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Cheap Eats

Poodle piddle problems

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS You thought you were done with this, I know, but I forgot to say that I did get a couple of correct answers to my months-ago riddle: what my mom said when I came home crying after the beating I took for peeing on my kindergarten teacher’s hot-car-melted poodle.

Two readers got it right, but only one accepted lunch on me, and that was my new friend B.B. Teaspoon, who earned her fried chicken salad by crafting her answer into a brilliant, Ogden Nashish, Shel Silversteiny — no, downright Dr. Seussian poem:

If the poodle made you piddle

And the puddle got you paddled

Cuz your teacher was so addled

When her poodle’s life skedaddled

Then …

Did your mother try to straddle

Moral lessons that a lad’ll

Never learn when he is rattled

Cuz he’s maybe too gonadal?

Even electronically, her hesitance to hit the send button was palpable, yet B.B. Teaspoon actually did send these exact words, line breaks intact, to me, Chicken Farmer. I publish it here, in spite of pronoun-induced discomfort, because it’s been too long since I printed a poem in Cheap Eats and I was about to lose my accreditation as a literary magazine. Plus what the hell, everybody knows I grew up boy. Or lad, if you will, for the sake of rhyming.

Not surprisingly, B.B. Teaspoon is a songmaker and a teacher of children. I told her about my new part-time job, nannying and cooking for a family of four: two musicians and two budding musicians. They have a dedicated music room full of entirely on-limits drums, pianos, toy pianos, a stand-up bass, and other stringed things. I tried to find a way to express, in words, the cacopho-symphonic potential of a 3-year-old boy, a 9-month-old girl, and me in this room while Mom and Dad are away at band practice.

Words didn’t work, so I tried interpretive dance, but that didn’t exactly come across either.

B.B. Teaspoon was telling me about a kids’ song she sings about a noose, and, in spite of my morbid curiosity, I suddenly realized I was as cold as I had ever been. First unofficial day of summer, sunny California. Could of been New Years Day, Canada.

We were sitting outside because that was the only place you could sit, at one of several ironing boards on the sidewalk. Maybe she said "moose." I happened to be wearing my beloved rabbit fur jacket, not because I’d guessed it was going to be Canadian out so much as to annoy vegetarians.

But not even that, and not even the many jalapeño slivers in the coleslaw, could melt my cold, cold …

Come to think of it, the other guy who correctly punch-lined my stupid joke was a musician too. We could have been a band! A really, really, really annoying band. Sike.

A lot of people love alliteration.

And I’m just going to let that line sit there, by itself, until it proves it’s ready to join the rest of the class and behave. A teacher! Of children! Other people are having kids, right now, even as we speak. Still others are adopting, or having sex real hard.

Me? I’m Dani the Tranny Nanny. As predicted.

I like to rhyme.

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My new favorite restaurant is Bakesale Betty. Fried chicken sandwiches, fried chicken salads, sidewalk ironing boards that are probably pretty fun when it’s nice out. By salad they mean coleslaw, no mayo! Also famous for its strawberry shortcake and baked goods, this funky little Temescal district joint is not undiscovered (as in: lines). The good news: you might get a complimentary cookie out of your wait. We did, and we weren’t even in line — we were sitting there talking. It was buttery, cinnamony goodness.

BAKESALE BETTY

5098 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 985-1213

Mon.–Sat., 7 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sun., 7 a.m.–3 p.m.

No alcohol

AE/MC/V

Walk the line

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS "It’s hard to find people to eat pork bellies with me," he said, over pork bellies, and I thought: I’m your girl.

This was my second date of the day. I’d had a chef salad for lunch in another town, with someone else, and was not his girl. I could tell. Still, we walked down the hot sidewalk and into a famous bar with trophied animal heads all over all the walls. I’d always wanted to go there, and liked it inside, so I asked if he wanted to stay, have a Coke, or something. Stare at a moose.

"No," said the guy whose girl I was not. He had better get going, it was the weekend, hard week, and he wanted to be home, had things to do. Long drive.

My therapist wants me to speak on the topic of dating at a conference on gender identity issues. I suppose that I can take this as a compliment. Maybe I will, and maybe I will speak at this conference. Or, hey, hell, maybe I’ll write an actual restaurant review! It’s been a while …

The pork bellies were delicious. Thick, crisp, fatty slices of fried pig in a dark, salty sauce with Chinese broccoli. The duck came with celery and lychee, the Chinese fruit, which is way weirder to the teeth, tongue, and taste buds than any animal organ that I’ve ever eaten. The name of the restaurant is not important.

My date insinuated that I must have some kind of skinny gene.

I speared another square of almost pure fat and, chewing on it, both literally and figuratively, reckoned that hmm, maybe I did. Plus there’s the soccer … sometimes two or three games in one day, ooga.

Really, I don’t know a lot of people who like duck.

"When I was a kid," I said, "my brothers and sisters used to pass me all their pork fat and chicken skin."

My therapist thinks I am articulate and well-spoken, but he’s never been on a date with me. I actually said that — about pork fat and chicken skin — on a date, and knew almost immediately that I wouldn’t be seeing this guy again, even though there was no doubt in my mind that I was his girl.

It was cold outside, after dinner, so he gave me his coat. We walked to a book store. I picked up a book that I have but hadn’t read yet and said, "Did you ever read this?" So he bought it. I wondered if I looked cute in his too-big coat, my hands lost way inside its dark sleeves.

I’m trying to understand guys who like girls like me. The best thing I’ve heard, so far, is that they love femininity, and that I represent a very complicated form of femininity, and therefore they love me. Except they don’t, because — and this is just a guess, but it’s one thing to eat pork bellies with a pretty woman, I’m guessing, and something else entirely to envision them engulfing a pile of table-scrapped fat or three chickens’ worth of chicken skin.

I can understand their problem with the image. Honestly, I get it, only not quickly enough to not hand them the picture.

It’s like: they want you to watch football with them, but do they want to watch you play football? Probably not. What we have here is a balancing act. Everyone knows you have to walk a line — everyone — and that’s hard. For all of us. I begin to suspect that for girls like me and for the guys who go for us, there’s not a thin line. There’s nothing at all beneath our feet. Try to look graceful, and act balanced, while free-falling away from yourself. Or toward yourself. Or both at the same time.

I get motion sickness. Last night, to distract myself, I opened the book that I have but had not read, and I started to read it. The name of the book is not important.

My new favorite restaurant is Soi 4. It’s just a couple of bucks more than other Thai restaurants, but definitely worth it. Especially if someone else is paying. The short ribs are fantastic. Perfectly tender and juicy and then, as if they needed any help, the most amazingly smooth-tasting peanut curry by way of a smother. So good it’s kind of terrifying. I can’t stop thinking about it and have been having nightmares. *

SOI 4

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

5421 College, Oakl.

(510) 655-0889

Beer & wine

MC/V

Like butter

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I was eating eggs fried in butter and scratch biscuits made with butter and then slathered with butter, thinking about addiction, and how I don’t have an addictive personality.

I’m addicted to popcorn. But oddly enough, I don’t like butter on my popcorn. That’s how I know I’m not addicted to butter. Just popcorn.

The last time I saw my sweet, good, dear friend what’s-her-name, we were standing in her kitchen at 9 p.m. eating butter with spoons. It wasn’t just any butter. It was fresh-churned, European-style, organic, free-range, home-schooled hippie butter. And it was bringing me back.

See, I grew up on the stuff. My mom used to buy unhomogenized milk from our Amish neighbors, skim the cream off the top, and we kids would take turns cranking the churner and cursing our mother for being such a hippie-ass Amish wannabe.

Probably I complained the loudest. And without doubt I consumed the most butter. To me, butter never was a "spread" as much as a food group. We had this 100-percent whole wheat bread that was heaven hot out of the oven and then cooled into basically lumber. So there was a window of opportunity for bread and butter, and the rest of the time it was just butter. For me. Thanks.

But: I’m not an addict.

This week my mom turns 75. She doesn’t read me, but I’ll say it anyway: happy 3/4 of a stick, you goddamn hippie-ass Amish wannabe! Thank you for giving me butter. And thank you, dear sweet goddamn Juicy Toots, for respoiling me half-a-life later. Because frankly, even though I have spewed prose, poetry, and other art forms in praise of butter, I had kind of forgotten what it tasted like.

It tastes like clouds. Slightly sour, somewhat sweet, seriously salted cumulus clouds formed from the condensed tears of exiled angels, with annatto for coloring.

First I thought she churned it herself, and perhaps milked the cow that morning at some North Oakland happy hippie co-op creamery.

No, she said. She got it at the store.

I was astounded. I shop in stores. Like millions of Americans, I make my weekly grocery list on the back of some junk mail envelope, faithfully magnet it to my refrigerator, forget to bring it to the store with me, come home and stand before the refrigerator, with bags of sweating things around my feet reading my grocery list to see what I forgot, and never once have I forgotten to buy European-style, fresh-churned, cultured and salted butter that tastes like clouds.

I slept on Juicy Toots’ couch that night, with Juicy Toots’ cat, also named Juicy Toots, and I dreamed of slippery and saturated things. We had eaten butter for an appetizer, butter on bread with our spaghetti, and then butter again for dessert.

On my way home in the morning I stopped at the store, any store, listless as usual and with only one thing on my mind (although I’m not an addict). Yes, they had it! A couple different kinds of fancy-pants, top-shelf butter, ranging from like seven to eight bucks. No wonder I never saw it! My mind has a kind of barcode-scanning filter chip that doesn’t even allow me to see things that cost more than $2.89.

What I did: I bought a pint of heavy cream for $2.89, let it sit in the car for a few hours after I got home, cooled it in the fridge, poured it into a glass jar, shook it for 20 minutes until a big yellow lump formed, poured off the buttermilk for future pancake batter, rinsed the solid lump in cold water, pressed it dry, sprinkled it with salt, plopped it on a plate, and stood there looking at it and giggling. I had made my own butter.

You can too, dear reader, unless of course your time, unlike mine, is valuable. Twenty minutes of vigorous shaking, just to make butter? I know, I know. Gotta get to work. Gotta get to the gym and tone those arms, so they stop jiggling. Check it out: www.bunsofbutter.com


My new favorite restaurant is Uncle Willie’s BBQ & Fish, in downtown Oakland. Wings and fishes get fried, and ribs, chickens, and briskets go on the grill. The fried is pretty good, but the ribs are great. Very smoky, tender, and juicy. Whatever Willie’s dry-rubbing … it works. Of the sides I’ve tried, I loved the collard greens and corn bread. The red beans and rice are nothing special. Nice folks, great place. 2

UNCLE WILLIE’S BBQ & FISH

614 14th St., Oakl.

(510) 465-9200

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

No alcohol

MC/V

Razzed and dazzled

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CHEAP EATS My new favorite hair chopper is a magician’s assistant named Dazzle, thanks to whom I accidentally got beautiful. I admit this defies logic, not to mention math. But defying those kinds of disciplines — with the help of elves and pixies with names like Dazzle — turns out to be one of my specialties.

