Hard Time (33 page)

The following afternoon, the noise
step-squeak-slide, step-squeak-slide
interrupted my reading. It was coming from the day room. I thought I was familiar with all of the sounds in the jail until I heard that one. The
step-squeak-slide
grew louder, so I rolled off my mattress and went to the cell-door’s narrow window. Someone was approaching. I backed away so as not to get caught staring.

A tall frail young man in bee stripes limped past. He had cropped copper hair, a gaunt freckled face and a shrivelled left arm sticking up uselessly in the air. I waited for him to circle the day room again and then moved closer to the window to get a better look. As he neared my door, I saw how sad his eyes were and the rivulets of perspiration on his face. Dragging his lame left leg behind his strong right step, he passed by. Watching him do laps, I put my face closer and closer to the window. Eventually he saw me and gave me an uncertain smile. I smiled back but also felt guilty for watching him. I returned to my bunk and tried to read, but my mind kept wondering about the man I’d watched and how hard it must be for the handicapped in jail. Wanting to know more, I planned to talk to him at his cell window when I was allowed out for a shower. By law, prisoners in lockdown had to be let out for one hour each day to take a shower, make a phone call and walk around the day room. But inmates in lockdown were prohibited from loitering outside each other’s cells. He was housed in cell 1 next to the shower, so my best bet was to talk to him by hovering near the entrance to the shower, which wouldn’t be so obvious to the guard in the control tower.

Every day, my hour out was an hour later than the previous day’s. For the next three days – commencing at 6.30 a.m., 7.30 a.m. and 8.30 a.m. – I was disappointed to see him asleep in the foetal position. But at 9.30 a.m. on the fourth day, I caught him awake but forgot all the things I wanted to ask him.

‘Hi, I’m Shaun,’ I shouted at his window.

‘Hi,’ he said, sitting on the bottom bunk, barely audible behind the Plexiglas. ‘I’m Chicken Wing.’

‘Do you have any deodorant?’ I asked, assuming he was indigent.

‘No.’

‘Need some?’

‘Er, yeah, yeah, sure.’ He seemed confused.

‘I’ll be right back then.’ I fetched him a deodorant from my cell and pushed it through the gap below the bottom of his door.

He scrambled from his bunk, crouched down and grabbed it. ‘Thanks,’ he said in a weak voice, staring at the deodorant as if he didn’t know what to do with it. ‘Got any crackers? I’m hungry!’ he yelled, his face shaking with excitement now.

‘Sorry,’ I said, disappointed I had none. ‘Haven’t any left.’

‘Oh, well. Never mind. Thanks for the deodorant,’ he said, and about-faced, ending my plan to learn more about him.

The next day an announcement was made: ‘Attwood! Cell 4! Roll up!’

Nervous about being moved, I starting gathering my property together.

A few minutes later, a second announcement: ‘Hernandez! Cell 12! Roll up!’ And then a third: ‘Miller! Cell 1! Roll up!’ The only person in cell 1 was Chicken Wing.

Glad Chicken Wing was rolling up, I hoped to get another chance to talk to him. I coiled my mattress, placed my collection of books onto a bed sheet and made a carrying sack. When the sliding door opened, I followed the control guard’s instructions to wait in the corridor next to the guard tower. A guard came down the corridor, handcuffed me and left. Hernandez and Chicken Wing were called out but not handcuffed. The three of us stood together, awaiting further instructions.

‘How’re you?’ I asked Chicken Wing.

‘I dunno. OK, I guess,’ he said.

‘Pleased to meet you again,’ I said, offering him my handcuffed hands.

The guard-tower door clicked open and a Mexican American emerged.

‘Where we going?’ Hernandez asked the guard.

‘Dunno. It’s up to the guards in 5-4,’ the guard said, handcuffing Hernandez.

Chicken Wing couldn’t be handcuffed in the usual fashion. It was impossible to cuff his good arm to his handicapped arm, but security protocol demanded he be cuffed somehow. The guard strapped a thick brown belt around Chicken Wing’s waist, and handcuffed his good right arm to the belt buckle, rendering him unable to carry his mattress. Reluctantly, the guard carried it. Shackled and carrying our heavy belongings, we struggled to 5-4. Instructed to wait at the foot of the control tower, we sat on our mattresses.

‘What’s your accent?’ Chicken Wing asked with a curious smile.

‘English. I’m from England.’

‘England! You Scottishman, Englishman, Londonman you!’ Growing excited, he started to stutter. ‘S-S-S-S-So t-t-tell me, wh-what’s it like in England?’

‘Cold and wet most of the time. Very green ’cause of all the rain. The people are friendly. I think you’d like it.’

‘I-I d-d-don’t like the cold. W-W-Well d-d-do they have car races in England?’

I paused to think. ‘I don’t follow that. They have the Grand Prix in Europe. A lot of it goes on in France, which is next to England. There’s some motorbike race on the Isle of Man, a small island off the coast of England, and people are always getting killed.’

‘D-D-Did you see them get k-k-killed?’

‘No, I never went. I only saw bits on the news. But I had a nice little Japanese sports car before my arrest.’

