Hard Time (32 page)

‘Lockdown!’ announced the guard in the control tower.

About ten minutes later, four massive goon-squad guards marched to Bullet’s cell. I heard a key open his door, then boots sliding and a body getting walloped. Bullet appeared with a brown leather harness around his body and arms. There was a chain attached to the back of the harness, held by a guard walking him down the stairs like a dog. He never returned.

Guards escorted me to Medical for the EKG Dr Jean had ordered. Nurse Shavonne attached the EKG sensors to my legs, and her eyes bulged when she saw the reading.

‘What is it?’

‘The reading,’ was all she volunteered.

Convinced the jail had finally done me in, I expected to have a heart attack on the spot.

She disconnected the sensors and retried but got the same reading. ‘I’d better go get the doctor!’ She rushed from the room as fast as she could carry her great mass, as if any delay might be fatal to my health.

The prospect of there being something wrong with my heart was making it beat much faster.

Nurse Shavonne burst into the room, eclipsing the doctor behind her.

Dr Jean worked his way around her and stared at my legs. ‘They’re not supposed to go on his legs. Put them on his chest.’

‘Thank goodness! You had me worried there,’ I said.

‘With that sexy English accent, you’re my favourite inmate.’ Dr Jean winked at me.

The next EKG reading was fine. I returned to the holding cell, where two men were comparing spider-bite wounds so infected Medical had actually agreed to see them. Looking at their wounds leaking pus – raised reddened areas threatening to erupt – the bleeding rash on my chest seemed trivial. Yes, my chest was itchier than ever, and a splinter group of pox-like sores had been travelling up my legs recently as if it were a living thing with a consciousness homing it in on my groin, but I wouldn’t have traded my rash in for their zombie-movie wounds. No thanks.

August 2003

In September, I read a book by Arnaud Desjardins, a student of Eastern spiritual traditions. I learned about monks who, from time to time, do horrible things such as eat their own faeces as a show of mental stamina. According to Arnaud, ‘To appreciate a painful situation is to be at one with it, to be at one with the suffering. It is only in this way that we can learn something.’ Thanks to books like Arnaud’s, I made further progress on how I viewed my own suffering. I’d put myself in jail, yes, and was doing my utmost to accept my karma cheerfully, but these books really helped me stay focused on learning as much as I could from the situation. Although the conditions had crushed my spirit over the summer, I was bouncing back. I stopped taking the Benadryl that helped me sleep and instead meditated for up to an hour before bedtime. Meditating, I tuned in to the rhythms of my body, from my heartbeat and breathing to the anxiety rippling through me. When worries intruded into my mind, I’d push them out. This approach took the edge off my tension.

Lying down after meditation, I questioned my propensity for crime. Were there any criminals in my family? Definitely not my parents. But my aunt Sue was a master of operating in grey areas of the law. Some of the genes on my father’s side were definitely suspect. As far as nurture was concerned, my sister had turned out well, and I had had all of the advantages in life not afforded to most of my neighbours, which made me all the more blameworthy. I put my crimes down to sheer hedonism. The selfish pursuit of pleasure by a man with more money than common sense.

In a cell upstairs, I started an English class for the Mexicans. If the jail didn’t want to educate prisoners, then maybe I could make a small difference. Most of them could barely write at all, so I helped them compose letters in Spanish for their loved ones. I had five students: four murderers and one charged with attempted murder. One of the murderers was a midget with a thick beard and a boyish happy face. Mid class, he’d stand up, flex his muscles like a strongman and chuckle. Some of the whites disapproved of me helping another race, which worried me because a female guard was smuggling drugs in, and the men had been up for days and were looking for someone to smash. But Joe intervened with the whites and told me to continue.

I incorporated some new yoga postures into my routine. Triangle. Bow. Boat. Lion. I was in the canoe pose – belly down, alternate arms and legs slightly raised – when Lloyd, a member of the notorious Lindo Park Crip gang who expected to be sentenced to death by the end of the year, came in and said, ‘You look like one of my victims trying to crawl away.’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘Lloyd’s all right when he’s not murdering people,’ Joe said. ‘I get along good with him.’