I wish there was a way to use time-lapse photography in Cheap Eats. Hairstylistically speaking, in the past four years, I have gone from a 40-year-old rapidly recedingly hairlined dude, to a 41-year-old piratesexual in hoop earrings and bandanna, to a 42-year-old aging-rock-starsexual with way-too-long greasy locks, to a 43-year-old passable transsexual, to, now, a 39-year-old hot chick.

How I know is because I put one of those personal ads on the Internet one night and the next morning there were eight guys — some in their early 20s — telling me I was beautiful. And by the time I finished writing long, thoughtful, philosophical letters back to each of them, proving them wrong, eight more guys were telling me I was beautiful. I’m learning to leave it at that after two or three days.

"Thank you, dear, that’s sweet," I say. "You don’t look too much like a ham-and-potato-chip sandwich yourself!" They’re not sure how to take that, but we make a date for coffee anyway, and they stand me up.

Which I totally deserve because, as you know, I’m already dating someone. But 74.4 miles is a long way away from the woods where I live. And the woods are dark and cold, and I get pretty lonely between weekends. So I told him, over chicken soup and tortilla chips, that I was going to start dating other people too — find me a little something snuggly a little closer to home.

Last time I tried something like this was a year or so ago, and guys weren’t buying it. But that was before I had bangs. Still, I didn’t expect to have any better luck this time. And, truth be told, I haven’t. Unless by some geographical razzle-dazzle, Truckee, Denver, Florida, New Hampshire, and Belgium are now "closer to home" than Alameda.

If there’s a way to have online sex, I haven’t figured it out yet. And anyway, it doesn’t sound very warm, or snuggly. Guys keep asking for more pictures, more pictures. And I don’t know what else to do, so I take shots of my chickens. Or what’s for dinner. There’s one pic of half a barbecued chicken I find particularly attractive, myself, but, like I said, I tend to get stood up by the local boys.

The ones in Belgium, New Hampshire, and such, they’re all hooked. Packing up their houses, giving notice at work, learning English, scouring their local libraries for books about chickens…

I should probably not be allowed to do this sort of thing. Online dating. I’m serious. Sometimes I feel like a professional boxer about to get into a drunken bar brawl, like … uh-oh, this has got to be unfair, if not illegal.

Then I remember that, in the words of Clint Eastwood, "fair’s got nothing to do with it." Since when did Clint Eastwood become my rabbi? Since he said to Gene Hackman, near the end of Unforgiven, "Fair’s got nothing to do with it."

So, glory be to Dazzle (a.k.a. Karianne) at Peter Thomas in Berkeley, I’ve got all these electronic guys, all over the electrified world, e-coming all over me. Let me rephrase that. Coming on to me. Some are articulate and romantic and want to buy me dinner. Others come right out with their "thick cocks" this and "my clit" that. Don’t fear for my life, dear reader. They know what that word means, in the context that is me. And anyway, those ones go straight to the slush pile.

Someone told me it’s my natural prerogative as a woman to get to choose. That now they have to prove themselves to me. What a novel idea! Can it be true?

Clint? *

Bones and balls

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Bones are supposed to decompose, right? But sometimes, for the sake of archaeology, they don’t. They pile up behind you in the cave until, if you eat as much meat as I do, you eventually have to live outside.

It’s like naming a band. The old ones don’t go away, so it just keeps getting harder, which is why many musicians my age either give up or rejoin their old groups and go on reunion tours. Or they switch genres, simply so they can recycle the old names but with z‘s for s‘s. A short-lived solution (if it has any life at all), as evidenced by the almost immediate fizzle of The Bee Geez, Harry Nilzzon, and the Mamaz & the Papaz — heavy metallic flops all.

Soon we will begin to see (and hear, and feel) the effects of a generation of rising rockers whose parents announced their births via e-mail. Brace yourselves. Here comes U2000, Prince2009, and, my personal favorite, AbbaLoL.

Recycling is good. It’s decided, right? Without it we all die and have no music to listen to on our deathbeds. I save the bones. So do lots of people, Mountain Sam to name just one. He makes sculptures out of them. I make soup, then I scrape and dry them, wrap one end with rubber and/or felt, and re-reuse them as steel drum mallets. So that’s food, food again, then music. Then they just pile up in my cave and stay there, waiting for future archaeologists to wonder about a chicken-like creature that wore socks.

I was babysitting the baby I babysit (I’m not allowed to say her name) and the TV was on because the mama and the papa hadn’t left yet. This is what distinguishes me as a babysitter: no TV. None. Absolutely not. TV is not harmful enough, in my opinion. Instead, we do truly dangerous things together, like tasting mysterious plants, staring into mirrors, and rock climbing, me and this one-year-old.

But the parents hadn’t left yet. The TV was on. Food Channel, so I was interested. Mesmerized. Appalled … because what they were talking about was barbecued spaghetti, some joint in Tennessee, and I have to say it looked delicious. I was appalled because here I’ve been trying to invent a thing that has already been invented.

Hey, there oughta be a saying about this, something like, I don’t know, reinventing the … uh …

Never mind.

You people who live your whole life without ever changing gender — not even once. Frankly, I don’t know how you do it. I mean, it takes all kinds, I suppose, but I personally would have died of boredom by now.

In the coed soccer league I play in, I’m an average-size girl with average speed and average skills. I’m slightly above-average agewise, and slightly below-average butchwise. No matter what, though, there is always one thing that distinguishes me from the other girls on the field and it is this: as far as I know, I’m the only one out there with balls.

And I’m not speaking figuratively. If anything having balls, in this case, makes you chickenshit. You know how when guys line up in front of a free kick, they place their hands over their crotch? I can’t do that! So I run away. Nobody knows I’m trans. At least that I know of, nobody knows. I’m not sure about league policy on this.

I’ve always wondered what would happen … what I would do, what my body would do, if and when I took a ball to the balls in one of these games. It was a matter of time, and in the first half of the second game of my third season as a girl, there it was. A guy unloaded and I jumped but didn’t twist, and, oof!

Guys know what this feels like. Now I know what it feels like to feel that feeling and not be able to go down, not even to one knee. To have to turn and run like nothing much happened, without even a look on your face, breathless, hating life but just generally playing on.

—————————————————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Mary’s Place in Novato, where I’ve been camping out a lot on account of car problems. Mary’s Place is a way to kill time over delicious crepes, hash browns, and coffee, coffee, coffee. It has a counter. It’s kind of a diner-ish feel, but with way better food. And, oh yeah, a bar.

MARY’S PLACE

819 Grant, Novato

(415) 897-9761

Tue.–Sat., 7 a.m.–9 p.m.

Sun.–Mon., 7 a.m.–3 p.m.

Full bar

MC/V/AE

A time to kill

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS It’s a question of balance. If I brag, it’s because I also put myself down a lot, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think me insecure. That’s not it at all. I am capable of saving the day, but probably more likely to trip over a milk crate with a crunched, empty can in it. My fuck-ups are occasionally spectacular and always well documented. You don’t have to read Cheap Eats. Just look at my shirt.

I mean, read Cheap Eats, by all means. The thing about failure is that it makes better copy than success. That almost has to be a saying already, and I’m either an idiot for repeating it or a genius for inventing it — in which case I’m a braggart for pointing it out and an idiot for bragging. It’s a question of balance.

For some reason there was this idea afloat that, if the puerco pibil came out great, we would have no choice but to kill Earl Butter. I know, I know. It didn’t make sense to me either, because he was the maker of the pork — and the chief advocate for killing the cook.

If it was a suicide attempt, it failed. Maybe a cry for help?

I think not. It had something to do with bisexual people’s favorite film ever, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, starring Johnny Depp and Salma Hayek. I never saw it.

My favorite movie is Vernon, Florida. Still! Almost thirty years later! I’ve worn out two video tapes already, and it’s the only movie I ever made a CD of, so I could listen to it in my car, the visuals having long since been stamped onto my brain. Some day, after I finish film school, I’m going to do a remake of Vernon, Florida starring Johnny Depp and Salma Hayek as the couple who sits on their steps and talks about sand. Nobody ever does remakes of documentaries, I’ve noticed. Why is that?

Don’t think too hard. That’s my job. And you can rest assured I’ll do it. As soon as every other restaurant reviewer in the world is writing about movies, their friends, cars, sports, and chickens instead of restaurants, I’m going to go to film school and start making remakes of all my favorite documentaries.

The beautiful thing about Once Upon a Time in Mexico, according to Earl Butter, isn’t Johnny Depp or Salma Hayek. It’s pork. Specifically, puerco pibil, the marinated, slow-roasted pork dish that Johnny Depp’s character just loves. And, if you think following Cheap Eats can be tough, check this out: apparently if a chef’s puerco pibil tastes too good, Johnny Depp kills him.

I never understood why people complained about violence in movies, until now. You can’t kill someone for cooking something real good! Not even in real life. I just saw No Country for Old Men. Didn’t like it, but I have to admit that you can kill someone for losing a coin toss, pissing you off, trying to kill you, being married to someone who pisses you off, just for fun, or for no reason at all. But killing someone for cooking something too good, that crosses the line. I didn’t even see Once Upon a Time in Mexico and I’m going to have nightmares about it.

Well, Robert Rodriguez — writer, director, producer, editor, music maker, cutie-pie, and complete bastard for making me have nightmares — puts on a little cooking show at the end of the DVD, according to Earl Butter. You also can watch it on YouTube. That’s what I did.

Earl Butter followed the director’s directions, I believe, except for the banana leaves. He invited seven people over for dinner: one was me and none was Johnny Depp.

But he’s out there somewhere, you gotta figure, and for all we know he reads Cheap Eats as faithfully as everyone else in the world. So at the risk of reviewing my best friend’s cooking, the pork was quite … hmm, good? But not great. A little dry. And perhaps not spicy enough. Middle of the road. I say this for your own protection, Earl.

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My new favorite restaurant is Thai Noodle Jump, mostly for the name, and because it’s on my way to the bridge from pretty much anywhere. Sometimes I need a bowl of duck noodle soup. Can’t recommend the grilled beef salad, though, because the meat was way overcooked. But the soups … big bowls, decent prices. Small, cozy place. Great name.

THAI NOODLE JUMP

560 Balboa, SF

(415) 379-6422

Daily: 11 a.m.–10:30 p.m.

Beer

MC/V

Yet

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS "Well, sweetie, what did you expect?" my mother said after I came home crying from the beating I took for peeing on my kindergarten teacher’s melted dog. "You can’t piddle a puddle of poodle without getting paddled!"

… crickets …

Oh, Christ. You’re not buying it, are you?

I know because ever since my punch line and I were so heartwarmingly reunited, I’ve been telling that joke — the joke I wrote — to everyone I know, and a lot of people I don’t. The idea: to grind it like so much Cheetos dust into the very fabric of American consciousness, in case I forget again.

The problem: it ain’t funny.

Nobody’s buying it, and the blank stares and exaggerated death bed groans are starting to hurt. Real bad. I literally have gone door-to-door, trying to sell this joke like vacuum cleaners or life insurance, and I have taken a figurative beating. You can’t peddle a puddle of piddled poodle without being paddled, either.

