JUG

When I was in High School or, as I used to call it then, "prison", I was a fairly good kid. I mostly kept to myself, I mostly obeyed the rules and I usually displayed outward respect for my teachers and the school staff despite feeling that they were all a bunch of nacos.

Despite my calm and quiet, respectful demeanor, I was somehow thought to be a particularly dangerous problem for the Dean of Disciplin, Mr. Queery.
Queery was not so much a man as a robot.
Even his voice radiated the sickly mental dust from the reruns of Lost In Space on an old black and white rabbit-eared TV set. Since Queery was evil, he was more like a combination of the robot and Doctor Smith. He used to call to me with his robotic arm, gesturing for me to come to look at the clipboard in his hand so he could write my name on it.
"Mr. Sepp", he'd say as he looked at the clipboard. "You have JUG. Report to room 145 at 2:35."
"Why? What did I do?!"
"You're slacks are not proper dress slack material."
"These? These are so dress pants. I wear them all the time"
"Well, the you've been getting away with murder, Mr. Sepp. They are not regulation fabric."
"Yes. These pants are dress pants. You cannot tell me that they are not dress pants!"
"They are not dress pants, Mr. Sepp. If you keep arguing with me you will have two days of JUG".

I guess I deserved this JUG punishment. After all I was killing small African children by wearing non-standard-fabric Bill Blass dress pants to school.

JUG was rumored to stand for JUSTICE UNDER GOD and it was just a CARDINAL SPELLMAN word for 'detention'. It was a waste of an hour after school but at least I did some homework when I was there when they decided to let us do it. Sometimes doing anything was forbidden and we had to just sit at our desks with our hands folded neatly. JUG was, after all, a punishment for doing awful things like wearing bad fabric or not having our ties so tight that we couldn't breathe or letting our hair grow one milimeter below our shirt collars.
It's no wonder I was ADD when I literally spent every other day of my first year of High School in JUG doing nothing but staring at Sister Angelica's beard and wondering why she didn't get a Gillette Contour Plus razor and shave those suckers right off there. Maybe it was too embarassing to go to Duane Reade and ask for a man's razor when you were a nun. She could have dressed like a man or even taken off the habit and pretended to be a normal woman shopping for her husband. Of course the cashier would have noticed the beard and realized that this woman was actually buying the razor for herself.

Maybe she could have asked one of the other nuns to wax it for her in the convent loo. Then again, where would these convent nuns get the wax? Maybe they could make it. After all, don't nuns spend a lot of time in nature and have easy access to the common wax plant? Then again, these were city nuns - Bronx nuns. They probably don't know anything about making wax. So, I suppose she could send one of the non-bearded nuns to a beauty supply shop and have her buy a tub of wax with which to tear off her muttonchops. But then maybe it was too embarrassing for her to confide in any of the other nuns enough to send them on such a mission. Yet aren't all nuns supposed to be on a mission? Perhaps other kinds of missions.

You see where all this is going, don't you?

Exactly.

Mr. Queery will have a lot to answer for in the next life.