• No categories

Cheap Eats

You and yers

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Dear Earl Butter,

North Carolina was different. Since we would be there only one day, and that day was a Sunday, and all the barbecue places near my sister’s house are closed on Sunday, she had the presence of mind on Saturday to pick us up a pile of barbecue.

Mind you, she’s a vegetarian now, like the rest of my sisters and most of my brothers. But the more vegetarian the rest of my family becomes, the more meat I feel I have to eat. It’s complicated math, or maybe simple math and complicated metaphysics, but I know that you, of all people, will understand. My sister does.

My brother-in-law picked us up at 4 a.m. at the train station in Greensboro, where they live now in a rented single-wide, out between the last street light and the dump. Their couch folded into a bed, and the bed was very comfortable, but I was too hungry to sleep, so I visited the fridge. And there it was, lit from within, two quarts of pulled pork and a pint of barbecue slaw. There would be donuts and bagels and coffee when we woke up, but another way of looking at it is that I had barbecue for breakfast, lunch, and dinner that day.

And Earl, what I’m driving at, or meandering toward, is that none of this so-called authentic North Carolina barbecue was even half as good as what you brought over to Deevee’s house last time. Which is remarkable, considering that whoever made this must have lived here a lot longer than you did, I guess. And for sure more recently.

You lived here, what? A year? Twenty years ago? I guess you’ve just got a natural touch for North Carolina barbecue. Or another possibility is that sometimes you just flat-out outgrow a thing. Maybe I don’t like North Carolina barbecue as much as I thought I did. It happens. Example: I used to think my own hometown in Ohio had the best barbecue ever, but the last time I ate some I burped plastic the whole next day.

And I should mention that I did eventually get me some Georgia barbecue last week too, in Marietta, and it was way better than what we had here, although Romea might disagree, which goes to show you. When I come back, let’s go to Dibb’s Barbecue on Fillmore Street. I missed it last time I was on that street, remember?

But first we’ve got one more week of planes, trains, and automobiles, only not in that order. Like, right now we are on a train. Romea’s sleeping next to me, on my pillow, in my poncho. She’s probably dreaming my dream, too — which is (right now) of bacon fries. Did I tell you about bacon fries? Don’t wait for me to come back for that one. If you’ve got $5, go get you some, and if not borrow $5 off my brother.

I heard he stole my car from you. Don’t let him do that.

Yours,

me

P.S. I love her.

L.E.,

That is great. I went to the Lawrence Bakery Café, and got what I have gotten there for the last four, five, or six years. Which is a cheeseburger and french fries. I would like to say that in all that time, their prices have never changed. But that is not true. At some point, a cheeseburger and fries went up from $3.75 to $4. Is that an outrage? No, it is not an outrage, it is perfectly fine. I love the Lawrence Bakery Café and several places around the Mission for the very same reason: they serve very good food at very good prices, giving a guy like me, well, a chance.

I can cook food. Most everybody knows it. But it was out of necessity that I learned to cook. Believe me, if I had the dough, I would be eating out every night, maybe at fancy-pants places, but also at great regular places, too.

My kitchen has been very good to me over the years. But I would leave it in a second and never speak to it again if I could. Please do not let my kitchen know that I wrote this.

Yers,

Earl

LAWRENCE BAKERY CAFE

2290 Mission, SF

(415) 864-3119

No alcohol

Cash only

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

What if …

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Surreally, I find myself a student at Kennesaw State University north of Atlanta. It’s weird. Not the least because I am not really of course a student. I’m a guest of the university. Technically I’m a guest of a guest of the university.

Romea is the rock star. I’m a tag-alonger, which suits me. Turns out I am good at tagging along. Sometimes I even say things. For example, I have managed to interject the word "barbecue" into several cuisiney conversations, and while they acknowledge it exists, days pass before anyone offers to take us to it. Liberal academic smarty-pantses in the South (or at least here) associate barbecue with Republicans, I find, and therefore don’t want any, at worse, or at best consider it a guilty pleasure. To which I say … well, to which I am speechless, actually.

Being a hanger-onner, I hang on, biding my time in respectful silence and tiding myself over (to the amusement of our hostess) with fried chicken wings from the grocery store deli. Next week in North Carolina, I know, I will have my way. My way = pulled pork and sweet tea.

Speaking of sweet, Romea and me are so increasingly insanely in-lovingly besmoldered of each other, I don’t think we can at this point bear to be apart. There are physical symptoms. And it’s so great to be so in love with a writer, but so strange to not be able to read her novels. Not to mention her short stories. One of which I have heard her read now twice, and I’ve read it on paper, and am just now beginning to get an inkling of what happens.

I know I’m going to be fluent in German one day, but …

I mean, I feel certain about Romea. About us. I have never been more sure of anything, but …

Well, her love poems to me she has the decency to write in English, at least, and with all the possible objectivity in the world I can say that they are wonderful, but …

You know, it could take decades. I could be old, and about to die happy, in love and in German, as I imagine, before I can really really read one of her novels, and …

I mean, not that it could possibly matter … not that in fact it isn’t half the fun of it, not knowing, but what if … what if I ultimately only then find out that I find her prose slightly somewhat stilted? Or something. I’m just asking.

