The Indy Herald & Globe

Tent City Times, Part I.

The following is a serialized account of the short stint I did in Tent City (an infamous jail) years ago when I lived in Arizona.  Although it wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be, it is indeed nowhere that I would ever go again.  I have changed some names and numbers in order to protect the not so innocent. I tried to take notes while on the inside but didn’t want anyone to find my notes and think that I was a narc or something, I even tried to make some type of encryption code for myself when I took notes but couldn’t figure out what I was telling myself after the first sentence. So this story is all from memory. 

Ever since I got my DUI, I never really ever felt like a criminal. Certainly not when I was taken to jail for a blood test the night of my arrest, nor when I appeared in court and received my conviction. I didn’t even feel like a criminal when I was sentenced.

That changed June 2, 2001 at exactly 3:00 pm.  That was my check-in time along with about 12 others at Estrella Jail, the processing point for all of us going to Tent City. We all sat outside the jail in the blistering sun until about 7:30pm when a Detention Officer (D.O.) finally came to admit us.

That’s when it first began to sink in. I, son of Elana Pena, was a criminal. As we were processed, the D.O.’s forced us to surrender all our personal belongings to include keys, wallets, my contact solution–everything, even our tooth brushes. We were frisked by a female guard, then led by gender groups into bare ten by ten foot cells without bathroom facilities to await being fingerprinted and photographed.

From our original dozen, our ranks swelled as more men and women reported to serve their time.

It had really sunk in now. I felt like a criminal waiting there in that tiny room with some thirty men. Some of us lay on the floor, others sat with our backs to the walls. I was lucky to have been one of the first brought into the cell, so I had a sliver of a bare bench to sit on.

 I learned the phrase, “En shit’ while in that cell.  I don’t know where it came from, but everybody used it. 

“It’s all cold in here en-shit” 

“There is an orange en-shit”

“That mouse is looking for all the cheese  en-shit” 

I didn’t understand what it meant at first, so it got on my nerves.

 As I sat there cramped together with all the others, I couldn’t help but wonder, “What the f*** am I doing here? How did it come to this?”

Last year at this time, I was all set. I had all kinds of plans with a new girl, going to get a great job and live happily the rest of my life.  I had/have the greatest truest friends in the world, I was well liked and anything I wanted in my life was there, I just had to pursue it.

What happened to ruin it all? The truth was, I was the only one to blame, and I knew it. Nevertheless, part of me still felt I didn’t deserve to be in this terrible place.

We endured in that cell for two and a half hours. I dozed off. Suddenly, a commotion woke me from my cell block slumber at about 1:00 am. A guy who had spent nearly the entire the day in the Arizona sun waiting to be admitted let out a huge scream and fell atop some of the guys laying on the floor.

We all just jumped up and started screaming for the guard. The guy convulsed for about 45 seconds before he was subdued by the guards. He lay there huffing with one of the D.O.’s on him, and I couldn’t help but to think of my uncle who has epilepsy. What happened looked exactly like what is called a grand mal seizure. Even after he was subdued, the guy suffered a couple more mild convulsions while the guards moved us to the next cell.

When he finally came to with the help of smelling salts, a nurse examined him and concluded he had heat stroke. As the nurse questioned him, he admitted he’d never gone that long without alcohol. Heat stroke combined with alcohol withdrawal symptoms made for a nasty combination.

As he told the nurse he’d been drinking 12-18 beers a day for four years straight, I started worrying about myself. Would I go into withdrawal? I never drank as much as that guy, mainly a beer a day during the week. But when the weekend came around, I was always ready to go. Would my body start wondering where its’ fix was?

I worried all that first night. When would it hit me? Fortunately, it never did.

Around 2:30 that morning, the guards finally fingerprinted and photographed me. Then I was sent Tent City.

Tent City was a creation of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a no-nonsense lawman first elected to the job in 1993. He was sick of jails being cushy “country clubs” and “cozy” places for inmates. He wanted something bare bones harsh that could impart a lesson. Tent City realized that vision. It consisted of 33 male tents (22 inmates in each) and then some women tents elsewhere.

There was a huge watch tower that has a large neon light reading, “Vacancy” under it. Before it was finally closed in 2017, all inmates wore black and white striped pants and shirts, pink boxers, pink socks and pink plastic sandals.

There was a day room big enough for the entire male population, plus twenty toilets for the 726 of us. Toilet paper rolls were banned from stalls. Instead, inmates had to pull sheets off a chain as you entered the bathroom, calculating what they would need. The bathrooms were kept surprisingly clean, though the toilets had no seat ring, so the first time I sat down, I nearly fell into the bowl.

There were also twenty showers for us inmates. set up like a high school locker room. Privacy did not exist in Tent City.

That first night, the D.O.’s escorted me to the day room, which was virtually empty at that hour of the night. There, I waited another 45 minutes before a guard finally issued me a bunk. I was also issued my booking number, B446139.

I lucked out, my tent and bunk number, 20-06, led me to the bottom bunk. I walked into my new home carrying my sheets, stripes and pink towel only to discover most everyone in the tent was still awake. Some were smoking a joint, no less.

Several of the guys greeted me, most of them Mexicans. They asked if I was new and I said I was. That was followed by chicano salutations of, “Me llamo Flaco, que honda” and, “What choo in for esse?”

Then one of them offered me a drag on the joint.

Without missing a beat, I said “Hell yeah!”

Now I didn’t smoke pot, really didn’t do drugs either beyond beer. But here I was, being scoped out and I did not want to be the new guy in the tent who refused. They could think I was soft, or even worse–a narc.

I took a hit, said thanks and passed it along. They let me make my way to my bunk, where I laid out my bedding and dropped down on top of it just in time. That one hit got to me almost instantly, making me drowsy. As I started to fall asleep, my tentmates suddenly started running around me, chasing a mouse that had emerged from a sack of garbage.

That was my last image of my first night in Tent City. Before my eyes closed, I understood my reality at last: a criminal among criminals. And only I was to blame.