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Cheap Eats

Sticky buns

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS This Thanksgiving I am thankful for sushi, pre-cum, the hangtown fry, clam chowder, big green salads, soft-boiled eggs, carnitas tacos, biscotti, roasted chickens, cum, day-old sticky buns, and Canada. However, I have no plans for Thanksgiving dinner.

How can this happen? My favorite holiday! My only holiday!

Deevee and Gilley are going camping. I’m invited, but don’t like to be cold. The Maze invited me to San Diego for dinner with his parents. I like to be warm, but the train ticket costs $150 and you have to spend half the time on a bus. What kind of train ticket is that?

My new favorite country is Canada. Truth be told, Canada was my old favorite country too, only for different reasons. I used to like Canada because it seemed less like a country than other countries, the mouse sleeping next to the elephant. Its people, peaceful and funny.

Second City Television was my favorite TV show. "O Canada" stirred me more than "The Star-Spangled Banner." I almost died in Canada, in the late 1990s, and have only been back once since, to play cowboy songs for elderly shut-ins in Ottawa.

That was five years ago, and I was in a van. You don’t need a passport to get into Canada, just to come back. I learned. The hard way. I’m afraid to fly and can’t afford to and have no plans to visit my new favorite country, but that’s OK. Apparently, it will come to me.

In Canada all the animals are moose. If you have mice, and you trap one, you will find on closer inspection that your mouse is a little tiny moose. If you have a cat and a dog, you have a moose and a moose. Small ones. If you go to the zoo, or the circus, and they feature an elephant, it will be played by a humongous moose. And if you see an actual-size moose — say, on the side of a small road in the mountains — then that’s a moose too.

Thanksgiving in Canada happens in October and is not a big deal, according to my Canadian. After work I picked him up at the airport, and I took him out for sushi and then to a downtown hotel with clawfoot bathtubs.

We hardly slept that night, or the next, or the next. The groundwork had been laid online, which doesn’t sound right, I realize. But besides sex, we drove around and talked about food, and movies, and food. Fuck history, Canadians know as much about American barbecue as most Americans do. We’d eaten at a lot of the same places in the South. He knew where to get fried chicken in Missouri, and Buffalo wings in Buffalo. I showed him where to go for breakfast in San Francisco, lunch on the Sonoma Coast, and dinner in the wine country.

He bought me a bottle of great whiskey and a big book about road food. All weekend that weekend I didn’t check my e-mail or answer my cell phone, and my friends worried about me. They needn’t have. I was visiting Canada, in the comfort of my own county and country. And I found it infinitely sweet, hospitable, romantic, and, best of all, game.

The boys around here, you know, the too-cool-for-drool outside-the-box ones who describe themselves on the dating sites as open-minded, adventurous, looking for new experiences, blah blah barf … I hate to say this, my rad hipster sexually-liberated countrymen, but you were just schooled in all of the above by a middle-aged Canadian tweed with daughters and a favorite toothpaste.

He didn’t know I was trans when he first wrote to me, just liked my pics and words and food-itude. I told him right away. I told him and showed him: look, man, an outtie. And unlike you, he shrugged. Never been with a body like mine, he said, never even thought about it. But … he couldn’t wait to find out.

And did.

And loved it. And loves me. He said so.

"I love you too," I said. And I took him back to the airport and then went to play soccer as usual.

My new favorite restaurant is Sushi Man. Just for the name. That’s all. The sushi was … well, nobody got hurt or anything. I got sashimi hamachi and some saba, and the steamed spinach thing with sesame seeds, which was great. Better than the sushi. Nice atmosphere, surreal service, nobody there … *

SUSHI MAN

Daily: 5 p.m.–10:30 p.m.

731 Bush, SF

(415) 981-1313

Beer & wine

MC/V

Meatballs

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Earl Butter made the sauce and I put meatballs in it. You could smell this on the stairs. Between the first and second floors it was something, and between the second and third it was something else. The meatballs had beef and pork and cheese, garlic, parsley, an egg, some old bread crumbs … basically, whatever I could find in Earl Butter’s kitchen. I browned them in bacon fat; then, while they were bobbing in the saucy gurgle, I washed the soccer off of me in Earl Butter’s shower.

Five zip we’d lost. I tossed a salad, boiled spaghetti, Wayway brought the bread, and it was Sunday afternoon all over again. My hair air dries. I do not use hair dryers.

I use a towel.

The occasion: a visit from our own private Idahoan, Johnny "Jack" Blogger, né Johnny "Jack" Journalism, né Johnny "Jack" Poetry, the master of doing what he does, and being what he does, and words and I guess horses.

There were eight people total gathered around a couple of makeshift tables, spinning mismatched forks and raising glasses and bottles and eyebrows to bad jokes, good food, and questionable politics. We laughed until it hurt, ate until it hurt, and then one of us had to go give a massage, another was late for load-in and sound check, a couple needed a nap, and dirty dishes beckoned.

Somehow Johnny "Jack," our guest of honor, wound up doing most of them. I helped. When I go to Idaho, Johnny "Jack" and his wife, Mrs. "Jack," always have a big pot of something or other waiting for me. Mac and cheese. Red beans and rice. It’s a long drive.

When he showed up here, a couple nights before spaghetti, I had jambalaya, which is my new favorite thing to make. And eat. I am eating the leftovers as we speak, and I gotta say: yum. Every time I make jambalaya I have to call Crawdad de la Cooter five times to ask about this or that or rice, and I suppose that’s partly what I love about jambalaya. That tech support comes with it.

You can toast the rice first, or not, or sauté it a little with the "holy trinity" of onions, celery, peppers, and garlic, and, oh, you can imagine how a chicken farmer loves four-thing trinities!

But this time Crawdad called me. "What are you cooking?" she asked.

"Jambalaya," I said. "Here. Talk to John." And I handed him the phone. My two favorite laughs, his and hers, but I could only hear one of them and wished I had a speaker phone.

At the show that night three of our spaghetti friends were playing in two different bands. Everyone was there and I talked to a lot of people I hadn’t seen in some time and lost my voice. That’s just one reason why this column isn’t exactly saying anything.

On the way back to the woods we stopped at a late-night Chinese joint for something to eat. Up high near the ceiling in a corner was a medium-size fish tank with medium-size fishes swimming back and forth, winding around like letters, trying real hard to spell P-O-R-K and B-E-E-F and even C-H-I-C-K-E-N, and really only looking like fish in a fish tank. And tasty ones at that. Which reminded me of this article even before I started to write it.

Johnny "Jack" Blogger has been blogging and talking a lot about nostalgia. This ain’t that. My own happy happy sizzly sadness is set some time in the future. I don’t want to be fried, or cooked in a clay pot either, but there is something delicious in my medium-size heart, flop and roll and apropos of none of the above. I twist, I turn, I sink and spin, and can’t even begin to spell it.

My new favorite restaurant is Lee Hou, which claims to be "the very first Chinese restaurant on Clement." So … OK, so they’ve had a long time to perfect their salt and pepper chicken wings. We also got lamb sticks, because that seemed like good road food, but the wings were 10 times better and soared us, and we got crumbs and bones all over Johnny "Jack"<0x2009>‘s car, not mine. Damn it! Some things we didn’t eat: snails, duck tongue, and goose intestines. Oh, and fish. *

LEE HOU

Sun.–Thurs., 8 a.m.–1 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 8 a.m.–2 a.m.

332 Clement, SF

(415) 668-8070

Beer and wine

MC/V

F-ing hippies

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS My friend Hoohoohaha has a son, a daughter, an ex, a small dog, and a hippie. She also has a wood pile, and has recently developed an allergy to fireplaces, poor girl, so I picked up a pizza after work and went over to console, catch up, and steal her wood pile.

So you know, in my first week of owning my first-ever brand new car pickup truck, the subcompact Honda Fit, I hauled: a wood pile, a Dumpster full of kindling, a new bed, a beautiful table and two chairs, a goth sympathizer, and a dump run’s worth of garbage.

Hoohoohaha’s son makes magazines out of magazines, and they are roughly the size of a postage stamp and entirely devoted to the topic of butter. At this rate of brilliance, I project, he will win a Pulitzer before he goes to high school.

The daughter scares me. She’s three.

The dog, a yapper, doesn’t scare me one bit, but wouldn’t leave me alone, either.

"It’s just plain pizza, pup," I tried to explain. "There isn’t even any meat on it. Now get outta here." I’m not a dog person, but I recognize that people like them every bit as much, if not more, than I like my cat. So I resisted the temptation to kick or even tease Hoohoohaha’s stupid new one.

Her hippie pretty much stays in the garage. She’d been talking about him for months and months. At first I suggested that she set traps, but it soon became apparent that Hoohoo actually wanted him there. In fact, she mentioned over pizza that he was moving on, or out, or re-garaging, or whatever it is that hippies do. The implication was that she would be looking for a new one, and the significant look, I gather, was because I live in hippieland and might know somebody. But I didn’t.

I have cats and rats and chickens and bugs. The hippies leave me alone. Except on Fridays, when I go to my tiny town’s tiny little farmers market, and then they try and sell me cucumbers. Maybe it’s the way I dress, or smell … something makes me exude meat-eaterliness. I was checking out these heirloom tomatoes at one booth and the woman hippieing it said, and I quote: "They taste like bacon."

I looked at her. I was holding a tomato and, still looking at her, I brought it slowly to my nose. It smelled like a tomato. "They taste like bacon?" I said.

"Bacon," she said. She was beautiful. "Yep."

"You realize you’re talking to a serious bacon eater," I said. "This is no small claim." I was thinking, I’m going to have to rethink my unreasonable prejudice against hippies. Just because I kind of am one, that’s no reason to hate a whole class of people. Maybe some hippies appreciate life’s more sacred institutions, such as bacon, every bit as much as the rest of us do. Maybe they not only love bacon, but they know how to grow tomatoes to taste like bacon. If so, I want a hippie in my garage too!

"Do you eat bacon?" I said. I don’t have a garage, but I was thinking maybe she could move into my storage shed, or chicken coop.

She said she didn’t, but used to, and now, with her amazing new bacony tomato variety, she could still enjoy a BLT with only the L and the T on it.

This is going to get my head blown off some day in an old Clint Eastwood movie, I know, but I can’t help it. I am one of those people who just has to know. So I bought a lot of tomatoes from this beautiful vegetarian hippie chick, and I left them on my counter for a couple days, like she said, and then ate them and they didn’t taste anything at all like bacon.

Fucking hippies. I’m setting traps in my chicken coop and storage shed, and it’s obtuse, so I’ll tell you: the moral of this seemingly silly story is that if you voted Yes on Proposition 8 here in California, you are, whether you know it yet or not, a homo.

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My new favorite restaurant is Gioia Pizzeria for giving me an alternative to what I usually tell transplanted New Yorkers who ask my advice. Now I can choose between "give up" and "Gioia." Super thin, super saucy, and very very similar to actual New York style pizza. Check it out.

GIOIA PIZZERIA

1586 Hopkins, Berk.

(510) 528-4692

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

No alcohol

MC/V

Can have

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Me and Boink at the counter, aprons on, hands washed, ready to go … "I’ve been looking forward to this all week," I said. "You’re my new favorite person to cook with."

