Our Toilet Thesis; Two Writers Went in. This Came Out.
By: Palash Kulshreshtha and Keerthana Satheesh
Fresh out of BSc
When two friends decide to write an article together, the weirdest topic must be picked. It’s only the law of nature. Naturally, we gravitated to the idea of writing about toilets. After a brief ruffle through the history of sewage and plumbing systems, we discovered something absurdly interesting: potty talk. Before you laugh, know that the FBI once tapped sewage lines and got evidence on their suspect, who was recorded threatening to kill witnesses that might implicate him in his case.
Potty talk is when prisoners connect and talk through a “phone line” built through toilets and toilet rolls. Toilets and the sewage pipes connecting prisons become a line of communication and even exchange for the inmates, especially in multi-floor prison complexes. Amidst the harsh realities of their confinement, the toilet line is where they find life, love, joy and laughter.
To convert the toilet into a device for conversation, the water is first cleared out. The long route to this is ladeling, where a container of some sort is used to scoop out the water in the toilet until empty. The smarter route is called “the shift”. Prisoners sit on the toilet such that they are covering the whole bowl with their body, and by manipulating the pressure applied by their butt, they can clear the water in much less time. Now, with the empty, hollow toilet pipes, a prisoner can communicate with inmates above and below them. Yes, we are not making this up.
Regardless of how secluded and segregated inmates in such facilities can be kept, sewage pipes are always accessible. Inmates have been documented bartering, negotiating, providing legal counsel, or even forming romantic relationships, all through toilet talk.
For male and female inmates housed in the same building, the toilets played the role of prison Tinder. ID wristbands would be sent down the toilet. If the woman didn’t like the ID she received from the bowl of the toilet, she “swiped left” or passed it on, through the toilet towards other women. If she found herself interested, it could be the beginning of a relationship centred all around the toilet: with long text conversations all passing through the same route, where a flush can break off an argument.
Because of how well sound can travel across toilet pipes, inmates of the opposing sex can enjoy conversations they are otherwise banned from having. Living in segregated environments, they still find ways to mingle and thrive.
It’s not just talking; inmates even exchange goods through this communication line. To do this, the sender leashes the object of exchange by a cloth line, which has three to five spoons tied to it, at regular intervals, passing the line down the toilet. The recipient drops their own spoon-laden line, with the two lines entangling each other in the toilet pipe. Once securely entangled, the receiving inmate could now pull on the whole string to receive the item that was sent. There is a diversity in the objects exchanged via the toilet route, ranging from burritos to text messages and makeshift cigarettes. One had to ensure the object was well wrapped to prevent the water in the lines from ruining it.
Prisoners also learn to make fancy meals to try to emulate their life before confinement. A spread is a meal made by inmates. They may use hot plates to emulate stoves, or use ID cards to replace knives. Spreads use improvised ingredients and methods, and can be as simple or as extravagant as the inmate likes. For many, cooking in prisons is less about the taste and more about the person you once were. Crunched up Cheetos and hot water are used to make prison style tamales.
To have the boiling water used to make ramen or other popular spreads, inmates make clever use of a bunch of rather ordinary items. Inmates have access to running water and nail clippers. Any power cord can do. The process begins by attaching the clippers’ two separate metal components to the positive and negative wires of the cord, which is plugged into the power circuit. Now comes the hard part: being brave enough to drop the live clippers into the water. This is famously called a “stinger”.
Similarly, when cooking oil in an American prison was banned after boiling oil was thrown at a guard, mayonnaise came to the rescue. Boil the mayonnaise until it separates, and now you can skim the oil off the top. A former prisoner recounts purchasing ten mayonnaise jars at a time for the same. In the winters, one can keep the separated mayonnaise by the window, and everything but the oil will solidify, and now the process becomes a lot less arduous.
The cycle for each prisoner seems to be more or less the same. Clever combinations of unthreatening and mundane commodities are modified to resemble an appliance or device which is otherwise unobtainable by the innovative prisoners, before being confiscated by the authorities; only for a new invention to emerge and get confiscated.