‘D-D-Did it have gears?’

‘Yes. Up to fifth and a twin-turbo engine.’

‘I-I-It went fast! It went faster! It went fastest!’ Chicken Wing yelped. He made a low rasping sound, mimicking the roar of an engine revving, while shifting gears with his good arm. As his euphoria grew, he turned up the rasping noises and began rocking. Perched hazardously on his rolled-up mattress, he lost his balance. Hernandez and I were riveted as Chicken Wing toppled backwards and banged his head against the wall.

‘B-B-Blood?’ he asked, touching his head. ‘Am I bleeding?’ Rubbing the back of his head, he howled, ‘Will I die?’

We were assuring Chicken Wing he was neither bleeding nor about to die when a guard emerged from the control tower. ‘You lot are going to B pod. Miller, cell 1. Hernandez, 9. Attwood, 14.’

Glad to be housed in the same pod as Chicken Wing, I resolved to get to know him better. I watched him approach cell 1. His new cellmate, a tattooed youngster, fetched his mattress.

In the
Twilight Zone
episode ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’, William Shatner spots a gremlin damaging the nacelle on the wing of the plane he is aboard. The gremlin has the wide eyes of a zombie and a weatherworn animal-like face: a face like that of my new cellmate in lockdown, Squeegee, who was in the throes of heroin withdrawal. Forty-one-year-old Squeegee had scraggy shoulder-length hair and abscesses the size of emu eggs on his tattooed arms, some of which were hatching into open sores.

‘I was arrested on October the third for the seventy-seventh time,’ Squeegee said in a soft-spoken Texan accent.

‘How can you be arrested that many times?’ I asked.

‘Forty-seven of them were misdemeanours. I’ve been in prisons and jails across Arizona and Texas, and I can honestly tell you this place is the worst. Sheriff Joe’s jail’s hard time, dawg. It’s even worse than death row.’

‘What did they charge you with this time?’

‘Weed. But it’s a bullshit case. The cops pulled us over for a traffic violation. I was in the passenger seat. The cops became suspicious and searched the vehicle. They found a roach with a tiny bit of weed in it.’

I explained my charges and asked about his drug history.

‘I lived in Tyler for 20 years. At nine, I started smoking weed, boozing and burglaring. I dropped 20 hits of acid at 14. I was 21 when I moved to Phoenix and got into crystal meth. Five years later, I was slamming it. I was 38 when I got into heroin. In ’98, I shot up some coke and fell in the bathroom. My dad found me and called the paramedics. In June of 2000, I shot a dime of heroin, went outside and collapsed on some bushes. My sister found me and called the paramedics, who revived me. Up until this arrest, I was shooting a gram of heroin a day. That’s three hits a day for three and a half years. Three times a week, I treated myself to a special high. I’d cook a quarter gram of heroin, melt a quarter gram of coke into it and add half a gram of speed. It all dissolves nicely in the spoon. There’s nothing like it. It’s the best high there is. It makes your body warm, gives you an instant erection and makes your asshole tingle.’

I laughed at his candour. ‘When were you last employed?’

‘I worked construction – roofing, cement, clean-up – for 15 years. My girlfriend of nine years broke up with me in 1990 ’cause of my habits. Since then I’ve hung out on the streets.’

Squeegee passed the time wriggling around on his bunk, his eyeballs rolling around inside his head as if they were tracing figure eights and loop-de-loops on the cell walls. Sometimes I caught him gnawing on the abscesses on his arms. When he attempted to eat, he suffered chronic flatulence. He filled out a medical request form: ‘I need to see a doctor. I have been here 10 days, and my heart just keeps raising [sic]. I can’t sleep. I toss & turn every 30 seconds. I need to see someone.’

The lack of human contact in lockdown can send prisoners crazy. But I viewed it as an opportunity for uninterrupted thinking. I read like never before, and my mind began to skirt around the big questions in philosophy. What are we? Where are we? Why are we here? My father sent me
On the Origin of Species
. Reading the book that had shaken the foundations of many religions raised even more questions. I wondered why Darwinism and creationism couldn’t be reconciled. What if our creator made a species that evolved? What if our creator was some kind of cosmic scientist to whom we were like a strain of bacteria in a Petri dish? But then who created the scientist? Or God?

Boggled by how insignificant humans seem to be in relation to the vastness of the universe, I strained my mind on these questions, only to conclude I’d never know the answers. On religion, I decided most people need some form of spirituality to flourish as well-balanced beings – especially during difficult times – and that’s why I’d turned to yoga. After Adam Smith’s
The Wealth of Nations
, I finished Karl Marx’s
Capital
. I learned that at the height of the cotton industry, the people living in the region of my hometown were worked so hard they didn’t last long. Maybe 30 to 40 years. The chapters on child labour and ailments appalled me. Obsessed by history books, I ranged from the Second World War back to the Sumerians. Fascinated to learn how much knowledge they had in areas such as astronomy, geometry and trigonometry as far back as 6000 BC, I wondered why I’d been taught Westerners had discovered most of these things in recent centuries. Reading was transforming my world view. I read for over 14 hours a day, until my brain and eyes ached so much I couldn’t take it any more. Every word I didn’t understand I looked up in my dictionary: metaphysics, inchoate, caprice, solipsism, empiricism, acrimony, abstruse, irascible, phlegmatic . . .