He looked up from his step stool with all the earnestness in the world, which seems to be his for the asking, and asked, "Do you love me?"

"I do, Boink," I said. And I kissed him on the head. "I love you very much."

He said he loved me too, and asked if he could kiss me. (So polite!) I said that he could, and he gave me a cute little peck on the cheek.

You were expecting what? Diarrhea? Well, I did get sick again. The thing about working with kids is that you wind up with every communicable disease in the world, on a daily basis, especially if you kiss them and eat food right out of their mouths, like I do. Gotta stop that. I’m getting sick of being sick.

On the other hand: I, your chicken farmer truly, bought a new (as in new new) car. Thanks to Boink, and Popeye the Sailor Baby, and Big Chunk and Little Chunk de la Cooter, and all their various and sundry parents, I can now afford to make me a monthly payment or two, or 60. And, yes, for the first time in my farmerly life, I am the proud driver of an actually reliable motor vehicle.

All the gears work and everything! Horn … Check this out: it has seatbelts that actually lock when you get in an accident. And, most meaningfully to me, what with winter coming, you don’t have to pop the hood and leave the vehicle to turn the headlights on!

How stylin’ am I?

I know what you’re thinking. You’re going to miss my little tales of sitting on the side of the road for exactly 52 minutes, waiting for my old pickup truck to start, aren’t you? I know I’m going to miss all the colorful people one meets in such a manner. Tow-truck drivers, police, drive-by mechanics, and so forth. Yesterday, out of habit, or nostalgia, or both, I stopped at my local car parts store. I bought a roll of paper towels.

My new pickup, which I named Alice Shaw after my hero, Alice Shaw, is the ever-popular Honda Fit pickup truck. Light blue, almost silvery. It’s so beautiful I cold lick it, and often do.

Now I’m not a car reviewer, I know, but this Fit is the damnedest thing on four wheels. A miracle of modern engineering, it’s the first car ever to be twice as big inside as out. Even more cargo capacity than my old Chevy Sprint! You can carry two bales of straw at once, and still have room prolly for a sack o’ feed and a little load of scrap wood.

First thing I did, before I even drove it off the lot, I folded the back seats down. "Pickup truck mode," I said to the dealer, who nodded unknowingly and handed me my balloons, for the kids.

Then I drove around town looking for Dumpsters, playing with all the buttons, and just generally showing off.

"Wait till you put your first ding in it!" all my friends keep saying.

I don’t know what they’re talking about. I dinged the dang thing at the dealership, I was so nervous. I’ve never been in debt before, not even a credit card debt. Are you kidding me? I had to scratch the driver’s door with my key just to get myself to sign my name.

The idea here, so you know, is to teach myself that I can have and might even deserve something nice in this world. Because I didn’t grow up knowing that. You get so used to can’t have that you forget how to even want. I thought of this a lot, last few months, dating married men, creepy redneck couples, and other unloveables.

My new blue beautiful car = can have.

And I tell you this now so I can say I told you so when you see me, one day, walking around the world with a loving, shiny, and reliable man. With a ding in one cheek.


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My new favorite restaurant is Hometown Donuts #7. It’s in Richmond, off the same exit I take to go to my favorite Dumpster. So I needed a haul for my new car, and a haul for me. Check it out: two things, plus rice for under five bucks. Chinese. Fried and barbecued. I got spicy pork and a fried chicken thigh hot out of the fryer. Yum! A pretty plasticky place to eat, but I’ll take it. And a donut to go, please.

HOMETOWN DONUTS #7

2315A Cutting, Richmond

(510) 237-2652

Mon.–Sat., 5 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sun., 6 a.m.–7 p.m.

No alcohol

Cash only

Brilliant ideas

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Here’s what I did: I roasted a chicken in a cast iron skillet, then I cooked a batch of drop biscuits in the drippins in the pan. They already of course had butter in them, but when they were done I halved them, buttered them again, and dipped them in the chicken juice. I washed this down, and the chicken down, with an elegant French wine, straight from the bottle, and worried about one day dying in a plane crash.

The thing about my cooking partner, Boink, is that he has a vision. Being all washed up, myself, and entirely out of original ideas (butter butter butter, chicken chicken chicken, plane crash), I rely on Boink for inspiration in the kitchen. Meaning the whole alternative weekly world will now have to rely on him too. If ever a three-year-old could handle this kind of pressure, Boink is the man. Boy.

"What kind of soup should we make today, Boink?" I ask.

"Pesto," he says. "Pesto soup."

Another time I wonder what else we might add to our banana bread.

"Pesto?" he says, chewing thoughtfully on his apron string.

Brilliant ideas, all, but don’t forget that I am a paid professional in this house. At the end of the day, when Mom and Dad come home and I put dinner on the table and then leave real fast while they’re all washing their hands and putting their bibs on, my actual income is on the line. Without which I could face eviction, repossession, disenfranchisement, bankruptcy, and, eventually, bunions. Whereas Boink’s biggest fear is time out.

So I’ve learned to funnel his fun, adventurous, if pestocentric decision-making by asking better questions, such as, "Hmm, what kind of sauce do you envision on this fettuccini, Chef Boink?" (Pesto!)

"What kind of spread, in your opinion, might be good on these sandwiches?" (Pesto!)

So the other day we’re making ravioli, which is a complicated, drawn out process and therefore one of the more effective ways to keep three-year-olds off the streets and out of gangs. In my opinion.

We rolled out our noodles, and I mushed up a barbecued squash for some of the ravioli, figuring ricotta cheese for the others. But I thought both fillings could use a little color and zing, so I opened the cupboard where they keep their pesto, pretended to rummage around a bit, and asked Boink what else he was thinking for our ravioli.

He didn’t hesitate. "Raisins," he said, with conviction.

I decided to throw a tantrum. It’s the best way to circumvent his, I’ve found. "Raisins??!!??!!" I stomped and scowled and threw up my hands, and he laughed and laughed. I’m good at this. I tugged my hair, squeezed my eyes closed, and shook my head real hard. "I can’t work like this," I said, taking off my apron and throwing it on the floor. "Raisins! In ravioli!!!"

"Not in the ravioli, Silly," he said, still laughing. "In the sauce."

There was a beautiful bolognese gurgling on the stove, and I was pretty sure it was the most wonderful creation I had ever created. Perfect, I thought. I brought the box of raisins to the stove, left the lid on, and shielding him from the action with my body, shook the box a wee bit, just to get a realistic rattle out of it.

The lid fell off and every raisin in the world plonked into my masterpiece. It could have been a Reese’s peanut butter cup moment, come to think of it — but not at the risk of homelessness. So, between all our spooning and folding and cutting and crimping, I kept revisiting the stove, and eventually tasted every single raisin out of the sauce.

Next week, to compensate for the cuteness of this week’s tiny tale, I will describe my diarrhea.

———————————

My new favorite restaurant is Dempsey’s Brewery in Petaluma. Especially if you park on the street. Because then you get to walk over a river on a wooden pedestrian bridge where I stopped once last summer to look at the water and kiss a guy. And there’s a real nice outdoor patio and pretty nice innards, too, with booths, good burgers, wood-oven pizza, and great beers. Red Rooster Ale. But if you park in the parking lot, you’re going to know that this quaint, cool brew pub is actually in a strip mall.

DEMPSEY’S RESTAURANT & BREWERY

Sun.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–9 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

50 E. Washington, Petaluma

(707) 765-9694

Full bar

AE/D/MC/V

Nostalgia

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Now that I am once again all chipper and cheerful and shit, albeit without wheels or money or, you know, prospects, I reckon I can return to writing about food. Anyway, I’m going to try.

My happiness is speculative. I figure, in a world with Alice Shaw and her biscuits in it, all things are not only possible, but likely. Right now, for example, I am lying outside in my tiny patch of woodsy sunshine, dreaming about becoming Canadian, if for no other reason because their Thanksgiving comes earlier than ours, and who wouldn’t want that?

What I love about sunbathing in the woods in October is that you don’t need to wear sunscreen. Or anything.

What I love about Canada …

What I love about fall is sitting in a pile of dead leaves on a sidewalk in Berkeley with Clara de la Cooter, wiggling our legs.

A couple weeks ago, when I was still engaging in defeatist activities such as dating, I was asked, over coffee, what my favorite restaurant was. I don’t believe the asker even knew I was a chicken farmer, let alone the chicken farmer, and that, therefore, my favorite restaurant was wherever I happened to be eating.

So it surprised me more than him when, instead of saying "all of them!" I waxed nostalgic over a particular one, Gravy’s, which has been boarded up for at least five years. If anything I should have said Penny’s Caribbean Café, which has been boarded up for less than one, and which I drive by once a week in the wild hope that she will have resurrected out of the flour and chickpea dust in her cluttered back-room kitchen on Sacramento Street.

Nostalgia happens. Fall’s a good time for it. It’s not a good or a bad thing. It’s nostalgia. It means that at one point in time, at least, you enjoyed life, and that your memory function is functioning. Unfortunately, it also implies that right now things aren’t so bacon for you. For example, you have no idea, say, where to get a good curry goat roti.

There’s a very plastic dollar-fitty-a-thing Chinese joint where Ann’s Café was. I went in there a couple months ago, and got it to go. What was Ann’s Café, in its entirety, is now just the kitchen. The grease on the walls back there looked familiar. I’ve been meaning to write about it.

Maybe next week.

Anything can happen. I have a recurring dream about Ann’s reopening in a food court kind of setting, a small, square, open-air restaurant with Her, Fran, in the middle, holding court and slinging omelets. It’s the same feeling as the one I have when I dream about my closest comrade ever, who died 20 years ago: that this is just wonderful, and not at all, not-even-the-slightest-bit real, like heaven.

While I dream of food courts, by way of conceptualizing a nonexistent afterlife, or bullshit reincarnation, some people get to have children!

Take my other old favorite restaurant, Yamo Thai Kitchen, or Mean-Lady Thai as its ardent fans affectionately called it. Of course, Yamo still stands, in name, reincarnated as Yamo, a Burmese joint.

What you may not know is that Yamo’s son and daughter-in-law (who used to cook at Yamo, near the end) have opened a Thai restaurant in the Excelsior District, hooray! My last first-date ever, the guy who asked me what my favorite restaurant was, launching this nostalgic fit … he not only knew this but had eaten there, turns out. I excused myself.

Outside I called Earl Butter on my cell phone and said, "Let’s go."

We went. My new favorite restaurant is Zabb. Familiarly great Thai food for familiarly cheap prices. Diehard fans of Yamo might miss the tight quarters and sweet tension of watching your meal happen from a front-row counter seat, but I liked Zabb’s atmosphere too. Spacious, unpretentious, and very friendly. They definitely put more effort into presentation. The spring rolls were, if anything, better than Mom’s. The choo-chee curry was fantastic. And they also serve my old Yamo favorites, red curry duck, and chef noodles. All this … this is good news, for me. *

ZABB

Wed.–Mon., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

4440 Mission, SF

(415) 586-2455

Beer & wine

Bottom biscuits

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My pickup truck died and this time the death was fatal. The clutch, the transmission … costs more to repair than I paid for the mighty ‘mobile four years and 60,000 miles ago.

