There are many ways to meet women.
Church, coffee shops, grocery stores, dating apps, mutual friends, and then there’s the Jefferson County Jail.
I discovered that when human beings are deprived of ordinary communication, they’ll invent extraordinary alternatives.
Somebody in the Jefferson County Jail apparently invented the toiletphone, and I was there to witness it. Unfortunately.
The men’s jail was on the sixth floor, the women’s jail directly beneath us on the fifth.
Every evening, men up and down our cell block began shouting toward the fifth floor.
“OH, NOW FIF’ FLO’! OH, NOW FIF’ FLO’!”
That’s what they hollered. Just that peculiar call, repeated over and over.
And in our cell, the name I kept hearing was KK.
I never saw her, but I heard her voice.
Elsewhere, I could hear other men shouting, but I couldn’t hear the women they were trying to reach. I couldn’t tell you who was talking to whom, or whether every call got an answer.
All I knew was that our cell had KK, and the guys were interested.
But while all this was happening, I was lying on the floor, face to the wall.
I didn’t have a bunk. Some nights I was directly on the floor. Other nights I had a tiny plastic mat and a blanket, and I was terrified.
Today I can laugh about it. I can laugh about the inventiveness of people refusing to let concrete and steel stop them from reaching out.
But I cannot laugh about how frightened I was. Both things are true.
People need people, even on the fifth flo’, especially on the sixth.
JC
