I LEFT A party in Dog Shit Park to go play baseball at Moscone Park. Then, top of the eighth, I left the baseball game to go to a poetry reading in Berkeley: Jan Beatty, Pittsburgh poet, and some guy from Fresno who looked exactly like Richard Brautigan if Brautigan had looked a little more like Captain Kangaroo.

The reading was at Cody's Books on Telegraph, and I was probably the only one there wearing cleats. I don't know, because I didn't see every single person's shoes, or hear them walk to their seats with their little plastic cups of bad jug wine, raising the kind of racket I raised. I can never be 100 percent sure about this, either, but I have a strong feeling that I became that day the first person ever, in the history of poetry, to attend a poetry reading with a cup on. At least the first, to my knowledge, who has come forward.

I can explain ... but maybe it will be funnier if I don't.

Of this we can be certain: I smelled bad. Plus I'd slid into second, so I was entirely dusty. Still, surprised by the opportunity (I was late, but the reading hadn't started), I shook hands with Jan Beatty, quickly snatching one of her books from the table and having her sign it – thinking all along she was Ann Beatty. Wondering where everyone was. Figuring, at any rate, that the way the day was going, I'd be leaving the reading before it was over to go get pizza. I was starving already, and you know how writers can go: on and on and on.

Beatty didn't. I should have tap-danced out during the break, I know, but I had to at least hear one poem out of Captain Brautigan, the love child of my favorite writer ever and one of my favorite childhood television personalities. I liked his first poem almost as much as I'd loved Jan Beatty (who, it turns out, could write circles around Ann Beatty). But after two poems, my hunger for pizza was so profound that I thought I might die, or at least go crazy. Not even poetry could sustain me for not even another 15 minutes, let alone 20. Let alone the third poem, which went on and on and on. I could miss breakfast too, if I didn't take a stand.

So I stood. All day that day my day had followed a pattern. I couldn't fight it. We are all after all just cogs in the machinery of big Mo. Momentum. In the middle of a great and momentous and excellently orated achievement of arts and literature, pizza called, and I stood up and answered, leaving a parting sea of sour faces and sneezing fits in my dusty wake, my shoes going clang clack clang clack clang clack ...

I don't play softball, you see. I play baseball, so when I say cleats I mean real ones. Metal. Spikes. When I say tap dancing, I mean tap dancing.

So ... don't know how the poetry reading ended, don't know how the party ended, and though I scoured the Chronicle sports section the next day, I don't know how our baseball game ended either.

Can anyone guess how this restaurant review's going to end?

I'll tell you this: no pizza. By the time I got there, Lanesplitter was closed. Fucking bikers. So I had to cruise San Pablo Avenue for something else to eat, which, if you're going to have to cruise an avenue for something to eat, there are worse ones than San Pablo in Berkeley.

Just past Gilman I found Tung Yuen, a cozy little joint with peach-painted cement-block walls, a chaotic floorful of two clashing patterns, maybe eight tables with flowery plastic tablecloths covered with glass, fake-looking plants, and track-lighting-lit paintings of scenery and shit. Chinese vertical art.

The food – egg rolls ($1.95), green onion pancakes ($1.95), General Gao's chicken ($6.75), and shrimp with black bean sauce ($7.25) – was all halfway decent but not particularly memorable.

What I won't forget about Tung Yuen is the waitressperson woman in the window like a tollbooth attendant, talking on the phone while taking my order and then asking me how many people I was ordering for.

"Two," I said, and technically I wasn't lying, although one was me and the other was me too, the next day for lunch.

Another thing she asked (at least five times) was whether I wanted it "for here or to go."