I rolled into a legal parking spot, got out and walked to a restaurant I like, sat on a bench outside with my head in my hands, and cried. I had $8 and change in my purse, on my lap, and one bar of battery left on my cell. None of my city friends have cars. I called my sister in Ohio.

"When your car dies," she said, "that’s rock bottom. Now you have nowhere to go but up."

I didn’t think this was true, but my sister, this one — Carparts, I call her — is younger than me and therefore wiser, so I decided to take her word for it. Rock bottom. Depressed. Beaten. Hopelessly hopeful. Puked upon. And now wheel-less, an hour and a half from home. And cat. And chickens.

Sockywonk has a car. I called Sockywonk. But she’s had an even unluckier life lately than I have. She has to move from her great place, and was moving, so her car was already in service for at least a week.

Me, I didn’t want to sit on a bench for a week, so I called my brother in Ohio, and then my other brother in Ohio, and then my other brother in Ohio. If there’s a way to eke 75 more miles out of a clutch-fucked junkyard pickup truck, they would know.

So you know, before I say this next part: I do not embrace terms like "trailer trash," or "white trash," or even "college-educated fuck-up farmer trash" in reference to me and my family. We are "people of trash," thank you. We have dignity. We just also have rusted cars on blocks all over the property, it happens. And I know for a fact that any one of my brothers, and many of my sisters, could have and would have pulled the exact parts that my exact situation called for, and shipped them to me.

All I had to do was ask, but I didn’t. Because right now I don’t have any brothers or sisters or even nephews out here on the receiving end, and, while I can do some things myself, I have never replaced a clutch and transmission and had no interest whatsoever in learning how now. Call me unautomotivated.

What I really needed, I’m embarrassed to admit, was for one of my brothers, probably Jean Gene, the Frenchman, to say, "Wait right there, sis. I’m going to book a flight and pull the parts and … what day is street cleaning where you’re parked?"

I would have said, "Thursday," and Jean Gene would have showed up on Wednesday, taken care of it, and I’d buy him a burrito with my $8.

Let me have my fantasies!

How about this one … I open my cell phone contact list, first name: Alice. Hit send and she answers. "Hi, Alice. My car died." And she says, "I have an extra one. I’ll come get you."

Now, the cool thing about this particular fantasy is that it happened. I swear to my sweet sisters, one minute I was a wreck on a bench, publicly losing it, and the next minute I was sitting at Alice’s kitchen table eating biscuits and gravy, a lone car key on the Formica between us. It belonged to a Honda that is registered, insured, and mine until the end of the month, or, you know, longer if I want.

Those were some very important biscuits. For one thing, they tasted great, better than any biscuits and gravy I’ve ever tasted, and not just because my New Favorite Person had made them, from scratch!

They were bottom biscuits, highly symbolic and loaded with sausage chunks. It was easy to believe, eating such biscuits and gravy so soon after feeling so hopelessly fucked so far from home, that in fact I had bottomed out, and was well on my reboundingly upswung and cheerful way to, if nothing else, a second helping of biscuits and gravy.

Which I was. Alice Shaw, everybody!

——————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Yummie Fast Food on MacArthur Boulevard. It’s Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese and cheap cheap cheap. Steam table fare. I had chicken fried rice with teriyaki chicken and kung pao chicken, dollar-fitty a thing, that’s $4.50, and it was piled on. Everything was great! New favorite restaurant.

YUMMIE

Daily, 10:30 a.m.–8:30 p.m.

4104 MacArthur, Oakl.

(510) 482-1648

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Hope blows

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Hope does not spring eternal. It springs for about three years and four months. Just kidding. It springs eternal. For me it does, but I kind of wish it didn’t. My friends who have given up seem happy, and I look at them, laughing the dark laugh and drinking heavily, and I think, I want that. Thus the fascination with self-destructive habits like, yes, drinking, but also self-pity, insomnia, and burning the roof of your mouth on hot pizza.

You probably noticed that Cheap Eats has become a kind of a blues tune, featuring repetition and heartache. I’d love to stay right there, believe me, and close my eyes and just ever-so-slightly sway, real sexy, like buildings, while the harmonica, "brings it home" and the ice in everyone’s glasses melts.

This sounds nice, doesn’t it? Trust me. It does.

However, and this is a terrible attitude, I know: I keep having hope. Which springs eternal, like cockroaches.

But I would like to learn hopelessness, and am thinking about getting a television. That’s Earl Butter’s advice. "Don’t do drugs," he said, over coffee, down at the coffee shop, ’cause I asked. "Do TV."

Yeah! Food Network, I thought. That’s something I’ve heard about. As usual, Earl Butter has his finger on the pulse of — well, on my pulse.

And let’s be clear: I say learn hopelessness instead of be hopeless not because I’m a new age hippie chick, but the opposite. A chicken farmer. As chicken farmers know (from shoveling shit, chopping off heads, and watching the hawks circle) we are all, ultimately, hopeless. It springs eternal too! But it gets overlooked, so you have to learn it.

This week’s dating disaster blues song is too sad and scary to sing, even for me. So let’s cut the one-four-five, shitcan the harmonica player, shoot the piano player, and, pending his mommy’s permission, effectively turn Cheap Eats over to an adorable three-year-old boy named Boink, who loves to cook and hates to eat. I’m seeing a kind of an alternative weekly cooking show, wherein Boink, with the help of his washed-up chicken-farming nanny, invents pesto soup and generally tries to poison his little sister, who eats anything and is just the cutest little sweetie-pie ever to hit the alternative weekly world since Matt Gonzalez circa 10 years ago.

Let’s call it … I know: Cheap Eats! The first episode begins right now, with Boink at the counter doing what he does best: raising dust. Dust is his word for clouds of flour he inspires by 1) sticking his hands in the mixing bowl, 2) bringing them to face level and clapping, and 3) repeating steps one and two. His whole face, eyebrows, hair, clothes … he is coated in "dust."

I am standing nearby, holding Boink’s cute little sister Popeye the Sailor Baby, who is spewing puke all over me. I’m soaked. If her brother and I were to hug right now we would make, between us, a most disgusting batter.

In fact, let’s make it: puke pancakes! I’m disgusted, not because of the state of my nannywear, but because the day before, I am remembering, standing there dripping sickness, Popeye and me shared fresh figs under their back yard fig tree, alternating bites, while Boink tortured the chickens. I give myself 24 hours before I’m puking all over my nanny.

This feels more like a medical certainty than a prediction, but 24 hours later I feel fine. I feel great. Home, and clean, and hopeful, I call my TV-watching friends the Mountains and invite myself over for dinner. They accept! I e-mail the TV-watching couple I wrote about last time, and invite myself over after dinner for late-night meaningless sex. They accept!

In my car I listen to the debate, and begin to feel it. By the time the ribs and chickens come off the grill, I am on the Mountains’ bathroom floor, missing dinner and cell-phoning my couple to cancel them, too. I was off by six hours, but not off. Puke springs eternal.

My new favorite restaurant is Patxi’s, the Chicago pizza place in Hayes Valley. There are a couple other sources for deep-dish pizza in town, but none come as close to the East Bay’s great Zachary’s as this. In fact, um, I think I might like Patxi’s better. Meat slice (and they do sell stuffed slices) had pepperoni, sausage, and jalapeños — genuinely hot ones. Great crust, soccer on TV … *

PATXI’S

Tues.–Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

511 Hayes, SF

(415) 558-9991

Beer & wine

AE/MC/V

Smoke signals

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS For those of you who are getting a vicarious thrill out of my nightmares d’amour … don’t! Nothing ever happens! It’s like if James Thurber wrote Harlequins, or Jim Jarmusch made porn. Either one might be entertaining, sure, but comic relief is neither to the players themselves.

Short story long: dude contacts me, likes my looks, my writing, and barbecue in general. (This is my online dating profile he’s responding to, not Cheap Eats.) Anyway, his wife and him are poly, she’s bi, and, well …

One thing leads to another, including her writing me too, calling me "doll," and being generally sweet. He sends me the requisite pictures of his penis. Only in this case, maybe because of all the talk of barbecue, it works! It looks absolutely, spectacularly delicious. I want it.

So, OK, so we make our date. It’s a barbecue date, but the implication is hot three-way sex. I take a long bath, do my nails and makeup, spend way too much time picking out my sexiest skirt and the shirt least likely to be ruined by barbecue sauce.

And I’m off. They live just up the road in a shack in the woods, on the river, which is redneck country. I’m thinking: Yay! My people! What I’m not thinking is that their seven-year-old daughter will be home. Or that while dad is busy with the grill and mom with her bong, it will be the daughter who shows me around the place, engages me in conversation, takes me through the trees to the playhouse she’s building, and asks me interesting questions.

I like the parents too, only I love this kid. While she flits about, chasing cats and climbing walls, me and mom and dad sit under the redwoods around an unlit fire pit, enjoying four kinds of potato chips and three kinds of dip, sipping our drinks, and waiting for the ribs.

I ask questions and they answer them, the wife leafing through a magazine. He’s not a huge practitioner of eye contact, either. Oddly, I’m enjoying myself. The woods, the smell of smoke … I feel right at home. And they’re attractive enough, I just kind of wish I could ditch them and run with their daughter. Who, during dinner, puts headphones on and plays violent computer games.

Instead of the deck or the dining room, we adults eat at the TV, plates on laps, and — get this — what’s showing is Sweeney Todd. Perfect! I’ve got the couch to myself, barbecue sauce all over my face and fingers, pork in my teeth … there’s blood squirting all over Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter at the meat grinder, and I am, as you might imagine, in chicken farmer heaven — at each slit of each throat squirming all over the couch and feeling finally sexy.

There’s a mattress on the floor under our feet. After the movie, when I come out of the bathroom, both parents are gone and the kid is jumping on the mattress, telling me about the next movie, how I’m going to love it and have to watch the whole thing with her. It’s a kids’ movie.

"Where are your mom and dad?" I ask, thinking maybe they’ve gone into their bedroom. I hope.

"Outside smoking," she says.

I find them at the potato chip buffet and they’re, like, "Hey."

It’s the woods, it’s dusk, sweet. I linger, trying to read the situation, but nobody asks me to sit or offers a drink, or gives me a sign, so I thank them for the meat and movie and get my purse. Wife gives me a hug. Husband walks me to my car and kisses me on the lips. And he’s tall, so I have to stand on my tiptoes, which I love. The next day I thank them again, in writing.

He writes back, says they had a nice time too, only he would’ve liked it better if I’d spent the night because, and I quote, he "really wanted to shove [his] cock down my throat, lol."

So. Tell me. How am I supposed to take this?

———————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Little Joe’s Pizza. They serve Italian and Mexican food. Which is especially poignant because it’s at the corner of Mission and Italy, in the Excelsior. We had a pizza party there for Deevee’s birthday. She’s 41. Salads, garlic bread, pizzas, and pitchers and pitchers of beer. We stayed for hours. Total damage: $20 per person, tip included! Great atmosphere. Black vinyl booths, red walls, very friendly.

LITTLE JOE’S

Sun.–Thu., 11:30 a.m.–midnight; Fri.–Sat., 11:30–1 a.m.

