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Gord.
    Stop calling me that! If you’re too cool to say Dad you can damn well call me Mr. Rankin.
    Calling him Gord was still a new habit at that point. I’d acquired it not long after I turned fifteen. It hadn’t been intentional, the first time I’d done it — I can’t even remember what the circumstance was — but once it was out and in the air between us I could tell I had kind of broken Gord’s heart. After that I couldn’t seem to stop.
    Hi guys, I would greet the punks.
    And what would happen next depended entirely on the punks in question. Sometimes the punks were my friends. They would smile up at me with their greasy, fry-fed faces, make an ungenerous remark or two about my hat and I would respond with a cheerful threat to shove my hat up their asses. After some back and forth along these lines I would tell them they should come back between around five and seven next time because that’s when Gord went home for supper and then we could all hang out and I would give them free Cokes if they were nice to me.
    Meanwhile, I’d say by way of wrapping things up, my dad requests you remove your dirty punk asses from his family establishment.
    But Rank, Scott was thinking he might like a fudgy bar. He hasn’t quite decided yet.
    We don’t want your business, boys. You bring the tone down. Bad optics, scuzz like you chowing down on our fudgies.
    Why don’t you chow down on one of my fudgies sometime, Rank?
    Ha ha ha. Oh my god. Nice one. Get out.
    And the guys would snort and smirk just so not to lose face entirely, then shuffle their way out the door taking care to look extra dangerous and sullen for the benefit of Gord, scowling away by the fryer.
    Those were the good days.
    On the bad days, guys like Mick Croft showed up.
    Mick Croft was one of the town punks who actually was a punk — not just a gangly, belligerent, functionally retarded teenage boy like the rest of us. He dealt drugs — of course — and brandished knives — of course — and had been expelled for kicking the gym teacher, a man with the unfortunate name of Mr. Fancy, in the ass when Fancy was bending over to gather the volleyballs into a canvas sack. Fancy had just called Croft a loser in front of the whole class. Take a good look, guys, he’d said, at what not to be if you want to achieve anything in this life other than a welfare cheque. And then Fancy made the unbelievable move of turning around to get the volleyballs and showing Croft his sinewy glutes. It was like, Croft is rumoured to have protested, the man was offering it up.
    That was the effect Croft had on adults — he enraged them, moved them to say the kind of things you should never say to a sixteen-year-old kid, no matter how much he pisses you off. Men in particular he provoked to tantrums. Croft had flunked enough grades to be in a couple of classes with me and I remember the entire room sucking in its breath when a red-faced Geography teacher took hold of either side of Croft’s desk — with him in it — and yanked it with an effortlessness born of pure animal rage to the front of the classroom. When everyone was going around asking what had prompted Fancy to denounce Croft like that in the gym it turned out to be because Croft had forgotten his shorts at home. Which sounds like nothing, but we all understood how little the shorts would have had to do with it. What it had to do with was Croft’s attitude. Croft had a smirk that made you want to take hold of either side of his mouth and pull his face apart. It wasn’t a smirk like that of other punks. It was a smart smirk, and was usually accompanied by a smart remark. And when I say smart, I mean smart . Croft wasn’t your typical idiot punk like say his compadre Collie Chaisson who did time in the Youth Centre for putting his fist through a convenience store window and leaving a multitude of perfect, dried-blood fingerprints polka-dotting the cash register.
    So it was no surprise that Croft would be the first