This afternoon Romea rocks the Goethe Institute in Atlanta. This morning, against the worst odds ever, we sit side by side on our comfy bed in the cozy attic apartment of KSU’s International House, her practicing today’s reading aloud, in German, me trying to write in English, and about 20 guys in work boots walking with Southern accents on our heads, sliding ladders, scraping shingles, hammering roof nails, staple-gunning … Outside our window, on the lawn, there’s a generator, a table saw, and a 100 percent chance of rain. Thunderstorms, actually. I can’t wait. It’s going to seem so quiet, so calm, ka-boom.

I’ve danced to a lot of things in my day, but can’t quite pick the beat out of this one. Still, I have something to say. It’s just going to be hard to understand me over all this racket. One day in Berkeley, I said ONE DAY IN BERKELEY when Vik Wholesale was closed, I mused with the Maze at India Chaat & Sweets over curry goat. Curry goat! Well, goat curry, technically, is what they call it there. And it’s $12.99. Almost all their stuff is more than $10, which would explain why no one else was eating there.

Oh, but it was so quiet. I could hear the Maze’s musings, and he could hear mine, and neither of us had to raise our voice, as I recall. In fact we kind of whispered.

And the curry goat curry was great. But really, why anyone would want to eat there except in an emergency (i.e. Vik’s is closed) … is far, far beyond me.

INDIA CHAAT & SWEETS

Mon., Wed.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m, 4:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m.

Sat., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun., 11:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

824 University, Berk.

(510) 704-1200

Beer & wine

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Pears and pairings

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS There’s that stretch of Fillmore Street between the Western Addition and Japantown. I’m rarely there, but when I am, it amazes and amazes me how otherworldly it increasingly becomes. Chains, boutiques, chains … It’s so sort-of centrally San Francisco, yet you forget where you are and can easily become disoriented.

Or worse: disillusioned.

I have started out looking for a bite, and wound up desperately turned around, trying in vain to get back on a freeway that isn’t there, never was, and never will be.

Why does it look like this, and what does it look like? A cross between the worst of New Mexico and the best of Iowa. I don’t know. I’m redisoriented, just thinking about it.

It’s not that I can’t decide. I can: I want everything both ways.

And there I was, on my pointless way from point A to point B, and I needed a little something to chew on in my car.

Did I tell you I was studying German? Yep. It started last spring after the first time I said bye-bye to my bilingually bisexually both-gendered and many-named new lover Romea at the airport. I wanted to be able to say, basically, I love you, but a million different ways, and in German. So I haven’t stopped studying since, although my goals have changed a little.

Or I should say broadened.

But I practice in my car, a lot, and the other day I accidentally said to Crawdad in English, in a kitchen in Berkeley, without thinking, "Can I this pear eat?"

Which, when I realized what I’d done, thrilled the bejesus out of me. The sentence was grammatically perfect, in German, and the pear, unblinkingly granted by Crawdad, was delicious and crisp.

I used to only like pears that made my gums bleed. Now I like all kinds. Not yet ready ones, the over-ready yellow ones that bruise when you look at them, Asian pears … Pears are good. And this one was perfect, just like the grammar that got me it.

And got me out of my Fillmore Street predicament. Which, saying so …

Well, there’s a barbecue place there I think, but I didn’t see it. And then at the last minute, just as I was about to lose my sense of reality forever and ever and become a duck — about a block from Geary and, therefore, Japantown — I started to see one or two realistic looking Korean joints, and this: the Fillmore Mexican Grill & American Deli.

A burrito would be just the thing. I love eating burritos in my car, because then you find the beans and rice and things in the cracks between seats, or under them, many months later, and remember. And, too, there was an open parking space right in front, which meant I could leave the car unlocked and wouldn’t have to worry about anyone stealing my dirty soccer socks and unspit sunflower seeds.

Cavalierly did I step up to the counter, where I was immediately unhorsed by the appearance of an Asian woman who took my order and, in so doing, made my day. A lot of people would be put off by Asian-run Mexican grills, or vice versa. In fact at one time in my life I might have been guilty of similar small-mindednesses. Now I cherish such plot-twists, and for years have secretly wondered how the sentence "What kind of beans?" would sound with an Asian accent.

So I ordered my burrito.

"What kind of beans?" she said.

I swooned, and pretended not to understand so she would say it again, but instead she only listed my choices: pinto, refried, etc.

I said, "Refried."

They only had one kind of salsa, which was green and good. And the chips were freshly homemade, or at least seemed so, which is all that really matters. And some other things.

Oh, it was a pretty good burrito. It was alright. Nothing otherwise special, except I should point out that one of their meat choices (the one I got) is chicken and steak, and another is steak and prawn, and still another is salmon and prawn.

These are a little more expensive, yes, but, you know, so is life when you are Gemini.

