Stuff You Should Bring For Your Stay In Tent City

Getting convicted of a DUI in Maricopa County usually means that you will be going to the legendary lockup facility known as Tent City to do some or all of your mandatory jail time.  I have a total of 15 days and I am participating in the work release program that allows me to check out of Tent City at 8AM to work for 12 hours and then check myself back in at 8PM to stay the night in the tents. 

Since I don't have 12 hours worth of work to do each day, I will be taking a few minutes whenever I can to post some of my observations from the Tent City Experience.

Phase 1:  The Staging Area
To be admitted into Tent City you check in through The Lower Buckeye Jail (LBJ) facility in South Phoenix.  It is my understanding that most inmates in tent city are Self Surrenders, (i'd like to shorten self surrender to SS but it feels too Hitlery) meaning that as part of their sentencing they are assigned a particular date to show up to begin their jail time. 

The staging area outside LBJ has a large parking lot and a waiting area for self surrender inmates.  As I arrive at 8 AM, I see that there is a line that is about 50 people long waiting to get in to the jail. 

I'm all about being punctual to a court ordered jail sentence but if the door isn't open yet, I'm not going to stand in line like I’m waiting to get into The Ghost Bar in Vegas.  Also there is a perfectly good waiting area with about 20 benches where I can sit and chill out until somebody in the jail decides to start letting people in.

Prominent above the people waiting in line is a large bronzed sign which has a list of stuff you can bring into the facility as part of the self surrender:

·         Two towels – I decided against bringing any towels to the jail because I’ve seen American History X five times.  I don’t care if this is minimum security county jail, I’m not taking a shower in a prison.  As I found out soon enough, the towels that they allow you to bring in are put to good use as pillows while waiting in holding cells until you are processed into tent city.  It would have been nice to know that.  Maybe when they mention two towels they could also drop in the following addendum – to be used as pillows in holding cell while we botch your paperwork, lose your fingerprints, misplace 300 pound inmates, misspell your name, surf the internet, have a potluck, eat birthday cake, watch football games on TV and basically do everything you can possibly do in a prison except for process you into tent city in a timely manner.  I personally witnessed all of those things from my holding cell which was across the hall from the deputy’s lounge.  Details to follow in Phase 3.

·         One paperback book

·         One plastic flashlight c-cell or smaller

·         A non-hooded jacket or sweater – more to come on this

·         A wallet – One of the nicer deputies pulled a Velcro wallet from one of the inmates during the frisk and commented sarcastically that he hadn’t seen one of those in awhile.  One of the other inmates wondered aloud if he got it from Miller’s Oupost.

·         Up to 40 dollars in cash – This is money that can be used at the commissary.  I knew this going in, so I brought 2 twenty dollar bills.  The “commissary” turned out to be 4 vending machines that only take ones and quarters and there is a change machine that only changes ones and fives.  One of my first prison transactions was changing a twenty into 4 fives.  Not as cool as Andy Dufresne buying a rock hammer and a Rita Hayworth poster from Red but I wanted to start small and not attract too much attention from the warden.

·         A non-electric clock.  Non-electric is essential because there are no outlets in the tents.  I considered a Grandfather clock but it was a little too bulky to get into my car.  I also considered a sun dial but then realized most of the time I would be serving would take place at night so it would be rendered useless by mother nature.  I decided to forego the clock and just roll with the next allowable item on the list.

·         A wristwatch – I haven’t owned a wristwatch since about 1988 so I grabbed one at the dollar store for, get this, a dollar.  It seems to lose about 5 minutes per day.  That may sound good for a one dollar watch until you consider that in the 1600s they had timepieces that lost only 10 seconds per week.

·         A ring

·         A clear plastic bag to hold all of your stuff

I knew about this list of items ahead of time because the confinement order that tells me the date of my surrender has a phone number to call that will tell you this same list.  Why don't they just put the list on the confinement order instead of giving you a phone number to call?  Because, as you will soon find out, the folks at LBJ are masters of inefficiency.

At about 8:45, the door finally opens.  This is not a good sign because I have talked to a couple of people that have been here since 7 AM which was their assigned time.  So basically we are an hour and forty-five minutes delayed already on a process that I hear can take as long as 8-10 hours and we haven’t even started yet. 

A heavyset female deputy walks out and starts yelling in the direction of the line of people (side note: in the rest of this blog when I refer to any female deputy, you may go ahead and assume she is heavyset unless otherwise noted).  In drill sergeant fashion she tells the group to make a male line and a female line.