5006 Mission, SF

(415) 333-3684/5/6

Beer & wine

MC/V

Drama queen

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I did think about drinking myself to death, I admit, but it wasn’t a serious thought. I just thought, I can drink and drink and drink … but everyone knows I can’t. I fall asleep after one. Sometimes I don’t even finish it.

Still, you like to pretend, and there’s a certain mystique to drinking oneself to death, like Billie Holliday. Or working oneself to death, like John Henry. Or crying oneself to death, like lots of people.

Mystique is good.

I know what you’re thinking, but it won’t work. My stomach is cast iron, and very well-seasoned at that; my metabolism, miraculous. I have, in fact, a pretty incredible body to live in. If I have an Achilles heel — and the anatomy experts among us are going, "You do!" times two — but if I have an Achilles heel, it’s the roof of my mouth. Or, the insides of my cheeks and lips where I’m constantly cannibalizing myself, by accident, because I eat like a wolf.

I am prone to mouth ulcers. Hmm …

It’s decided! I am going to eat-only-acidic-things to death. Tomatoes. Vinegar. Hot peppers. Grapes. Orange juice. Lemons. Tomatoes. Reckless rebel that I am, I shall henceforth bite the pizza the moment it arrives at the table! I don’t care. Already the sides of my tongue hurt when I chew. The roof of my mouth feels gritty like an inside-out worm. Soon it will shred, then crumble, then fall away and I’ll die, on the floor, an empty jar of peperoncini next to my head.

And everyone will say, "Whoa, she peperoncini’d herself to death. How mysterious, exotic, and, and, mystique-y!"

There will be a rush on my books and albums, so I better get busy. Tell you something about life, real fast: It sucks. Everyone knows this, because it’s wired right in. Life sucks, and rocks. What you may not know is that the split is exactly 50-50. And I don’t need a very big chalkboard to show you the math. One plus one = two things: the miraculous kick-ass fact of your point-of-view, and the sadly inescapable fact of its total cessation.

Now, life happens off of the chalkboard. Thanks to the decimal point, one of our tiniest and most powerful inventions, there are an infinity of possible percentages between none and 100. If you would describe yourself as 51 percent happy, you are 1 percent kidding yourself, or deluded, or lying, or repressed; at 49 percent happy, you are 1 percent whiner. If you’re 100 percent happy, you’re a spiritually enlightened new ager or religious zealot. In which case you may not even eat bacon. End of conversation.

My goal is 50-50, because that’s where you laugh the hardest and cry the most, and therefore where bacon tastes best.

My sister asked if I thought it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved. I said I sided with Alfred Lord, which is, to me, a no-brainer. Since loss is a given, you may as well love your socks and panties off getting there.

On a day when I never even made it out of my pajamas, I also talked for hours and hours with a friend in Bakersfield who is coaching me on dating married men. We knew each other only slightly and for about a year, many years ago. Apparently, we were sleeping with all the same guys at the same time, although I never knew this until she recently e-hunted me down and told me so.

I was, like, cool. A coach! Because, unlike me, she never digressed, and continues to this day to go for the enigma. Me, I digress. I have a problem, I know, and it isn’t depression so much as digression. Probably it isn’t even a problem. It’s just that —

Never mind.

Another person I talked to that day was my brother, who is in Ohio. I asked him if I was a drama queen and he hesitated.

My new favorite restaurant is Happy Garden because I didn’t get sick when I ate there. (I have high standards, huh?) Well, I have heard from neighbors of the place, in Oakland’s Laurel District, that pretty good meals could be had, but I went and got the salt and pepper oysters, and one smelled like shit. But, being me, I ate it anyway. No problem. Great place! *

HAPPY GARDEN

4112 MacArthur, Oakl.

(510) 482-3988

Mon.–Thu., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

Beer and wine

MC/V

Daddy’s girl

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My dad was here, and, like a lot of daughters, I tried to impress him. Like a lot of fathers, he worries about me, his far out (and up and away) California girl. I just wanted to show him that, look, I’m fine. I’m doing well. No need to worry. All quiet on the western front.

I moved all my garbage from the front seat to the back of my crumbling, windshield-cracked, transmissionally-challenged vehicle, and went to get him at the airport, calling several times on my cell phone to let him know that, essentially, I had a cell phone. Finally.

I also have an iPod Touch, so before I left I tickled up directions to the airport, even though I knew how to get there, and I wedged this into my ashtray to resemble, as closely as possible, a GPS device.

On our way away from the airport, windows rolled down against the 100-plus degree heat, I made sure to mention quite casually that, although my 22-year-old, three-cylinder pickup truck gets better mileage than his Prius, I am saving money to buy a new car.

I took him to work with me, just for three hours, and while he wasn’t paying attention I quite quietly lost that job. Or found out that I will have, come November. To my credit, I didn’t start crying until much later, after midnight, in the woods, trying to fall asleep in the hammock.

On the way home we’d stolen a chicken from a backyard in East Oakland. My dad had held the flashlight, and I’m pretty sure he was impressed with the speed, dexterity, and fearlessness with which I snatched the beast from its sleep and stuffed it beak-first into a cardboard box.

I know he was impressed with my shack because he said as much. He said he’d pictured it much smaller. And he liked my stuff. He hadn’t taken me up on my offer to stop at a drug store on the way home, boxed chicken squawking between suitcases, and buy a shower curtain for my shower-turned-litter-box-slash-storage-space. He’d take his baths outside on the porch, just like me!

What a dad. Jetlagged and overfed, he fell asleep as soon as his gray hairs touched the pillow on my fold-out futon. I made love to Weirdo the Cat on the carpet for a while, and then grabbed my sleeping bag and went outside. It was too hot for sleeping bags. Luckily, and weirdly, it was too hot for mosquitoes, too.

I lay in the redwood-strung hammock, where I usually sleep very soundly, thank you, and I tossed and turned and sniffed and sobbed and howled, albeit very quietly, at the moon. The chicken, which I’d moved from the cardboard box to a cat carrier on an old rusty oil drum next to me, peeked out of its air holes and tossed and turned and pecked at the moon.

Between the two of us, we woke up squirrels, but not my dad.

Who, when he saw my woods and ways in the refreshing (to him) daylight, was even more impressed! He kinda liked bathing outside, and marveled at my outdoor desk, and complimented my apples, which I love but most people find too tart.

Most impressively, though, and he, being his daughter’s father, elaborated at some (if not chicken farmerly) length … the old man couldn’t stop crapping the whole time he was here.

"I seem to have that effect on people," I said. It’s true. I have friends who call me when they’re constipated. They claim the sound of my voice has a laxative effect. Which I take as a compliment.

My dad, who leans toward constipation himself, attributed it more to my healthy diet. His word: "healthy." What we ate: jambalaya with three kinds of meat and two kinds of seafood in it. Omelets. Barbecued eggs. Smoked chickens. Fried clams. Clam chowder. And a Zachary’s stuffed pizza with anchovies.

And if that’s all health food, you gotta wonder, kind of broken-heartedly, what people are eating in Ohio.

—————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Guerilla Café in Berkeley. They have a waffle-of-the-day, and on this day it was cardamom, buckwheat, and dates. Couple of fresh organic strawberries, three or four thin slices of pear, a bloop of crème, one pat of butter, thimble of syrup … bam! $7.25. And a $2 cup of Blue Bottle coffee with no free refill. Justice, Berkeley-style. Hip, righteous, artsy, and expensive, it’s immersion therapy for a chicken farmer come to town.

GUERILLA CAFÉ

1620 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 845-2233

Tue.–Fri., 7 a.m.–6 p.m.

Sat.–Sun., 8 a.m.–6 p.m.

No alcohol

MC/V

Sex and salad

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I was crying long before my cleaver touched the onion. The trick, when slicing onions for a salad, is to slice them so thin that they flop like fettuccini. I like lots, white and worming, in my salad. The onion, I’ve decided, is going to help me die.

A guy told me about The Tibetan Book of the Dead. On a date! I was going, mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm, and all the while I was thinking about onions. That will be the thing for me to focus on while I let go of my last breath. Probably in a cracked up car, or underwater, far from any real chance of salad. My eyes squeezed tight. The onion, hot and sad, on the tongue. There it is. Sexy, sweet, tearful, complex, layered … and out.

Whereas the best place to eat an apple is under the tree! Sitting down, hopefully, on a log, and alive. Very much alive, I was sitting on a log under my apple tree, eating apples. Just now, in the failing daylight, writing this in the dirt. Which never fails. The dirt. My apples, like me, are tart, juicy, and very green. They are wormy and temporary, also like me.

Today instead of being a writer I had online sex and phone sex, both for the first time. That I know of. I’m on OkCupid now. Imagine me — the chicken farmer — mixing it up with cool people and hipsters! They’re all polyamorous and spiritual and shit, and so far I have learned what "tats" means, and some other things, but I forget what. Mostly I don’t know what anyone’s talking about. What’s ttyl?

Here’s the context: a couple of pictures of the same penis from different angles, and the message, "here are a couple of pics for ya. ttyl." Um … T-Bone? Tabasco? You? Liver?

Tats means tattoos.

A married couple wants to do me. They’re into barbecue. Hey, me too! Then there’s this "generous" gentleman, also married. He wants to do me. And wants pictures. Of me … in lingerie.

I have lingerie. I have a camera. What does "generous" mean?

I’m going to meet all these people within the next week or two, and I’m going to do them, I don’t care. I already know that, like dirt. My profile clearly says: long-term dating, don’t need friends. Used to be a boy.

Nobody believes me, which is flattering, since my pictures are recent, and real. My strategy: to flush out all the too-cool-for-school hipsters and then school them. In chicken farmerology. They say they’re adventurous and open-minded. They think outside the box.

And I write them and say, "I have a box for you to think outside of." Bam! They are gushing over my hair, my smile, my sense of humor, and in one case my nose (?) … perhaps wondering (or not) about the faint scent of chicken shit. And onions.

Meanwhile, the really cool, really open-minded guys are contacting me. And they get it. And want it. Today I was just beginning a long-overdue e-mail to one of my many, many vagina-having girlfriends who wrote to ask me for Wine-Bottle Wiener’s phone number, and all of a sudden in the background, on OkCupid: Instant Message! Which — I just learned how to do this yesterday.

So, friend forgotten, me and this mister are typing back and forth, in my opinion setting up a check-you-out coffee date, when all of a sudden he’s, like, "What are you wearing?"

And I’m, like: What? You mean for coff — . Ohhhh … this is that thing. My first-ever what-are-you-wearing moment<0x2009>!

The truth: last night’s baggy hand-me-down pajama bottoms and a long-underwear shirt. It was 2 p.m.

"Just panties and a tank top," I typed. "It’s HOT up here." Lucky him, I’m a trained fiction writer. "What about you?"

When, eventually, my woodsy wireless connection failed us, we moved to the phone. And by the time his cell phone battery died, my actual clothes were all over the floor and I was crumpled on the bed, wormy and warm, craving a good, crisp salad and an even better cry.

———————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Saigon Cuisine. I needed a bowl of soup badly, to drown a very specific sorrow. Very specifically, the sorrow was that China Light, my old favorite restaurant in Santa Rosa, had closed. So instead of eating roast duck noodle soup, I ate pho. Great! I used all the jalapenos, and then a lot of hot sauce. And stopped crying almost immediately.