But I mentioned spaghetti-cue. This was a couple weeks ago, and not that anyone’s necessarily wondering, but … it didn’t work. Nothing does the first time you try it. I just don’t want to rule out the possibility that someone, somewhere has better culinary instincts than I do. Far-fetched as that might seem.

I’m not being sarcastic. I’m being immodest. Barbecued pasta is the best idea ever. It just doesn’t work. Key word (only I didn’t say it yet): yet.

And I might yet be the best comedienne ever, even though my first-ever joke kinda shat the bed.

Take the small bright dots that sunlight leaves on a countertop, slanting through the kitchen window, then through a cheese grater, still somewhat carroty from last night’s salad. You see? Those dots, those slanty, imperfect rows and columns. Why do people still sometimes believe in things?

That’s a stupid question. Let me rephrase it: why would anyone wash their dishes at night when they could leave them ’til morning? When the circus of sunlight filtering through a carrot-crusted cheese grater might change the color of your day …

Or turn you into a poet. (Yet.)

Well, for starters, since answering my own rhetorical questions seems to be one of my specialties, maybe your kitchen window faces west. Or north. Life is hard. I could be terrified right now. Instead, I am casually digesting my lunch, which is pretty easy work considering I spilled all but about two spoonfuls of it all over my shirt, lap, and bare feet. Green salsa, homemade chicken soup … I give new meaning to the phrase, "Dinner’s on me!"

Grandma Leone baked the meat for her meat sauce in the oven. I’m not a cook (yet), but I guess that’s how you do it. Key word: you. You bake the pork bones, the oxtails, the ribs, whatever, transfer it grease and all to a sauce pan, garlic, tomatoes, and leave ‘er be.

That’s what you do. I do the same thing, only I cook the meat in a wood stove with smoldering applewood. And that’s how to make spaghetti-cue. Which doesn’t work.

But don’t forget that barbecued eggs didn’t work either until the fourth or fifth try, and now they are generally considered (by four or five people) to be the best thing since cinnamon-swirl raisin bread.

I’m not being immodest. I’m just spinning you in circles. After we pick up speed, I’m going to let go and you’ll be on your own, sailing over tent tops and parked cars, every bit as dizzy as me.

———————————————————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is La Piñata. There are six of them around the Bay Area, but the one I’ve been to is in Alameda. Sockywonk’s been talking this place up for a long time. Chicken soup, she says. Guacamole. We got both those things. And carnitas, beans, rice, tortillas, and of course plenty of fresh, warm tortilla chips and salsa. All good. But the soup … the broth really was something special. I might have dreamed it, but I think there was a tall frosty glass of fresh-squeezed limeade somewhere in the picture, too.

LA PIÑATA

1440 Park, Alameda

(510) 769-9110

Daily, 7 a.m.–3 a.m.

Full bar

MC/V/AE/DISC

The punch line

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I wrote a joke. I don’t mean that I tried to write something funny. I’ve been doing that (which is to say, this) since I was nine. I mean that for the first time, I wrote a joke joke, the kind that gets told by comedians, barbers … basically everybody in the world tells jokes. Except me, cause I can never remember the punch line.

For the joke I wrote, I made the punch line first. It was twisted, diabolical, clever, goofy, and just generally pretzels — such an amazing and unthinkable payoff that it took me hours and hours and hours to earn it, to craft the hard part of the joke, the long part, in my head. I was driving. By the time I got the getting-there down, I had forgotten the punch line.

Not really. But I knew I would. So as soon as I got out of the car, I wrote it down in an e-mail and, to be mean, sent it to my most inquisitive, most curious, most questioning, most nearly neurotic friend. I said, "I wrote a joke. Here’s the punch line."

Then I forgot it. I could find it in my out box, maybe, but it’s more fun, in my opinion, not to remember the punch line to the joke you wrote, or not to know the joke to the greatest punch line in the history of humor. My friend probably disagrees.

I never said I was nice. Sweet, yes. Cute. And sometimes, like when I’m not splashing green salsa or dumping noodle soup all over myself (admittedly the moments are rare), I can be charming, dignified, even ladylike. But I’m not a good person.

For example, I hate dogs. I don’t know what dogs ever did to me, or what I ever did to dogs, but I hate them and the feeling seems mutual. I do know what I did, actually, but it was so long ago! I was five! And socially awkward! And incontinent!

My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Plant, left her toy poodle Muffy in her car, windows closed, on the hottest day of the year, and the poor little feller just melted. When, from the playground, we heard Mrs. Plant’s shriek, we of course went running to see what was biting her.

Well, poor little Muffy had been perched on the armrest, scratching at the passenger seat window, when she gave up the … whatever. Thus, when poor shrieky Mrs. Plant finally opened the car door, Muffy just sort of oozed out into the parking lot. Rigor mortis had not set in. I mean, this dog was practically liquid, sort of steaming, sort of wavy, like a mirage.

Here’s where accounts vary. I say: while my angelic, dog-loving classmates wrapped themselves comfortingly around Mrs. Plant’s considerable legs — I believe there were two of them — I stepped up to little liquid Muffy and, with a perfectly healthy and appropriately morbid curiosity, touched it with my toes. At which, quite naturally, considering the magnitude of the moment, I wet my pants, kind of adding to the mess.

What Mrs. Plant told the principal was I squatted over her dear, departed doggy, lifted my skirt (figuratively speaking) and "scatologically degraded its corpse."

Truth be told, I prefer her version. It’s so punk!

In any case, not to date myself (although it might eventually come to that) … but this was back when corporal punishment was quite in style at public schools. Our principal’s weapon of ass destruction, as we called it, was nicely varnished at the handle, then raw wood at the business end, scuffed and scored to encourage splinters.

I was still crying when my mom, a top-shelf linguistics prof with poetic powers (or at least a liking of alliteration) came home from work.

My mother was a sensible, kind, instructive woman, and at this point anyone who knows her suddenly realizes, without a shred of doubt, that this is a joke. However, exactly what my mother said to me after I tearfully told all, only one person in this wide world knows. And it isn’t me, and it’s certainly not my mom.

What’s in it for you is dinner.

My new least favorite restaurant is La Corneta in Glen Park. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with it. Now it’s hate. The green salsa, which I love, got stuck in the squeeze bottle. Why anyone would keep salsa in a squeeze bottle is beyond me. But there it was, and stuck it was. Until I squeezed too hard. It became unstuck in dramatic fashion. My face, my eye, my hair, my new dress, my cousins, the wall. I’m still finding green salsa in places where no color salsas should be. Bullshit!

LA CORNETA

Mon.–Sat., 10 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

2834 Diamond, SF

(415) 469-8757

Beer

Cash only

Chickens and cake

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4

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I put the chocolate chip cookies in my purse and of course forgot about them. There were three, homemade and perfect, and the small plastic bag that they were in immediately entangled itself with feed store receipts, directions to junkyards, takeout menus from restaurants I’ve been meaning to eat at for 14 years, a barrette, some lipstick, and hand cream. The pills, pen, loose change, and wads of ones go without saying, I presume. And the sunflower seeds.

My chickens, who will go to their skillets believing that grass falls out of the sky, have more of a sweet tooth than I do. Which is saying something if you know anything at all about chickens. And especially if the thing you know is that they don’t have teeth. That’s why they need stones and grit, to churn around in their gizzards, like nickels in a purse, and grind up the wads of grass, grain, bugs, and birthday cake that make up their diet. And sunflower seeds.

Oh, and grass does fall out of the sky, by the way, if you are one of my chickens, and you live in the woods, and the floor of your woodsy world is redwood needles and dirt but you are lucky enough to have a caring and dedicated farmer whose time, in defiance of tens of thousands of years of human thinking on the subject, is not valuable. Meaning she will happily goat around every day in greener environs, on the "other side of the fence," pulling up grass and throwing it over to your side.

Long pause.

Even longer pause …

As long a pause as you will let me get away with without losing you to your horoscope or the page with pictures of even sexier trannies than me.

Then: birthday cake?

Well, yeah, what were you expecting? Chocolate chip cookies? Didn’t I tell you I forgot about them? And that they were perfect? Whereas the cake, on the other hand, was already leftover when it was left at my shack by some superheroes. And that was more than a week ago. And my birthday isn’t until May. And I don’t have a sweet tooth or a sweet gizzard.

Still, I would have eaten the whole, huge, three-quarters of a cake, instead of none of it, in the interest of having healthier chickens, and therefore healthier eggs, and therefore being healthier myself … except that the superhero who made the cake, first time ever from scratch, insisted that it sucked.

If it doesn’t taste good or have nutritional value, I’ll still eat it, but not if it’s cake. I’ll leave it on the counter until it’s almost moldy and then, at the risk of one day getting my head chopped off by chickens, I’ll let them eat it. As the saying goes.

I set half of three-quarters of the homemade chocolate cake on the ground and watched them treat it the way any small group of women would. Chickens see one thing out of one eye, and something else out of the other. They looked and they looked, with adoration and with horror, and then finally one took a peck and ran away. Then came back. Then they all started doing that, eating, retreating, chattering. And then they didn’t bother to retreat or chatter — they just chowed down.

I put the rest of the cake in their coop, closed them up with it, and went to the city, half-expecting to come home the next morning and find them not only dead, but dead on the ceiling instead of the floor.

As we speak I am inventing spaghetti-cue, lest anyone think me a slacker. There’s a bag of cookie crumbs in my purse, a carton of post–expiration date milk in the fridge, and chickens in my yard, alive, well, and running. Like every day, they have left me a nest full of eggs, some smudged with chocolate frosting.

My new favorite restaurant is Robata Grill & Sushi in Mill Valley. Not that I ate there. They let me use their phone and ladies room when my engine popped en route to the city. One of the last four or five people without a cell phone or a reliable car, I stood outside on the corner, cold night, lamenting these facts and others, waiting for my rescue. The people on the other side of the windows seemed warm, happy, well-fed, and yeah, a little bit rich. I was wearing my sexiest skirt and my rabbit. Late for a gig. Probably looked, from the inside out, like a prostitute. New favorite restaurant.

ROBATA GRILL & SUSHI

591 Redwood Highway, Mill Valley

(415) 381-8400

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.; Dinner: Mon.–Thu., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.

Beer and wine

AE/D/MC/V

Poetry

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0

CHEAP EATS We took the board outside and, like any other civilized wine-country people, we ate our cheese and our bread. We sipped our wine out of jelly jars, and it was cheap shit. Birds. Frogs. Crickets. The redwood trees catch fire in the sunset, and the pink peach blossoms and the white cherry ones glow a little after like phosphorescent stars on a teenager’s bedroom ceiling.

The Jungle told a childhood story about worms, gathering them for his uncle, who, for show, would grill them on the barbecue. There were three of us: him, me, and this visiting friend of his from Bumfuck, Wash.

"So I get how it is that we return to the soil," I said. "But how exactly is it that we come from the soil?"

They looked at me. It was almost dark. In private, I had been wondering this since I was six. Geologically, biologically, ill-logically, I had wondered. Becoming worm shit seems pretty easy. The reverse blows all sorts of fuses for me. Not to quote myself, but I put it best 20 years ago, in a song: "I can make a dead cow into steaks but how can I make a live one out of stew?" People danced. Nobody answered the question.

