Little Timmy Temper Tantrum

Maybe he picked a fight with a person less inclined to turn the other cheek and maybe Little Timmy Tantrum got all his fucking teeth knocked out.

I’ve been fishing with Mike Pell for as long as we’ve been friends, which is about 35 years at this point. For the last ten years or so we each travel to the other’s home once a year - me to New Jersey for stripers in the fall, typically, and Mike to WNY in the Spring for trout and smallmouth. Last year when Mike visited we had a tense interaction with a guy at the boat ramp - we called him Boat Ramp Bill. We talked about this on the short-lived, now-defunct 1-900-FISH-BEER podcast. I’ve added that episode here if you want to catch up.

This year we had an even more stressful interaction with a stranger on the water, whom I’ll call Little Timmy Temper Tantrum.

Mike and I had pretty tough fishing this year. We were excited to fish for smallmouth on Lake Erie in my new boat but the conditions were terrible. Very windy every day, small craft advisories, you know, the normal bullshit. We fished the small boat harbor in Buffalo, which is a very nicely protected harbor, but were blown off that with two foot breakers inside the harbor and huge waves crashing over the six foot tall breakwall. We managed to catch a few fish here and there and Pell was very excited about all the drum we caught and one day Paul graciously guided us on a brush-busting tour of his favorite small local trout creeks and we stuck a few nice wild browns which was awesome. We ate some good food, drank some good rum, a bunch of beers, smoked some good cigars, talked a lot of nonsense, it was of course a great time, except for Little Timmy Tantrum.

After spending most of the day on the little creeks with Paul on Saturday we hit the Swamp for beers and wings and after a brief late afternoon siesta found that the wind was going to lay down in the evening so we put the boat in on Chautauqua Lake hoping to chase some smallmouth. We hooked a fish or two and I landed a decent one. It was a beautiful evening, mostly cloudy, cool and comfortable. The lake was glass calm around 8:15pm and there was another boat fishing maybe a hundred yards away from us, a pontoon boat with two older guys on board. A guide boat came slowly trolling through the area at one point. We could hear talking on the other boats, the sound easily carrying over the calm lake. We could hear kids playing nearby, jumping into the lake off a dock, squealing with joy. Then a big white boat materialized from the shadows near shore and jumped on step just outside the buoys and took off up the lake. It went between us and the pontoon boat. It was maybe a little close to be stepping up where it did, but it was not the end of the world. I didn’t think twice about it. It was a white inboard with a full windshield, at least 20’ long, high sides, deep hull, and maybe it even had a little cabin in the bow.

About ten minutes later it came back and went directly to the pontoon boat and a man aboard the white boat, who turned out to be Little Timmy Tantrum, started talking loudly at the two men aboard the pontoon. We could hear the men on the pontoon say “we didn’t hear anything, we just got here” and then Tantrum Tim started screaming at them, calling them liars and telling them they were pieces of shit.

I looked up at Mike and said, “What is going on over there? That is wild.”

Mike said, “I don’t know, but he’s coming this way.”

As Tantrum Tim came off plane a few yards from our boat he starting yelling, “you didn’t hear that girl call for help?”

“No, we didn’t hear anything,” Mike responded honestly in a concerned tone as I’m shaking my head side to side in the background shrugging my shoulders as I continue to fish.

“BULL SHIT” Timmy Tantrum screamed at us. “YOU HEARD HER AND DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!” Tim was idling alongside us now, standing at his controls, he was tall-ish, on the heavy side of fit, he had a slightly receding hairline with short grey hair combed forward, a large, sharp nose, a cleft chin, small eyes and the lumpy, clay-like face of someone rapidly growing out of late middle age. There was just enough gap between each and every one of his teeth to call attention to his mouth. When he was angrily yelling at us his facial features all pinched together into a sharp, rat-like point. He wore a blue v-neck pullover windbreaker with some sort of logo over the breast like a heraldic seal or something. I’m sure his lake house is worth more than a million dollars. He had real douchebag vibes.

“Fuck you, get the fuck out of here, we didn’t hear anything,” Mike responded with full PA/NJ borderland brogue and swag.

“She was screaming for help for 45 minutes and blowing her whistle! We could hear it in our house! There’s no way you couldn’t hear it!” Tim was livid. Screaming. “She needed help and you guys ignored her! You scumbags!”

And then his wife, I assumed, who was sitting behind her foot-stomping husband, chimed in reluctantly - “It’s true, she was screaming for help.”

Mike reiterated - “So what happened then? We didn’t hear anything.”

“You pieces of shit did nothing! NOTHING!” said Tim.

“Fuck you, get outta’ here,” Mike answered, drawing out the “fuck you” in a beautiful long falling melody that dripped with dismission and punctuated with the staccato command as if he was talking to a stray dog.

Tantrum Timmy was about to boil over. His face was screwed up into a fixed rat-rictus of rage, glowing red with anger and frustration. He threw the throttle forward and his big boat jumped and he drove it in a circle at-speed mere inches from our boat, nearly hitting us and causing us to pitch wildly in his wake, water splashing over the sides of our boat, screaming insults and judgment at us. Just before he turned his boat away he screamed one final, hilarious instruction: “STAY OFF MY FUCKING LAKE!” Mike and I laughed. My wife later suggested that we should have confronted him about the blue-green algae blooms on the lake and warn him against claiming ownership of such a troubled body of water.

We never did get any answers. We have no idea if someone did need help and if Tantrum Tim and his wife provided it. We have no idea if Tantrum Tim heard the kids playing on the nearby dock and mistook it for someone calling for help. We certainly never heard anyone blowing a whistle or “screaming for help.” Mike and I are both Eagle Scouts, generally good persons and upstanding members of our communities, both with excellent hearing, I’ll add. We’re not in the habit of ignoring calls for help.

A little later the pontoon boat idled by us and we had a brief discussion about Tantrum Tim - the older guy wearing jeans, a white t-shirt with suspenders and gray velcro sneakers said, not sarcastically, “I just hope he has a better day tomorrow.”

Our only regret is that something bad didn’t happen to Timmy Tantrum that night. Maybe a boat accident where he was badly hurt but his wife escaped unfazed, and no boats came to his aid because they couldn’t hear his calls for help. Maybe he picked a fight with a person less inclined to turn the other cheek when being shouted at and menaced for no reason, and maybe Little Timmy Tantrum got all his fucking teeth knocked out.

I did find out who this asshole is. His real name is Tim. I have his full name, too, his wife’s name, his place of employment, etc. I could tell roughly on the lake shore from where he came and to where he returned in his boat so I used the county tax parcel data to get the names of the owners of the few houses in that area and I Googled them. The second name I googled was him. Unmistakably.

He seems like a perfectly normal, though annoyingly rich and preppy, person on the internet, judging by his Linkedin and Facebook pages. He’s a husband, a father, the vice chair of the local hospital’s foundation, a Vice President - there is no indication that he occasionally (well, at least once for sure, but I bet this happens with some regularity) throws unwarranted rage fits on Chautauqua Lake like a spoiled rich kid. Mike and I think that even Boat Ramp Bill would be on our side with this one and would surely threaten to chop Little Timmy Temper Tantrum down like a tree.

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