Is that how it works for you? This never really occurred to me before. I have to admit I kind of imagined you sitting around rubbing your hands together and cackling to yourself as you plotted out your miserable theft, not just typing away and suddenly looking down and going, Oh hey, check that out. I just completely screwed over a guy I used to be buddies with.
And I’ve also just realized that even though my outrage resulting from the above has led me to launch myself at you across the ether hollering Hey nice story you thieving bastard but guess what, I have the real story right here — so get comfortable, chump! That is, even though I was completely gung-ho when I initiated this little back and forth between us, there is a big part of me that keeps trying to bow out.
But I am going to do this, Adam. Neither of us is getting out of it. Every time I think fuck this and fuck you — and I think it with approximately every other sentence — I imagine your relief at never having to open another email from me and it propels me right back here in front of my ancient computer, constantly hitting the wrong keys and having to go back and start again in all my enthusiastic umbrage.
Gord used to go over the counter. That was the crux of the matter. I had two jobs at Icy Dream — well, three, if you counted working the till and manoeuvring the soft-serve into two perfect undulating bulges balanced in the cone — three bulges if the customer ordered a large. That was something I eventually got very good at, executing perfectly undulating soft-serve — I felt like a sculptor at times. So I did that, I even took a bit of pride in it, but I was mostly at Icy Dream, according to Gord, to “bust punks’ skulls.” So I busted punks’ skulls, but I also had a third job, a private job that I had not been assigned but ended up inevitably assigning to myself.
And that was to keep Gord from going over the counter.
The problem, which my father could not have foreseen when the Celestial Fast-Food Overseer descended from the heavens and demanded he choose between ID and JJ’s, was the existence of punks. Punks abounded in our town, as they do all towns, big and small, 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?