Now seemed like as good a time as any to ask again. The Jungle is one of my go-to conversationalists and thinkers. We’ve spent many hours together, in vans, trying to wrap our verse-chorus-verse-chorus brains around just such concertos, and worse, like where to eat in Nebraska.

His friend had gleaming eyes, bushy eyebrows, and a long beard. Not quite white, his hair was nevertheless Einsteinian in length and spirit. And, turns out, his brother-in-law is a physicist. Thus was he able to explain to me, in lay-chicken-farmer terms, the law of conservation of energy: there’s only so much stuff, it says, he said, and stuff can turn into other stuff, but nothing new gets created.

"Are you trying to give me writer’s block?" I said.

He said he was not. He said something turns into something, but nothing does not. He might as well have been dancing.

Behind me, in the coop, my chickens were unwinding toward sleep, which is an audible process, like a car engine ticking as it cools. They kind of buzz, and whir. Then nothing. After a day of scratching, pecking, and bathing in dirt, eating bugs, stones, grass, and oyster shell, they deserve the few feet of elevation the roost provides for the night.

In the morning they will lay their eggs. Which kind of answers my question right there. For chickens. For humans, we will need to add poetry. My mom and dad, to the best of my knowledge, did not eat bugs or grit or take dust baths. In fact they were pretty annoyingly hygienic. At least at the time. Always changing my diapers and sloshing me in the tub, baptizing me, making me go to church and shit. As if to say: You are not dirt! You are not dirt! And other such poems and prayers. Maybe what’s needed is not the addition of poetry, so much as the subtraction of it.

Yes! You know how I know? Because after the chickens were eaten — the ones on the grill, not the roost — we wiped our mouths and went inside, drank more wine, and Einstein said, "OK, I have heard both of you perform before. How about if I read you my poetry?"

This, for someone who’s been through Catholic school and, worse, graduate school, for someone steeped in prayer then poetry, poetry workshops, and poetry readings … this should have been a horror-movie moment, the Jungle and I looking at each other with wide, terrified eyes, the music chopping, screeching, swelling. May I read you my poems? Life had honed me to cut my wrists, or his, at the thought of it.

Instead I was thrilled, delighted, honestly honored that my slanty, woodsy, slightly witchy shack should hostess an impromptu after-dinner poetry reading. And that was when I knew that the transformation, this me-in-the-making, was finally, impossibly, complete: I really am a fucking chicken farmer, ain’t I?

——————————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Green Chile Kitchen, and my new favorite thing is pozole, or posole. No matter how you spell it, it’s hominy, it’s chicken, it’s onions and cilantro, it’s soup, and it’s spicy. And that all adds up to I’m drooling all over the keyboard, just to type it. This is New Mexican style stuff, with an emphasis on red or green chiles, or "Christmas," which is both. Check it out: cheap, and damn good!


GREEN CHILE KITCHEN

601 Baker, SF

(415) 614-9411

Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–9 p.m.

Sat.–Sun., 9 a.m.–9 p.m.

Beer and wine

MC/V

Ping pong

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS It’s a swirly, soupy thing, life, and I would like to be less dizzy in it but there’s this furiously pointless Ping-Pong game, nonstop, between my head and my gut. Fortunately, I’m a fan of the sport. And of spin, and slams.

Cousin Choo-Choo Train says I am never quite satisfied unless my dinner guests go home a little nervous, on top of everything else. And it’s true that I like to err on the side of salmonella, that I have no respect whatsoever for trichinosis, and that E. coli could be the latest Internet gadgetry for all I care. Still, no one has ever puked because of my cooking.

And if that ain’t a claim to fame … if I’m misclaiming it — if I just don’t know — then please tell me so’s I can change my ways. I don’t mean to make anyone sick, just nervous. Just a little bit nervous, like, hmm, I wonder if I might wind up in the emergency room. But then you don’t. Like that.

A lot of people don’t like to eat with me. In many cases their reasons are valid, like they’re vegetarian, or don’t know me. Other people keep coming back, keep going home nervous, and keep coming back.

This is called a sense of adventure. I know you have one, dear reader, or you wouldn’t be reading Cheap Eats. You’d be hoping your parachute opens, or surfing where sharks are — something really really boring.

Speaking of boring, one of my oldest, meat-eatingest friends wrote to remind me, after I got soft a couple columns ago and accidentally wrote about a one-year-old client of mine who I love, and who loves flowers, that "there’s only one thing more boring than listening to cat-loving freaks talk about their freakin’ cats … "

The ellipses are his. I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean chickens, though, because I’ve been writing about chickens ever since I was a teenager, no lie, and we’ve been in writing workshops and bands together. Surely he’d have said something before now, like, "Whoa! Chickens are boring."

Besides which it just ain’t true. So he must have meant either babies or flowers. Probably both. Together. Cute little flower-loving babies. Boring — unless they’re yours (or your client) — according to people.

So, OK, so how am I going to make it up to my Cheap readership, this un-farmerly lapse of coolness? Why, it’s almost too easy! By treating you all to something so freakin’ fascinating, so exciting, so universally bacon that even the most jaded cynic will have to turn his NASCAR cap around afterward, read it again, shake his head, and go, "Whoa! Chickens are boring, compared to this."

The subject of which I speak, of course, is My First Mammogram. I thought I was going to say Food Poisoning. But everything changed when I went to the mailbox just now and there was a letter from the medics re: my March 3 breast imaging examination:

Blah blah blah, there’s something in there, yadee-yada, they believe it’s benign, but…. And these ellipses are mine because my brain by now was awhirl with horror and general aghastness at the thought that two weeks had passed since My First Mammogram without me writing about it!

Well: Everyone said it hurts like hell, especially for small-breasted women. They described mean-fingered, banjo-faced technicians leveraging practical white nursing shoes into your sternum, grabbing one nipple in both hands and yanking and flattening you out like pie crust, in some cases using marble rolling pins to coerce you into the picture.

"Are you currently pregnant?" my mammogrammer asked.

It was the kindest thing anyone ever said to me and I told her so, then realized that she probably had to ask, by law, even if you had a mustache. In any case, she was a dear, and it didn’t hurt one bit. I like pie.

And, no, I ain’t afraid of no probably benign notes in the mail. I know just what it was they saw in there: a ping-pong ball. I’m game. Next time they look, I know, it will be exactly the same size, only in a whole different place.

My new favorite restaurant is Roadside BBQ on Geary in the Richmond. Sockywonk’s been barking it up for a long time so I finally grabbed her and shook her and made her take me there. And pay. What I like, besides sweet tea, tangy no-mayo slaw, and great fries, is that it uses apple wood for smoke, in addition to the more common hickory and mesquite. Apple smoke is my favorite kind of smoke. Smoked chicken sandwich with avocado and cilantro, and you can get your ‘cue in a salad, which is something else I love.

ROADSIDE BBQ

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

3751 Geary, SF

(415) 221-7427

Beer and wine

AE/D/MC/V

Shitloads of Money

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Stirring constantly … I’m a troublemaker. For complicated reasons, my old pals, um, Ronnie "Zack" Pottery and his wife, Mrs. "Zack" Pottery, were running from the law. Understand that these are two of the sweetest, law-abidingest people you will ever meet. They live very cleanly, simply, and musically in subrural, um, Idaho, pay taxes, stay sober, write, work, and record at home, go to the doctor, and consume more tea than anyone I know. Their idea of a wild time is to stay up late (as in, like, 11 p.m.) and render jazz standards on melodica and banjo. Sometimes they throw in a little slide whistle, or toy piano … the sick, twisted deviants! Their closest friends, I swear, are nuns.

Everybody sing: The hills are alive with the sound of music. No. It’s Idaho, but it ain’t like that. And I’m not sure I quite know what I mean, but I have a gut feeling it might be funny, in an over-my-own-head kind of way, so let’s stay with it. Just in case.

Everybody sing again: The hills are alive with the sound of music.

Sorry. The reason I’m stalling is because I want so very badly to explain why my two most clean-living friends ever, anywhere, were fugitives from (in)justice for a week. It’s so exciting and ridiculous. Surely it will make great copy. And yet, I have to be careful, don’t I?

Suffice it to say, as vaguely as possible, that people with shitloads of money can do basically whatever they want to people without squat, or very little, at any rate — like maybe some musical instruments and herbal tea. Everybody knows this, right?

But it’s even more twisted than that. Woohoo!

To make a long story short, as Ronnie "Zack" himself is fond of saying, someone with shitloads of money takes someone else with shitloads of money to court over, say, shitloads of money, or custody of kids, or it could be anything, really. The point is that clever, ruthless lawyers with shitloads of money start playing shitloads-of-money hardball with each other over shitloads of money, and the next thing you know, nun-hugging, starving-artistical innocents with a fear of flying are about to be subpoenaed to appear in a courtroom many states away to testify against a third person with shitloads of money who is not even materially involved in the case of Shitloads of Money vs. Shitloads of Money.

So let’s say that this third person with shitloads of money would prefer not to see Shitloads of Money winning shitloads of money off of Shitloads of Money, if only because in the process his own good name, Shitloads of Money, stands to be destroyed and he may, for example, lose the respect of loved ones who may or may not already have lost respect for him years ago. In any case, it’s too much to risk for someone with shitloads of money, so he generously suggests to said nun huggers that they must certainly be under stress and could use a vacation.

Oh, it’s so convoluted and other-worldly. It’s enough to boggle a little chicken farmer’s tiny brain. Which is partly my fault, because as soon as I saw Mr. and Mrs. "Zack" Pottery in their his-and-hers false mustaches at a discreet little hotel in My Hometown, California, I asked them please not to tell me too much about what was going on, so that I might write about it more accurately.

As a result, you probably know more about this case right now than I do. All I know is that Shitloads of Money vs. Shitloads of Money + Shitloads of Money – False Mustache–Sporting Nun Huggers = Fun for Chicken Farmers.

Breakfast was on them. Lunch was on them. Dinner was on them. Gas was on them. And as it gradually dawned on me that "on them" likely didn’t really mean on them so much as on them, I started suggesting fancier and fancier places. Places that chicken farmers and musicians don’t generally get to eat at.

And in this way, in my own imagination at least — which counts! — I had the small satisfaction of sticking it to Shitloads of Money.

———————————————————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is the Willow Wood Market up here in Graton. It’s the kind of place where I would never be able to afford to go, myself. It ain’t cheap eats: in other words, you’ll spend $15-$25 on a dinner entrée. But on special occasions, like your birthday or surprise out-of-town visitors wearing false mustaches and picking up checks…. It serves pretty basic, unpretentious, comfortable, and great food like risotto with scallops, rock shrimp with polenta, and grilled flat iron steak.

WILLOW WOOD MARKET & CAFE

9020 Graton Road, Graton

(707) 823-0233

Mon.–Sat., 8 a.m.–9:30 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.–3 p.m.

Beer and wine

MC/V

Craft fare

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS There was this crafts fair at one of our bars, and Sockywonk said she knew a guy who was giving away waffles. "Crafts fair?" I said, picturing clothes, jewelry, and purses, but not waffles.

