ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A high-flying finance executive in the Big Apple has today taken a brief mental detour from structuring multi-billion-dollar credit facilities to laugh at the time his school bus driver beat the piss out of a classmate for simply talking back.
Sitting in his high-rise Midtown office, 32-year-old expat Callum Rourke , a back of house guy at a prestigious New York hedge fund, was in the middle of a conference call when his mind inexplicably wandered back to an afternoon in 2005.
“Fuck me,” he said.
The memory? An after-school bus ride through Betoota Plains, when their famously volatile driver, Bruce, snapped and laid out a Year 9 named Declan O’Shea, of the O’Shea cattle family, for backchatting him.
“We used to push Bruce right to the edge,” Rourke told The Advocate later today.
“He’d huff and he’d puff, and we knew we were dancing with the devil. But Declan, mate… he went too far.”
According to Rourke, Bruce, an ex-stockman with a permanent sunburn and a voice like gravel, had enough that day. After a particularly spicy remark about his driving, Bruce yanked the bus over, stormed down the aisle, and delivered a quick jab straight to Declan’s forehead.
The bus reportedly fell silent for three seconds before erupting in laughter.
“No one dobbed, no one cried. We just sat the fuck down and Bruce kept driving. None of us wanted to get a smack from Bruce.”
Now deep in the world of leveraged buyouts and distressed debt, Rourke acknowledges that the incident probably wasn’t above board.
“But fuck, it was funny at the time.”
More to come.