"Look at the list on this wall.  If you have anything on your person that is not on the list it will be confiscated!" she bellows.  She sees that some people, myself included, are wearing stocking caps or beanies.  I’d been told by multiple people who have previously served at Tent City to bring one of these to keep warm at night while sleeping in the tents.  Now she is saying that I can't have one.  Whatever.  Maybe they had a rule change and don't allow them anymore.  I decide to just get out of line and take mine back to my car. I return from my car and get into the back of the line.  She then notices that some of the inmates have on hooded sweatshirts and points at them, then points at the list.  "You may not have hooded sweatshirts or jackets", she says.  Then follows with "Tuck your hoods into your collar."

So now I'm confused.  I can't have a beanie because it’s not specifically mentioned on the list, but I can have a hooded sweatshirt that is specifically prohibited on the list as long as I'm pretending it’s not hooded by tucking it into my collar.  I think I may have found a loophole on the beanie so I ask her if I can tuck my beanie into my collar.  She doesn't answer, either because she thought I was joking (I wasn't) or because she's paid to be unpleasant.  I assume the latter. I decide to let it go and just get checked in.

Next:  Phase 2 The Frisk, Medical Clearance and Photos

Rules and Regulations For Inmates

This post was originally going to be about being frisked and medical clearance but I've truncated part of that so that I can bring you the RULES AND REGULATIONS FOR INMATES.

As you may recall from the first post, it takes us awhile just to get in to the prison.  Once they frisk us and check us for weapons, we line up and go inside the jail for the first time.  They parade us into a small room where we line up against the wall.  The room would comfortably accommodate maybe 30 people but we have 45 so some of us just sit on the floor wherever space is available. One by one, they call us up to hand in our medical/processing forms.

Amazingly, this process of handing in a form takes nearly 45 minutes.  Finally my name gets called and I walk up to hand in my forms.  On the counter is a stack of pamphlets titled Rules and Regulations for Inmates.  I grab one and take it back to my seat on the floor.

On the first page of the pamphlet there are four sections:

Section One:      Introduction

Section Two:      Americans With Disabilities Act(ADA)

Section Three:   Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003

Section Four:   WAIT A MINUTE!  WHAT WAS THAT LAST SECTION????

Sure enough, in 2003 there was apparently enough prison rape going on that the Republicans and Democrats agreed that we needed to actually draft and approve a law that dealt with Prison Rape.  My first thought is, “Wow, there must been a lot of people getting prison raped.”  My second thought is, ”I’m glad it’s not 2002.”

According to this little section, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) has established a zero tolerance policy concerning prison rape. 

This is good because that is the exact same tolerance that I personally have for being prison raped.  It looks like the MCSO and I have reached some common ground on this particular topic.

I peruse further into the pamphlet and see that there is a disciplinary section that lists “Major Offences” by inmates and how they will be dealt with.  There are 49 different major offences for which you can be sanctioned.  They are listed in order of most severe to least severe and Prison Raping someone is 7^th. I personally can’t think of 6 things inside or outside of a prison that would be worse than prison rape but apparently these 6 items are worse:

1)      Killing – Okay, fair enough.  Personally I’d rather be dead than get prison raped but I can at least see their argument

2)      Assault on inmate – Just a regular assault?  I’m absolutely certain that somebody hitting me with a chair is better than being prison raped.  I’m going to mention this on my comment card when I check out.

3)      Assault on an Employee – I can understand this one.  The sheriff wants to protect his employees.  I’m surprised that this one is less severe than assault on an inmate.  Moving on.

4)      Fighting – See item number 2.  Getting into a fight gets you more sanctions than prison rape?  Really?

5)      Threatening – Lets see...would you rather have somebody say “Hey, I’m going to prison rape you” or have them actually do it? This one has to be much further down the list.

6)      Extortion or Blackmail – I guess if it is extortion of one of their employees I could see this.  What are you going to extort out of inmate anyway, his cigarettes.

7)      Sexual Assault/Rape – So here it is.  Number 7.  I’m thinking in the 2011 reprint of the Rules and Regulations for Inmates this has to move up to at least number 3.

By the way, the actual sanctions for Sexual Assault/Rape are as follows:

                15-30 Days Disciplinary Segregation. (We know this as solitary confinement)

                Possible Permanent Removal from Work Status

                Up to 30 days on the Alternative Meal Program

I have to look up this last one about the Alternative Meal  Program.   It turns out that the Alternative Meal Program is something called Nutra-Loaf.  Nutra-Loaf meets USDA 2005 dietary guidelines blah blah blah.  It sounds like that elfin bread that the hobbits ate in Lord of the Rings.  Whatever it is, I don’t know if replacing the prison’s normal crappy food with some other crappy food is enough of a deterrent. 