Stowed away from society, prisoners even figure out ways to create their own economy. Cigarettes have been a classic currency in prisons, along with postage stamps, as documented in a POW camp in Nazi Germany, 1945. American prisons often use cards loaded up with cash, declaring hard cash as contraband. Keeping cash out of prisoners’ hands makes illegal activities such as bribing prison guards much harder. This pushes inmates to engage in primarily barter trade. After cigarettes were declared contraband after the banning of tobacco in 2004, many prisons now rather trade in instant ramen noodle packets. With food budget cuts for prisons in the US, many inmates rely on ramen to supplement their nutrition.
Soon after the 2004 ban of cigarettes, packets of mackerel or “macks” also became popularised. Since inmates had limits on their purchase of “macks”, there was a controlled supply of the currency. These packets of mackerel expire after 3 years, but prisoners still hold onto them as currency, calling them “money macks”. When the prison authorities confiscated a prisoner’s enormous stock of mackerel, and reintroduced the confiscated surplus into circulation, they essentially hyperinflated the currency.
“In a situation where you have basically zero control of your life, [making spread] gives you an opportunity to have some control of your situation.” — Robert Gumpert, a photographer who spent years interviewing San Francisco county jails.
Learning how prisoners make do in their restricted lives draws disturbing parallels to our own daily lives. Comparing and understanding prison life to our own daily life is not without a philosophical basis. Michel Foucault did it years ago when he claimed that as modern society progresses, we adopt prison-like expectations as our norm. And that, despite this hypothetical panopticon around us, we strive to live on our own terms. The inmates’ eclectic shenanigans involving toilets, live wires, and mayonnaise jars are essentially a call to meaning in life. Hummingbirds in captivity need to be fed through tubes resembling flowers. The caged bird flies free, as long as it is in the cage. Freedom in captivity. In a broader and more abstract sense, we are all in prisons of some kind. We derive meaning amidst ever-shifting constraints and challenges, and still find our time worthwhile. New innovations succeed older ones, and the heart stays hungry.
All of this is reminiscent of Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, in which, as the Earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable, the elites leave the Earth, leaving many behind. Dr. Ana Stelline is one of countless who couldn’t go offworld. Her parents had their passes, but she fell sick and they had to leave without her. “A life of freedom, so long as it’s behind glass.” Limited by a compromised immune system, she lives in a glass cage, away from any human contact. Ana designs memories that robots are fit with, giving them some semblance of what it’s like to be human. With a special device (remember it is 2049), she is able to conjure up her dreamy, imagined memories, which poetically gives her some semblance of what it’s like to be amongst people.
We are much like Sisyphus, rebelling in every second of our existence. Like Poland, when it vanished from the map. It is as if a verve exists, a force to pushback just as vigorously as it is pushed down, like forcing a floating device down underwater. Even in this article, I wanted to talk about humans making it home wherever they are, the other guy wanted to talk about toilets. Somehow, the balance arrives, and you get this piece that both of us are largely happy with.
Life is a damnation for humans, a hilarious curse to live, die and toil away for a purposeless, meaningless end. And yet, amidst this depressing reality, we find our ways to simply be. To laugh, dance, joke. Most of the time, we are not thinking about eternal doom. Such is the curse. Every day we must think about the next, but not too far, or we risk realising that nothing matters. This is what Martin Heidegger described using the word “Fallenness”. The hustle and bustle take over, and we forget to be. Engulfed by the exacting existence, we vanish, ceasing to exist itself.
Imagine being told that you will be spending the next 20 years of your life in prison. Your friends, family and aspirations have been snatched away from you. You live in a room, perhaps smaller than your bathroom. Despite your world turning upside down, you continue to walk against the wind. With prison inmates under the lens, we learn lessons in humanity. In the harshest of battles, with grit, tenacity and a sense of inventiveness, we stand tall, in the face of hardship and calamity. From humans in extreme environments to daily mundane tasks, the same qualities that helped us hunt for food in the African savannahs, guide us in all assortments of situations, lifelong or ephemeral.
There is perhaps an innate resolve in humans to reject fallenness. To express, unforgivably, the characters of ourselves that are human. A rejection of the norms and panopticons around us and a zest to continue with imagination. We make our life a thumping march forward, even if the destination is nothingness. Along the way, we seek our pleasures. All the vanity rejected by the gods, we collect them like barnacles in the sea.