SHOCK THERAPY

“Ask your tutor if he plays the slots,” a coworker suggested to me a few years back while we sat in the employee lunchroom.

“Which tutor?” I asked.

“Mr. P,” he answered.

I guess he thought I’d just fallen off the turnip truck. Or perhaps he witnessed how a former corrections-officer-now-turned-rapper played a dirty trick on me:

“I shook down one of your students and found this.” It was a shiny silver Zippo lighter, something prisoners aren’t allowed to have.

“What student?” I asked.

“Oh, I can’t remember.”

Slightly puzzled—he must have written a ticket on the person, his short-term memory couldn’t be that horrific—I said, “You found contraband on a prisoner and can’t remember his name?”

By this time he suggested I feel the weight of the lighter and slipped it into my hand. “I don’t know if it works,” he said.

I flipped the cover over and flicked the small metal wheel with my thumb and couldn’t let go of it fast enough, a surge of electricity shooting through my fingers. Everyone laughed as I cussed him out. “How many volts did you hook up to this thing?” I asked once I had calmed down.

Call it “shock therapy.” A lesson well learned. I know better. Think before you do anything around here.

“Go on, ask Mr. P if he plays the slots.”

So I’m thinking Mr. P has some type of gambling debt and wants to lay low until the next pay period. I’ve been to “Anatomy of a Set-Up” training. I wouldn’t want to create a situation in my classroom and have blood all over my carpet. “Nah,” I responded, “I’m not asking him diddly-squat.”

Here’s the real shocker, something I found out later: Mr. P, for reasons only he and the Almighty Lord will know, inserted coins into his granddaughter. His nickname in the facility—The Quarter Man. How disgusting is that?!