I can just see some guy getting cornered in the shower and saying, “Ahem… Umm… Bubba…Mr. Bubba…may I call you Bubba?  I  am compelled to tell you that if you prison rape me, you may be subject to the alternative meal plan.”

But I digress.  Back to the business at hand, which is trying to get through processing.

After turning in my medical forms and sitting around for about another 45 minutes and thoroughly studying the Rules and Regulations for Inmates, my name gets called again.  This time it is for a photo which will eventually end up on my ID card in Tent City.  Where do I go to get my photo taken, you ask?  At the same exact counter where I was 45 minutes ago to turn in my medical paperwork.

It is now about 10:45.  It took an hour and forty-five minutes for 45 people to hand a form to somebody and get a mug shot taken, both of which could have apparently been done at the same time since they take place at the same location.  I’m thinking if this was a privately run enterprise you could get everyone through in about a half hour.  I don’t realize it at the time, but this is as good as it’s going to get for the next 24 hours, because next comes:

Phase 3:  The Holding Cell

The Holding Cell

The Holding Cell

After we’ve finally completed the process of turning in our medical forms and getting our pictures taken we are lead into a large corridor.  Heading north down this hallway are 3 holding cells on the left hand side of the corridor.

About 25 of us are put into holding cell number 3.  Along the right wall of the cell is a concrete slab to be used for a bench.  The slab has enough room for about 10 people to sit.  On the left wall is a shorter bench that can seat maybe 7 or 8.  Next to the bench on the left wall is a short privacy wall which barely hides a stainless steel toilet. 

When I say that the toilet is stainless steel, I am referring to the actual material used to form the toilet.  The actual toilet is far from stainless.  In fact, it is spotted up like a windshield after you drive through a field of grasshoppers at about 90 miles per hour.  The kicker though, is that this dysentery covered commode also doubles as a drinking fountain.  Yes.  I just said that the toilet is also a drinking fountain.  Conceptually, it really is just a disgusting idea.  The prison also has combination toothbrush/dingleberry combs that you can buy at the commissary.

One of my cell mates bravely goes over to get a drink from the fountain part and jokes that when he turns the fountain on, the water level in the bowl goes down.  Yuck.

I decide that I am going to wait until one of my cell mates is midway through taking a leak, and then I’m going to go stick my head under his elbow and get a drink from the fountain.  “Sorry Buddy.  Mind If I get in here.  I’m parched.”  This should make for maximum awkwardness in the use of this bizarre invention.

The toilet of course, has no seat.  No toilets in prisons have seats.  Apparently the traditional toilet seat that folds down has been used as a weapon too many times in the history of prison toilets, so now they just don’t come equipped with seats.  It is basically just a metal receptacle with a metal backing that is the refill tank.  There are two buttons on the backing.  One button flushes the toilet, the other button engages the drinking fountain.  The flow of water from the drinking “fountain” is not really a fountain at all.  It is actually just a dribble of water that runs down the front of the metal.  If you were really thirsty you could probably put your mouth on it to get some water…did I mention that it’s covered with unidentified splatter stains?

We’ll come back to the toilet later.

So now we have 17 people sitting on these concrete slab benches and 8 people sitting or lying down on the floor since we have no more bench space.  Now begins the waiting.

The intake process, I have heard, can take up to 12 hours.  I arrived at 8 AM.  By the time we all get shoehorned into this holding cell it is only 11AM so I could be looking at 9 more hours of just sitting here.

For the first 3 hours in “the tank” as we call it, there is pretty raucous conversation amongst us inmates, everyone pitching in their story about being arrested.  Some are contrite and realize that they shouldn’t have been driving drunk, others are bitter, still arguing that they got jobbed by the cops. 

A couple of stories are told, some jokes are made and sometimes I almost forget that we are here to go to jail.  We get to laughing so hard at some of the stories and the follow up comments it is actually fun at times.  But after the stories are all played out and our asses are sore from sitting on concrete floors and slabs for 3 hours we are all getting weary. 

There's one guy in our group that I dub Tour Guide, due to his encyclopedic knowledge of the booking process at Tent City.  He’s very funny and has obviously been here a few times for various transgressions.  At around 2:30PM one of the other inmates, realizing that Tour Guide is a wealth of knowledge, asks his opinion on how long we will be waiting before we get to Tent City. 

“There’s no f**king way we’re getting to the tents before 11.”  He tells us. 

A chorus of “no way” and “you’re nuts” comes from the cell but I have a bad feeling that Tour Guide knows what is up and that we had better just get used to it.

After Tour Guide's disheartening comment I stick my nose into my book for a couple of hours.  It’s now about  4:30 PM and I’m getting hungry but even worse…I’ve got to go the bathroom.

