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to send my father lunging over the counter at Icy Dream, hands clenched to throttle and punch — simultaneously if at all possible. I will never forget that first time, grabbing Gord around the waist like a child and hoisting him backward as every muscle in his tiny body strained in the opposite direction. He actually had a boot on the counter at one point, but instead of using the leverage to launch himself at Croft, he was thwarted by me hauling him back at just the right moment and using the momentum against him. Croft was wide-eyed, having shot a good three feet back from the counter, skeezy smile quickly affixed to mask his shock. In his mind he was already sitting in some sweaty basement telling the story to Chaisson and his other dirtbag friends. Gordon Rankin man! Little fucker comes at me right over the fuckin counter man! Lost it. You goddamn punk! You little asshole! Like he can’t even talk he’s so pissed. Like in-co- her -ent with rage. So I’m ready to go right? Grown man coming straight at me, fuckit, he’s the one who’ll be charged, not me. I’m just a widdle kid. Lucky for him the gland-case comes to the rescue.
    No one had ever called me a gland-case before I met Croft. I remember being a little shocked by it — the audacity. It wasn’t the kind of town where guys got mocked for being big. You got mocked for wearing colourful shirts, or using words with more than two syllables, but not for being big. Big was considered an achievement. Total strangers all but stopped me on the street and congratulated me on it. Croft was the first person to make me feel like a freak.
    I remember walking by him at a dance. Croft started bouncing up and down and making earthquake noises. I glanced around and grinned to show I got the joke, but also to let him know I had heard the joke and to determine if it was the kind of joke that required me to walk over there and set a few things straight. Croft grinned back at me. Huge and chimp-like. At which point I stopped smiling, allowed myself to slow down a little, upon which Croft held his hands up in the air, all innocence and goodwill.
    I kept walking . Fucking gland-case , I eventually heard, enunciated loudly and with care from somewhere behind me. When I turned around, Croft and his cronies had dissolved into the crowd.
    Here’s a snippet of how the conversation went between Croft and Gord moments before my father’s attempt to take flight.
    Gord: What can I get you today, son?
    Croft: Coke.
    Gord: I beg your pardon, now, I didn’t quite catch that.
    Croft: Coke.
    Gord: You’d like a Coke, would you?
    I should explain that Gord is already doing a slow burn at this point. I can all but hear the rant bubbling away in the foreground of his brain: goddamn little Christer no respect doesn’t even know how to ask for something it’s the parents off doing god knows what don’t even instill common courtesy let alone basic please and thank you think the world owes them every goddamn thing they get. So it’s only at this point that Croft, who has been paying no attention whatsoever up until now, actually turns his nasty focus on my father. So I see this. I am standing at the grill supposedly waiting for it to be time to turn the patties over but at this point I have pretty much forgotten about the patties because I witness the way Croft’s bright little eyes are taking full measure of Gord and the tendrils of smoke slowly wafting from my father’s ears.
    No, I think. Not the smirk.
    Croft allows the smirk to just kind of ooze across his face like syrup over pancakes.
    Croft (enunciating loudly, precisely the way he did when he called me a gland-case at the dance): Yeah, bud. I said a Coke. Coca. Cola . I wanna teach the world to sing.
    (Chortles from the skeezer crew lined up behind him.)
    Gord (with a hideous patience that tells me he is revelling in the accumulation of adrenalin that’s taking place as his ire is stirred. Now the two of them are practically