of the way before shit could meet fan. Backing up, arms in the air. The guy who let me believe for the rest of my life I had been too much for him. That I was not worth the aggro; that he wanted no part of the bad-news contagion that constituted my life.
That it should turn out you wanted everything to do with it. That you should want it, in fact, for yourself.
3
05/25/09, 6:17 p.m.
MY ADVICE TO YOU Adam is to sit back and enjoy the story. Okay? Stop whining, stop threatening (it’s pathetic and besides I don’t know how you expect to serve me “notice” whatever that means if you don’t know where I am) and for Christ’s sake stop interrupting. You’re like one of those assholes at the movies who can’t shut up, who keeps asking questions or complaining in a loud voice about how lame the dialogue is. There was a time when you used to let me talk and talk. For hours. Eyebrows going up, eyebrows going down. Thank god for your eyebrow movement — it used to be the only way I could tell you were still listening, that you hadn’t abandoned your physical body at some point and were occupied bouncing from one astral plane to the next. I invested a hell of a lot in those twitches and furrows. And if anyone was looking for any more than a few twitches and furrows after they’d yanked off a hank of flesh and handed it over, they were in for disappointment, right?
Of course I know now why that was, what it was that made you such a wonderfully attentive listener.
Well now I’m giving it to you — all the stuff you felt you had to wheedle out of me on the sly. Look, it’s all yours, unspooling like fishing line. So relax and just try to appreciate how magnanimous I’m being.
Where was I. We’re skipping childhood because that’s where Sylvie lives.
So, the Icy Dream. Gord blames Icy Dream Inc. for everything that’s gone wrong in his life since the day he opened shop. He likes to imbue his failures with a cosmic significance, because this makes him a kind of Jeremiah in his own mind. For example he wasn’t just some underemployed loser, back before he became my home town’s emperor of ice cream, bouncing randomly around from job to job like a pinball — he’s God’s pinball, in God’s own pinball machine, meaning the good Lord has always got a watchful, pie-plate eye on Gord.
Another example of my father’s monomania: he always tells the story of how, once he got the loans together to buy some kind of franchise, he had “the choice” between an Icy Dream and a Java Joe’s. Like it could only possibly be one or the other — the wrong choice and the right. As if some kind of celestial fast-food overseer descended from the heavens with a ID cone in one hand and a crumpled JJ’s cup in the other — obliterating all possibility of, say, a Pizza Hut, a Mickey Dee’s — displayed them both to Gord and thundered: Pick!
This would’ve been something like 1981. And the way Gord tells it, he scratched his head and said to himself: Coffee? Who wants to sit around drinking coffee all day? Who wants to go out for a coffee? ID was a magic land of ice cream confection — the kind of thing children clamoured for. The kind of all-forgiving place to which you got in the car and drove after a fight with the family, say. Everyone cools off and then you reappear bearing some kind of sweet, frosty olive branch and you’re hero of the day. This had been a favoured tactic of Gord’s long before he bought the franchise — maybe that’s part of what inspired him to go with the Dream. He couldn’t see coming home with a tray of large coffees to make up for his transgressions, no matter how many creamers and sugar packets he emptied into them. I remember Arctic Bars, Oh Henrys, two-litre bottles of root beer (A&W, the good stuff, not the no-name kind from Dominion) accompanied by a tub of vanilla ice cream to make floats. Sylvie always got a box of either Cracker Jacks or wine gums — she had strange tastes.
Point being, the way Gord saw it there was no insult, no trespass, no random act of prickery that sugar couldn’t sweeten.