The problem with having to go the bathroom is not just the disgusting toilet.  I only have to take a leak so I won’t even have to touch that foul piece of machinery.  The problem is that I’ve got stage fright.  Basically I find it almost impossible to go the bathroom in an open area with a bunch of people milling around.  In doing research for this blog post I find that this is an actual medical condition called parauresis. 

Parauresis is caused by a problem with your prostate or it is caused by a mental hang up related to one of the following:

1)      Fear of exposure of an inadequate or small penis

2)      Fear of being judged for not being able to urinate.  This is often rooted in a past memory or experience of not being able to produce a sample for a drug test.

Clearly, my parauresis is caused by option number 2.  The reason I know this is that I am completely comfortable with the fact that I have a small penis.

Whatever the cause, it doesn’t matter.  The result is the same.  In a situation like this if I try to go, I will be unsuccessful and my bladder will continue to fill and cause me bitter discomfort until I am finally able to use a civilized bathroom that is not surrounded by a bunch of prisoners.

I continue to hold it in until about 6PM.  It is so painful now that I have to at least try to go the bathroom.  Three other inmates have tried unsuccessfully to use the bathroom in the past hour which lets me know that this parauresis deal is an epidemic. 

By the way, why don’t we have a pill for this?  The pharmaceutical companies can get you a pill to keep your toenails from being yellow or keep your legs from being restless but they can’t produce anything to prevent your bladder from bursting?

My attempt is pathetic.  As I approach the latrine, I am imagining Niagara Falls, a hot shower, spillways at Hoover Dam, anything with water.  Nothing.  As soon as I stand there wanting to go, nothing happens.  I go back to my seat vanquished by the toilet bowl just like the three guys before me.  If this was a baseball game, the inmates would be the Pittsburgh Pirates and the toilet is Roy Halladay just mowing them down. 

We receive a meal around 7PM.  I won’t go into that monstrosity right now because I will have a full post devoted just to the food.  Let’s just say, I thought I might try a different strategy to conquer my parauresis. 

The meal comes with this brand of green koolaid type stuff called Chubs.  I can’t even find this crap with a google search on the internet but somehow they got a contract with Maricopa County to supply drinks to the prisoners.

Anyway, I figure if I chug one of these things, it will make me go just from the added pressure.  Basically, I’ll have to go so bad that it will overcome my parauresis affliction.

Well that doesn’t work.  All that does is make my bladder more full and I still can’t go.

Over the next couple hours I try to go two more times unsuccessfully.

It is now 11 PM and according to Tour Guide we are probably going to be staying the whole night in here.  I ask him how he knows this.  He points out that none of us have been finger printed yet.  In order to get in to Tent City we all have to be finger printed and then given an ID card.  We’ve been sitting in this cell at Lower Buckeye Jail for 12 hours now and it looks like we may be here until morning. 

The battle with my bladder rages on until about 4:45 AM.  I’ve now had to go the bathroom for a full 12 hours.    The other inmates have been trying to grab some sleep in shifts on the floor.  Sit an hour, sleep an hour etc.   I don’t even try to sleep because my stomach is just killing me.

My stomach is now hard to the touch due to my overinflated bladder.  It feels like a drum.  A drum covered with fat, but still a drum.  Finally, on my fifth attempt of the evening, I am able to go the bathroom. Apparently necessity has cured all of us, because in the past hour several of the other sufferers have been able to “let go” as well.

I sit back down on my bench and immediately fall asleep which is really saying something because I am just sitting straight up against a brick wall.  Not exactly my optimal sleep number setting.  The abdominal relief combined with the fact that I’ve been awake since 6 AM the day before just knocks me out.  About 5 minutes after I fall asleep, our door rattles and I wake up with a jolt, hopeful that we are being moved forward in the process somehow.  Nope. Just some dick that works for the jail kicking our door as he walks by because he thinks it’s funny to wake up the sleeping prisoners.  The joke's on him.  He has to work here, I’ll be gone in 15 days.  F**king loser.

At 6:15 AM one of the guards that frisked us the day before walks past our cell.

“Holy crap!” he says.  “These guys are still in here?”

He seems genuinely concerned about the fact that we’ve been stuck in this same cell for almost 20 hours. 

About 20 minutes after that we finally start getting finger printed.  I’m just glad to be moving out of the cell, even though it's just for 2 minutes and it's only across the hallway.

Tour Guide says it will still be about another 3-4 hours before we get to Tent City. After the grueling evening of staying up all night with abdominal pain, 4 more hours of sitting around doesn’t sound too bad right now.

You know that you’ve had a shitty day when the best thing that can happen to you is finally getting to Tent City.

