not still banned am I? Come on, I love this place. Best fries in town.”
“We’re within our rights to call the cops,” I said, before Gord could chime in. I wanted that information, that evocation, front and centre.
Croft spread his hands, smiling wider in mock disbelief. “For buying fries? You’re gonna call the cops because I wanna buy some fries?”
“Get your ass back in the restaurant, son,” said Gord to me, not taking his eyes off Croft. This directive, I knew, was pure showbiz. Gord had kicked off a routine, and I could only respond by rote.
“You go back in, Dad,” I said, “and call Constable Hamm.”
The first part of the sentence was dictated by our routine, the second of course was my own improvisation. He shot me an appreciative glance as if to say, Nice touch!
But he didn’t deviate from the script. “Get your ass back in there,” he repeated. “No one’s watching the till.”
“And someone’s gotta make my fries,” added Croft.
Cue Gord! Wrath mode! Uncontainable rage! He lunged, I restrained. It was downright boring at this point. Croft backed up, hands in the air, laughing, as I got my father’s swinging limbs under control.
“I will take that fryer and I will shove your pimply punk face in it,” Gord was saying, among other things. “Howya like your french fries then!”
“Inside,” I was saying. “Inside, back inside Gord, come on.”
But he just kept flailing and cursing and threatening, moving Croft and his cohort to new heights of merriment, and I knew he would keep it up until I returned to the script, until I delivered my big line. No improvisation would be broached at such a key moment.
“Dad,” I said. “Go back inside.” I felt Gord’s muscles slacken in anticipation — he could feel it coming.
“I’ll take care of this,” I said. Loud enough to be heard over the laughter, the cursing.
Everything stopped — the obligatory momentous pause. What a bunch of drama queens they all were. Gord went still, the perpetual skeezer laugh track warbled into silence, Croft’s wide, guffawing grin compressed itself into a soundless smile and he crossed his arms, waiting. Even though I was standing directly behind Gord, I could feel my father smiling back at Croft. Such fun the two of them were having. Gord shifted himself out of my grip, straightened his apron, adjusted his hat, and turned away without a word. Back into the restaurant where I knew he would station himself behind a window, nose practically against glass, and the phone would sit there on the wall behind the counter doing nothing.
Already the handful of drunks out front at the Legion had metastasized into an enthralled flock, beers moving toward mouths in slow motion.
At the last moment, I remembered to take off my hat.
“Let us go then, you and I,” said Mick Croft, pretty face beaming.
07/01/09, 11:12 p.m.
And where the hell did he get that?
I can assure you I almost crapped pants when I came across it five years later. Flipping through one of those massive, massively expensive intro readers they made us buy in undergrad English. Needless to say, it’s a line I’d never forgotten, being the last words I ever heard out of Mick Croft.
And there I am, Adam, there I am, jump ahead if you will to the time when we, when you and I, became acquainted with each other. I am alone and motherless and at university, I have drunk my own vomit in public, eaten posters off walls, inhaled raw frozen cow — what won’t I consume? — and very recently walked out of the locker room in the middle of a playoff game at the insincere behest of my coach who told me if I didn’t do what he wanted I could “walk away right now.” (I still relish the bug-eyed, juicy-veined full-facial flush it provoked when I stood up without even taking off my skates and did exactly that.) So I didn’t even have hockey — my one and only justification for being there — to ground me at that point. So there I am in the library, flipping through the anthology, having decided to “buckle down.” I knew I had it in me — I’d always been able to lock myself in a room for a couple of days, study like a madman and jack up a dwindling grade at the eleventh hour. I just had to lay off the purple Jesus for five minutes and crack a book. By Christ, I decided,