When I was a teenage inmate at a state operated boarding school for cripples, which I affectionately referred to as the
Sam Houston Institute of Technology (SHIT), I had a student/work job. I didn’t
apply for this job or anything. They just gave it to me.
I was the allowance
clerk. Every Friday evening a staff member would receive a bunch of envelopes
that looked like miniature manila envelopes and each one had an inmates name
written on front and a few coins inside. The staff member would pass out the envelopes
to the various inmates and that was their allowance. That was basically the
money we spent on the vending machines around SHIT.
Before any of that
happened, I went up to the Social Services office every Friday afternoon and fulfilled
my duties as allowance clerk. Waiting for me was a metal box full of coins,
stacks of those envelopes and a list of every inmate who received an allowance
and how much they received. I would write the name on each envelope, drop in
the appropriate amount of coins and seal the envelope by licking the adhesive
patch under the flap.
Not every inmate
got the same amount. Some received as much as a dollar and some only got a
quarter. Every inmate had an allowance account that their parents or whoever
was their legal guardian put money into. How much they got depended on how much
was in their account and how their parent or legal guardian designated that it
be distributed.
I was among the
ones who weren’t even on my list because we didn’t get any allowance. At first
that made me jealous of the kids who received a dollar. I wanted to be one of
them. But I came to realize that those kids were the ones everyone referred to
as wards of the state. That meant that the state was their legal guardian
because their parents were AWOL. So nobody wanted to be like them, even if
their allowance was a dollar, because the reason they got a dollar probably was
that the state felt sorry for them because if the state didn’t give them
vending machine money no one else was going to.
I figured I didn’t
get an allowance from SHIT because my mother didn’t establish an account
because it wasn’t necessary. She was very present in my life. I went home every
weekend and if I needed money for vending machines and such, she gave it to me.
I was lucky I didn’t need a SHIT allowance.
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