Next:  Arrival At Tent City

How I Got Arrested

This section was supposed to be about finally arriving at Tent City but after the hellish night spent in the holding cell for 22 hours, the actual arrival to Tent City is somewhat anticlimactic and I’ll probably cover it as a foot note in a future blog.  Besides, it’s my blog so I’ll write whatever the hell I want.  So I’m going to go talk about how some of my new friends from Tent 49 got their DUIs and then I will tell you how I got mine.

From the first moment that people get out of their cars and wait in the self surrender area at Lower Buckey Jail, they start comparing notes on how each of them got here.  As expected, almost everyone is in for DUI.  What I didn’t expect was the wide variety of ways to get a DUI.  To really explain some of the stories you have to know some basics of the DUI laws and penalties.

There are several different degrees of DUI in Arizona:

Impaired to the slightest Degree – This means that even if you only had one drink and your blood alcohol content (BAC) is .03 you can still get a DUI if they determine that your driving infraction was due to alcohol.  Well guess what?  If you get pulled over after having just one drink they will always determine that is was due to alcohol because the state gets a couple thousand bucks for a DUI as opposed to 125 dollars for a speeding ticket.  If you are just a crappy driver and take a shot of Binaca to freshen your breath you can probably get this kind of a DUI in Arizona. 

DUI with blood alcohol level in excess of .08– This is driving while intoxicated.  Somehow, .08 has been determined to be the level at which one is intoxicated.  At .08, someone like me can juggle chainsaws and live cats while riding  a unicycle but some people just can’t hold their liquor so .08 is the number they’ve arrived at. Seriously, that's only about 3 beers.  Intoxicated?

DUI with blood alcohol level of .15 BAC or greater – This is an extreme DUI which is the category of my DUI.  The fines just about double and the minimum jail time jumps from 1 day to 30 days.   At .15 BAC some people are puking drunk.  I don’t drink anymore since this whole thing happened, but at the time, due to the fact that I am about 220 pounds and I used to drink frequently, this is about the point where I am starting to get a buzz. 

DUI with a blood alcohol of .20 BAC or greater – This is called a super extreme DUI.  There are more fines , longer jail terms and longer driving suspensions than for the extreme DUI.  Pretty much everyone at .20 or above is well on their way to being hammered. 

On to some of the stories. 

One guy tells us how he was going 119 miles an hour down 51^st Avenue when he saw the lights in his rearview mirror.  He said he immediately pulled over, got out of the car and walked over to the back door of the police cruiser, handed his keys to the cop and put his hands out to get cuffed so that he could be taken down to the station.  He was only at .07 BAC so he got 1 night in Tent City and just a regular DUI.  They dropped his wreckless driving charge when he pled guilty to the DUI. 

As I will get to later, I was going 35 mph in a 35 speed limit zone and I got 30 days in Tent City.  This maniac gets one day for going 119 miles an hour and I get 30 days because I can handle my liquor better than him?  I admit I was wrong to be driving and I have learned my lesson but surely this guy is more of menace on the streets than me. 

Tour Guide, whom you’ve met in previous posts, got a Super Extreme DUI with a .329 BAC.  The only reason he got a Super Extreme DUI, is because they didn’t have Super Duper Extreme DUIs on the books yet.  They might create a whole new tier and name it after him.  It’s really almost impossible to get that drunk.  Most people would pass out or actually die before they got to .329.  That’s a hall of fame batting average, not a BAC level.  I went to an online BAC calculator to find out what it takes to get to .329.  23 beers in four hours would put you at around .329 or you could do it quicker drinking shots or mixed drinks.  Whatever combination you use, you've got to be trying to get drunk to get to .329.

The most bizarre story was the guy that was sitting down just about to eat a burrito at Filibertos when 4 officers walked in and arrested him for a DUI.  Apparently a good citizen saw this guy weaving down the street and called 911. She gave them his license plate number and told them that he had pulled into a Filibertos.  They found his car in the parking lot.  He had the keys in his pocket.  Bang.  DUI.  You can actually get a DUI if your not in your car and its not running because they can test your BAC and retrograde it back to when you pulled in to Filibertos.

By the way, it doesn’t surprise me at all that a drunk guy was at Filibertos.  I’ve been to Filibertos near my house probably 10 times.  Haven’t been sober once, nor was anybody else in Filibertos sober during any of my visits.  I’m pretty sure that whole chain would shut down if it wasn’t for drunk people eating there.  In fact, the 911 operator was probably just going to blow off the good citizen that called in until she heard her say that the guy pulled into a Filibertos.  He must be drunk.

