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and were the bane of Gord’s existence as a small-business owner.
    Everywhere kids went in our town they promptly got thrown out of, was the thing. Nobody wanted teenagers anywhere out in public. I knew because I was one. I was the worst kind of teenager — superficially speaking, that is — the kind that grownups like the look of least. Big and thuggy. I could take them. I could take anyone, obviously. And if you put me with another two or three guys, no matter what the size of the others might be, we were terrifying. We were punks.
    I remember getting thrown out of the mall once — for doing precisely nothing. We’d been sitting on one of the benches outside the Pizza Hut waiting for it to be time to go to a dance when a cop sauntered up carrying a grease-pocked bag of garlic fingers and told us to get lost. Our very existence was offensive to the other mall patrons, he explained. They couldn’t abide the sight of us, a clutch of jean-jacketed menace huddled on the bench.
    The cop didn’t call our parents or curse us out and it was, as far as this kind of thing went, a pretty innocuous incident, which is why I didn’t think it was something I should keep from Gord. But it turned out it was. When I mentioned it the next day at dinner he took a fit. I didn’t raise you to be a goddamn punk, he screamed, handing me a bowl of mashed turnips. So why are you going around hanging out in the mall like a goddamn punk?
    I wasn’t doing it like a goddamn punk, I protested. We were just sitting there.
    Sitting there like a goddamn punk! Give me the salt! Like you got nothing better to do!
    I don’t have anything better to do.
    Then you get your ass home if you don’t have anything better to do! Help your mother! Do your homework! Straighten up your goddamn room! Where the fuck is the butter?
    And so forth. There was no arguing with Gord on the punk front, not since he opened Icy Dream. Punks streamed in at all hours, hot and cold running punks, and Gord discovered his group nemesis. They scared off the kind of customers Gord wanted — moms with kids, for example, not to mention the considerable number of people who shuffled in solo just to buy a single cone or hot fudge sundae, some small confection to brighten up their lonely, ho-hum lives. These customers were depressing, yes, but at least they didn’t make trouble. There is not much sadder than a fat guy in his fifties sitting alone in the back of an Icy Dream plastic-spooning soft-serve into his mouth, but there is one thing sadder, and that’s watching the same guy flinch every time the jolly group of teenage dicks in the next booth erupt into gales of comradely yet somehow malicious laughter.
    The punks would invariably order small orange pops and skulk in the corner booths spinning coins and shooting the shit under their breath until the gales of brain-dead testosterone-stupid laughter erupted, a sound that was like the pig-squeal of microphone feedback to my father’s ears. For a while he tried the “Eat something or get out” tactic, at which point the punks would invariably pool their change and place a single order of small fries to see them through the next hour of customer alienation.
    Get the hell over there, Gord would hiss at me then, and tell those punks to pound salt. Or else you’ll bust their skulls, tell them.
    They have drinks, I’d say.
    They don’t have drinks! They got a cup full of gob after chewing on their goddamn straws the last hour. Put your hat back on.
    Usually when I had to confront the punks I would remove my paper hat because it made me feel like a tit.
    I look like a tit in the hat, Gord. They won’t take me seriously.
    You don’t look like a tit in the hat! It’s your uniform. A uniform gives a man an air of authority.
    An Icy Dream uniform does not give a man an air of authority.
    You take pride in that uniform. You have nothing to be ashamed of. That uniform puts food on the —
    Oh Jesus, I’m going. I’m going,