Bullies

Regarding the subject of the new documentary Bully, which I haven't seen yet, I have a classic story. Given what a nerd and a bookworm I was, I wasn't bullied that badly as a kid, and I held my own fairly well. But when I was a freshman at my my Catholic boys' prep school, there was this upperclassman, Bob P., who lived to bully and who did what he could to make me and my buddy Seth Cornwall miserable on the long school bus rides. Seth was an eccentric and rather delicate kid who had developed a passion for Russian Orthodoxy; he and I would have long talks about Czar Nicholas II and suchlike topics. (He later became a celebrated modern iconographer and, alas, died way too young.) The ungainly Bob P. would taunt us verbally, and sometimes physically by means of his henchman Richard B. I felt quite strongly that the two of them were sorry excuses for human beings, but I survived their attentions without any permanent damage, and had a pleasant moment on the last bus ride of freshman year when I dumped a large Coca-Cola all over Richard B. and his new pimpin' outfit (silk shirt open to the navel, tight polyester bell-bottoms - it was 1973).

Richard B. and Seth Cornwall both transferred to new schools after that year; I forget whether Bob P. graduated that year or the next.

Flash-forward to the Google Era, and one day while I was tooling around the Internet I thought, I wonder whatever happened to those guys? I couldn't make a definitive ID on Richard B. But Bob P. was easy enough to find; his family was still in New Jersey. And guess what? He was in prison! He and his brother, actually, both convicted of real estate fraud, quite a big scheme too. My expression of Schadenfreude was completely undignified and completely satisfying. "Yes!!" I leapt out of my chair. "There is a God!" Absolutely a moment I will never forget.