“I’m doing my best, but some days are brutal,” says the 2nd floor, rear Glass House toilet, the most-popular by volume.
“My brother works over at the Ritz Carlton on Collins. Second floor lobby, Men’s just like me, but that’s where the similarity ends. Most people don’t even know his room exists. He rarely has to deal with anything too nasty,” says Tito the toilet, the name he adopted after his favorite Motown star (“It sounds like Toto, a great brand”), “most don’t sit. We call them a ‘stand-and-zip’, I think you call them ‘taking a piss’, but nobody takes anything so that expression confuses us.”
It’s not all roses at the Ritz, though. “He’s always complaining about bits of cilantro — he can’t stand cilantro. I’m fine with it, which is funny because supposedly that’s genetic and we’re identical. Maybe I’m just immune to everything after years of this.”
FCI Miami, however, sends Tito much tougher work than a few bits of cilantro. “I do my best to swirl things clean on the first shot, I’ve got a pretty tough shell, but it’s just impossible. Are they feeding these guys glue? Is that why it sounds like they’re fighting their own bodies?”
“The constant flushers are a problem.” Old-timers in prison flush after every fart or drop, convinced the flushing sucks the smell into the pipes. “Like, we spray up… a good flush is releasing droplets, not just sucking them down. You’re just spraying your tush with your own waste, my fellow child of G-d.”
Tito has found religion in prison, too. “There’s not much to do, but sit and think. I mean, where do you get your best ideas? We’re here 24/7, so imagine the thinking we do… and guys leave books. I went through a Kant period, Hume didn’t do it for me, but even Kant… I think the New Age-y quantum guys are onto something, but then again we always think of G-d in the framework of our latest technology. They used to think of G-d as a firemaker, then thousands of years later he’s a Watchmaker, then a computer, now He’s some sort of Large Language Model (LLM), some sort of AI… for a while we were all convinced G-d was one of those smart Japanese toilets, but that’s just self-centered, we realized. The world is not one big toilet, though the galaxies do swirl like one, and things spiral into black holes, so maybe! Everything’s a fractal”
His deep faith is a far cry from the humor he’s subject to on an hourly basis, he laments. “Toilet humor. The worst.
Oh, you’re going to ‘Feed the warden?’ You ‘have a pickle in the hopper?’ Please, that honestly feels anti-
Semitic… to besmirch pickles like that. The Jewish guys have it bad enough.”
“The Jewish guys?”
“Whatever they’re feeding them, man… I know they’re not supposed to pray on the toilet, but I’m pretty sure that’s what the Psalmist meant when we wrote, ‘From the depths I cry out’ I’ve had dead animals flushed down me that were fresher and more organic than the meat they’re feeding the Jewish guys. ‘Meat’ is a generous term… some sort of soy patty with a touch of meat, I think…”
“Sorry man. That’s what they feed us. I didn’t know you were conscious.”
“It’s all good. Every day I thank the Lord I’m not a shower tile in this place. Dear G-d, what a house of sin those stalls must be. You learn to just not pay attention, to not notice… that’s the art of prison survival, I guess, not noticing things right in front of you. A few soy nuggets aren’t worse than Planned Parenthood’s busiest month being bested in a hour down the shower drain.”
Who knew a toilet could be a pro-Life foodie. But he’s right about the food (I decide not to dig into his thoughts on birth control … I’ll still need to visit him and that topic is a tinderbox) — the diet and nutrition at FCI, Kosher and non, has room for improvement.
Some guys struggle with their weight at FCI, where carbs are in everything, and Tito has his struggles, too.
“I wish the commissary would run out of Honey Buns some days, because I’m an industrial toilet, but some of these guys should be squatting on a forklift. I get that there’s not much to do here, it’s an open bathroom, I get the same TV as these guys… after 10 hours of Fox News you just want to fall into a sugar coma, but man, when you’re exceeding the weight limit of an American Standard industrial, it’s time to look yourself in the scratched-up mirrors”
Being a toilet in a prison is being part-therapist, part confidant, he adds. “Guys cry a lot. It’s an open bathroom, so usually it’s just a whimper. They’ll flush to mask the sound. Sometimes I’ll drag out the flush or throw in a blurb when a guy’s really hurting. We’re all One, you know. I can’t tell you why we’re here, exactly, or how, but that much is clear.”
The same, he says, is true for the staff toilet, “The Counselor and Case Managers sometimes just come in to get a break… sometimes they don’t even sit down. They just lock the outer door and breathe slowly. Sometimes they drag it out — it’s their own bit of solitude. “A lot of being a toilet is just being a safe space to breathe and meditate,” Tito says, “And, hey, if it’s not a safe place to breathe, that’s on you.”
“But,” he adds, “I hear the staff toilet is a lot safer a place to breathe. Case Manager Kost — I think that’s his name, the tag’s a bit tough to see from my angle, you know… looks like Matt Damon? Yeah — he brings Pine Sol in with him sometimes, too. Counselor Martin came in a few weeks ago to cry about a lost bulldog from Georgia.”
“That’s his favorite sports team, the Georgia Bulldogs,” I explain, “they lost and ended their season.”
“That makes sense, well… not as much as crying over losing an actual bulldog, but… man, honestly I don’t get the sports thing, but I guess it’s the one area left where it’s safe for a man to express emotion, especially in a prison.
That’s all you’ve got, sports and the toilet. Tell your wife your real pain and you’ll be back here with me crying for a third reason.”
Tito, too, says the guys have changed over time. “Being a prison toilet, you know you’re going to be flushing stuff down that’s not human, that’s being hidden, ‘contraband’ they call it, but the stuff has gotten dirtier and more deadly, and the guys flushing it look sicker and sadder,” he explains, “It’s less about the party and more about avoiding life, and to me, that’s really sad, a step backwards for society.”
“Would you say society is going down the toilet?” I joke.
He looks at me with a serious face, “We don’t appreciate those jokes. This is a job. We do it with pride, and I see myself as a government worker, with all the responsibility and honor that comes with it. I’m a toilet of the United States of America’s Department of Justice and I’m exactly as honorable and necessary as everyone else who works for the DOJ.”
I know I shouldn’t prod him, but I can’t resist. “A Federal worker, eh? You get great Health insurance? Dental?”
“I’m just a toilet, man.”
“Sounds like you’re much more than that… therapist, confidant, protector, cleanup guy…”
“Yeah, I guess, you know, I never really thought of myself that way…”
He pauses. A moment of silence stretches just past the point of comfort, and then he opens up.
“All this time, there’s this kid in me, this baby toilet fresh form the factory, feeling down on himself for getting sent to a prison when his brother’s at the Ritz… you get it. We’ve got a sister in a luxury condo, some 22-year-old chick barely uses her, shits mouse pellets, she tells us… but here I am, they gotta plunge me out a few times a day and sometimes they don’t think I can be saved, but I always pull through… I feel worn… I wonder why G-d put me here… but, yeah, I guess we’re here to help, and I guess being able to lift the burdens of so many men is what “It’s true,” Tito the toilet says, after a pause, a glimmer appearing on his rim, “The way to lift yourself up is to uplift others.”
==========
Group message. Draft 1.0. You can share this (but why?).
Pray for me to be out soon. There are so many hours in the day, that pretty soon you find yourself interviewing a toilet… I wrote this whole thing, designed a multifamily building, meditated, prayed, practiced the entire Torah portion, read Tehillim, called my folks, read chapters of a book, had a meeting, drew a guy, taught someone to draw, scheduled a class, shopped commissary and… it’s not even 10:30am.