Yeah, she said. He’d figured out a way to get waffle batter into an aerosol can, like Reddy-Wip, and he was promoting his brilliant invention by feeding all the craft fairies for free.

I loved Sockywonk for knowing such a thing. But after a sporty morning, I had me a good sticky, stinky sweat on and was mostly interested in her bathtub. We were going to a potluck at another bar later in the afternoon. I still had my soccer socks on.

"Well … " I said.

"Waffles!" she said, and what could I say? I had to agree with her 100 percent, once she put it like that. Waffles! Free ones, at that, and I was hungry and only had exactly $1.15.

"Waffles!" I said. And I changed my socks, borrowed a shirt, and found all sorts of things in Sockywonk’s bathroom to rub and spray on myself in lieu of a waterier bath.

At the end of the block we joined forces with Natty King Coal, the oatmeal pusher, and his charming bag lady–enforcer (and my personal hero) Little Orphan-Maker Annie, who was on crutches due to a grisly roller derby smash-up. She hadn’t been out of the house in months. I’m not kidding.

Annie had a crazed and wonderful look in her eye, like Give Me Blood, or syrup, or bargains. She also had a handicapped-parking thingy, so we drove to the bar even though it was within walking distance — or would have been, without pins and rods and crushed bones and so forth.

"What’s that smell?" Natty King said once all the car doors were closed.

"Do you mean ‘What are those smells?’" I said. "They represent a delicate yet complicated blending of the usual — sweat, smoke, and chicken shit — with the unusual: whatever the hell Socky keeps on the shelf in her bathroom."

Sockywonk works at a girly, soapy bath, spray, and general smell shop called Common Scents, and that was pretty much what I smelled like, like the entire store, Common Scents, on 24th Street. Plus sweat and smoke and of course chicken shit.

"I like it," the Orphan-Maker said, turning in her seat and smiling. Christ, she’s so sweet. And that was the end of that discussion.

At the crapshoot, or crafts fair, Sockywonk left less $40, the Orphan-Maker dropped two great T-shirts’ worth, plus the $20 she spotted the Wonk for even more cool stuff. Natty King, who knows how to treat his girls, bless him, went down whatever-the-worth of three bags of hot-sauced mango from a sidewalk vendor. Yum! And I, your chicken farmer truly, walked away with exactly $1.15, plus Aunt Jemima stains all over my borrowed shirt. Syrup. Sorry, Socky.

The verdict on aerosol-can waffle and pancake batter?

Yeah. Whatever. No, I mean, it was free, and it was delicious. But being a person who loves to cook, and who loves to spend as much time as possible doing the things that I love to do, like cooking, why in the world would I ever in the world squeeze waffle batter out of a can? And then blow time looking out the window that I could have more wisely spent separating egg whites and hand-whisking until they hold soft peaks?

No kidding, I make three meals a day. I want to have my hands in the food, and my arms, teeth, and tongue when appropriate. Like sex, I actually want it to take as long as possible. And dirty all the dishes. (I’ll do ’em in the morning.) You’re in a hurry, I know. You have a job. Check it out: batterblaster.com. Me, I’ll keep doing what I do … stirring constantly.

——————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Pretty Lady, a divine dive in West Oakland. Me and Deevee both ordered fried egg sandwiches, because we only had $10 between us, and all of it was hers. She laughed at me for ordering my sandwich eggs over easy, and I laughed last when my first bite squirted egg yolk all over my shirt and pants and the place. Which I really and truly love, did I mention? Nothing but counter, U-shaped for easier people-watching/eavesdropping. Saw a good-looking salad and stir-fry down the counter, so … stay for lunch.

PRETTY LADY

1733 Peralta, Oakl.

(510) 832-1213

Mon.–Sat., 7 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Flowers

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I see flowers very differently. Not because I’m a woman now, or a softy, or insane, or even a chicken farmer. It’s a kid thing. I learned it from little Clara de la Cooter, who bonked into the world a year ago and very quickly became my new favorite person in it.

Probably not a lot of people get to babysit their ex’s kids. So I’m lucky in that sense, and so is Clara. She’s a passionate eater — I daresay a budding foodie. Her favorite food so far is eggs. I’m just saying …

It’s not hard to imagine who her favorite auntie will be, I’m saying.

Today I saw an ad on the side of a truck that said, "Just the freshest eggs you will ever eat." I forget the brand, but if its slogan is true, then I highly recommend it. Its eggs will be sold not by the carton but by the chicken. Yo, I’ve held warm ones in my hands on cold days between the nest and the skillet. I’ve had to postpone lunch until almost dinnertime because somebody was all stopped up.

And the boys who I’ve dated have not tended to bring flowers. But that’s OK, because most of them never knew they were dating me. I like to think of Clara de la Cooter’s first date. Some awkward, googly kid hands her a flower and she laughs.

"What?" they say, offended.

But if they knew her now, they would know better. The girl just cracks up at the sight of flowers. That’s all. For some reason they are the funniest thing in the world to her. They’re hilarious. She points and giggles, and she laughs her head off. And I think that’s beautiful. More beautiful than I used to think flowers were.

I’m inspired. I want to laugh at flowers too, and I think there’s a chance I might learn to. Yesterday we took two walks together. It’s spring. It’s Berkeley. I held her in bushes and she kicked her legs and squealed with pleasure, rattling the leaves and branches. I pushed her stroller right up into pink ones, purple ones, white ones, yellow ones, and she pointed and laughed and touched and tugged. That she also tried to eat them goes without saying, don’t you think?

Under a lemon tree I wheelied the stroller back so she could look straight up into it. The tree was loaded, and she lost it. She busted a gut. All that yellow, it was early Woody Allen to her. If she hadn’t been so strapped in, she’d have been rolling on the sidewalk.

I want this. I want one. And that alternative-weekly groan you’re hearing is all my old friends, because they know how I used to be. And people tend to expect you to stay the same. Especially those who love you most.

Which reminds me that one day Clara will not be so tickled by flowers, or not in the same way. Maybe she’ll have allergies. I had a fantasy, under the lemon tree with her, that I would live to be 84, and that she would ask me, hopefully over dinner, what she was like when she was one.

Like I started asking my own parents, and at least one of my aunts, a couple years ago. They didn’t seem to know much, maybe because I was 1 of 11. Or they forgot. Which … I don’t have the world’s best memory myself. Already. What I will have is an excessively creased and yellow newspaper clipping in my apron pocket, where I’ve been keeping it for 40 years, just in case. "You found flowers very funny," it will say. And: "We laughed till we cried."

Making limeade out of lemons is my motto in life. This was someone else’s tree, of course, but I picked a small, hard one and put it in Clara’s little hand, unwashed, let her gum and suck it. And a couple of sidewalk squares later I saw, and picked, one tiny wild strawberry, the size of a pea. This I put in her other hand, knowing she’d eat it. And that it might have been sprayed, or peed on by a dog.
——————————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is one of my old favorite restaurants, but I never told you. It’s the 55-year-old Cinderella Russian Bakery in the Richmond, where I refueled with my soccer buds recently and dripped sweat and blood (from my nose) onto stuffed cabbages, garlicky potatoes, homemade bread, and dill in general. Wow! I think my mates were looking for more like, you know, breakfast, but for my money this is just the thing.

CINDERELLA RUSSIAN BAKERY

435 Balboa, SF

(415) 751-9690

Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–7 p.m.

Beer and wine

AE/DC/V

Change of heart

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0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS You don’t know me. You think you do, but not even my closest friends in the world know what a foolish, silly, misguided, and clumsy chicken farmer I can be. Key word: can be. Key words.

Luckily, we do have a choice, or at least a say. I have decided to be flattered by what happened on the night when I made a beautiful chicken pie out of one of my own, then accidentally dumped it in the sink. This point of view was not easy to come by.

At first I felt about as awful as it is possible to feel without dying. People who were in the kitchen had to leave the kitchen because they couldn’t bear to see me like that. I said what any English-speaking chicken farmer would have said right then. I said, putting it mildly, "Fuck!" My posture, I am sure, said the rest. I was bent or buckled over the counter next to the sink, my head in my hands, feeling entirely broken.

There was a time, earlier that day, when I had looked in the mirror and thought, I look pretty. Yeah, and there was a time, however brief, when my pie had looked delicious. Now it was a pile of steaming ruins in the bottom of the sink. Is this life? I keep trying to find out what life is, and the results keep coming back from the lab: an image of something ugly over porcelain.

Fortunately, I laugh easily and play hard, so I don’t stay down for long. During my already overdocumented recent depression (thanks for the concerned e-mails, BTW) I spent a long, blubbery time on the phone with my beloved Sockywonk, and she kept saying, "Your chickens! Your chickens!" And this is why I feel so sorry for people who struggle with longer-term depression. Because when you’re like that, not even the things you love can quite cut it. Not even chickens. Not to mention that, truth be told, I don’t even love my chickens. Not these ones. Not yet.

There’s no delicate way to say this. My chickens are pussies. Remember? I had to coax them out of their house and into the world with ham sandwiches. They had been outdoorsy, technically free-range chickens for months without ever really ranging freely. With half an acre of brush and stumps and logs and trees to explore, they mostly stay in the bushes right outside their door and just quiver.

Houdini they are not — Houdini being my famous and beloved escape-artist chicken whom I loved and then killed, when, even in death, she leaped out of the pot and bit me. In fact, hey, wait a minute! Come to think of it, ohmigod, this was Houdini, the end of her, the last little bit of freezer-burned meat, the last couple cups of broth, that went into this pie! I swear.

Holy shit! So she had one last escape attempt in her!

Not that it succeeded. The sink being pretty clean, Choo-choo and me spatula’d it all back into the pan, a broken mess, a chicken-pie casserole — but those who were brave enough to try it liked it.

Wow. Which would also explain why, while I was walking to my car after a sleepless night in Earl Butter’s closet, even the leftovers tried to get away. The pan, I swear, flew out of my hands and, without spilling, clattered across the sidewalk. I attributed this, at the time, to precaffeination, but now I’m thinking: Houdini!

That right there, that is spirit, soul, zest, zing, and that’s what my current chickens lacked. I had yet to look out my kitchen window and see my favorite sight in the world: chickens running around being chickens. So when Sockywonk said, Your chickens, your chickens, I was, like, whatever. Like I didn’t even hear her.

But they did, I guess, because four hours after we got off the phone, when I finally had the strength to get up from the table and turned to the sink to fill the teakettle, there they were. In the waning daylight. In the big yard. First time ever. Loving life and running around like chickens with their heads still on. Their world had just gotten bigger.

Mine too. I smiled for probably the first time in weeks.

My new favorite restaurant is Calafia Taqueria ’cause it’s where Mookie gets his burritos. This is the nice thing about dating an Alamedite. One of the nice things. Now I get to know where to go in Alameda, and then you get to know too! Anyway, the carne asada is great, they grill the tortillas, and there’s a big bar of fresh salsas. Didn’t get to try them all, but I’ll be back. *

CALAFIA TAQUERIA

1445 Webster, Alameda

(510) 522-2996

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

Beer

MC/V

Skunked

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS One week you smell like bacon, and the next week it’s skunk. Life is like this.