Another  strange scenario involved 5 college kids that pulled into a Circle K to, of course, get more booze on their way home from the bar.  They were being loud and obnoxious so apparently somebody got the cops there.  They weren’t in their car yet so the cop asked who was driving.  They all clammed up and didn’t say anything which sounds like a good strategy. 

He gave them all DUIs

Since they were all drunk, one of them had to have intent to drive.  Since they wouldn’t talk he nailed all of them.  It ended up that one of them took the hit so the others could get off.

My story isn’t quite as exciting as going 119 miles a hour down a residential street or having a burrito commandeered by some cop.

I was just watching Sunday Night Football.  The game got over and of course I decided to stay out for 2-3 more hours because it was Sunday after all.  I was playing golden tee with a friend and having a few Smidwick’s.  (For those of you unfamiliar with Golden Tee, its a video golf game).  In retrospect, the Smidwick’s should have been a sign that I had too much to drink.  I was pretty much a miller light kind of guy.  I would only drink “flavored beer” on rare occasions. 

Anyway, I have no idea how many I had.  I didn’t even feel buzzed.  That’s the problem when you go out and drink 3 or 4 times a week.  It gets to be normal feeling so you don’t really know when you’ve had a lot to drink which is why the only really safe policy to avoid a DUI is to just have nothing.  We wrapped up our game of Golden Tee around 11:00PM and decided to call it a night.  I got in my car and headed home. 

When I got onto the road I noticed that a cop started following me almost immediately so I was being extra careful.  Then they turned on their lights.  My first and only thought was, “I’m screwed.”

I pulled into a Best Buy parking lot.  Here’s a pro tip if you are planning to get a DUI.  If you pull over into a parking lot, they won’t tow your car.  This will save you some money so that your DUI will only cost you 5900.00 instead of 6000.00.  They did their field sobriety tests on me.  Even though I didn’t really feel drunk, I barely remember these tests so I’m guessing I didn’t do great.  I tried explaining to them that I just shot a 22 under on golden tee less than 5 minutes before but I don't think that they cared. 

Then they had me blow into the breathalyzer.  .176 BAC.  Whoops.  That sounds high.  I demand a recount. 

They don’t use breathalyzer’s as the final figure with which to convict you of a DUI because breathalyzers can be inaccurate due to a number of factors.  They use the breathalyzer for probable cause to cite you on the spot for DUI.  For trial purposes they take your blood. 

Well I was glad to hear that.  I know that I’m going to get a DUI at this point but I can try to just get a normal one instead of an extreme.  My blood report would not be available for several weeks after the arrest but I knew that the breathalyzer had to be wrong and it turns out that it was wrong.  My real BAC was .184.  Shit.

When I was pulled over, i was going 35 mph in a 35 mph zone.  I was pulled over for driving in my lane but not driving directly down the middle of my lane.   These are not my words.  These are the cop’s words that are on my ticket and in the police report. 

As anyone can see from the police report, at .184 BAC I’m driving pretty well.  Going the speed limit.  Staying in my lane.  Hell, at .184 BAC I’m still a better driver than anyone texting, all teenagers, Asians, and most senior citizens. 

Unfortunately for me this not-driving-directly-down-the-middle-of-your-lane infraction is a legitimate reason to pull someone over according to Arizona traffic laws.  If it was 11:00AM no one would ever get pulled over for this, but since it was after 11:00PM they pulled me over.  After 11:00 PM, if you pull over 10 cars on the road, more than half of the drivers will have been drinking.  And if those cars just pulled out of a bar, like mine did, then it’s probably 99/100.  It’s like shooting fish in a barrel for the cops.  They just need to find some reason, any reason to pull you over.  Once they do, if you’ve been drinking, you’re toast. They were camped out just down the street waiting for someone to leave the bar parking lot.  On this night, I happened to be that guy.

After the .176 breathalyzer and the field sobriety tests that I surely aced, they cuffed me and drove me over to a mobile processing station at a QuickTrip convenience store.  They took my mug shots, drew my blood, had me sign some papers, took my keys and got me a cab.

When I got home, my wife was still up.  She was really excited to hear the news.  I pointed out to her that in the past month and a half I’d taken cabs home from bars several times when I had had too much to drink.  To which she said, “That’s just great.  You’ve been so drunk that you’ve had to take cabs home several times in the past month.”

Ouch.  That was a solid counter punch.  I decided to just grab my pillow and go to the couch before she came up with any other really good points about what a dumbass I had been.

That was the last day that I drank anything and I still can’t believe my last beer was a Smidwick’s.  Not that there’s anything wrong with Smidwick’s, it’s just so out of character for me.  Anyway, that’s the beginning of my Tent City story. 