SAIGON CUISINE

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

320 W. Third St., Santa Rosa

(707) 528-8807

Beer & wine

MC/V

Identity crisis

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My answering machine almost always has a message on it for Brent Casserole. It’s another machine, talking to my machine, and it says, in its robotically female voice, "This is a message for … Brent Casserole. If this is not … Brent Casserole … please press two now."

Clearly, I am not … Brent Casserole. Even I know this. And so the first time I heard it I picked up my phone and started pressing 2 2 2 2 2. Five times because nothing was happening. Nothing was happening because, of course, as anyone but me could have told me, the message had been recorded hours ago, when I was not there. It was way too late to press two. I had missed my chance to not be … Brent Casserole … so the machine on my machine just kept treating me as if I were … Brent Casserole.

There are problems associated with being an open-minded, free-thinking, and completely unhinged chicken farmer. The one I’m thinking of is that you can only be called … Brent Casserole … so many times before you start to wonder if, by some odd turn of events, you are … Brent Casserole.

I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror looking for clues, some little crack in the glass of my perception, something I’d missed. It’s not like me to owe anyone money. Brent Casserole does, according to the rest of the message on my answering machine, and he had better call the following number or else (and this part is only implied) he’s going to have his head bashed in by robots.

Kind of like mine.

My therapist can’t see me until October. I already tried the chickens, but they were no help. My friends all have kids, and, therefore, anxiety disorders of their own. Weirdo the Cat just looks at me as if I were … Brent Casserole? She’s so hard to read sometimes.

That leaves you. I’m going to have to work it out with you, dear reader, because you’re all I have left. Sorry. And we’re going to have to move pretty fast because, on my way to work this afternoon, I need to stop at the feed store and pick up a live chicken for my employer. Then I need to stop at the junkyard that has my stupid Saturn and wrestle either the car or a check for $1,650 away from them. Then I have to stop at the grocery store and buy ingredients for jambalaya because that’s my job du jour, changing diapers and making jambalaya — which I’ve never made before but people seem to think I can because I used to be married to someone named Crawdad.

I have no idea how to make jambalaya, so add that to my list: learn to make jambalaya. And then, while it’s gurgling on the back burner and the baby (oh please oh please oh please) is napping, I need to figure out a 75-word way to say that the worst-ever nightmare taqueria where I had the lousiest burrito ever made in the state of California is actually my new favorite restaurant.

Which …

Hey, wait a minute! Do you see what I did? By accident, by reducing myself to, essentially, the minutia of my day, a grocery list, a chicken farmerly litany of Leoneness, or impending failures, I have established beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am not, no matter how many machines might think otherwise … whatshisname. There can only be one person with that exact list of Things To Do: Me!

So the moral is that we are what we eat, and buy, and cook, and do, and in my case write, and we are not what we owe. Or even what someone else owes. It doesn’t matter how a machine on your answering machine addresses you: we are the sticks, the stones, and the bones. Not the names.

And you say, "Duh."

And I say, That’s easy for you to say. You’re … Brent Casserole. Hit the delete key if you’re not.

—————————————————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is La Villa Taqueria in Berkeley, on the strength of how bad they are. Unlike hippies, I enjoy a little hatred and anger in my mix, and La Villa deserves credit for making easily the worst burrito I’ve ever eaten. Crusty, dry carnitas, bland beans, and the lamest pico de gallo ever to tap my tongue. At least it only took a half hour to slap this crap together! My friend was next door deciding on and buying a piano, and she got done first.

LA VILLA TAQUERIA

2434 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley

510-843-0112

Daily: 7 a.m.–8 p.m.

No alcohol

MC/V

Revenge

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Cut to wide-awake eyes in a moonlit room. In the dream, he could drive my funny little car that no one else but me can drive. He knew how to sweet talk it into first gear, and fearlessly came to complete stops at stop signs. Marveling at his confidence, and competence, I leaned into his big soft arm and he leaned into me, then pulled over and parked and miraculously, as happens in dreams, the stick shift didn’t get in the way.

There’s another guy, way out in Railroad Flat, who calls me to talk car talk, and who tells me, by way of flirtation, how many future–fried chicken hearts he keeps in his freezer. And I don’t have the chicken farmer heart to tell him it’s the livers I like.

The one up in Lake County, he doesn’t call. But when he did, we talked for hours about all the people he’s going to sue, including his neighbor who puts out food for deer and squirrels, and who punched him when he pointed out that it’s against the law, and nature, to feed wild animals.

The big wet spot on the bed next to me has nothing to do with my bladder, so you know. I sleep with hot water bottles on cold nights, and this one sprung a leak. It’s just water. But it might as well be urine, or blood. That’s how freaked I am. And, unlike the other two or three times in my long life that I have nibbled on the earlobe of insomnia, this has nothing to do with dread of death.

The guy driving my car in the sex dream, he may well have accomplished what no amount of religious upbringing or adult talk therapy has managed: helping me wrap my brain around my impending point-of-viewlessness. And on our first date! By accident, by reminding me about onions! Christ, he was so cool, and good.

So, instead of lying awake last night worrying about death, I was lying awake worrying (more like knowing) that I was never going to see this great, cool, good driving man again. Hold on a second. Let me check my e-mail …

Yep. Wow, that didn’t take long. He slept on it, unlike me. Apparently didn’t have the same dream I did, and very succinctly decided friendship yes, romance no. So, let’s see, that makes 1,439,187,009 really really close, loving friends. And exactly nobody to hold me at 4 a.m. when I forget about onions. Or I should say, nobody to snore and grunt and roll away from me at 4 a.m. when I forget about onions. (It’s best not to ask for too much, with odds like mine.)

Merle Haggard has a song where a woman breaks his heart and he’s going to get even by breaking every heart of every woman he sees. Some day I’m going to get me a boob job and break the heart of every man who lays eyes on me, or on them. However that works.

As for deerkind, I exacted my revenge with a big pot of venison chili last weekend, courtesy of the refrigerator and garden of Johnny "Jack" Blogger (Robert Frost’s Banjo) and Sister Mary His Wife, my favorite Catholic ever.

Gardens are good, in Idaho. I don’t know if a pot of chili ever was made — until this one — without opening one single can. Lard be praised, I hardly even had to shake anything into it. There were five kinds of peppers, all fresh-plucked from the garden, at least three varieties of tomatoes, tomatillos — all from the garden. Onions and bacon fat were the only things not grown on the premises. Oh, and the venison. I wish I could say that it was hatchet-ground, but that would be hatchet-grinding the truth, and I prefer just to stretch it.

The deer was courtesy of a wonderful and talkative woman from Portland, Ore., who’s husband (lucky us) has an unadventurous palate. Which drives her crazy, and would me too. So they fight. I’ve met this guy, and he’s a great guy. But if he doesn’t learn to eat new things, I’m going to get a boob job and break his fucking heart.

————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Mi Lindo Yucatan. It’s a lot cheaper at lunch time, though, so if you find yourself in Noe Valley between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.: Platillo Mi Lindo Yucatan is a mixed platter of … let’s see, there was a shrimp ceviche tostada, some salad, a tamal, a cheese empanada, chicken this, pork that. But my favorite was a couple of barbecued ribs. Nice place, interesting menu.

MI LINDO YUCATAN

Daily: 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

4042 24th St., SF

(415) 826-3942

Beer & wine

MC/V

Cheap eights

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS On my way home one morning from another night of urban debauchery followed by very little and very disturbed sleep, I happened to glance at my little pickup truck’s odometer at the exact moment it turned to 88,088. You want to mark these moments, if you’re me, but of course you can’t. At 60 mph, you have, what, one minute to revel in the numerological significance of the big event?

Well, guess what? One minute is enough time to realize that, hey, the day was Friday, Aug. 8, or 8/8/08! Which I very quietly celebrated for 12 seconds (two-tenths of a mile) before going, Hey, I wonder what time it is? Because I left the city at 6:45 and I’m on Stony Point Road, approaching Pepper, so…. No way!

Yes way. It was 7:52, exactly, by my cell phone, which never has enough signal for meaningful conversation but always stays connected to the sun. Or however they do that.

So, to summarize, at eight minutes to 8 a.m. on 8/8/08, my car’s odometer read, 88,088, and just like that your chicken farmer truly had herself a new favorite number.

Yeah yeah yeah, but what did you eat that day? Well, since you asked, I ate oatmeal with blackberries for breakfast as soon as I got home and picked me some blackberries. Then I ate a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich with a pile of home fries for lunch. And then I ate some chicken soup with lots of hot sauce for dinner.

In-between meals I ate the first couple apples off my apple tree, and I ate some sunflower seeds, and popcorn of course, and a poached pear. Poached in the sense of I stole it off someone else’s tree. Oh, and I ate a cucumber salad. All these things I ate. Since you asked.

And notwithstanding all this eating and eight-ing, it was an unremarkable day. In fact, an unlucky one. I had planned to stay home all day to sign for my new laptop, which never came because FedEx couldn’t find my house. Which is what I get, I suppose, for living in a shack.

Come to think of it, eight was my first favorite number. Thanks to Ray Fosse, whom I was in love with. For no apparent reason. I remember that, thanks to Ray Fosse, eight was my first big-deal birthday. Which (for the record, by the way, so you know) I turned on May 21, 1971. Or: 5/21 (5+2+1), ’71 (7+1) … and … oh, I’m just fucking with you now.

I mean, it’s all true, and my math, I believe, is good. But I’m a reasonable chicken farmer. I have a level head and square shoulders and two flat feet on the ground — except, I guess, when I’m flying over fences with a hatchet in my hand, chasing deer. Which I do, if you believe everything you read in the paper.

Anyway, like I was saying, new laptop. As you know, I finally broke down and got an actual cell phone. Plus my first-ever iPod. I am totally geared and gadgetized now for a serious bid to re-enter the world as most people I know know it. My chickens shudder at the thought, but I am even looking to move back to civilization — not so FedEx can find me so much as that’s where I work now. In civilization. With people and everything! At least part-time, but I haven’t had me even a part-time job since the late ’80s. No lie.

I’ve been buttering my bread and bringing home the bacon as a musician and a writer, respectively. And all along, as you know (if you’ve been paying attention), my true ambition has been to work in the service industry.

Is feeding kids, changing diapers, and cooking dinner the service industry? If so, I am almost there! Last week I opened an actual savings account. And I know what you’re thinking, right now, if you like Cheap Eats and Eights. You’re thinking, "Don’t quit your day job."

I won’t.

—————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is King Sing Chinese Cuisine because its name is practically a song. At lunchtime on a Sunday there was nobody there, and the weirdest show ever on TV instead of the Olympics. Some kind of Chinese reality variety show with fire-jumping, sleight-of-handing, and iron-cheffing. Plus cute cute girls and hot hot guys. Both waiters were standing in front of the TV with their hands behind their backs, mesmerized. Wanted to ask for an explanation, but asked instead for the fish fillet with tender greens.

KING SING CHINESE CUISINE

Sun.–Tue. and Thu.–Sat.; 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

501 Balboa, SF

(415) 387-6038

Beer

MC/V

Wine and deer

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS A man with a penis the size of a wine bottle told me you can shoot a deer out of season if it’s decimating your vineyard. We live in wine country. We’re neighbors. He had set a bar of post-coital dark chocolate and a bowl of cherries on the coffee table for me, and was making us tea. I like the taste of wine, but would rather live in beer country, or, I don’t know, hot sauce country. Wine bottles hurt.

