The Jimmy’s of the world can teach you a lot, if you have the patience to deal with them over the course of a school year or four.  Mere days will not suffice, as one is incapable of understanding the true nature of a Jimmy after one, two, or twenty-five encounters.  If Ogre’s are like onions, then Jimmy’s are like rutabagas.  Difficult to peel, but you can boil them down to something pretty good over time.

Our relationship did not begin well.

On some days, Jimmy made it nearly impossible to teach.  One of his very first questions to me was, “Do you drink?” Not only was the question way, way out of context and inappropriate but also hugely interruptive.  Of course I had to stop what I was doing to take the time to explain to Jimmy that the question had no bearing on the lesson and if he wanted to discuss it further we could do it at brunch – which is exactly what he wanted to happen.  It was a battle of wits, and clearly I was the loser.

Jimmy was constantly in motion – fidgeting in his seat, walking around the classroom, asking to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water.  Taking notes? Barely.  Finishing classwork?  Hardly.  Doing homework?  Rarely.  Actually – never.  Discussions with Jimmy centered around partying, fighting, and getting laid.  As you can imagine these were not discussions so much as soliloquies, spoken while everyone else was working, or even worse: trying to listen.  On his best days he was just tired, and as the school year progressed he was most likely hung over as well.

One day after class Jimmy decided he wanted to take some time to talk to me about a fight he had gotten into recently.  We were standing in the middle of the classroom when he begins to dance around, Sugar Ray-style – acting out the fight, with me being the bewildered other party.  Soon enough we’re both throwing jabs slow-motion, with Jimmy narrating as I swing exaggeratedly at his jaw: “And then he hits me with an overhand right…BOOM!”  After a week or so these “matches” became more discussions of strategy than any re-creation of an actual event.  I was never the kind of kid that picked fights, or ever really got into a fight, but Jimmy taught me some valuable tips.  Things like: how to get into someone’s face in order to get a fight going, how to stomp on someone’s feet and shove hard backwards (also presumably before punches are thrown), and what to do when attacked from behind.

Jimmy was physical, and had some obvious athletic gifts.  I tried to get him out for football the following year, and he was doing fine up until the first 6-week grading period.  He got benched due to poor grades and then eventually quit.  I thought he would be good for the wrestling team, but he had an aversion to wearing “tights” as he mistakenly called the uniform.  About the only exercise he got was running from cops on Saturday nights, or so he claimed.  Since he was far from the only squirrely male in the class, at the end of the week I would organize a Feat-of-Strength Friday, which involved a series of physical tasks but mostly consisted of arm-wrestling.  All the boys jumped to it eagerly, arm-wrestling again and again in rematch after rematch until they could barely pick up their backpacks.   I was often asked to join in, but being the smart, older role model that I am I waited until the boys were nearly dead before coming in and beating everyone handily, left AND right-handed.  They never caught on to my strategy, yet the experience somehow bonded Jimmy and I in a weird way that I didn’t quite understand until later.