Hard Time (6 page)

‘What they’ll do next is try to play you all off against one another, so they can build cases against whoever they want to portray as the big players. They’ll assign you all scumbag attorneys who are on the payroll of the state, and the attorneys will try to frighten everyone into signing plea bargains so they don’t have to do any real work, like defending you at trial. The sooner you sign a plea bargain, the sooner they get their fee and move on to their next victim.’

‘No shit!’ Cody said.

‘Yes. Your best bet is to form a united front. Have a highly paid attorney act as the lead attorney for the whole case. The prosecutor is relying on the domino theory in a case like this. If one of you falls, you all will.’

Good advice, I thought.

In tones of solidarity, we pledged a united front. If the police had no drugs, no evidence, there was no case, and no need for anyone to cooperate. Or so I thought.

Hours later, my name was called. A guard escorted a group of us to a changing-room. We were instructed to strip naked, deposit our clothes in a bin liner and put on the jail uniform. I returned to the cell dressed like a chain-gang con from a black-and-white movie.

After the next delivery of Ladmo bags, I scoured the area for fruit and ate a few oranges and grapefruits. My eyes stung as I watched men nod off, fall on their neighbours, wake up and repeat the cycle. But I was beyond tired and entering a kind of madness. I desperately needed to do something for my skin – it felt as if lice were burrowing into it – so I marched to the water fountain with some grapefruit peel, ripped my top off and splashed water on my upper body. Attempting to reduce the onion stink in my armpits, I squeezed grapefruit peel below them.

‘Does that work?’ a skinhead yelled. ‘Gimme a piece!’

I threw him some. Smelling my left armpit, I watched the skinhead squeeze the grapefruit peel. The onion smell had gone, replaced by the stink of a chemistry-class experiment gone wrong. I splashed more water onto my armpits. Pacing the cell, I felt the rush of a trapped animal. My mind started to slide. Thoughts of never being free again were rising, hovering, flitting, as if I had a skull full of hummingbirds. I wanted to explode, thump a wall, project my anger onto something. Anything. I felt a primeval rage.

I was distracted by an inmate at the front of the cell announcing the names on the new batch of IDs on the guard’s desk: ‘Attwood, your ID’s white. Medium security. You’re off to Towers jail.’ My journey through The Horseshoe was almost over. Now that I’d been booked in and seen by a judge, I was to be housed in one of Arpaio’s jails in accordance with my security classification. Wild Man and I had been classified as medium-security inmates. The rest of my co-defendants were minimum security, so they would be housed at Durango jail.

A guard called my name but not Wild Man’s. Disappointed that Wild Man was not being transported with me, I was chained to four other inmates. A hippy. A lanky African American. A middle-aged bespectacled man. Someone who resembled a homeless version of Jack Nicholson. Gripped by anxiety, I yelled goodbye to my co-defendants. I prayed my next destination would be softer on my soul than The Horseshoe.

Sunlight bore down on my head and glistened off the transportation guard’s Terminator sunglasses as we waited outside Towers jail – a complex of beige buildings, including six identical towers, surrounded by chain-link fences, razor wire and a few palm trees, on the outskirts of Central Phoenix. With only 20-odd officers guarding close to 1,000 unsentenced prisoners, the jail was dangerously overcrowded and understaffed.

The entrance door buzzed open. ‘Everyone get inside. Wait for the interior door to open!’

Chained together, we shuffled into a bare room.

A young guard unlocked the interior door. ‘Line up in the corridor!’ He had spiky hair and was wearing the standard beige uniform with black boots and a utility belt.

Inmates in the holding cells rapped on the Plexiglas and heckled us.

‘Turn and face the wall! First in line, raise one leg and lift your foot toward me!’ The transportation guard removed our cuffs and chains. ‘This lot are all yours now. I’m outta here.’

‘Wassup, Kohlbeck!’ the Jack Nicholson-looking inmate said to the young guard.

‘Not you again!’ Officer Kohlbeck said, frowning.

‘’Fraid so.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Boyd.’

‘Smoking crack again, were we, Boyd?’

Boyd smiled, displaying what was left of his teeth. ‘Any chance of Ladmo bags? We haven’t eaten all day,’ he said in the tone of entitlement used by those who know how to work the system.

‘Any Ladmo bags left?’ Officer Kohlbeck shouted.

At the reception station, a guard sighed, slammed down
The Arizona Republic
, opened the refrigerator, grabbed some Ladmo bags and chucked them at us.

Making green-baloney sandwiches, my companions showered the floor with breadcrumbs.

‘I need you all in this cell. Show me your IDs as you enter!’ Officer Kohlbeck said.

The empty cell had three sets of double bunks and a toilet in the corner with no privacy divide. It wasn’t as filthy as the cells in The Horseshoe. I sat on a bottom bunk. The bespectacled prisoner sat aloof from the other three, who chatted like regulars at a social club.

‘I gotta take a crap,’ Boyd said.

