You do eat hot dogs and pick your nose. And nobody notices. It doesn’t seem to sully your newfound respectability one bit.
So imagine you’re not just a grown man at fourteen but (and sorry for how this sounds) imagine you’re a spectacularly grown man. That you tower above other men. That your voice is deep and authoritative — your pronouncements, therefore, not to be denied. That your forearms and chest and genitals are practically carpeted. If being a grown man endows you with instantaneous authority, what do you suppose a body like mine was telling people?
It told people, I think: Make way.
It told people: Trust me.
Some people it told: I am your hero!
It told women: I’ll take care of it.
Men it asked: How could I have anything but contempt for you?
It said: Prove it. Prove to me how big you are.
06/07/09, 1:27 p.m.
So I was fifteen and Croft was eighteen, and I was the obvious choice among all my friends to head to Croft’s upstairs apartment on Howe every few months or so and purchase a few fragrant rabbit-turds of hash and multiple baggies of what my father so quaintly called “the maryjane.” There was never any discussion of this among me or my friends; it was simply understood that Croft was a dangerous skeeze, known to deal with bikers and carry knives, and therefore it fell to Gordon Rankin Jr., fifteen-year-old colossus, to do business with him. Everyone assumed I was invulnerable and would have no problem with this, and in fact I didn’t. I wasn’t scared of Croft. I wasn’t scared of anybody. Because when people make the kind of assumptions about you that I describe above, Adam — that you are basically a 214-pound superman — it is kind of hard not to assume it right along with them.
I went to see Croft not long after Gord took that run at him. I don’t think it occurred to me that the incident at Icy Dream would interfere with our business interactions, so when I climbed the steps to Croft’s apartment, the woozy stench of cheap meat and sesame oil from the Chinese restaurant filling the stairwell, I’d pretty much forgotten the whole affair. Like I said, I was fifteen years old. Not all my higher brain functions had gelled at that point. I was fantastically oblivious to danger at that age — or even the idea of consequence itself. It never occurred to me, for example, that there was any reason I should bring a buddy with me to Croft’s — none of my friends had any interest in attending these transactions, and they all had complete confidence in my ability to handle myself. Therefore, needless to say, so did I.
Imagine how any given small-town petty-criminal teenage headbanger circa 1985 would decorate an apartment and — bang — there’s your mental image of Croft’s drug shack. A lot of red light bulbs, a lot of smoke, a lot of heavy metal odds and sods (skull candles, flying-V ashtrays — you get the picture). The guitar in the corner, the amps, the preposterous stereo system, so tweaked and extravagant it might as well have been sculpted from solid testosterone. The grimiest of couches placed behind a wooden slab of a coffee table that in its squat massiveness had a kind of sacrificial-altar thing going on. Croft probably chose it for that very quality, now that I think of it (and by “chose,” of course, I mean hauled it out of the dump or his grandmother’s basement or somewhere). Because the coffee table definitely performed a ceremonial function during these meetings. This was where Croft cut, measured, tested and finally bequeathed his product.
Croft’s bright little eyes lit up when he opened the door. “Dude!” he greeted. This I should mention was long before people in my part of the world started saying “dude” all the time, but ever since that California stoner movie with Sean Penn, Croft had adopted the expression as his own as if in tribute. That, and “bud.” He also went around exclaiming “You dick!” more than was strictly necessary.
And if you’re expecting an atmosphere of criminal intrigue to take over at this point, Adam — sorry. I was one kid buying dope from another, just as millions of kids do every day. I sat down on the couch across from Croft (and the cow-flop of hash that was splayed on the table between us), placed my order, and waited for Croft to saw me off