BUTTERBALLING

I call him Butterball—not to his face—it’s the way I see him, his five-foot frame, his wide-stance, his hooked thumbs in saggy trousers. How could I miss him? When he is seated—which isn’t often—he sits near the back door, the one maintenance refuses to bolt shut for fire-safety reasons. I tell my students, “Use the front door, the back door’s ‘For Emergencies Only’.”

With Butterball everything’s an emergency.

“I had to take a shit,” he says upon his return.

He did not have staff authorization to leave. I’m tired of his antics. I write him an “Out of Place” ticket. As I press ballpoint against the triplicate-form, he grabs the evidence: the absence slip, and rips it into pieces, and makes it snow.

“Give me your ID card,” I order.

Butterball refuses—his flat-footed feet are stubbornly anchored at the side of my desk.

I’m not into confrontations; but I’m also not into being “disrespected.”  I clear out my classroom. Soon Butterball and I are standing toe-to-toe in front of the deputy warden, school principal, and school officer. His final defiant act is to drop his ID card onto the floor when I request it—his way of showing everyone that he will now follow the CO’s direct order and hand me the ID card.

I add the following violations to the ticket:  “Disobeying a Direct Order” and “Destruction or Misuse of State Property.”

Of course none of it matters. He resides in the mental healthcare unit; He’ll claim he needs to be re-evaluated, that his medication is off. His actions are deliberate; he knows what he is doing. It's part of the game. I call it BUTTERBALLING.