‘How’re you liking the fifth floor, English Shaun?’ asked a tall, grinning 20-something with a handsome Hawaiian-looking face and a snake tattooed on the side of his neck. He was standing outside my cell door, yelling at the narrow window.

‘How do you know who I am?’ I asked, approaching the window.

‘I’ve been to your raves. Name’s Mack. You gave me some Ecstasy one night at DJ Steel Rok’s apartment. Tempe cops even offered to cut me a deal if I could provide information on you, but I told them to fuck off.’

‘They did?’ I said, surprised, until I thought of Detective Reid.

‘Yeah, we both know a lot of the same people. Glad you finally made it upstairs. I read the
New Times
article on you. They’ve got a few high-profile cases up here.’

‘Like who?’

‘Let’s start with the Indian living next door to you: Chris Cleland. Remember the Rodeo fire up by Show Low and Heber that was on CNN every day?’

‘Yes. It was all over the news. The biggest fire ever in Arizona.’

‘Your neighbour in 15 is the Rodeo Arsonist.’

‘No way!’

‘Don’t get too excited. He’s just some brain-damaged Indian the Feds found for a fall guy.’

‘You saying he didn’t do it?’

‘Who knows? But if you talk to him, you’ll see what I mean.’

‘Who else is up here?’

‘The 101 Slayer.’

I’d heard a news report on the 101 Slayer. He’d run some people off the Interstate 101. The police had thought only two cars were involved, but a third car was found three days later with more dead people in it. ‘What’s he like?’

‘He’s cool, man. He’s from a rich family. He used to go to raves, too.’

‘Any more up here on the news?’

‘In 11 is the skinhead who made the news for spray-painting a swastika on a mosque. The guys in that pod over there only get the loaf to eat. It’s a disciplinary-segregation pod. They just moved two guys from the Mexican Mafia in there for soaping off the American flags painted on their cell walls. That was on the news. Arpaio made PR out of it. In that pod over there is the abortionist, Dr Ross, who the
New Times
ran a whole series on. They say he molested his patients.’

‘He’s all over the news. He’s got no chance.’

‘He says he didn’t do it, and I kind of believe him ’cause he refused to sign a plea bargain and he’s taking it to trial. If he loses, he’s gonna get a lotta years. My celly was on the news, too. His girlfriend dumped him, so he figured he’d commit suicide by doing a bunch of robberies and getting shot by the cops. He did the armed robberies, but they just ended up arresting his dumb ass. That guy yelling to you down the vent from the sixth floor is some maniac who killed a bunch of people.’

‘How do you know what all these people are accused of?’

‘You find out when you go to court with them and see them on TV. The last time I went to court, some chomo teacher was sentenced to 400 years: 50 for each victim. All the news channels were there filming us spitting on him. Some soldier got four years for statutory rape. The 17-year-old daughter of his colonel seduced him at his barracks, but he goes to prison ’cause she’s underage.’

‘I just saw they gave the death penalty to that guy who killed the Sikh right after 9/11. The Sikh was the uncle of two of my friends who own an Indian restaurant. How much time you facing?’

‘For ever. When the prosecutor brought up how much time I’m facing, I told her, “I’m going to fuck your dad in the shower and then have a little snack afterwards.” She said, “I’m gonna see to it that you never see the light of day again.” The goon squad escort me to court now in all kinds of shackles and chains.’

Later on, an inmate shoved a note under my door:

At a legal visit, Alan Simpson said four of my co-defendants had agreed to testify against me: Wild Woman, DJ Spinelli, Melissa, Boo. Due to these witnesses, I was now looking at a minimum of nine years if I plea bargained and the judge didn’t aggravate my sentence, and a maximum of hundreds of years if I lost at trial and the judge gave me the aggravated sentence for each count and ran the sentences consecutively. If I held out for much longer on signing a plea bargain, Alan warned, each additional witness found would add at least another year to my sentence. The news shell-shocked me.

Wild Woman had signed a cooperation agreement with a sentence ranging from four to eight years – far better than the decades she was facing on more than 150 felony charges. Unbeknown to me, her public defender – who had barely done anything for her throughout her incarceration – had frightened her into cooperating by stating that Wild Man and I were setting her up to take the fall for our crimes, and that most of the evidence would go against her. He told her she would get anywhere from 25 to 99 years if she didn’t cooperate. After agreeing to cooperate, Wild Woman was told that her life was in danger from me. She was whisked off to Payson jail, where the police booked her in as ‘Missy’ and prohibited her from writing to anybody, including her dying mother.

Wild Man wrote, urging me to sign a plea bargain so Wild Woman wouldn’t have to testify in court. Angry and unable to stomach even the nine-year prospective minimum sentence, I refused to sign a plea bargain. Against Alan’s advice, I demanded a trial. Months later, Wild Woman sent an apology.