This morning at the kitchen sink, grinding my Sweet Maria’s, I looked out the window and saw a small nuclear family of deer looking in the window at me, like, "What the — ?"

I opened the window.

"It’s a kind of coffee," I said.

I didn’t have to holler. The deer were right there — and, perhaps not surprisingly, completely weirded out. I admit I don’t always look exactly sexy in the morning, let alone easily categorized. If they didn’t bolt — and they didn’t — I attribute it more to their being surrounded by chicken wire than any headlight-like radiance on my part. Like most animals, including human ones, deer have an easier time getting into situations than getting back out of them.

The chocolate and cherries were a nice touch though, I thought. The tea was a nice touch. The talk of deer, and vineyards? Nice touch. Very neighborly. Our neighbor, my neighbor told me, shoots deer in his vineyard and can’t be bothered with the rest of it, the gutting and dripping and butchery, so he digs a hole with his backhoe and buries his deerly departed.

I don’t like dark chocolate.

My neighbor said his neighbor calls him first, sometimes, to see if he wants the deer.

"Do you?" I said.

He said he can’t be bothered.

I was eating the chocolate anyway, so as not to seem unladylike, sipping my tea in a manner most dainty. Then, being essentially a cartoon character, the chocolate bar turned into a strip of venison jerky, and the hot tea into a cold beer. Not sure if this would qualify as ladylike or not, but I gave Wine Bottle Wiener my number and said, yo, if anyone ever calls him again with any large game or anything, have them call me.

I just love venison. Steaks. Sausages. Liver. I love venison. So does Mountain Sam, and he has sharp knives and can help me, I figure. What I need, my dear alternative-weekly PETA-supporting readership, is a rifle.

Hey, I have grapevines to protect. Check that: I have grapevine. One. I don’t make wine, but me and my chickens eat a few handfuls of grapes every fall and enjoy them very much, thank you. Now the deer have been sneaking into the chicken yard in the middle of the night and helping themselves. And then mangling, tearing, eating through and sometimes just bowling over my elaborate fencing system by way of saying goodbye.

A farmer wearies of mending fence.

I slowly closed the kitchen window, tiptoed across my shack to the door, which I opened and closed soundlessly, and, in my bare feet still, and pajamas, I snatched my hatchet from the wood pile, jumped the fence myself, and damn near got me my first deer ever, chicken style.

After fixing the fence, I went back inside and drank my coffee.

The phone rang. It was him. And he didn’t have a deer for me; he had a bottle of wine. His deep voice was all want, with maybe chocolate and cherries in it, for me.

"I like cherries," I said, and then I didn’t say anything else. He waited very patiently, but I can never find my way out as gracefully as I found my way in. The man was going to need a smaller dick, was the thing … or a bigger woman. "I like grapes. I like deer," I said. My big toe was bleeding and Weirdo the cat was sniffing me like I was piss, but I could not hang up. "Coffee," I said. "I love coffee."

—————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Pho Vietnam, in Santa Rosa. These folks do the biggest bowls of noodles I’ve ever seen. I’m talking about the bun, or vermicelli, but I’ve also had the pho, and it’s great too. The place used to be all soulful and divey and crowded and dirty, like I like, but then it moved next door into what might have been a pancake house, with big, soft booths, a posh counter, and carpeting. Funny. Fun. Great food.

PHO VIETNAM

711 Stony Point #8, Santa Rosa

(707) 571-7678

Mon.–Sat. 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; Sun. 10 a.m.–7:45 p.m.

Beer & wine

MC/V

Under the skin

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS To be honest (which is one of my two favorite ways to be) … I never very much liked ratatouille, or rat-a-tat-tat-ouille, as I have sometimes called it, to be difficult. Nothing against eggplant. It’s just that there are, at any given time, 9,999 other things I’d rather be putting in my mouth, at least one of which, at any given time, is a whole roasted chicken rubbed with black pepper and garlic, strips of bacon stuffed under the skin.

The only reason I mention ratatouille is because there’s a movie that, like most movies, I never saw. Called Ratatouille. But I don’t much go for ratatouille, so why would I want it in italics, with a capital R?

Plus I am the least movied person alive. That’s why I so seldom know what anyone’s talking about. I do see movies, occasionally, but only as a vehicle for popcorn. Home or away, I pop my own. Not that I can’t afford movie theater popcorn; I just like mine better. As it turns out I — famed appreciator of Two-Buck Chuck and Dollar-a-Thing Chinese fast food — am a popcorn snob.

I get my kernels at Rainbow Grocery, so we’re talking organic, free-range, home-schooled, non-HMO, white corn popcorn. And, in one of those cool turnabouts that makes life soupy and worth living, it’s cheaper than Orville fucking Redenbacher and Jolly goddamn Time. Oh, and every kernel pops — for real, Orville. I can prove this in a court of law. I know how much oil to use, so the salt sticks too. No butter. Just salt.

People are always almost beating me up in bars. And not for the normal reasons, either. Most recently it was a matter of my not having seen Ratatouille, the movie. I forget who it was, but it wasn’t the one person in the world who’d have "probable cause" for beating me up in bars for not seeing Ratatouille — the badass biker babe I know who actually worked on that film.

Whoever it was, they were berating, abusing, and downright poking me over never having seen Ratatouille. I didn’t dream this. I know it wasn’t a dream or else it would have been the badass biker babe.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: no butter? Did you just say no butter on your popcorn? You, Chicken Farmer? Butterer of everything, singer of songs about butter, and placer of bacon under chicken skin? No butter on your popcorn?

Well, first let me say that it was Crawdad’s idea to put bacon under the chicken skin. I was 100 percent behind the idea, yes. But ultimately I was, like so many ruiners of life and meals before me, "only following orders." It was her kitchen.

We both knew that the bacon stuffed under the skin and into the cavity would never get crisp, nor exactly palatable to most palates, save mine and maybe the dog’s. But I figured, well, we could always put more strips of bacon on the outside of the bird. To eat! The bacon-inside idea, I imagined, would lasso all sorts of holy cows at the dinner table. It would melt into the meat, and leave an extra layer of pretty pure fat under the skin, essentially turning chicken into duck, and consequently turning us, me and Crawdad, into Nobel lariats.

There’s a word for this. It’s either hubris, dumbass, or joie de vivre … depending where you come from and what kind of mood you’re in.

Speaking of Frenchness, I borrowed Ratatouille from Crawdad that night — something to watch with my bedtime popcorn when I got home.

Got home, popped my corn, salt, no butter, opened the box …

No disc. No Ratatouille. Still going to get beat up in bars, etc. Except: the following night, last night, at Yo-Yo’s, cat-sitting, out of pure boredom, I swear, I touched the "open" button on her DVD player. I’d already scanned her shelves, nothing I wanted to see. And you’re not going to believe this, because Yo-Yo and Crawdad haven’t seen each other in years…. In fact, I’m not even going to tell you.

—————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Cactus Taqueria. There’s one in Oakland and one in north Berkeley. That’s the one I like, because that’s where I lunched with a one-year-old after a grueling five-minute birthday shop for another one-year-old. Best thing about nannying: you always have someone with you to help finish a burrito. And if it’s Clara de la Cooter, she’ll finish all your hot sauce too. We were googy over the carnitas.

CACTUS TAQUERIA

1881 Solano, Berk.

(510) 528-1881

Daily: 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

Beer & wine

DISC/MC/V

Reliability

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Most expensive thing I ever bought was a shiny, concert-quality, made-in-Trinidad steel drum which, in its case at the head of my futon, makes an excellent back rest while I’m reading books. The drum I play and love and cherish is a rusty, junky trash can, hammered out by some white guy with a stutter in Mendocino. He used it as his beach drum for a while, then left it out in the rain for a winter, then gave it to me for $100 and it sounds like butter. Whereas my $1,600 Steel Island special, crafted by Tony Slater and fine-tuned by the great Bertie Marshall himself, sounds like paper clips in the laundry. But, hey, back support is very important. Without it, I would constantly be hitting my head on the floor.

Last fall, for the first time in my life, I started driving a reliable car. It was less than 10 years old (a first for me), had air bags (a first for me), a door lock clicker (a first for me), and three state-of-the-art cupholders. In March, the engine blew up. Cost me $1,649 to fix it, and it’s still not fixed. In the past four months my reliable car has spent more time with my mechanics, Larry, Curly, and Moe, than it has with me.

Luckily, it shit the bed so fast I hadn’t yet got rid of my ’86 3-cylinder pickup truck. So that’s what I’ve been driving, Old Reliable — only when I say reliable in this case I mean it. No tongues, no cheeks. My old truck may take many tries to go into first gear, but it will, eventually, go. And once a month it is going to leave me sitting on the side of the road somewhere, broken down, for exactly 52 minutes.

I know that nice guys in nicer, bigger trucks than mine will stop and noodle around under my hood, try to get it going, give up, tell me I need a new this or a that, and offer to give me a ride somewhere. And I will sit there and smile and say, "No thanks, but thank you though." And sometimes right in front of their disbelieving eyes, if 52 minutes has passed, I will turn the key and it will start — and run for exactly another month. That’s what I call reliability.

I’m trying real hard to get legit. I’m a part-time nanny now, and kids and parents are counting on me. So I got a cell phone. My first! Now, for $40 a month, I pretty much always know what time it is. This is a first for me too, since I’ve never been a watch-wearer. And even though I am invariably out-of-signal when my car dies, I can sit there and look at the time on my cell phone and know exactly when 52 minutes is up.

For 10 years I wrote on an old Gateway dinosaur. Then, a year and a month or so ago, I bought a shiny new MacBook with a one-year warranty. As a visual joke, a twist on my farmerly aesthetic, I set up the Gateway outside next to the chicken coop. When it rains, I put a tarp over it. But in any case it is generally covered with dust and feathers and shrouded in salty coastal fog. Every now and then, on a nice day, I turn it on, and am always pleasantly surprised that it boots.

In fact, I’m writing on it right now because my MacBook died — not only mere months out of warranty, but on the exact day the new iPhones came out, assuring I would not be able to see anyone at any Apple store for at least a week.

So I took it to MacMedics. Their estimate: $960. How much I paid for the new computer one year and one month ago: $950. Do they sell new Macs? You bet!

While it’s still Poo-Poo Pride month, I would like to dump a figurative pile of stinky, steamy, corn-dotted, meat-eaterly chicken farmer shit all over Apple Computer, Saturn, Steel Island, and AT&T — only in AT&T’s case I don’t exactly know why yet. Forty dollars a month is more a trickle than an explosion. Still, I hold my cell phone like a hand grenade.

——————————————

My new favorite restaurant is Taqueria La Nueva, and not just ’cause I work right up the block. Although that helps. The al pastor burrito is wonderful, the carnitas less so. And it’s kind of inconspicuously tucked away on an odd corner of Foothill in Oakland. They have to put a sandwich board out in the street — not the sidewalk, in the street. Yes yes yes, we’re open open open. Right here. And still there’s never anyone there. Four-fitty gets your burrito, chips, and some great green salsa. That’s old school, and that rocks, in my opinion.

