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stooped out, stopped on the top step and unfurled the physique of a bear. He cocked his head back, targeting the men over his Viking’s beard. ‘If you don’t pack it in and leave my woman alone, I’ll have any of you when we get inside those cells.’ He nodded at The Horseshoe and grinned. ‘If you think I won’t, just keep it up and see what happens.’ Wild Man laughed in a way that said he really knew how to hurt someone. That shut up most of the men.

2
    ‘Any pain, bleeding, fever, skin problems, lice, scabies, open sores?’
    ‘No,’ I said into the speak holes of a Plexiglas window in the crowded pre-intake room at the Madison Street jail.
    The old lady fired more screening questions and grimaced at my answers as if my voice pained her. The Tempe transportation officers removed our chains and left us in the custody of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies.
    ‘Take your shoes off, put your hands up against the wall and spread your legs!’ yelled a drill sergeant of a guard in the admissions’ hallway.
    Guards patted us down, examined our shoes and confiscated our shoelaces.
    ‘Step through there,’ yelled a female, pointing at a walk-through metal detector.
    On both sides of the corridor, the inmates in the intake holding cells were banging on the Plexiglas windows. Outside the cells, the guards were shouting surnames, slamming doors and cursing the inmates.
    ‘You, this way!’ a guard yelled at me.
    I walked by a Mexican woman in a black restraint chair. Limbs shackled. Chest strapped. The drool string dangling from her chin swung like a pendulum as she wriggled in the tilted-back seat. When a guard hid her head in a spit hood, she howled like a cat on fire.
    ‘I’m Attwood.’
    ‘Get in there!’ The guard pointed at one of the first holding cells in The Horseshoe.
    My heart pistoned as I entered a cell containing dozens of men, most of them huddled on the floor in a variety of uncomfortable positions. Swastikas and gang graffiti – South Side Posse Bloods, Aryan Brotherhood, South Side Phoeniquera – loomed down from the walls. I gagged on the plague-like fug.
    ‘Excuse me,’ I said, pushing through the men clustered around the door yelling at the guards. At either side of the room, rows of men on steel double bunks formed shelves of humans. Manoeuvring over the patchwork of limbs and bodies, I found a space with a urinous odour by the toilet. Resting against the filthy back wall, I slid down. I was congratulating myself on finding a place to sit until I noticed insects shaped like almonds darting on the floor. Cockroaches! I flicked one off my sneaker and rose fast. I brushed the surrounding ranks of them away with my feet. Some of them scaled the ankles of a hobo sleeping under the nearest bunk and disappeared into his trousers. I’d never been surrounded by so many people and felt so lonely. Everyone looked agitated, and I soon lapsed into the same state. Every five minutes or so, the cell door swung open and a guard ordered someone in or out. Desperate for relief from the suffocating atmosphere, I hoped my name would be called next.
    ‘Fuck you! Get up!’ said an old hobo, rising unsteadily. His face belonged on a shrunken head in a jar. He slurred a string of insults, the top of his grimy beard sinking into his mouth as he spoke.
    Grumbling, his rival rose. The cell hushed, as if the curtains had opened for a violent comedy show. His rival swung, missed and fell on a gang member.
    ‘Don’t fucking fall on me, you drunk-ass motherfucker,’ the gangbanger said, pushing one hobo into the other.
    Ranting, the hobos fell as one, tied together by their own bluster until they twisted apart.
    The disappointment in the lack of bloodshed was palpable until a black man roused by the antics of the hobos yelled, ‘Why you look at me?’ at the man sitting next to him.
    ‘What’re you talking about?’ the man said, sidling away.
    ‘He’s a crazy Cuban,’ someone said.
    On his feet now, the Cuban