‘Me too, dawg. But you called it first,’ the hippy said.

‘This chow always sends me straight to the shitter,’ the African American said.

There was no privacy, yet they went about their business as casually as young children pick their noses. The toilet flushed louder than on a plane, and I wondered why they pushed the button as soon as they sat down and kept flushing.

For days, all I’d eaten was fruit. Desperate to freshen my mouth, I unpeeled an orange and ate some slices. The juice soothed my mouth. But a few minutes later, I felt stomach cramps that spread to my bowels. I’d reached such a low in my life it was now necessary to go to the toilet in front of four strangers. That three of them had gone before me offered little comfort. Searching for something appropriate to say, I played around with sentences like, ‘Hey, guys, I need to take a dump.’ But I couldn’t get the words out. Instead, I adopted a diversion strategy: I gave them my Ladmo bag. As they argued over the food, I rushed to the toilet, pushed my pants and boxers down and tried my best to act like someone who’d been going on the toilet in front of strangers all of his life. The seatless steel toilet chilled my behind. Straining in vain, I regretted ever attempting the toilet. Convinced I needed to go, but was just too nervous, I took some deep breaths. Eventually, something happened. But not much.

My deposit was barely underwater when Boyd said, ‘Goddam, put some water on that to kill the smell, dawg!’

It dawned as to why they’d flushed so much. Blushing, I pressed the button. The toilet flushed, splashing water upon my backside like some out of control bidet. I wanted to get off the toilet, but I had to wipe. I picked up the institutional toilet paper. Coarse and thin. I wondered what the subtlest method of wiping was. I didn’t want to stand up and indecently expose myself. How had they done it? Seated with one buttock raised. I copied their method. All done, I ran water over my hands, dried them on my pants and returned to the bunk. I was aching all over, and the metal surface added to my discomfort. In the foetal position, I drifted in and out of consciousness for hours.

I was roused by Officer Kohlbeck’s voice. ‘Line up in the corridor!’

We shuffled out of the cell.

‘I need to pat you down! Turn around, put your hands against the wall and spread your legs! I hope for your sakes none of you have any weapons or drugs keystered!’ I was unaware that keystered meant drugs stored in your rectal cavity, that most inmates were involved in keystering tobacco, drugs and paraphernalia.

Kohlbeck patted me down. I was beginning to lose count of the number of men in uniform who’d karate-chopped my crotch in recent days. Officer Kohlbeck donned wraparound sunglasses and escorted us down a series of corridors. ‘Right! Stop there!’

A hibernating bear of a Mexican lay curled up and snoring on the floor of an adjoining corridor.

‘Wake the hell up, trusty!’

The trusty blinked a few times. A pained look came on his face. Reluctantly, he rose.

‘They need mattresses and bedding!’

The trusty fetched us blankets, sheets and towels. We helped ourselves to torn thin mattresses leaking a toxic-looking black soot. My companions coiled their mattresses around their belongings, so I copied them.

‘All right. Keep walking! We’re going to Tower 2!’

Shouldering our mattresses, we exited into a breezeway with an expanded-metal roof. We passed two recreation pens surrounded by chain-link fences and razor wire. Due to the weight of my belongings and the heat, sweat was running into my eyes by the time Kohlbeck buzzed us into Tower 2.

As we walked down the cement-block corridor, tattooed men wearing bee stripes banged on the Plexiglas at either side of us: zoo animals yearning to attack their visitors. Unnerved by the rows of hard faces, I wanted to look straight ahead, but my eyes instinctively jumped to the sources of the loudest banging. Some of them mimed smoking: their way of asking if any of us had smuggled in cigarettes.

‘Stop below the bubble,’ Officer Kohlbeck said.

We stopped in the middle of the building – all Plexiglas, metal and concrete. In the centre were spiral stairs leading up to the control tower – a giant fishbowl in the air giving the guards a view of the four identical pods lettered A, B, C and D. Separated by cement-block walkways with Plexiglas windows, each pod took up almost a quarter of the space below the control tower and had its own electronically activated sliding door. Walking in a circle in the control tower was a guard struggling to keep an eye on the almost 45 men in each pod. The other guard was watching surveillance screens. He occasionally pressed a button on the control panel to open one of the sliding doors to allow an inmate in or out of a pod. At the back of each pod were two storeys of cells facing the day room and the control tower. Each pod had stairs running from the middle of the upper tier down to about six feet before the sliding door at the front of the pod. The stairs were metal grid, so the guards could see through them. Most of the inmates in the pods were sizing us up. I steeled myself to join the overcrowded population of sweaty, hungry, violent men. A guard descended the control-tower stairs and ordered us to wait further down the corridor. Officer Kohlbeck disappeared. We sat on our rolled-up mattresses. The men in the pods talked to us in sign language.

‘He’s swindowing you,’ Boyd said, pointing at a skinhead with a swastika and skulls on his chest.

‘Swindowing?’ I asked.