And do you know what a skunk sounds like? They make one of the most sinister noises in the animal kingdom, I think. They speak in a kind of wheezy, whiny murmur that forebodes death and disaster like a bunch of gangsters with head colds complaining about the service at a Chinese dive.

First I thought they were trying to make a hit on my chickens. It was three in the morning and I was in the throes of my depression. So the last thing I needed to wake up to was a pile of smelly, bloody feathers. Wait. I think skunks are like weasels. They pull the chickens’ heads off and suck out their brains, then leave the rest.

Either way, not a cheerful scenario.

So I dragged myself out of bed and went to my closet for something farmerly to wear. I couldn’t decide between overalls over a union suit and a Western shirt with a denim skirt. Overalls look great with a shotgun, and Western wear goes better with handguns. Of course, I don’t have either kind of gun. I just wanted to look convincing because the last time I raced outside in the middle of the night to defend the honor of my chickens, I was essentially laughed back to high school by a gang of possums, I assume because of the pajamas I was wearing.

In any case, my self-esteem suffered. They can be a cruel lot, these woodsy types that I hang with. Possums, foxes, bobcats, skunks … Eventually, after trying on several outfits, I settled on a "safe" floral-print flannel shirt and tight blue jeans under a long oversize coat that isn’t a trench coat but looked pretty good in the half dark in the mirror, especially from the side, I thought. And I went outside with a flashlight and walked around the chicken coop, trying to act casually curious, if not cool.

At the exact same time I realized that, gasp, I was wearing socks with Birkenstocks, I also saw, spotlighted in my flashlight light, the skunk. Also looking at my feet, shaking its head, like, "Loser!"

He wasn’t interested in my chickens after all. He’d been messing around behind the woodpile. I think he had a girl with him, or vice versa. In any case, this skunk was now smack between me and the door to my shack, and it turned its back to me, still shaking its head and muttering something about "pathetic hippie chicks."

I’m going to smell really bad for a really long time, I thought. But miraculously, it didn’t spray.

I was almost offended. What do I have to do to look threatening around here? I wondered, tiptoeing back around to the porch. Inside my shack I stood in the dark with my back to the door and breathed again. Then I threw my coat on the floor, kicked the old Birks way under the bed, and got back under the covers. Way under.

The fucking skunks fucked all the rest of the night that night, and when they weren’t making love they were complaining in those whiny, whiny undertones, right outside my window. I think someone wasn’t seeing to the other one’s needs or something.

It smelled a bit bad, but not as bad as it did a couple of nights later when the same skunk or skunks — or a different one — mixed it up with a feral cat in the crawl space beneath my shack. That was on Friday, and five days later I still smelled it on every single aspect of my life. Everything I own, and everything I have on loan from the library.

My dreams. My thoughts. My food. My songs, my singing. My writing. It all stinks right now. My cat, Weirdo the Cat … She doesn’t seem to mind. I smoke a lot of pot. And I keep a pan of bacon grease just sort of simmering on the wood stove.

Trying to get it back.

My new favorite restaurant is Fruitful Grounds. It’s just a little coffeehouse on Fulton near Masonic, but it has a good choice of good foodstuffs. Like French toast with bacon for $7.50. Huge portion. Delicious. And you can also get omelets, burgers burritos, smoothies … and, of course, bagels or pastries.

FRUITFUL GROUNDS

1813 Fulton, SF

(415) 221-1876

Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 9 a.m.–7 p.m.

Beer and wine

Cash only

The drop

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS On his 40th birthday Jolly Boy talked about beautiful. Beauty this and beautiful that. We were in a bar in the Mission, saying good night. He was impressed and grateful, I think he said, to have seen so much beauty in 40 years in the world.

"Good night, Jolly Boy," I said.

I hugged some other people too, and one of them said I smelled like bacon.

This floated me home to Earl Butter’s closet. I walked across the Mission at 12:30 a.m. with my hands in my pockets, alone and cold, knowing that this world, Jolly Boy’s world, was pretty lastingly beautiful and that I, in any case, smelled like bacon.

On the darkest part of my walk, near the little park on 19th Street, a guy wanted to talk to me.

"Hello," he said as we passed each other on the sidewalk. He was wearing a dark, hooded sweatshirt, but I thought I could see his nose twitch somewhere in there in it.

I was wearing a white, warm, short coat with a rabbit fur collar and a skirt with flowers on it.

"Hi," I said, smiling. He waited a little too long to ask if I happened to know what time it was.

I don’t wear a watch, or own a cell phone, but I turned around on the sidewalk and said, "No. I don’t know. But I think it’s around 12:30."

This was all that he needed to hear, apparently, to follow me. Tuesday morning, 12:30 a.m. I knew he was following me, and then I turned to see and saw that he was, beautiful world. He’d reversed direction and was walking 30 or 40 feet behind me, in his hood.

I smiled to myself and slowed down. The stars were about as bright as I’d ever seen them in the city. Earlier that afternoon, in the sun, in the country, I had been walking down my street, which is a dead-end street on a thousand-foot-high ridge overlooking, at various points, rolling coastal redwoods, vineyards, cows, sheep, and the Pacific Ocean. It’s a brilliantly beautiful world up there, and tears were streaming down my face because I had lost my soul and could not see much of anything in it.

I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t play music or listen to music. And I couldn’t imagine what I might possibly have left to live for. So I thought I would go for a walk and find out. What I decided while walking, crying, looking at cows and sheep and Pacific Oceans and the thousands of acorns that acorn woodpeckers, in their kooky wisdom, have embedded in a telephone pole next to a barn … what I decided was that I was going to go out that evening to the closest bar to my house, pick up a faceless, nameless drunk guy, and go home with him. Take it from there.

It was like all the flavor had been squeezed out of life into one dense drop on a bent piece of sheet metal in a driveway, then evaporated, taken up to the clouds, and spit back down with this season’s above-average rainfall. One drop. Somewhere. I was as likely to find it on the tip of an anonymous Sonoma County penis as anywhere. Or in the featureless face of a dark hood on a dark street in the Mission District at 12:30 a.m.

I’m not saying I’m smart.

But I do think I might be pretty enough now to pull off something like this. Pick up a guy in a bar. So I turned away from the acorn woodpecker’s acorn art and started back for my shack, beautiful world.

I put a big piece of apple wood on the fire. Took a bath on the porch while the sun was going down, put up the chickens, put on some clean, pretty clothes and makeup, and checked my e-mail.

Jolly Boy’s birthday. Drinks. Earl Butter had beans. Bring tortillas, he said. Well, so maybe I would find that drop, that one thing to hold on to, in a hot sauce bottle, on a cupcake, or in the hugs of friends. It never occurred to me that they would find it on me. In my hair.

The smell of bacon! In retrospect, I’m surprised more people didn’t follow me across the Mission.

My new favorite restaurant is Dragon Rouge, where I ate when I was starting to get sick and could not find duck soup. So I got hot and sour instead. Or "sweet and sour," as they call it, only that was before I poured all the hot sauce in the world into it. Didn’t work (no duck), but the shrimps were particularly great, and it has some cool nonstandard Vietnamese treats for next time: mango steak blankets!

DRAGON ROUGE

Lunch: Tues.–Sun., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5–10 p.m.

2304 Encinal, Alameda

(510) 521-1800

Beer, wine, sake

MC/V

Duck me, I’m sick

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS It had been a few years since I’d been sick, and I’d forgotten how to do it. I walked around in the rain, looking for this party. And when I found it, I stayed until almost the end. Then I called up the Boy Who I’m Kissing and asked if I could come over and kiss him.

In my defense, I didn’t know at the time that I was sick sick, as in the flu. I thought it was just lung cancer or something, from breathing all the smoke that I breathe. One of the advantages of an active imagination is hypochondria, or what I call "my sick mind" — without which I would never have compiled this amazing record of miraculous recoveries.

I have bested brain tumors by closing one eye and opening the other real wide. I’ve conquered cardiac arrest with cups of hot tea and survived strokes by slapping the side of my head, then getting some rest.

So the combination of my sick mind and an actually pretty fucking healthy body means that when I do get sick sick, as in the flu, I tend to think I can lick it by licking the Boy Who I’m Licking, or drinking more wine than usual, or stepping away from my smoky shack in the woods for a weekend.

This is unfortunate, and not just for the Boy Who I’m Infecting. It’s unfortunate for me because I probably would have been better by now if I’d gone, "Oh, the flu," and stayed home in bed with Weirdo the Cat. And it’s unfortunate for Weirdo the Cat, who could have been warm and cozy and well fed while I stayed in bed with her all weekend, albeit moaning and groaning.

As it was, Mookie got to get me in his bed, moaning and groaning, which, on the surface, might have seemed like business as usual, woo-hoo, but trust me, this wasn’t like that. It was the first time ever that we didn’t have sex. I just laid there with my eyes kind of open, coughing inconsolably and gradually realizing that it wasn’t lung cancer, goddamn it, but the flu.

By morning I hurt so bad I couldn’t even speak straight. "You have a sick chicken farmer on your hands," I tried to say. But it came out "chick sicken farmer."

He brought me coffee in bed, as usual, and offered to go to the store for Robitussin.

I was pretty sure I had cough syrup at home with codeine in it. Probably four years old, and certainly someone else’s prescription. But without codeine, cough syrup has never done much for me. It’s like duck soup without duck in it. Or chicken soup. I love chicken soup. And tea, and rest. But only two things can cure the common cold, and they are, in order of efficacy, duck soup and codeine.

Thinking I was closer to duck soup than codeine, I spent an hour on Mookie’s couch with a laptop and a telephone. Oakland’s Chinatown was just on the other side of the tunnel, for crying out loud.

And failing that, Crawdad de la Cooter’s freezer was in Berkeley. I happened to know that there were wild ducks in it. However, restraining orders prevent me from raiding her refrigerator, or coming over without calling first, or, um … writing about her in Cheap Eats.

I’m delirious. How, in other words, did I wind up without my face in a bowl of dark, rich, greasy, spicy duck soup? It was through no fault of Mookie’s. Let me rephrase that: it was all his fault. Because when Thanh Ky had a line out the door into the rain, he remembered for sure seeing duck soup at a place in Alameda. Only they were closed. Sunday.

For future reference, I’m never going to start seeing someone ever again without first finding out where the closest duck soup is to their house and having little cards printed up with business hours and directions. Then, when I’m laid up with flulike symptoms or the flu and they offer to go get medicine, I can hand them the card like a prescription.

"Ask for extra hot sauce."

I’ll either say that or have it printed on the card.

My new favorite restaurant is Bai Som Thai Kitchen. It’s a comfortable, colorful, and fun little place. Its motto is "Cooking with care" … and my soup was almost cold by the time the others at the table were served. So that proves it! Tom yum with salmon and pineapples, superspicy. And mealworthy, with a plate of plain noodles on the side. Look up at the ceiling while you’re there.

BAI SOM

Lunch: Daily, 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Daily, 4:30–9:45 p.m.

2121 Clement, SF

(415) 751-5332

Beer, wine

MC/V

Snowed

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Bernie Jungle made me a frittata, then got the ladder out, and we went onto his roof to look at the chimney.

"It’s going to snow," I said.

