Locked Up In La Mesa by Asp Eldon & Peterson Steve

Author:Asp, Eldon & Peterson, Steve [Asp, Eldon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biographies
Publisher: DIRT CITY PRESS
Published: 2011-08-01T04:30:00+00:00

Tren

The Babysitter

LA MESA WAS SUPPOSED TO be a family-friendly kind of prison. There weren’t a million kids, but they were around, and they lived in the tanks and the other apartments right alongside the rest of us. They were a fact of life, part of what made the place what it was, and they had to be taken care of, just like kids anywhere. At the same time, of course, you had prisoners and prison people doing what they had to do, their drugs and their conjugal visits and what have you. Sometimes the parents would need to put the kids with someone for a little while so they could deal with their business. They needed a babysitter. And just like with every other thing in La Mesa, where there was a need, someone set up a little operation, a little business, to meet it. That’s how The Professor started his babysitting service.

I don’t know if this guy was a real professor or not. That’s what someone said he was and that’s what we called him. I guess he must have had some kind of university job on the outside or something, some kind of academic position. He was a smart guy, obviously, and he kind of had that bearing, you could say. He was also crazy, like a bad schizophrenic, and he struggled with that. The story I heard was that he had a good job and a family on the outside, a good life, but for some reason he just lost his mind one day. Out of nowhere he snapped and murdered his whole family. Whether that’s true or not I have no idea. For all I know the guy was in there for selling dope or evading his taxes. I tend to believe it, though, because he definitely seemed like a smart, educated guy who also happened to have the potential to go nuts and slaughter his family.

Prison had been hard on The Professor; he looked like a derelict. He wore rags all the time and he seemed a lot older than he was because he had a long beard and long, greasy hair. Just a really unfortunate-looking guy. But the thing about him is he loved kids. The only thing that made him happy, that seemed to give him some peace, was being around the little kids. And he was good with them, too.

So if anybody needed some time to themselves for whatever reason, they’d bring their kids to The Professor and he’d take care of them. I think he charged something like a few pesos an hour, not much. He probably would have done it for free, but everybody has to eat. He was usually set up on the basketball court, which wasn’t used all that often, for basketball, anyway; it was Mexico—they were all about soccer and baseball. Anyway, The Professor had these plastic milk crates, and he’d put the little kids in the crates and line them up like a train and then push them all around on the slick cement.

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