Eleven a.m., everyone returned to their assigned cell for the second session of count time, followed by lunch. More rec time. Count time again at three. Dinner around five. Final count time at eleven, followed by lights out, which was not to be confused with quiet time. In prison, there was no such thing as quiet time, and in a corrections facility that housed both men and women, there was definitely no such thing as quiet time.

The females, I quickly learned, occupied the top three floors of the Suffolk County “tower.” Some enterprising woman (or man, I suppose) determined that the plumbing pipes from the upper floors connected to the lower floors. Meaning that a female detainee—say, my roommate Erica—could stick her head inside the white porcelain toilet bowl and proceed to “talk” to a random male on the lower floor. Though, talking isn’t really what any man wants to do. Think of it more as the prison version of sexting.

Erica would make lewd comments. Nine floors beneath us, a faceless man would groan. Erica would make more lewd comments: Harder, faster, come on, baby, I’m rubbing my tits for you, can you feel me rubbing my tits for you? (I made that up: Erica didn’t have tits. Meth had dissolved all the fat and tissue from her bones, including her breasts. Black teeth, black nails, no boobs. Erica should be starring in a public service announcement targeting teenage girls: This is your body on meth.)

Faceless man nine floors below us, however, wouldn’t know that. In his mind, Erica was probably some buxom blonde, or maybe the hot Latina chick he’d spotted once in Medical. He would whack off happily. Erica would start round two.

As would the woman in the cell beside us, and the cell beside her and the cell beside her. All. Night. Long.

Prison is a social place.

The Suffolk County Jail involves multiple buildings. Sadly, only males in the lower floors of the tower could communicate via the toilets with the females on the top three levels. Obviously, this posed a great hardship for the men in other buildings.

The enterprising males in Building 3, however, figured out that we could peer down at their windows from our cells. As Erica explained to me, first thing in the morning our job was to check for messages posted in the windows of Building 3—say, an artful arrangement of socks, underwear, and T-shirts forming a series of numbers or letters. Only so much could be spelled out with socks, obviously, so a code had been developed. We would write down the code, which would direct the women of 1-9-2 to various books during library time, where a more complete message could be recovered (fuck me, fuck me, do me, do me, oh you’re so pretty can you feel me get so hard …).