He didn’t argue. Bernie did time in Cleveland, and he can feel when it’s going to snow as well as I can. He just moved to my neck of the woods from Oakland and now lives five minutes east of Occidental, in Sebastopol. I live five minutes west of Occidental, in Occidental. It’s complicated math, or cartography, but not as complicated as the meteorology of two aging Ohio punks on a Northern California rooftop knowing it’s going to snow. Even though, of course, it never snows here.

Except sometimes it does.

Anyway, we couldn’t figure out why his wood stove wouldn’t work, not even by standing on the roof with our hands in our pockets looking at the chimney and knowing it was going to snow. So we climbed back down the ladder. I thanked him for the frittata and headed home, stopping in town for a chicken so as not to have to kill one of my own. Because I’d be damned if I was going to let a rare Sonoma County snowstorm pass me by without lighting the grill.

I’m not sure how to explain why when it snows my thoughts turn to barbecue rather than snowballs, snowmen, or even hot chocolate. It’s complicated psychology. Another way of looking at it is that my thoughts are just stuck on barbecue, period, and always will be, no matter what the fuck — rain, snow, sleet, or hail, for example. I’m like a sexaholic, or the United States mail delivery system.

In which case I should have taken off Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but no. I stopped at the expensive little hippie grocery store in Occidental and bought me a chicken. When I went in it was raining, and when I came out it was snowing.

A young woman with a white face and the shakes was getting out of her car, saying to a young man with dreadlocks, "It’s a good thing I grew up in the Midwest."

"Why?" Dreadlocks asked.

The roads around here are steep and winding. And slick, even when they’re only wet. It couldn’t have been snowing for more than three minutes, but the streets were white. It was dumping. I clutched my chicken a little tighter to my chest and was glad I grew up in the Midwest too.

Five minutes later I arrived safe and sound at my little shack in the woods, and even though my elevation is 223 feet higher than town proper, there was no sign of snow. I hadn’t been home since the morning before. My chickens were glad to see their farmer and even gladder to see the little chicken-size bag in her hand.

"It’s going to snow," I said to them on my way into the shack, where it was in the low 40s. I could see my breath. "It’s going to snow," I said to Weirdo the Cat. "Maybe even in here."

It didn’t snow. I got a fire going inside, then I got a fire going outside, but it never did snow. Not even outside. I stood there in the woods, in the weather, with my arms outstretched, palms up, and my tongue out, like a little kid, pausing every 15 minutes or so to flip the chicken.

Which came out great, by the way, but no thanks to meteorological anomalies. The great blizzard of ’08 had lasted approximately five minutes, and the only casualties were a young Midwestern girl’s nerves and a middle-aged Midwestern girl’s $13.16. I would never have paid $2.99 per pound for a chicken if I didn’t think I was going to get to cook it in the snow!

On the other hand, now I can write it off on my taxes, like love and laser treatments and all the other expensive subjects Cheap Eats wrassles with. Rum, laptops, record albums. Soccer shoes, league dues. Boots. Bras. Train tickets … I reckon I might actually save money by spending it, and wish I could explain how.

It’s complicated economics.

My new favorite restaurant is Metro Kathmandu. A companion had just asked a provocative question: what was the strangest thing I’d ever buttered? I was carefully considering my answer while buttering my lamb curry burger and french fries ($10) when the waitressperson offered us a round of free mimosas. It was a January brunchtime-only promotion, so I guess it’s over. But still …

METRO KATHMANDU

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9:30 a.m .–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5:30–11 p.m.

311 Divisadero, SF

(415) 552-0903

Beer, wine, cocktails

MC/V

Platforms

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My little brother needs a big sister, and my big sister needs a little one. Chickens need a farmer. Bread needs butter. Earl Butter needs bread. Crawdad de la Cooter needs me to paint a bookshelf. She’s pregnant and can’t breathe the fumes. I’m not, and can. But don’t want to, so she bribes me with K.C. Barbecue or Zachary’s Pizza, then both.

"What time should I be there?"

"How soon can you be here?"

I don’t know. Weirdo the Cat needs warmth and affection. Dishes … My lover needs loving. Need is a strong word, according to Phenomenon. According to Buddhists we’re not supposed to need. But what the fuck? Everybody does, and I do. I need money, grace, hope, and lettuce.

A new stove … I need a new stove with 10 back burners and no front ones because I can’t seem to finish anything anymore. I can clean my plate, and I can clean my ass. Other than that, I’m a mess.

I’m an underachiever. My goal in life is to get my hair cut. I mean, I’ll miss it when I’m doing the dishes, not needing no scrubbies or nothing. But other times, like cooking and eating, it just gets in the way.

Earl Butter calls this the Year of Becoming Better Cooks. And I’m down with that too. Every year is that year for me. So he cleaned his kitchen. I came over after a soccer game, let myself in, and wondered whether I even needed a shower, it smelled so good in there. He had a pot of greens simmering on the stove, a pan of spicy wedged potatoes roasting in it, and a loaf of corn bread cooling on the counter.

Mod the Pod and the Kat Attack were on their way over for dinner, Earl Butter said. Could I do the pork chops?

I could.

"However you want to cook them," he said. Then he proceeded to tell me how to cook them. He said to sprinkle some salt and pepper into a dry, hot frying pan, then put the pork chops in there too.

I ran my fingers through my hair. I stood in front of the stove and held my arms out, basking in the warm, wet aroma of comfort food. Then, considering myself bathed, I put clean clothes on, draped my sweaty soccer stuff over the radiator, washed my hands, cracked my knuckles, and Became Better Cooks with Earl Butter.

And with you, Dear Reader. I’m not that smart, I know, but I think I think about things as much as the next chicken farmer. I have conviction. Something to stand on, a platform. If I were running for president, my platform would be: Hey, America, use your fucking broilers! What the fuck do you think they’re there for?

Sure, I’ve cooked steaks and chops in hot, salted frying pans, and it does work. But so does the broiler. Better. You know that. Everyone knows. The thing is that no one wants to have to wash it afterwards, and that, in a nutshell, is why I can never run for public office. Or private office either. I am unelectable because no one wants to have to clean the broiler pan.

Most of them haven’t been washed in decades. This is a problem, if you know me. If you don’t know me — personally, I mean — then most likely your broiler hasn’t been used in decades. So why clean it? If you do know me, then you know that I love to cook in other people’s kitchens and won’t hesitate to use your broiler. I will promise to wash it. I will eschew your salted frying pans and make a big mess.

I thought about this in Earl Butter’s kitchen while broiling our pork chops, having promised to clean up after. I thought: I can be a forgetful, sleepy chicken farmer, especially after a big, good meal. Hmm …

Sockywonk, Mountain Sam’l, Bikkets, Phenomenon, Choo-Choo, Crawdad, Johnny "Jack" Poetry … um, Earl Butter, and anyone else whose kitchen I have commandeered in the past 10 years … check your broiler. If it looks like a landscape from Star Trek, call me. I’ll bring the Brillo.

My new favorite restaurant is the Citrus Club, just for being there on a cold, rainy night in the Haight. I was this close to freezing to death, then: hot and sour shrimp noodle soup! Huge bowl, and spicy! It’s pan-Asian, noodle-centric fare, mostly rice noodles, but some egg, and buckwheat. Warm, dry atmosphere.

CITRUS CLUB

Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.

1790 Haight, SF

(415) 387-6366

Takeout available

Beer, wine, sake, and specialties

MC/V

The thaw

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I was so afraid he was going to say, "I love you." I was terrified, and I sweated during sex, insisted on leaving the lights on after, and peed with the door open. During dinner I made sure there was always parsley between my teeth and onions hanging out of my mouth.

We did romantic things together, like watching football, and I tried to keep my head in the game, but it was killing me. He loved me, I could tell. At home I only listened to jaded music, like Liz Phair and Kathleen What’s-Her-Name, the Canadian. We’d been seeing each other for months, and the sweet things he said were getting sweeter — like, we were talking about a steak house, and I said, oh, it was a special occasion place, like maybe for his birthday.

"Every time I see you is a special occasion," he said.

I almost peed my pants. I almost moved to Alaska. His birthday was a couple months away. I tried real hard to get more dates with different people.

Meanwhile, the things that I said and felt were sweeter too. I meant and felt them, but love is another story, right? So I dreaded the word and feared the sentence with such focused attention that I was almost always saying it myself, by accident. The words I, love, and you pitched three little tents on the tip of my tongue, and I found myself using more hot sauce than ever.

At one in the morning on New Year’s Eve night, in his car, before a beautiful view of the city, he said, "I just can’t get used to the fact that it’s 2008."

I was still smiling New Year’s Day night, at the Thai restaurant. I’d ordered something spicy. He likes it mild. And he doesn’t much go for duck. So after the check was paid and the leftovers were all packed up for me for lunch the next day, we got into one of those talks.

I’m not ashamed of my neuroticness. My brain swirls and imagines more actively than my body might want. So? So I’m going on about what about this, what about that, you know, intangibles, unmentionables, unusualness, and the unpredictable places it inevitably leads us to, like Thai food.

There wasn’t any parsley between my teeth, but you would think … I don’t know, cilantro?

"Alls I know," Mookie said, and I quote, "is I love you."

He said this casually, offhandedly (like I like it), right while we were standing up to go, and I did pee my pants. I did move to Alaska. I blinked and was delighted to find that I was still standing. Right there! I did not die of impossibility, or freak and run, or even kick and scream.

Nor did I say, "I love you too." My tongue was empty. I squeezed him a little harder than usual, and we walked out of the place about as close together as two people can get with big coats on.

It felt quite nice to be loved. It felt casual, easy, and cellular — or the opposite of neurotic. Alls I wanted to do was get back to his house, sit on the couch with him in the dark, and watch airplanes, other people’s living room lights, and whatever else the night sky that night might have to offer.

We were almost there before I realized we’d left my leftovers on the table at the restaurant. Aaaaaaaaaah!!!!! This must be what people mean when they say love hurts. I’ll write a jaded love song about it. Every day ever since I have thought about those leftovers and missed them and mourned them and craved Thai food.

What I’ve been eating instead is everything in my freezer, because it all thawed out. In the woods, when the wind blows, my power is the first to go and the last to be restored. Five days now.

My coffee water, soups, and stews, all of it I cook on and in the wood stove, because that’s all I have. And love. You know me. I love to camp. I love to eat. I eat by candlelight, alone, and it’s pretty fucking romantic, sipping wine straight from the bottle.

My new favorite restaurant is Toomie’s. It’s cold, slow, crowded, and not as good or as great a place, placewise, as Amarin, Alameda’s other noted Thai restaurant, but the red curry has decent kick to it, and the peanut sauce works, and … I don’t know, it just kinda conjures nice connotations for me — who knows why? 2

TOOMIE’S THAI CUISINE

Mon.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m. and 5–9:30 p.m.; Fri., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m. and 5–10 p.m.; Sat., noon–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9:30 p.m.

1433 Park, Alameda

(510) 865-8008

AE/MC/V

Beer/wine

Good luck

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS We’re not related by blood, but he’s as much of a brother to me as my many brother brothers are. He has brothers too, but no sisters, and he always wanted one. So there’s that.