Through his friend, a chief justice court clerk, Lloyd had tracked down the witness to one of his armed robberies. While she held her four-year-old son up to shield herself from him, he shot her in the face. Shortly after that murder, a second witness was found floating in a canal. The
New Times
did a cover story on Lloyd. He liked me because we’d both made the cover of the
New Times
.

September 2003

I was in a packed court holding cell when two Tempe transportation guards stopped outside. They kept glancing at me, rousing my suspicion since Tempe Police Department had initiated my case.

‘Which one’s the snitch in this cell?’ one asked.

‘Attwood’s the snitch,’ the other said.

‘Attwood’s the snitch. OK.’ When they knew everyone had overheard, they walked away. They’d ‘jacketed’ me. In the ’60s, federal agents jacketed the leaders of radical student groups. By giving the impression that the leaders were cooperating with the authorities, they could turn the group against their leader or at least flip those members who fell for the ploy.

I felt the hair on my arms rise. If the men in the cell believed the guards and figured out I was Attwood, then I could be smashed or possibly killed. In the jail, snitches were as hated as child molesters.

‘They’re just trying to cause trouble for Attwood,’ one inmate said.

His words relieved me. I was about to volunteer my name and explain that Tempe police were out to get me because they didn’t have much of a case, but a much larger prisoner said, ‘If we’ve got a snitch in here, we need to handle it.’

As if to prevent me from speaking up, the muscles in my face tightened. Now what? I thought. Other prisoners sided with the larger prisoner, clamming me up even more. All eyes were roaming the room in a mad search for Attwood. I pretended to look for Attwood, too, but my face blushed. Thinking about it blushing made it blush even more, and I feared it would give me away. The more vocal prisoners debated what to do, mainly expressing enthusiasm for smashing Attwood. I figured I was about to pay the price for all of the violence I’d dodged since my arrest. I assumed the guards who’d started it wouldn’t be in a hurry to stop it either. I remained motionless, saying nothing, convinced opening my mouth would invite disaster.

About five minutes later, a guard yelled, ‘Attwood, come out!’

Everyone looked at everyone else, as if ready to pounce on Attwood. I stayed still until the door opened, then walked out.

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ I said to my attorney. ‘Two Tempe cops just told the inmates in the holding cell I’m a snitch.’

‘You cannot be serious,’ Alan Simpson said.

I described what had happened. He told the prosecutor. The prosecutor guaranteed a full investigation. The inmates in the cell would all be interviewed. I’d have to identify the officers in a line-up, and they’d be reprimanded.

In a holding cell afterwards, dwelling on what had happened, I could only think of one person capable and motivated enough to jacket me – Detective Reid – but of course I had no evidence to back up my hunch. He’d led the investigation, said some things he probably shouldn’t while arresting me and attended nearly all of my court appearances with the air of a stalker. I remembered his emotional reaction when no drugs were found at my apartment, and how he’d threatened me over the keys to the safe.

When I returned to my floor at the Madison Street jail, the guard in the control tower said, ‘Attwood, you’ve been rehoused upstairs for your own protection.’ He wouldn’t even let me go back to my cell to collect my property. A porter brought it out in plastic bags packed by Joe. My books and stacks of legal paperwork slowly tore the bags open as I followed the guard to the elevator.

‘Where we going?’ I asked.

‘Wherever I take you,’ he said.

The elevator stopped at the fifth floor. I followed the guard down a series of corridors. We arrived at a control tower overlooking four pods. All of the prisoners were locked down except in one pod. The men out in the one pod were watching me, some smiling. Many of them were older men, clean cut, a breed apart from the prisoners I’d seen so far. The guard in the control tower instructed me to a cell in a pod that was locked down, and activated the sliding door. As I approached the cell, one of the rips in the bags containing my property expanded and shed a few golf pencils, which clinked as they hit the floor. The control guard hit the button to open the cell door. The door slid open with a mechanical groan. I went in.

Inside the cell, a startled black man in street clothes was hiding a glass pipe in the toilet. ‘What the fuck!’ he said. The trapped crystal-meth smoke reeked like cat urine with a twist of lemon.

Anything can happen in the jail, but I hadn’t expected this. ‘Who’re you?’ I asked, putting my bags down. The door slid closed behind me.

‘Who the fuck are you, coming in here making me flush my motherfuckin’ dope?’

