Wall Street's excitable boy. Which may not be a lot of fun. Cramer is -- well, he goes off sometimes. Imagine John Madden on way too much coffee. Loud? Yeah. Funny? Mostly. Smart? Oh yeah. Tough? Absolutely. Thing is, Cramer's a handful on a good day. On a bad day ...

He's not at any of the tables. The bar maybe? Nah. The only guy there is - put it this way, he's not Wall Street, not with that corduroy shirt hanging out. This guy could be a roofer. But then he's standing at your side, sticking out his hand. "Jim Cramer," he says. Odd, though. The voice is right but the eyes are way wrong. On TV they kind of glow -- not like it's an important game but like it's THE game. Tonight it's like somebody turned down that wattage.

Hmmmm. Where's the TV Cramer? Where's the gunslinger? Where's the guy who said on live national television that he wanted to throw the heads of a major corporation into an active volcano? The one who gets so worked up over the stock market that he starts to look like the shuttle about .2 seconds before liftoff, all smoke and vibration and tension and flame and ...

He smiles. As it turns out there are at least two Cramers. One works in Manhattan, investing millions of dollars of other people's money, fighting for every sixteenth, selling himself, writing for Time and being written about almost everywhere. This is the Guru. The other one lives in Summit. Has a wife, Karen, who is a former stock trader, and two kids, 8 and 5. Coaches soccer. Takes weekends off. Eats and drinks in places like this, the Beacon Hill Tavern -- good wings, big salads, nice waitress. This is the Cramer who pulls pictures of his kids out of his wallet and really looks at yours. This guy doesn't look at all like Wall Street. This guy looks like Philly, which is where he grew up, with a side of South Jersey.

"In the city I'm swimming with sharks constantly," Cramer explains. "Here it's different. This is the better part of my two existences."

Strange as it may sound, for Cramer Jersey is the land of the great escape.

"I think this town is a storybook town," he says, wiping salad off his face. "I have everything I want here. Summit is a great town and I love where I live. I pride myself that I don't live in Manhattan. My kids go to (public) school down the block. And it's a great school. The best move we ever made was coming here. All of my friends are parents of the kids my kids play with. This is very far away from the vicious and competitive world I find myself in all day."

Cramer is one of those people you don't want to compare yourself to. Growing up, his family wasn't rich, wasn't poor. He ran track and played soccer in high school. So far, pretty normal. But he winds up going to Harvard on a scholarship and graduating magna cum laude. Was editor of the Crimson. Then goes to work at a newspaper, a smallish one. Was so poor at that point that he lived in his car for six months. Applies to Harvard Law. Gets in. Pays his way through law school with his stock market profits - and likes it so much that instead of practicing law, he goes to work for a brokerage house, where he starts like everybody else, by cold-calling people. Not good enough. Decides to start his own hedge fund, Cramer Berkowitz, which now invests $360 million. The fund was up 63 percent last year. Donšt bother calling unless you can write a check for $2.5 million, which is the minimum. In 1996 he starts a financial Web site called TheStreet.com, which has 110,000 subscribers and the New York Times as a partner and investor.

The guy becomes a freaking human meteorite. Winds up all over the media, to the point where he's overexposed, cooked -- a clown to the suited-up Wall Street types, a huckster. This is where life gets tougher. TheStreet, his beloved dotcom, was hurting at press time, or that was the rumor. Cramer would say only that he -- along with many others -- misjudged how much people would pay for Web sites. They want to pay nothing. This put a hurting on Cramer's business model, which called for a "magazine" type company -- a Web site supported by a mix of subscription money and advertising. At press time the idea was to switch to a free site with a premium "upsell" that folks could pay for if they wanted periodic real-time conversations with Cramer himself.

Cramer explains all this gracefully, carefully, the Madden in his voice notched down. Surprising.

The TV Cramer is volatile. Animated. Incendiary. Perfect for TV. Very different from the "gurus" who go out on a limb to predict "continued volatility," which is such safe crap.

"If you were to be in my home or my office I would sound the same," he says, as the restaurant starts to clear out. "I have this defect in my personality, a big defect, and that's what comes out when I'm on TV. See, things will come into my mind and I'll just say them even though I'm not supposed to say them. Next thing I know I'm saying what everybody is thinking."