One thing I want to make clear is that I am not bitter about being pulled over and given a DUI.  I joke about Tent City and the DUI laws but I’m glad for it in many ways.  I’ve quit drinking.  My home life is better.  My work life is better.  I’m a better husband and father, I’m generally happier now than before I got arrested and I’m pretty sure my wife has quit interviewing divorce attorney’s.

I've still got a lot of material from Tent City. 

Next Post will be about the food and inmate ingenuity.

Tent City Food

This week’s post will be about the Tent City Cuisine.

Food as defined by www.dictionary.com  is “more or less solid nourishment, as distinguished from liquids.”

Whoever submitted that utilitarian definition must have spent time in Tent City.  I really couldn’t describe Tent City food any better than that.  It is a completely and utterly unremarkable and flavorless form of sustenance.

Does it look gross?  Yes. But if you can get past the appearance, it doesn’t really taste like much at all.  The flavor has somehow been removed.  Basically it is, more or less, a solid that provides nourishment.  The best thing you could say about what they serve in Tent City is that if you eat it, it will go into your stomach, form a bolus in your intestines and eventually form an equally unremarkable turd.  

The first food I received during my Tent City extravaganza was during the first day’s marathon check in procedure. Having reported at 8AM that morning, by 7PM on that first night, it had been over 12 hours since I had eaten anything.  I know some of my cell mates hadn’t even had breakfast so they were probably going on 24 hours.  We were all pretty damn hungry.

Finally some food showed up.  The first thing I was given to eat was something the inmates called a Ladmo Bag.  If you grew up in Arizona you will remember the Ladmo Bag as the paper lunch sack filled with junk food that was provided by sponsors of the Wallace and Ladmo Show which was the morning kid’s show that ran for 35 years from 1954 to 1989.

This Ladmo Bag at Tent City is a clear plastic bag filled with the following items:

·         2 wheat rolls that are sealed inside their own plastic bag yet are somehow completely dried out when you bite into them.  They are shaped sort of like mini Nerf footballs and are roughly the same flavor.

·         1 or 2 pieces of citrus. This is the only thing in the jail that consistently tastes good because they haven’t yet found a way to extract the flavor from it.  I’m sure they’re working on it.  I had an orange in my bag and I traded it for 2 grapefruits which was my first jailhouse transaction. 

·         An oatmeal cookie with cream filling.  It looked like a Little Debbie but I’m sure that they would never go for a top-shelf item like that.

·         Peanut butter in a plastic ramekin.    I don’t know where they got this peanut butter.  It was more like peanut sauce.  If you’ve ever been to a mediocre Thai restaurant, you may have experienced that thin, wet, peanut salad dressing that they drizzle over a couple of pieces of iceberg lettuce and call it a salad.  Well that’s about what my peanut butter was like.  More disturbing than that, was the guy right next to me had really clumpy dry peanut butter in his Ladmo Bag.  I guess that he got the last scoop out of the peanut butter container in the food factory, so they had to bust open a fresh 55 gallon drum of peanut butter for my serving and all the oil was sitting on top.  Even though my peanut butter container had a lid on it, whoever prepped my Ladmo Bag managed to get this greasy peanut stuff to coat everything else in my bag.  Just disgusting.  And of course I ate it all.

The next morning while still waiting in our cell we received another Ladmo bag.  It had all the same items except they replaced the greasy/oily/dry/clumpy peanut butter with a piece of meat of some kind.  I’m not kidding.  I really don’t know what it was.  The only reason I tasted it was because I knew already that I was going to write a blog about my experience so I wanted to make sure I took it all in.  It tasted vaguely like ham but the meat was more grey than ham and it had striations and lines running through the meat from one side to the other.  It looked like somebody put a piece of ham on the ground, donned track shoes and then did the moon walk on it. 

Not to be outdone by the monkey that sloppily got peanut butter all over everything in my previous Ladmo Bag, the food factory worker that packed this Ladmo Bag was able to get this ham-like substance to ooze moisture all over the rest of the stuff in my bag.  Fortunately, I was not nearly hungry enough to take more than just the one research bite of this meat entrée.

The next meal was dinner on Sunday night.  How delightful.  Sunday dinner.  Every night they serve a “hot” meal.  Hot being a relative term.  Is it hotter than say, Pluto or liquid nitrogen? Yes it is.  Is it hotter than the peanut butter sauce or the enigmatic meat slice that was in the Ladmo Bag.  Not really. It was actually just room temperature.  The criteria for calling something a hot meal is if it would be served hot in the outside world.  They could give you ice-cold chili and call it a hot meal because usually chili is served hot.  Since they serve it in a four compartment heat tray and its food that theoretically is supposed to be hot, they call it a hot meal.