‘They just moved me up here.’ I didn’t appreciate him talking to me as if I were new to the jail. ‘I’ve been in jail for almost a year and a half.’

‘A year and a half! What the fuck for?’ he asked.

‘Drugs. It’s a complex case.’

‘Mine’s a complex case, too.’ His eyes found my commissary bag. ‘Got anything to eat, wood?’ Addressing me as wood meant he assumed I was a gang member.

‘Not much. Just enough for me. Why the street clothes?’

‘Getting released at midnight. Girlfriend’s bonded me out.’

I was glad I’d be rid of him soon. He was not someone I could sleep safely around.

‘Gimme something to eat, wood.’

I didn’t mind giving him a store item as he wouldn’t be around long enough to demand more, but I felt disrespected by his tone. Knowing he was testing me, I tried to establish some boundaries. ‘Where’s your manners at? If you ask politely, I’ll consider it.’ I knew if we were going to fight, it would most likely happen now. I stared at him as if I were crazy from starvation and willing to fight to the death to defend my food. He had about a 50-pound weight advantage, but I’d been working out fanatically all year. He had sneakers on, but I had on deck shoes I’d acquired from a diabetic, not slippery shower sandals. Tense from being moved, I had no patience left for diplomacy. I figured showing him I’d fight was the best way to get him to back down. Without realising it, I’d adopted the prison mentality.

‘All right, man, can you at least hook your celly up with a little somethin’-somethin’?’ He’d switched from intimidation to playing on the rule that cellmates look out for each other.

Knowing what he was up to gave me a sense of control over the situation. ‘I’ve got Snickers, MoonPies. I ain’t giving up any of my peanut butter.’

‘Oo, a MoonPie.’

His response pleased me. A MoonPie was half the price of a Snickers. I’d only bought them for trading purposes. Giving one away would not cut into the commissary I’d allocated to eat. I handed him a MoonPie. He flushed its wrapper down the toilet and crammed the whole thing in his mouth.

Realising the top bunk didn’t have a mattress, I fumed, ‘No mattress!’

He stopped chewing loudly to say, ‘You got mine when I leave.’

‘I ain’t lying on that steel. I’ll flag a guard down when he walks.’

‘He ain’t gonna give you no motherfuckin’ mattress. They just ignore you up in this motherfucker.’

‘What is this pod anyway?’

‘Temporary lockdown housing.’

‘What the bloody hell’s that?’

‘They put people here they don’t know what to do with till they decide what to do with them.’

‘So you saying I won’t be here long?’

‘No one’s here long.’

I hated being in transit. Having nowhere to settle. Uncertain where I’d end up next. ‘What’s our neighbours like?’

‘Got none. This pod’s mostly empty.’

‘How about that pod over there with all those guys hanging out?’

‘Them’s all chomos and rapos.’

‘What?’ I asked, shocked. Having never seen a pod full of sex offenders before, I pressed myself to the cell door’s narrow window to get a better look. None of the men had tattoos. Many were old or middle-aged, fat, bespectacled, meek-looking. I didn’t want to imagine what they’d done.

‘Some high-profile Catholic-priest motherfuckers over there,’ he said, shaking his head.

I didn’t doubt it, as Catholic priests had been on the news recently. I put my commissary bag on the top bunk to use as a pillow and to prevent him from stealing out of it. I climbed up and read. The metal really punished my back. I heard the day-room door slide open. I jumped down, banged on the window at the guard and yelled for a mattress. The guard walked by as if I didn’t exist. My cellmate laughed. I cursed the guard, returned to my bunk and read for hours, unable to absorb much or let my guard down in case my cellmate tried to pull a fast one.

Come midnight, I wanted to sleep, but my cellmate hadn’t left. By 1 a.m. I assumed he’d lied about getting released and I was stuck with him and no mattress. I was wallowing in disappointment until 2 a.m. when the guards collected him. When the door shut behind him, I finally started to unwind. I jumped down to watch him go, convinced watching him go would prevent him from ever coming back. When he was out of sight, I basked in the sensation of being completely alone for the first time in ages. My mind was briefly happy, but my body ached all over from the steel. I moved to the bottom bunk. His mattress smelled of his sweat and the lemony-urinous odour of the crystal meth he’d been smoking. Drifting into sleep, I wondered what kind of person the jail had turned me into.