lunch with mark crotty, slapping john cramer

Had lunch today with a teacher from my old high school. (He’s been teaching in Dallas for about 10 years now.) It was odd to talk to someone who last remembers me at age 14.
Although he was a legendary teacher, scheduling quirks meant I never had him in a class. So his only real dealing with me came as the school’s discipline czar.
I had a 45-minute bus ride every morning, along with six or eight other kids who went to my school or its feeder. I was in seventh grade.
It was exam week, so I and the other older kids were using the long bus ride to study for the tests we had that day. Unfortunately, this little twerp 2nd grader named John decided to use the bus ride to prove, incontrovertibly, that he knew the names of all 41 presidents of these United States.
And could recite them in order. In song. Loudly. Over and over again.
Needless to say, we older kids wanted to throttle him. We kept telling him to shut up — first gently, then with increasing vigor. We appealed to our bus driver, the cool but ineffectual Tim, but he did nothing. Finally, when he progressed from singing the president’s names to screaming them — I believe it was Chester A. Arthur who set me off — I reached over and punched John in the jaw.
He looked at me, stunned. And he shut up for the rest of the bus ride.
Being the little twerp he was — his twerpdom would be more conclusively proven in five more years of bus rides — he tattled to mommy. Mommy called my school, and I got called to the discipline czar’s office.
I was a good kid, too geeky to ever get in trouble. The czar was a little unsure what to do.
“I hear you punched this second grader on the bus.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I hear he’s really, really annoying.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, the next time he’s really, really annoying, try really, really hard not to punch him.”
“Yes, sir.”
That was that.