a few chunks like I was waiting for a slice of ham at Easter dinner. We’d been through this a bunch of times. He didn’t give me a sinister look when he pulled his knife out of his back pocket, his eyes didn’t glint as he extracted the blade, he was barely paying attention to what he was doing, and so was I. I just sat there feeling vaguely depressed by my surroundings. Croft’s skeezer entourage lounged around sucking beers and bobbing their heads to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Collie Chaisson had his eyes closed and was playing air guitar. My own eyes were tearing up from the smoke. I remember thinking to myself, as Croft invited me to help myself to a beer from a cooler sitting near my feet, that I should feel jealous of him living this outlaw, parent-free life, and I wondered why I didn’t. I downed the beer and didn’t pursue the question, but the answer is pretty obvious to me now: I was only fifteen. I had no desire, conscious or unconscious, to live like Croft. I craved, like any kid secretly does, rules, decency, wholesome surroundings. I didn’t want this, or anything like it, not yet. I still wanted my mother.
“So dude,” said Croft, rolling a chunk of hash into a ball between his fingers. “Your dad, man. Fuck.”
I placed the emptied beer bottle between my legs. So we were going to have the conversation after all. “I know,” I said. “Sorry, man.”
“Lost it, bro.”
“I know,” I said again. For lack of anything else to do, any other kind of this-conversation-is-over gesture to make, I picked up the empty beer again and made a point of pretending to drain it.
At this point Collie Chaisson’s freckled eyelids flew open and he stopped playing air-guitar mid-riff. “Holy fuck man fucking guy!” he exclaimed. “Like, flying across the counter man!”
I slouched deeper into the chair and let my arms dangle over the armrests, deciding to just go limp and permit the stupid inevitability of Chaisson’s play-by-play wash over me.
Croft was smiling down at his drugs, shaking his head in a seen-it-all kind of way. “Angry little man,” he remarked.
I sighed. “Yeah. Short fuse.”
But Chaisson wasn’t finished. “So he, like, he comes at the Mickster, right?”
Chaisson was actually preparing to tell the story from start to finish. Not only that, he was acting it out, leaning forward in the chair with his arms extended straight out in front of him, fingers spasmodically clenching, exactly the way Gord’s had been. Even Chaisson’s face was twisted into a unpleasantly accurate imitation of Gord’s furious little knot of blood lust.
“And he’s like ‘You blankety little blank-blank!’”
Blankety? I stared at Chaisson.
“Dude,” interrupted Croft, and I was glad he did because we both knew if Chaisson kept going I would eventually be obliged to respond. Much as I wanted to distance myself from Gord, I couldn’t let this skid sit there guffawing all night about how ridiculous my tiny, angry father had made himself.
“We were all there, Col,” continued Croft, still not looking up from his work. “No need for the floor show.”
Chaisson immediately sunk back into his chair, glancing over at me and frowning just a little when he realized how hard I had been staring at him this whole time.
Then, a massive piece of furniture at far end of the room began to tremble and grunt — it was actually a guy, a guy in sunglasses who I’d originally assumed to be passed out when I first arrived. Now he was hefting himself out of a chair that had previously seemed a natural extension of his body, so snugly did it fit his lower half. I sat up and watched as he trundled over, still grunting, to join Croft on the couch. He was almost equally tall as wide, with a balding pate and grotesque little ponytail nestled in the folds of flesh insulating the back of his neck.
“Jesus, Croft,” he grunted as he approached. “I can’t watch this anymore.”
Croft smiled up at him. “What?”
“What,” repeated neck-fat. “What. It’s like you’re sitting there crocheting fuckin doilies is what.” He took the knife from Croft’s impassive hand and briskly finished the job like an executive chef chopping onions. A second later, he’d wrapped the chunks of hash and shoved them, along with the requisite baggies of pot, across the table at me.
“Good?” he said to me.
“Um,” I said.
“Hey man,” said Croft. “I’m just trying to do a good job by this guy. This