responded for about the sixth time, bracing my ears for Nurse Shavonne’s laughter.

She couldn’t get enough of my English accent. I was glad when she ran out of staff members to exhibit me to and deposited me in the Plexiglas holding tank for sick prisoners.

I waited two hours to see the man the inmates called Gay Dr Jean. All of the previous doctors I’d dealt with were abrupt and discourteous, and I’d been told that Dr Jean was different, a frisky individual. I found a thin man wearing rectangular glasses. He had short blond hair. Smiling at me, he was holding a stack of my medical-request forms in a three-ring binder.

‘So you’ve been having a variety of medical issues?’ he said in a chirpy voice.

I told him about the bedsores, the skin infection, the persistent itching, the chest pains, my insomnia. He complimented me on my English accent. I half-expected him to ask me to recite some Austin Powers lines, but he didn’t. He asked me to remove my top. I showed him the rash on my chest. My torso was all protruding ribs and hair matted with sweat.

‘These things happen while it’s hot,’ Dr Jean said, examining the rash. He grabbed a tube off a shelf. ‘Here’s some hydrocortisone cream to relieve the itching and some Benadryl to help you sleep. I’ll put you in for an EKG for the chest pains. Let’s take a look at the bedsores, shall we?’

I dropped my pants and pink boxers, embarrassed by the smell, and turned around.

Dr Jean crouched to inspect the bedsores. ‘Heat, sweating, sitting around. Nothing we can really do,’ he said with pity. ‘I bet you wish you were in the cooler climes of England.’

I pulled up my pants and turned around. ‘Yes, it’s much cooler. But it rains too much. Kind of like Seattle weather.’

‘Whenever I see it on the TV it looks so green and wonderful. All those castles and countryside.’

‘We’ve got loads of castles. Especially in North Wales, close to where I’m from . . . ’ I elaborated on the scenery of my motherland to extend my stay in the cool air. Before I left, he surprised me by offering a handshake.

Back in my cell, I was applying antifungal cream to my buttocks when Joe rushed in. ‘Hat Trick’s collapsed in the shower!’ Hat Trick – a crystal-meth chemist in his late 50s – was a friend of Joe’s. He was podgy, had a wizard’s beard and friendly piggy eyes. He loved animals and told me many stories about his unusual pets.

I pulled my pants up and rushed down the run with Joe. We joined the group of whites standing over Hat Trick.

‘It’s my lungs,’ Hat Trick wheezed, his face corpse pale. ‘I ain’t got much longer to live.’

‘You wannus to yell “Man down”?’ Larry asked.

‘It’s probably the only way I’m ever gonna get to Medical,’ Hat Trick said.

Half of the whites pounded on the Plexiglas at the front of the day room, yelling ‘Man down!’ at the control guards. Inmates all over the pod joined in yelling ‘Man down!’ Prisoners in neighbouring pods flocked to their windows to watch us. ‘Man down! Man down!’ It was like a chant at a soccer match and good to see everyone working together to help Hat Trick.

‘Lockdown!’ a guard announced. Guards from neighbouring housing units dashed down the corridor and into our pod. They swarmed around Hat Trick, quickly joined by medical staff who extracted him on a stretcher.

An hour later, they took us off lockdown, and an old-timer suffering from heat exhaustion collapsed on the toilet. They locked us down again. As they stretchered him out, the prisoners yelled: ‘How many more of us have to fall out before you get us some fresh air in here?’

‘Turn the fucking air up!’

‘It’s gotta be cheaper to give us some air than put us all in hospital!’

‘It’s not hot enough in here! Could you please turn the heat up?’

‘Where’s our ice cream?’

Hat Trick returned, disorientated, with a heat-exhaustion diagnosis and a pink slip of paper. ‘They gave me a ticket for passing out in the shower!’

None of us believed he had been ticketed for being ill. We assumed he was delirious until he showed us the paperwork.

For collapsing in the shower, Hat Trick received 30 days’ full restriction. No commissary, visits, phone calls, recreation.

July 03

In August, one of the regular outbreaks of food poisoning affected dozens of men. As converts to vegetarianism, Joe and I avoided it. The prisoners blamed the green baloney for their diarrhoea and dizzy spells. They used up their toilet-paper rations, and the guards refused to provide any more. The prisoners asking me, ‘Are you done with your
Financial Times
yet, dawg?’ were not checking up on the stock market.

Another hazard of our environment was all the filthy rusty metal. I was unaware of its potential for harm until Bullet, in the act of extorting Hat Trick, nicked his thumb on the cell door. His thumb ballooned to twice its size, but the guards refused to take him to Medical. When it turned black and fungal, the guards assured him he’d be seen by Dr Jean, but still no one came for him. The stretched skin eventually split open and leaked pus. Only then did the guards escort him to Dr Jean, who hospitalised him. The hospital doctor cut Bullet’s thumb down the middle to drain the pus out, and the inmates made bets as to whether he would lose it.

‘That’s called boomerang karma,’ Joe explained.

Bullet returned from hospital angrier than usual. The thumb incident had really got to him.

‘This motherfucking bread’s way too fucking mouldy to eat!’ he yelled at the guard serving Ladmo bags at the foot of the metal-grid stairs.

‘What do you want me to do about it?’ the guard said.

‘You try eating this shit! Would you feed your family this fucking crap?’

To denounce the food or a guard even was one thing, but it was never a good idea to bring a guard’s family into it. The guard snatched the Ladmo bag from Bullet. Bullet grabbed a fresh Ladmo bag from the guard and rushed away. The guard gave chase, caught up with Bullet halfway up the stairs and seized the Ladmo bag. Bullet threw his carton of milk at the guard. It hit the guard’s neck and splattered open.