TAQUERIA LA NUEVA

Daily: 9 a.m.–10 p.m.

5324 Foothill, Oakl.

(510) 698-4036

No alcohol

AE/DISC/MC/V

Home field advantage

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Bars are wired for weird times. I know that. The combination of amplified music and vodka makes for surreally truncated, garbled conversation (if any). Which in turn makes for strange looks, nods of unknowingness, flights of fancy, and colorfully elaborate misunderstandings. Then the next day you have to e-mail everyone and say, "Christ, what happened?"

Restaurants are wired for romance. Coffeehouses are wired for wirelessness. That’s why you get coffee on first dates. If they don’t show up, you can check your e-mail. Second date, dinner. Third date, drinks and dinner — then hopefully more drinks, then hopefully breakfast. But you don’t just drink until after you are bored with each other, or are at least married.

I was not on a date. My date, the dumb fuck, cancelled on me. It would have been a second date, so I would have had dinner. As it turned out, I did have dinner with a good friend instead, so it was actually enjoyable — if not romantic — and then we went to see another friend’s band play and everyone was there.

Now, if you’re me, all your friends are in love with all your other friends, with the possible exception of me. And all their relationships are always at various stages of disappointment/dissipation, in which case they may want to confide in you, or else they are on Cloud Nine, in which case they may want you to confide in them.

It might be the same mechanism that makes people rubberneck car crashes or turn into drooling zombies in the glow of the Disaster Channel. They could be safe, held, and accounted for, but some rare, blissless part of them misses loneliness and/or craves the vicarious ache of your dumb fuck dates and serial dicklessness.

And some not-very-rare but raw part of you wants to talk, and tell, and hear, and feel, so this all works out very nicely, or would except that you’re in a loud bar with a lot of strong drinks in your hands. And the next thing you know, if you’re me, all your friends have left, some having said good-bye, some not … and you live an hour and a half away, have keys to several neighborhood couches and crawl spaces, but miss Weirdo the Cat and are in general very, very confused.

It’s late it’s dark you’ve had at least a drink you’re a lightweight you’re afraid to go let yourself in to any of your many oddly departed friends’ apartments because they are probably all in bed with each other, making happy, sexual, slurpy noises.

How did this happen? You trade your unfinished drink for a cup of coffee to go and, replaying the strange night in your head, you drive home on the verge of tears and, more dangerously, sleep. You feel hardly understood, hardly understanding, in broad daylight on solid ground, outside. Let alone at shows.

You remember saying to someone back at the bar: "I think I might try dating younger men, since older ones strike me as disappointingly immature. With younger ones at least I won’t be disappointed. And there will be hope. Insane hope, but hope."

What they heard, between guitar solos and microphone feedback: "I think the fire was in the bedroom, since something something scintilutf8gly immature. With young rum the peaches won’t be disappointing. Something something. I’m insane! Ho ho ho!"

Little wonder they looked at you sideways and left.

Fuck bars. Fuck restaurants. Fuck coffeehouses. From now on I’m going to stay home, in the woods. If my friends want to see me, they are more than welcome here. And I will feed them. Complete strangers too. If they want it to be a date, I have coffee!

We can sit outside, and the only interference to our clear, body-boggling verbal connection will be birds and squirrels, and/or the sizzling of chops and chicken. Inside, the sound of a clock and the smell of bacon. This is called home field advantage.

Which … I think I could use me some.

———————————————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Taqueria Guadalajara. You know how I know? I had just bought about 15 pounds of Flint’s barbecue for my band, and Little Him showed up with a Guadalajara burrito. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it, ribs, brisket, and chicken notwithstanding. This burrito was eight-feet long and weighed 420 pounds. Next chance I got, I went to Guadalajara myself for about three solid meals’ worth of al pastor, and was not disappointed. Open late, and pretty nice inside, too.

TAQUERIA GUADALAJARA

Sun.–Thurs., 9 a.m.–1 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 9 a.m.–3 a.m.

3146 24th St., SF

(415) 642-4892

Beer & wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Erraticism

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Rube Roy’s gonna enjoy this … That sweet bluegrass kitty I wrote about? We got in an argument and I was the one who had to go to the hospital. It bit me, the little love, and drew blood. Just a couple a drops, but still, I’m a stickler for details. I called the advice nurse to see if I should bring the poor, exposed kitten in for a blood test, since probably some of my cells got left in its mouth, and it might have had a small cut or cold sore in there, for all I knew.

Ironically, the nurse was more worried about me! In her opinion, since this was technically a wild animal, albeit a cute one, I was at risk for rabies, kitten scratch fever, and sundry heavy metal maladies. Infection … who knew kittens could be so dangerous?

"Are you behaving erratically?" the advice nurse asked. To be fair, there were other questions too, but this was the one that impressed me. Was I behaving erratically?

I had one of those blink-of-the-eye moments, where a sudden shift in perspective allows you to see your life objectively and with absolute clarity. No time passes, yet you take instantaneous and discerning stock of your entire past, present, future, and (if you’re me) present perfect progressive.

Four years I’ve been living with my insane cat in this falling-down shack in the woods next to my homemade falling-down chicken coop. I’ve been driving a perplexingly sporadic little blue pickup truck that isn’t a pickup truck and only sometimes has a horn, or headlights, or first gear, and also only sometimes goes.

I’ve been lying outside in my junkyard bathtub, plucking my boobs and wearing a cowboy hat. There’s a black rubber ducky with anarchist slogans floating between my feet, a jar of piss next to a bowl of popcorn outside the tub, and on a beautiful Tuesday morning, to give just one example, while folks half my age and even probably one or two people twice my age are stuck in offices being productive members of society, here I am in said tub talking on the phone with you, Ms. Advice Nurse, because I tried to help a kitten.

"Me? Behaving erratically?" I said, more than a little miffed at her insinuating tone. "I’m a consistent character, if you don’t mind! Did I bite a kitten? No. A kitten bit me. Am I behaving erratically? What about this little nefarious bastard?"

My chickens were lined up on a log, just 10 feet away, looking at me and screaming. Inside our shack, Weirdo the Cat was jumping up onto and off of our chair, repeatedly, trying to bat down song lyrics that were hanging like laundry on my indoor clothesline, swaying in the wind because the windows were open to air out something I’d done.

"What’s that noise?" the advice nurse asked. "And what was that word you used?"

"Chickens. Didn’t I tell you? I’m outside, in the tub," I said. "What? Nefarious? It means wicked, or evil."

"Hold on a minute," she said, and she went away and came back nine seconds later and said I had to go see the doctor. As soon as possible. I guess because chicken farmers don’t normally use the word nefarious.

So, well, so I was erratic. And scared now too, so I called in "bit" from work, and did go see my doctor. I hate heavy metal music … and am susceptible to suggestion. Even dumb ones, like I could die from this horrific kitten wound, which was on my index finger and looked like a little dot, or freckle, only smaller.

My doctor laughed her ass off. She did give me a vaccine shot against tetanus, whooping cough, and something else — not because I got poked by a kitty, but because I work around little baby human infants and shit, in addition to chickens, chicken wire, and nefarious wildlife. So here’s why I love my doctor, and not advice nurses: while I was there, I showed her some warts I have and she said, and I quote, "Put duct tape on them."

————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Cable Car Pizza. And if you believe that, I’ve got a cute little kitten for you. This place kinda sucks. Only reason we went was we had a band to feed, and Arinell wasn’t open yet. I started foaming at the mouth when they rang me up. Georgie Bundle said $26 was the going rate for a large with a couple of toppings. If so, they might consider putting that price on their board, which apparently hasn’t been updated since the 1980s. It took four people to take our order.

CABLE CAR PIZZA

Daily: 11 a.m.–3 a.m.

535 Valencia, SF

(415) 431-8800

No alcohol

AE/MC/V

Catlady

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Every year the feral cat no one can catch has a litter of kittens and one of them winds up knocking on my door, so to speak, saying, "Well? Am I cute, or what?" And before I can answer — answering rhetorical questions being one of my favorite pastimes — the little outcast (who is of course the very definition of cuteness), falls into a feigned faint on account of starvation, obliging me to go get milk.

Now, I’ve listened to plenty of bluegrass music in my day. Between mandolin and fiddle solos I have absorbed the important lessons of the frozen girl, the paperboy, and others like them. Orphaned outcasts require bowls of milk, a crust of bread, and/or blankets, or else they will be dead on your doorstep come morning.

And nobody wants that, except maybe music publishers. I myself am not a moral, nor even an ethical, person. If I live by a code, it’s my own, and it’s odd, idiosyncratic, and inconsistent. Nevertheless, mercy for those less fortunate than myself, provided they show up on my doorstep no later than the second verse, starving or freezing, and preferably with a slight wobble, the back of their hand to the forehead … this is programmed into my cells as surely as one, four, five.

Plus: kittens are cute. They just are. Case closed. And I say this at the risk of offending a large portion of my readership, Rube Roy Perrotta, a.k.a. Shortribs Mosel, my old-time barbecue and buffet podner back in Ohio. He hates when I write about children and bunnies and shit. Speaking of which, there will also be fallout from the four or five people who have written, over the years, in support of Poo Poo Pride Month.

Which this is.

I’m sorry. I still listen to punk rock. I still like to look at, talk about, and journalistically record my scatological masterpieces. It’s just that I have also come to be an unabashed appreciator of cuteness. Sensing that, kittens come to my door.

I can tell that this will be the defining challenge of the second half of my life: how to die without first becoming a cat lady. All the elements are in place: aloneness, eccentricity, poverty, slanty one-room shack in the woods, disorderliness of mind, unrefined tastes, shortness of grace, pretty big bluegrass collection, and a weird, open heart.

Against that mountain of impending insurmountability, there stands one ally in my corner, and it is, ironically, a cat. My cat. Weirdo the Cat, whose legendary disdain for all carbon-based life forms, even orphans, is most vehemently expressed when the life form looks a little like her. As long as I have Weirdo the Cat, I reckon, I am absolutely protected from catladyhood.

Weirdo is 14 or 15. That means she likely will only live, I realize, for another 15, 20 years tops. Yes, I know that’s twice as long as cats generally live, but I’m factoring in her supernatural capacity for cantankerousness and tenacity. Some people are just too frickin’ pissed off all the time to die, and Weirdo the Cat, believe me, is one of those people.

How lucky is that? Without any question of me taking in one or 10 of these adorable outcasts my big-hearted self, I can get on the phone and start making calls. I know a lot of people with kids. I know a lot of musicians who know a lot of bluegrass songs. I know a lot of bighearted people without Weirdo the Cat in their corner.

Ate a lot of salad last night, as always, with my chicken soup, which had even more vegetables in it. Peas, celery, carrots. I ate a mango. Popcorn goes good with books, too, then a midnight bowl of Flakes & Flax cereal. For breakfast: oatmeal with sunflower seeds, strawberries, and blueberries.

Coffee.

Do you, like me, like balance? Don’t you wish this cute column came with a picture? Do you? Close your eyes.

———————————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Pho Hoa Lao #2. You know how I know? Because I ate there! Big, bright, empty place. The service is terrible, especially considering that there was no one else to serve. But the imperial rolls were pretty good, and both bowls of soup — the rare beef and beefball pho and the chicken soup — were very good. And it’s cheap, so …

PHO HOA LAO #2

333 10th St., Oakl.