‘Talking through the windows,’ Boyd said.

‘What’s he want?’

‘To know if you’re affiliated.’

‘Affiliated?’

‘With the gangs. Probably ’cause your head’s shaved.’

‘I’m not. Can you tell him this is my first time?’

‘Sure.’ Boyd raised his right arm to almost head height, hand horizontal, palm down, and then shook his head and hand in sync.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

The skinhead waved his arms around.

‘Now he wants to know if you’re bringing any dope in.’

‘No dope, no smokes.’

The inmates kept harassing us for contraband. I was starting to regret not being a smoker. I wished I had something to throw to the wolves other than just myself.

A guard descended from the control tower and directed the African American and the hippy to D pod, the rest of us to cell 12 in A pod.

The sliding door burred open, unleashing the stink of smoke and body odour. As I entered the pod, the heavy atmosphere weighed on my lungs. In the day room were four steel tables bolted to the floor: two at either side of the metal-grid stairs. The inmates at the tables stopped playing cards and watching the small TV fixed on a wall to check us out. I felt their eyes follow me up the stairs and along the balcony.

Boyd bolted ahead to A12 and claimed the bottom bunk. David, the quiet bespectacled man, quickly put his mattress on the middle bunk, leaving me the top, the smallest slab of sleeping space. The cell was the size of a bus-stop shelter. The floor was concrete, greasy black with grime. The walls were stained brown. On one side of the cell were our three bunks separated from a steel combination toilet and sink by a thin wall. The other side consisted of just enough floor space to do push-ups on and a tiny steel table and stool bolted to the wall. The toilet at the front of the cell reeked of sewage. The front wall was metal grid – the guards and prisoners outside could see right in – so there was no privacy for the toilet. At the far end of the cell, a tiny barred window granted a view of the desert, chain-link fences and razor wire. On the top bunk, there was hardly enough room to raise my head without it hitting the ceiling, which it did as I arranged my mattress and bedding.

‘I can’t believe they put three people in these,’ I said.

‘They were originally designed for one man,’ Boyd said. ‘Rather than build more cells, they double-bunked them. Then, when they got away with that, they triple-bunked them. So now you’ve got 45 men living in a pod designed for 15.’

‘When’re they going to start putting four in a cell?’ I asked.

‘They already do,’ Boyd said. ‘There’s just enough floor space for a mattress, so the fourth guy sleeps on the floor.’

My cellmates both urinated. They were soon snoring, shrouded in white sheets like corpses awaiting burial.

For a few hours, I tried to sleep, but my heart refused to settle down, and my mind was all over the place. Afflicted by the shock of the newly incarcerated, I began hallucinating. I heard my name whispered in the day room –
English Shaun. Yeah, him. English Shaun. That’s him. Let’s get him.
I saw men line up on the balcony, preparing to give me a heart check.

I knew about heart checks from Rossetti – one of the few members of my security team who’d been to prison. He’d told me gang members usually attack new arrivals to see if they show heart by fighting back. Fighting back earns respect. Those who don’t fight back are considered weak and open to getting extorted and punked (raped).

I knew I had to fight back or, better yet, attack them first to show heart. I visualised some of the moves I’d learned in kickboxing. I saw myself punching, kicking, mowing my attackers down like Kwai Chang Caine in
Kung Fu
. No problem. In theory. I was psyched up until my mind swerved to concern for my teeth. I had invested a lot in American dentistry. Fighting multiple assailants would expose my investment to unnecessary risk. I might even have to write off a tooth or two. But if I didn’t fight now, I would lose more teeth in the long run fending off extortionists and rapists.

‘If you don’t stand up for yourself during a heart check, everyone’ll punk you,’ Rossetti had said.

Teeth be damned! I jumped off the top bunk and charged from the cell. ‘Come on, motherfuckers!’ I was slapped in the face by silence. There was no one on the balcony. I almost laughed out loud.

The day room had emptied except for four African Americans slamming dominoes down on a table with excessive force. They frowned at me in a way that said,
Just another crazy white boy wigging out on drugs again.

Out of the cell now, I figured I’d best do something appropriate. Radiating purpose, I marched down the stairs. I tried one of the phones bolted to the wall, but it didn’t accept telephone numbers. I needed instructions on how to work it. The African Americans were really hurting their dominoes, and I had to think twice before interrupting their game. ‘Any of you guys know how these phones work?’

One of them took me to one side, and said, ‘Are you on drugs, man?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘You look paranoid.’

‘I’ve been up for days in The Horseshoe.’

‘Where you from, man?’

‘England.’

‘No shit. That’s cool. Look, man, I’ll give you a heads-up ’cause you’re new here. You be running round all paranoid and shit, motherfuckers’ll be thinking you got something to hide, and you’ll get your ass smashed double quick. Get some sleep, man, and settle down.’

‘I will after I make a call.’

He picked up the phone. ‘Look, tell me the number. I’ll put you through.’