mOCK cHICKEN*

I once ate a mock chicken sandwich so thick and blubbery that I couldn’t fit it in my mouth. I skillet-fried it, the edges curling up like cockscombs, on a cowman’s fire in the woods at the top of my street, when I was a boyish boy, a seedling, a lardy cheeked lad, a wee fucking toadie of a lad. I pressed the thick blubbery mockery between two heels of day-old bread---the crusts lovingly removed by my mother---and sluiced it back with a swig of Dr. Pepper. I won a free Kodak instant camera, a Swedish icon of a camera embossed on the bottle cap liner, which was worth less than the film it required to take snaps and photos with. I sold it to a deaf mute kid with crossly eyes and a clove lip for six dollars, and bought a wax pan flute full of juice and a packet of Indian chewing tobacco, which was really coloured coconut, and thrift the rest on hockey cards and smokes, Export A non-filter tips. I smoke Gauloises Blue now, and thrift money on other useless things, my computer and eyeglasses, for example, and Bok Choy and litchi nuts, grinding the shells into a fine and mottled sift, to be applied as a salve to my aching eyes. I still like mock chicken, but prefer it boiled with onions and carrots, skins and outsides left on, a swig of faucet water and a Gauloises Blue, filter tipped, not seedy and blubbery like Export A’s non-filter tips