Here is what the Sunday night hot meal consisted of:

Meat stew.  Again, I can’t get any more specific on the meat but we’ll go ahead and say it was something cow related.  There were slivers of meat mixed with slivers of vegetable all folded into a thick, mucousy looking, yellow, I don’t know, I guess the word would be gravy. 

The next compartment had an orange vegetable.  You really couldn’t tell what it was by looking at it.  It could have been pumpkin, carrots or sweet potatoes if you only gave a visual inspection.  By tasting it, you could eke out just enough flavor to realize that they used to be carrots.

Then there is the big section of the tray filled with beans and another one of those famous wheat rolls I told you about earlier.  When these rolls originally come off of the Nerf assembly line they are probably 2 inches thick.  The stackable dinner trays are only 1 inch thick.  In order to allow the trays to stack properly they have to squish the rolls down into the beans.  You end up with your Nerf roll half submerged in these beans.  A normal roll would get soggy under such conditions, but you can pull the Nerf roll out of the beans, wipe off of the bean residue and your roll is still bone dry.  It really is amazing.  Its the opposite of a Sham-wow.

The beans have absolutely no flavor.  It’s as if they have a flavor extracting centrifuge that they pour the food into, it spins around at 3000 miles per hour until all spices, nutrients and flavor have been freed from the food and then they replace it with wood filler.  I am convinced that they make a concerted effort to make the food worse than it would be than if they just opened cans of the cheapest, most low rent beans you could find and threw them in a pot. 

Luckily, I was on work release during my stay at Tent City which meant that I got to leave at 8AM on weekdays and stay out until 8PM.  I would obviously wait until I leave to eat breakfast.  Spend my day at work.  Go home and eat dinner.  Check myself back in with a full stomach. Rinse. Repeat.

The problem is when I check in on Friday night, I have to be in there until Monday morning.  I’m not going to go on a hunger strike but I’m also not going to eat the crap that they serve.  Luckily we have the commissary.

When Tour Guide mentioned the commissary, I was picturing maybe a small store with hot dogs, nachos, cokes, sandwiches etc.  Someplace you could go to get food instead of eating the excrement that they were serving to us as “hot meals”.  It turns out the commissary was actually just a bank of 6 vending machines. 

According to my fellow inmates, the machines are owned and operated by members of Sheriff Arpaio’s family.  No wonder the free food that they serve is so bland.  The more people that refuse the meals means more money into the vending machines.  With 400 to 500 inmates spending probably 2-3 bucks each on the vending machines each day, the machines must generate easily over a half million dollars a year in revenue and probably 250,000 in profit.

The machines have the normal stuff you might expect like snickers and butterfingers but there is one that has exotic items like a bag of chili, a ham and cheese sandwich, tortillas and honeybuns.  These are all premium items and if you aren’t one of the first 50-60 people to get into the commissary after the machines are restocked you may not get one.

Tour guide showed me how to make an actual hot meal with items from the commissary.  He bought the chili from the vending machine then he took it to the laundry room and set it behind the vent of one of the dryers to heat it up.   It actually does get the chili warmer than any of the hot food that is served.  That’s good eating in Tent City.  I suggested that he just throw the chili packet directly in the dryer and then it would get even hotter.  Of course, he already knew this method but he didn’t want to throw his chili in with somebody else’s clothes.  Who says prisoners aren’t civilized?

During the weekends I got by on grapefruits, snickers, jerky, oatmeal cookies and peanut M&Ms.  As one final indignity of being in Tent City, their vending machines sold RC Cola instead of Coke or Pepsi.  I can take a lot of shit, but this needs to be reported to amnesty international.  We as inmates will pay the extra 10-15 cents for Coke or Pepsi.  Throw us a bone here.

I did discover that you can lose a lot of weight with the grapefruit, snickers, jerky, M&M diet.  I would go in to jail on Friday night weighing in at about 220 pounds.  When I would get home on Monday morning I would be at around 212 pounds.  That’s from one weekend of eating just grapefruits and junk food.  Its all about portion control.  In order to eat the quantity of food that I usually eat, I would have had to spend 25 dollars on the vending machine, which I wasn’t about to do.

Needless to say, I am glad that the Tent City experience is over.  While I was in there, I met people that made one mistake and have learned their lesson but there are plenty that have been in on four or five different occasions for various issues including multiple DUI offenses.  Some of them are becoming institutionalized, which means they have become so accustomed to the routine of

the Tent City life that they are becoming incapable of managing a life outside.  Fortunately that will never happen to me.

I’ve got to go now because my daughter is waking up and I need to throw some pancakes in the dryer for breakfast.