(510) 763-8296

Daily, 8 a.m.–8 p.m.

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Cans and can’ts

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS There’s a reason you don’t see electric can openers anymore. They’re completely idiotic. But maybe you have arthritis, or a wrist-related disability. With you (and lots and lots of money) in mind, some cat in Hong Kong invented the One-Touch can opener, which runs on batteries. I came across one in an able-bodied young friend’s kitchen drawer. To her credit, the battery was dead, or MIA. Ergo, I couldn’t figure out how to work it.

Which wasn’t, by the way (and speaking of idiocy), for lack of effort on my part. In fact, we got into a bit of a brawl, me and this nifty, innovative, as-seen-on-TV assemblage of plastic and metal parts. It won. After about an hour and a half — bloodied, bruised, and fuming — I swallowed my pride, along with four teeth, and asked my friend in different words how the goddamn fucking piece of shit bastard worked.

She was in the other room, nursing the baby. "Oh, that?" Someone had given it to her as a present, she said, as embarrassed as I was (to her credit). It needed a battery. There should be a "real" can opener somewhere in the same drawer, she said.

Oh.

I limped back to the kitchen, found the familiar, trusty, stalwart hand-crank Swing-A-Way, and the feel of it in my hands was like mother’s milk to the tongue. I was so soothed and content I fell asleep. On my feet. At the counter. On the clock. So to speak. Next to the refrigerator.

Through no fault of my own, dinner was late. Modern technology was to blame. Anyone who can’t see that is even dumber than me. Some things can’t be improved upon, and the classic model rotary can opener is one of them. Anyone who tries … I hate them.

I love cooking in other people’s kitchens, but I’m going to have to start traveling with my own can opener — ideally, for effect, in a holster. Just one week after being humiliated by a device designed for senior citizens, I was in another friend’s kitchen, helping out eatswise before a party, and I had another run-in with yet another kind of can opener that wasn’t your standard Swing-A-Way rotary opener, and therefore didn’t work.

Technically it wasn’t my run-in so much as my friend Kizzer’s. At least initially. We were working side-by-side, me chopping up stuff for the coleslaw, and she opening cans for the bean salad. Trying to open cans, I should say. But this particular new, improved, innovative state-of-the-art can opener had different ideas, which included Kizzer almost having to go to the emergency room and me pretty much smelling and feeling like bean juice for the rest of the day.

Ironically, the idea behind this alleged improvement on perfection is to cut the lid down below, on the can side of the seam, rather than the top, so that you don’t end up with that ragged and dangerous lid to dispose of. You end up with a ragged and dangerous can.

Not to mention it took three people with graduate degrees, a couple of knives (without), and about 15 minutes to finish the job that my old $2 opener would have finished in less than 10 seconds (I checked). And the mangled can, afterward, looked very much like a weapon.

So I verbally abused our lovely and gracious hostess for keeping such a thing in a house with small children, and she said it was the only kind they had at Rainbow Grocery.

Ah. Leave it to my favorite kind of people, vegetarian hippies, to turn can opening into a bloody, beany battlefield, and in the interest of what? Safety? Ergonomics? The environment?

Look, if they don’t have a $2 can opener down at your local thrift store, you can order one brand new online for $6. I’m sure of it. I really did check: eight wrist-twists and five seconds opens a standard-size can. And if that sounds too exhausting, too time-consuming, or somehow dangerous to you, get the hell out of the kitchen please. I’ll cook. *

My new favorite restaurant is Puerto Alegre. I was eating something brunchy there with Earl Butter, my brother, and my nephew when it occurred to me that I’ve been eating here pretty consistently for longer than I’ve been pretty consistently eating anywhere else around here. So it must be good. It’s not the best Mexican food in the Mission District, but I love the atmosphere. And if you show up right at 11 a.m., even on weekends, you can sit right down.

PUERTO ALEGRE

546 Valencia, SF

(415) 255-8201

Mon., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Tues.–Sun., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

Full bar

MC/V

Sweet and spicy

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I dreamed I was pouring hot sauce on my ice cream, and the thought I was thinking along with the action, in the dream, was: So, it has come to this. Hot sauce on every single thing, even ice cream. Is this my nature, then? To go around setting sweetness on fire?

Don’t you love it when the dream interprets the dream for you? And then all you have to do in the morning is make your coffee and sit outside in the sunshine, watching your chickens scratch for gold. You are free to think about other things. Or to go about your business, which in my case is Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner, with 10-minute breaks in between for going bafroom, talking on the phone, reading, writing, and plucking.

My most angelic friend kinda wants to be a stripper. We talked on the phone for a long time last night. While we were talking, my mom called on the other phone, 2 a.m. her time, and sang a scary old church song to my answering machine. Poor thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it stops working, on principle, and I have to buy a new one.

"Make me a channel of your peace," my mother sang, after the beep. "Where there is hatred, let me bring your love. Where there is something, something something something." Her phone went bad, but as I recall the last line didn’t rhyme anyway.

If only my mom had electricity, I would buy her an answering machine and retaliate. I would call it at 2 a.m. my time (which is 5 a.m. there), and sing to it, to her, my latest sensitive singer-songwriter hymn about how I like it up the ass.

"Make me a channel of your piece" …

Oh, hi, St. Francis. I didn’t see you there. You’re my favorite saint, you know, even though if you were alive today you would probably be a member of PETA. And your songs don’t rhyme. But I think a city I love might have named itself after you, and I know I did, only I spelled it with an e. You are my middle name, but I don’t consider myself exactly Catholic, you see.

So the other person I talked to for hours yesterday was Johnny "Jack" Poetry. I can call him that again (instead of Johnny "Jack" Journalism) because he quit the paper and put his poems on the Internet. His wife, Mrs. "Jack" Poetry, one of my dearest, oldest, belovedest friends in her own right (I call her Mrs. "Jack" Poetry out of respect, ’cause she’s sort of a recovering feminist), recently became a Catholic. Now, I have only ever known lapsed Catholics, and occasionally, as in the case of much of my family, unlapsed ones. People who were born Catholic and stayed that way. Mrs. "J." P. is the first person I know to become one, by choice! And for this I love her madly.

So she was away at mass, the Mrs., then she came home from mass, while Johnny "Jack" and me were still on the phone, discussing secular matters such as poetry and pork rinds, and — lo and behold — she had a couple of nuns in tow!

My point being that this is exactly why I have two phones now. Because I live for moments like this. It’s right up there with the time the feds knocked on my mom’s door while we were talking, to account for her whereabouts because Bill Clinton was coming to town, make me a channel of your peace. Or the time the cops came and she dropped the phone, left me dangling, and swore at them until they left. Or arrested her, I forget.

Johnny "Jack" tele-described to me the vision of his sweet wife with a couple of elderly nuns, one wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh baseball cap over her habit, sallying into the wilderness on the world side of his window, hot day, Indian Valley, Idaho, tromping blessed and holy through the weeds, where the ticks are.

My new favorite restaurant is Khana Khazana. Spicy, good, Indian food in Emeryville. The service is very friendly and welcoming. Indeed, it stayed open just for us, even though we showed up five minutes after closing. Points for that, and for hot that means HOT. Portions could have been bigger, for the price. Or I can try and find more work. Either way. *

KHANA KHAZANA

4336 San Pablo, Emeryville

(510) 547-0992

Daily, 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

Beer & wine

MC/V

A lady’s choice

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS There is a kind of chocolate bar with bacon in it, so you know. There. You can go back to sleep now. You can believe in God again, or call and cancel your next 40 years of therapy, or board that airplane, or fall in love. I can’t do any of those things, yet, but you have my permission to go ahead without me. I’ll catch up.

First I’m going to sit here and work on my sweet tooth, which I’ve been trying to work on my whole female life. Before when I passed on dessert, opting instead for another helping of greens, it seemed kind of, I don’t know, cute almost — or quirky. Judging from the looks on people’s faces now, for a woman to not like chocolate … that’s unseemly, grotesque, and just wrong.

Now, y’all know how I love to reinforce stereotypes …

Actually, I do. It’s fun! I mean, ideally I’d be in on the ground floor of the stereotype, like the one where transgender chicken farmers make better lovers. (Neil Young has a song coming out about that.)

All kidding aside, did I ever tell you what I tell people who tell me that "women don’t spit" or "ladies don’t use that word" or "girls don’t go around with a chicken in one hand and a hatchet in the other"? I tilt my head a little, bat my lashes, and go, "They do now, dear." Then I spit and say, "If you’ll kindly excuse me, I have to go chop this fucker’s head off."

But belligerence, like my pickup truck, only gets you so far. It doesn’t get you back to sleep at 3:30 a.m., or into heaven or off the couch or onto airplanes and into hearts. So I am willing to learn to like chocolate, same as I had to teach myself to like applesauce: by putting bacon in it.

Only this time I can’t take credit for the idea. That goes to Vosges Haut-Chocolat, purveyor of Mo’s Bacon Bar. Sockywonk and/or our friend Funiamorari bought me one while they were in New York and gave it to me for my birthday. There’s a picture on the box of a strip of bacon next to a square of chocolate, and a two-paragraph essay on the back by someone named Katrina, chronicling how she’s been working on the bacon + chocolate equation since she was six.

No mention of how old she is now, but since her grammar is pretty good and her spelling impeccable, and since she seems to own a chocolate company with retail stores in Chicago and New York, if I had to guess I’d say she’s at least seven.

My point being: come on! It took me one day to add up bacon + applesauce. Admittedly, it’s easier math. But 365 times easier? Well, six-year-old girls do sometimes have a hard time staying focused, unlike 45-year-old chicken farmers.

Where was I?

Thank you, Sockywonk! Thank you, Funiamorari! This isn’t the first time my wonderful, sisterly girlfriends have helped me become more stereotypical, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Which is a subtle and complicated joke, but would be less so if we could include a group picture here of my wonderful, sisterly girlfriends.

I can’t express how much more confident I will feel now, on dates, when the waitperson asks if we would like dessert, and my date looks at me like, well? and instead of saying, "No, just another pork chop please," I can now say, "Oooh, do you have bacon chocolate bars?" Tilt of the head, bat of the lashes, and the deep-down knowledge that restaurants generally don’t serve candy bars. But at least it will seem like I have a sweet tooth. "I really shouldn’t," I will add, for effect, "but … "

They’re so good! Of course, of course they’d be even better if they were basically bacon with little flecks of milk chocolate in it, instead of the other way around. But my date doesn’t need to know every single silly thought flitting through my sweet mind.

Does he?

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My new favorite restaurant is Panda Country Kitchen. It’s also one of the windiest restaurants I’ve ever eaten at. Richmond District. I went there with the Maze on a foggy night, and we had tea-smoked duck and I forget what else. Oh, hot and sour soup, which was great, but it became cold and sour soup real fast. Turn the heat on!

PANDA COUNTRY KITCHEN

4737 Geary, SF

(415) 221-4278

Lunch: 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m., Mon.–Fri.

Dinner: 4:30 p.m.–10 p.m., Mon.–Fri.

Continuous service: Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

Beer & wine

MC/V

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