When I entered the Sacramento County Main Jail on Dec. 9, 2009, I marveled at the magnitude of the building and the number of lives contained within it.
The jail had eight floors. Each floor had three pods. Each pod had two tiers. Each tier had 32 cells. And each cell housed two people. That added up to 3,072 lives, and all of their human drama.
What I didn’t know at the time was that an intricate telecommunications system linked the eight floors and all those people via the plumbing. The jail is well known for “toilet talking,” or the use of toilets as a means to communicate with each other and obtain items. Toilet talking at this jail was even featured prominently in the Netflix series “Jailbirds.”
In my time, the jail was divided to manage the sometimes explosive volatility of prison politics. The west and east floors were separated by an elevator. The Crips and the southern Mexicans were on the west side; the northern Mexicans were on the east side. The east side of the eighth floor was for orientation — where new arrivals were classified as either general population or protective custody. The west side of the eighth floor, meanwhile, was for people in administrative segregation, a form of solitary confinement not tied to discipline. And of course, there was the hole — solitary confinement.
Through this vast network of pipes that connected all these parts of the jail, people socialized, received legal assistance or family counseling, traded food and bartered for items. You could get almost anything, from a sharpened pencil to sex toys. You could even arrange for someone to run errands, like make a phone call on your behalf if you were restricted from phone privileges for an in-jail offense.
Whatever the need, toilet talking could meet it, and the whole fascinating phenomenon eased the 22 to 23 hours a day we were confined to our protective-custody cells.
Here’s how it worked.
To begin, someone tapped on your vent — the pipe connected to the toilet — and told you to “bail out.” The voice came muffled through the water, but we all knew what the request was. Bailing out involved clearing the toilet water for conversation. There were two ways to do it.
The first was by “ladeling.” All you had to do was save the plastic foam cup once filled with soup from lunch and cut it into a scoop to haul water out of the toilet. But this was time consuming.
A quicker method was “the shift.” The shift required sitting on the toilet and covering the bowl completely with your body. By shifting your buttocks to apply pressure to the bowl, you could clear the water. This formed a hollowed pipeline through which sound could travel up to about three floors away.
Once the water was cleared, you could talk to people in the cells above or below you, or pass items using a “line.” Lines are strips made out of clothing that are used to fish things through the pipe system.
The person making the line typically tied three to five spoons at six-inch intervals along the bottom to serve as weights, then sent the line down the toilet’s pipe. The person on the other end of the line did the same. When the spoons tangled with one another, the recipient pulled on the line to bring the sent items out of the toilet bowl. It was crucial to wrap the items well — for example, a tortilla bag typically made for safe passage. I saw burritos passed this way. I even saw wicks (toilet paper ropes used to smoke tobacco) that stayed dry in a Dial roll-on deodorant container.
To arrange a call while on restriction, someone sent a “text message” — a persistent knock on the side of the toilet until someone in another cell answered. As long as the receiver wasn’t also restricted, they could receive a written message via a line and place the call, sometimes for a fee.
But jail life’s necessities weren’t all that we got through the toilet bowl. This is where the dating scene played out too.
For those who were lucky, romantic attention sometimes arrived in the form of a phone call or email from a sweetheart. The single among us made do with homie hook-ups, pen pals and returning to old flames. But the most reliable way to fulfill that need for love was through the toilet bowl.
Women were also housed within the jail, on the seventh floor. The guys could communicate with them via text message. The person who answered the knocks directed the caller to an “open line,” or someone available to talk — in other words, someone who is single.
We all had identification wristbands with our photo IDs on them. These were easy to slip off and fish to ladies using a line. After arranging to link up via toilet talking, each party sent a line and flushed the toilet to connect them. This entangled the lines, so the IDs could be fished out the other side.
If a woman didn’t like what she saw, she might have passed the ID to someone else — think of it as swiping left. But if she was interested, it could be the start of a relationship that could unfold through long chats into the toilet bowl. Sometimes, finding love is as simple as keeping an open line.