Investors may recall a company called Cendant Corp., which cratered after it admitted to accounting irregularities. So Cramer, whose fund owned the stock, winds up talking about it on CNBC's live morning show, Squawk Box. As it turns out he and his family had just come back from vacation. He's showing a picture of an active volcano they had flow over. And just to add a little spice to the voiceover, he starts talking about throwing Cendant's top executives into the volcano.

Regret? Nah.

"I'm thrilled that I've done everything I've done," he says. "I've always played by the rules. I'm a big believer in the rules. I don't regret anything."

Well, there is one thing ...

"I wish my kids liked soccer," he sighs. "This is a sports-directed town."

Cramer owes soccer a lot. It taught him that winning isn't everything, a concept so foreign he's still surprised he got it.

"Listen, I come from a competitive family," he says. "So when I started coaching soccer (as an assistant), I thought we were supposed to be winning. And here we are losing game after game, and coach is playing everybody on our team on a schedule, so everybody gets a lot of time -- and the other teams are playing their stars almost all the time. And I'm thinking, 'Geez, what's the point? Don't we want to win a few games?"

So coach -- neighbor Bill Evans, who has two girls the same age -- talks to him, and talks to him some more. After about a year Cramer figures it out.

"I just had to keep telling myself, 'It's fun even if we lose.'"

It's all true, Evans would say later. Cramer was great with the kids, but he had to relearn a few things.

"It was a little hard for him to get it," said Evans, who knows Cramer not as the TV guy but as the dad next door. "He's just a gregarious, 'type A,' outgoing person, and he wants to do everything 100 percent."

Cramer is a fun neighbor, Evans said, the kind who even occasionally gets in trouble -- modest trouble, fun trouble. Once recent example was a boys night at Cramer's house. Somehow the smoke detector goes off. Somehow the cops show up to check things out. And somehow, Cramer winds up saying, "Officer if I offered you a beer I'd probably be making it worse, right?"

Yes, Evans said, Cramer is something of a celebrity in town, but Summit is a town used to influential and moneyed people. To friends Cramer is the kind of guy you can mess with, just like anybody else. "A lot of people do bust on him," Evans said. Underneath it all is respect.

"He's very smart and very well spoken and not shy about sharing his opinion," said Evans. "And ... more often than not he's right."

Cramer has time to be a regular neighbor and daddy because now he takes weekends off. Didn't used to. Kids are important in his world. He even has a little farm somewhere in the western part of the state. Won't say where. When he's working he leaves Summit at 3:45 a.m. so he can be at his desk before 5 a.m. All this so he can be home by 6 p.m. to help with his kids' homework and, hopefully, be awake to tuck them in.

Through it all he remains a guy who can't stop talking about stocks. Stop him at CVS and ask him about Pfizer or Intel or the latest business-to-business Internet company. He won't duck you. Stocks live in his head like ants in a colony. At 45 he has the money to retire but loves the action too much.

"It's totally the sport. I do it because I like to win and because I like to be right," he says, eyes glowing. "I hate to be wrong."

The best advice Cramer can give about stocks is to get into the game. The way he figures it, if most folks put as much time into following the stock market as they did in following, say, the Eagles or the Sixers, they'd be a lot better off. "How much money has Iverson made you?" Cramer asks, referring to the Sixers shooting guard. "I mean, I love watching him, but Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates (of Microsoft) have made me a lot more money than Iverson."

Cramer is almost as passionate about sports as he is about the market. His hero is Dick Vermeil, who coached the Eagles to the losing side of the Super Bowl in 1981 only to retire, come back and lead the St. Louis Rams to the winning side of the Super Bowl this year. He likes Vermeil's ethics, work habits, dedication and drive.

"Vermeil is exactly what you should be," Cramer says. "If I could be the Dick Vermeil of stocks, that would be great."

But Vermeil seems so serious, so unexcitable. So Š dull.

"I'm not a lunatic, you know," Cramer says. "I just have a passion for what I do. And I think in this country if you have a passion for what you do, people look at you like something's wrong. I get up in the morning and I want to go to work. See, I love this and I think that bothers some people. I never get tired of it. I love it too much."

Turns out the dinner is pretty good. The company, too.