My brother Boomer makes poetry out of radio news like I turn food sections into fiction, sports, gossip, society, philosophy, agriculture, gender studies, travel, apolitical commentary … If, during the past 20 years, you have found yourself in Boston with a radio on, you may recognize his voice.

"Sister!" he boomed, and I heard it in the pay phone receiver and in the room. (Here room = Logan Airport.) I turned and saw him walking toward me, cell phone pressed to his silvering head with the big goofy grin and shining eyes.

"Brother," I said. We hugged, and he took my bags.

It had been some years. A lot had changed. He was skinnier. I’d been long divorced; he was getting there. His wife, always the insanely jealous type, had been cheating on him and was in love with some guy in LA.

Boomer had taken a couple of days off work to chauffeur me to the University of Maine, where I was giving a reading. It’s five hours from Boston to Orono — plenty of time to catch up, but not enough time, apparently, to eat.

Starving, I dropped hints. "Hilltop Steakhouse still there?" I asked, perhaps too casually.

He nodded. Then: "I tell you, Sis," he said. "I don’t know what I’m going to do. The boys …"

Route 1 was a parking lot. Boomer called his station’s traffic desk: "Hi Jim. Boomer."

While he was getting the inside scoop and then getting us out of it, I sat there seat belted and safe, feeling kind of cushy, or soft, like I was in good hands. Informed. I wondered if this was how people expected to feel when they ate in restaurants with me or came over to cook something.

"Why are you laughing?" Boomer asked.

There was the Hilltop. "Nothing," I said, twisting in my seat.

Surprisingly, little had changed on the Saugus Strip in the 20 years since I’d haunted it. I looked at my now silver-templed, golden-voiced newscaster friend and remembered him shirtless behind a drum kit, spit-shouting angry, stupid, and inspiringly poetic punk.

Over barbecued chicken, jerked chicken, and chicken sausages at the party after the reading, Boomer confessed. We were pressed between a table and a refrigerator, holding paper plates and drinking fizzy water while all around us the academics, grad students and their teachers, were drinking hard.

Years ago Boomer had driven back and forth, he told me, between a tree and a telephone pole — tree, telephone pole, tree, telephone pole — in the end settling on the pole, which snapped like a bean.

Power outages, burned houses, abandoned babies, train-wrecked lives, gang bullshit …

"Do you think you knew deep down it would do that?" I asked. "Is that why you picked the pole, do you think?"

"I don’t know," he said.

Call me crazy, but I think that — compared to at least one alternative — half-assed suicide attempts rock.

On the way back down to hard news, as on the way up, Boomer periodically rolled his funny car’s window down and shouted at the trees, at Maine, at the way life should be, "Good luck!"

Environmental disasters. Assassination. God. Government. There’s a cat, a fox, and a hawk stalking my chickens. Not to mention the farmer.

"Good luck!" Boomer booms, and you can hear him clear across the country.

——————————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Taqueria Reina’s. It has the cheesiest chiles rellenos ever, very good carnitas, and excellent salsa. My only complaint was we had to eat with gloves on, it was so cold in there. And speaking of cheesy, there were Mexican soap operas instead of soccer on TV.

TAQUERIA REINA’S

Daily, 9 a.m.–11:45 p.m.

5300 Mission, SF

(415) 585-8243

Takeout available

Beer

Free range

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Happy New Year. I was lying in bed one night toward the end of the old one with the lights on and my eyes open, thinking about the usual: death, emptiness, and whether or not dildos ever really break off inside people and get lost. Weirdo the Cat jumped onto my pillow, pawed my hair, sniffed my ear, sat there staring at me, and was all, like, "Meow."

Meanwhile in the coop, four little chickens huddled together for warmth — or, check that, three chickens huddled together for warmth and the fourth was off by herself in a nest, eyes wide open, thinking about death and dildos as if her sole purpose in life were to remind the chicken farmer of the chicken farmer. There’s one in every flock, usually at the punk end of the pecking order, and in case you were wondering, they’re the hardest to kill and the easiest to eat.

They were protesting outside KFC — people, not chickens. It was PETA, not CETA, I’m sure. Placards complained of poor working conditions for factory farmer chickens, something about broken wings and sawed-off beaks. I smiled and waved, honked my horn, and renewed my commitment never to eat at KFC, because Popeye’s is 10 times better.

Broken wings. Sawed-off beaks … Your chicken farmer shudders at the thought, but what really tears her up inside, besides death and dildos … I’ll take you back to bed in a moment, don’t worry. Or do, but please bear with me: it’s New Year’s, a time for bitching and moaning and, yeah, moaning. And bucking, but we’ll get back in bed, I promise; it’s just that you see these small-farm happy homeschooled organic free-range egg cartons that say "vegetarian diet" …

Are you kidding me? What greater cruelty can there be than to deny an animal its favorite thing in the world to eat? And if you’re a chicken, uh, that ain’t tofu. Hello. It’s not even salad or corn or grass. I’m sorry to have to be the one to inform you that chickens’ favorite food is pork. The other white meat. In fact, one reason they debeak the poor things is because they are not above eating the original white meat, or in other words, one another.

What turns chickens into cannibals? Lack of animal protein. Stress. General anxiety disorder, often accompanied by feelings of worthlessness, meaninglessness, and, in short, baconlessness.

You do the math.

Anyone who has ever seen a chicken light into a pork chop will join me, I trust, in boycotting vegetarian-diet chicken farming. There. I have taken my stand for ’08. PETA, I hope, will picket Rainbow Grocery and Whole Foods, a.k.a. Whole Paycheck. And by the way, to answer yet another rhetorical question, the only thing less ethical than denying an animal its favorite food is to then not put that poor animal out of its misery and onto my plate, where it wants to be and belongs. Trust me.

You already know about "free range," right? That the joke is on us? Just because you open a chicken’s door for an hour or two a day, that doesn’t mean it will ever go outside and play. I swear, I had my chicken door open all day every day for a week before they ventured from the safe familiarity of the coop into beautiful Sonoma County, and then I had to lure them out, finally, with ham sandwiches.

So: Free-range chicken ? free-range chicken. Happy chicken ? vegetarian chicken. And a true free-range chicken can’t possibly be truly vegetarian anyway, because if it’s outside and can’t find pork chops, it will certainly scare up roly-polies, spiders, worms, locusts, cicadas, mice, centipedes, a dead hummingbird …

The other day I saw a tiny line of beetles marching in a line outside my chicken coop door with little BETA placards. I smiled and waved and honked my horn.

Grasshoppers, caterpillars, brick bugs, moths, larvae, ticks, termites, ants, earwigs. Hold on a second, I need more lube. Crickets …

My new favorite restaurant is Happy House Korean BBQ, and I didn’t even get the barbecue! Me! Cal kook soo with clams. That means noodle soup. It’s $9, $10 for just the noodles and slivered cucumbers in a starchy broth, but the clams were good, and they give you all the little bowls of kimchi and stuff too, so … *

HAPPY HOUSE KOREAN BBQ

Mon.–Wed., 11 a.m.–midnight; Thurs.–Sun., 11 a.m.–4 a.m.

1560 Fillmore, SF

(415) 440-1990

Takeout available

Beer/sake

MC/V

Pork opera

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Earl Butter was drinking rum and I was drinking whiskey. Earlier that day he had composed a song on the sidewalk, a sidewalk song, and it was perfectly pedestrian and wonderful. Guitar on lap on edge of bed, he figured out the chords and taught me my part.

He sang, deeply and feelingly, with an operatic, incrementally building pomp, "I want / To / Have / A pork sandwich!" And I went, in a fluty falsetto, "Lu lu lu."

Between sips we practiced and perfected our presentation of these two brilliant lines, or one brilliant line with an enigmatic postscript. And when I thought we’d gotten it down I said, "OK, I feel comfortable with it. What’s the next line?"

He said there wasn’t one, and what was I talking about? "’I want to have a pork sandwich.’ What more need be said?" he said. Lu lu lu.

Ah! It was a song about longing, a longing for pork no less, and it was over. Complete. Perfect. And downright farmerly in its simpleness. Perhaps more than anyone I know — except maybe my old friend Bikkets, whose greatest imaginable worldly joy is to stomp on a cookie — Earl Butter is tuned to the simple pleasures of life, the two simplest of which are, arguably: (1) a pork sandwich and (2) a one-line opera unambiguously expressing one’s desire for same.

Does it get any farmerlier than that? Oh, I would have liked a bigger role … what leading lady wouldn’t? As if reading my mind, Earl Butter came up with one. His face lit up as he hammered into his guitar. Clearly, this was an inspired moment. In addition to "Lu lu lu," I would now accompany him on the word "have."

So the song was reperfected thusly: "I want / To / HAVE / A pork sandwich! Lu lu lu."

I shouldn’t be letting you in on our creative process, I know. Earl Butter and I are both respected, published troubadours, with bands and albums, music publishing companies, BMI registration, and, every 10 years or so, a royalty check.

Another thing we have in common is a freezer full of soup. All poor people have one. Right? Well, assuming homefulness and electricity they do. Between my shameless scavenging skills and Earl’s all-out general charm, we are the recipients of more bones and meat scraps than most of the dogs in California put together.

A typical phone conversation between us goes like this:

Me: What are you making? Him: Soup. My neighbors gave me their turkey carcass. You? Me: Oh, soup too. I had a babysitting–refrigerator-cleaning gig yesterday.

Or another thing I’ll do is, I’ll go into a foofy food store and appear at the meat counter, barely visible under armloads of designer macaroni, p.c. coffee beans, free-range organic drinking water, imported small-press napkins, etc. I’ll ask after their Neiman Marcus beef, and then, while I’m deciding how many pounds of it to buy, suddenly remember that I also need chicken giblets, necks, and backs for some alternative-weekly performance piece I’m working on.

While they duck into the butchery to secure these to-them throwaway ingredients, I decide against the beef — "for now" — but they still don’t charge me for the scraps, because I’m such a good customer. "Next!"

Next-in-line steps forward, and I step around the place putting everything else back on its proper shelf, then check out with an onion and a carrot. This saves me the inconvenience of having to pick my soup out of their dumpster after hours, in the dark.

I told Earl about the ham bone I’d scored from a holiday party cleanup and the gallons of split pea soup I’d made with it — did he want any? Sure; did I want to take home a carton of frozen turkey soup? Sure!

But I was too dark and it was too drunk to drive. Earl was in the kitchen. I made my bed in his closet but didn’t lie in it, because South Park came on. And Earl Butter came back with — I kid you not — two pork chop sandwiches, merry Christmas. *

My new favorite restaurant is Mama’s Royal Café. It’s quaint, it’s cool, it has good food and great booths, and it even offers salsa along with hot sauces — a fresh tomato, carrot, and cilantro blend that saves the potatoes and doesn’t cost extra! Just forget about Mama’s on the weekend, unless you keep chicken-farmerly hours or enjoy standing in line.

MAMA’S ROYAL CAFÉ

Mon.–Fri., 7 a.m.–3 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 8 a.m.–3 p.m.

4012 Broadway, Oakl.

(510) 547-7600

Takeout available

Beer/wine

Cash only

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