From Motel of the Opposable Thumbs. Published by Anvil Press in 2019.
after Larry Fagin Mark Laba and I took the Yonge subway downtown because we wanted to eat lunch in Chinatown. Mark pretended to have a wooden leg to make the woman beside us uncomfortable. (I don’t know if she was; maybe she had a wooden leg.) At Bloor station, people really poured on. It was so crowded that we were squished against each other. At Dundas we poured out and Mark and I went to Kwong Chow’s where we had the 85-cent lunch special: fried rice, chicken balls, chow mein and consommée soup. We were 15 years old. After we read our fortune cookies—Mark’s said “You are a well- respected man”—we went to Village Bookstore where Marty sold us some poetry books from New Directions. Back on the subway, Mark said he liked to drink pickle juice and when I saw him the next week he did exactly that.