School Days
Old Nick’s eldest son was John. He led a life different from Nick’s on the outside, but in many ways it was not that different at all. School was difficult for John, not so much because he was stupid but because he had a string of bad luck. The first problem was the principal who rode John hard. John spent more time in the principal’s office than in class. Actually Old Nick could be blamed for John’s misery because Old Nick and the principal were age-old enemies and the principal took this out on John.
The upshot result of this difficult situation was that John needed to find a bookworm he could lean on to do his work for him. This was just cheating, but it led to other things. It gave him a taste of freedom that a born lazybones such as he couldn’t resist. He started playing cards, his favourite 5 card stud, gambling, and smoking in the boys’ room.
One day while John relaxed in a toilet stall with a cigarette, it hit him. He should become a lion and tiger tamer. He thought that would suit him very well. Finding tigers and lions in a small suburban town was difficult, however. So he started on a small scale collecting the local cats and painting stripes on them. Things were going well, in a month he’d managed to collect about 15 kittens, keeping them in the school basement. He became so bold as to think he could sell some of them to the zoology teacher for 50 bucks each. Needless to say that stunt didn’t go over very well.
By this time, the principal was suspicious, but as yet unsure of what was going on. The last bit of evidence he needed came from Betty, John’s jilted girlfriend. She put an anonymous letter on the principal’s desk explaining the whereabouts of John the Lion-Tamer’s brood of kittens.
John was sent to the principal and got a good reprimand. His tigers and lions were flushed out of the cellar and onto the streets. ‘Oh well’ thought John, ‘I liked hanging out in the cellar, maybe I should be a plumber’. Two weeks later there was an unexpected ‘flood’ at school.
Luckily for John, school came to an end a week after the flood and John never returned.