FILLMORE MEXICAN GRILL

Sun.–Thu., 10 a.m.–9 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 10 a.m.–-midnight

1552 Fillmore, SF

(415) 921-9900

Beer

MC/V/AE/D

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

The art of biking

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Earl Butter and me decided there was one thing we wanted to see at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. So I stole my downstairs neighbor’s bike, borrowed a lock from another neighbor … who had to figure out the combination on the Internet … which took time … me thinking …

Can bike thieves get online?

Banking on probably not, I put the heavy lock in my purse, raced to BART without a helmet, almost falling every time I stopped because the seat was so high, carried it up the steps and onto BART, which became crowded, and 45 minutes later had to carry it up even more steps than before.

And when I came up from underground I was almost blown over by the wind. My handlebars were bent at a weird angle to the front wheel, but I managed to make it to Earl Butter’s house without veering into any busses or anything. Then we rode to Golden Gate Park.

The sun was setting. The temperature was arctic. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, houses were falling down. (Well, one did, I heard later on the radio.) On north-to-south streets we would have been blowed sideways into parked cars were it not for the ingeniousness of spokes. As long as we were aiming west, the wind was merely pushing us backward. Which seemed safe enough, except for the blinding sun. I couldn’t see Earl Butter in front of me, and wondered how in the world car drivers would see me.

Still, that’s the way you gotta go to get from the Mission to the park: west. At every other corner or so, Earl Butter would wait for me to catch up. I was so surprised: I’m supposed to be a soccer player. I can play three games in one Sunday, but I can’t ride a bike up a hill.

Six hours later we arrived at the festival.

There was nowhere to lock our bikes. I wished I had a camera, it was so beautiful, bikes totemed onto, around, and up every single signpost and pole, clinging at impossible angles, colorful and Seussian.

"I suggest you lock them to trees," the guy at the gate suggested, but even all the trees were taken, bikes hanging from every reachable limb, strange fruit. It was so pretty. I tried to think of this as an art exhibit, and my reason for coming, since I knew the Flatlanders, the last act of the evening, were already halfway through their set.

We had to do a little bushwhacking, but we eventually found some uncharted trees to lock onto. It was getting dark by then, and I realized I would need two things I didn’t have to get my bike back later: a flashlight and reading glasses. There was some solace in the thought that a bike thief would need at least one of those things, plus Internet access. Or, I guess, a saw.

We found our stage in time to catch four songs, none of which were particular favorites of mine, and then, thanks to full moons and the glow of my iPod, we found and even unlocked our bikes. By this time I couldn’t feel my toes, my fingers, or my nose. And it finally occurred to me that my borrowedish bike had not one single reflector anywhere on it, let alone a light, and that I was wearing all black and was about to die.

Now if there’s one thing you know about me after all these years on the toilet, it’s that I absolutely positively hate to die on an empty stomach. And that’s where Chiang Mai comes in. So once again, my fear of dying hungry saved my life.

Because this cute little Thai place on Geary Street was warm in more ways than one: 1) it was warm; 2) it was sweet and cozy, all a-clutter with plants and cute things and shit, which restored my will to live; and 3) tom yum.

"Medium?" the waitressperson guessed.

I shook my head, said, "Hot as you got."

Side a noodles, cause I knew I’d need the carbohoohaw just to get back out to the sidewalk, let alone home. And now I have a new favorite restaurant.

CHIANG MAI

Mon.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m. & 5 p.m.–10 p.m.;

Sat.–Sun. 5 p.m.–10 p.m.

5020 Geary, SF

(415) 387-1299

Beer & wine

AE/D/MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Half and half

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS At a pretty good restaurant in a small town, other side of the mountains, we were greeted and seated by a small boy, age 9, 10, 11 tops. We looked at each other, looked at the kid, looked at each other, shrugged, and followed him to our table.

"Can I get you anything to drink?" he said.

We had just emerged from Death Valley, where the heat was intense and the scenery surreal, and milk was the last thing on our minds.

"Um, what kind of lemonades do you have?" I said, scanning the menu very quickly. It was an inside joke between me and me — one of my specialties.

Romeo ordered a beer. He lives in Germany, and his favorite brew is Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

Well, we were doing it. Setting up camp together, if not house. After a few days of cooking on fires, sleeping in tents, squatting in the bushes, and not washing at all, Romeo said he felt like he had got to meet Dan Leone. He said he liked him OK, but maybe we should get a motel room for one night.

I agreed. It was weird to be cut in half like that and, though I have never been one to run from weirdness, I do prefer speaking of myself in the first person. A bath seemed like a very good idea.

A bath, a pluck, a night of mattressousness, change of clothes in the morning, and I would be myself again. But first, while I was still Dan Leone, I had to order a buffalo burger with bacon, cheese, barbecue sauce, and chili on it, because … I mean, come on, were we or were we not a couple of smelly cowboygirls just in from a roundup?

Of course we were. The more interesting question is what was the fuck re: the fourth- or fifth-grade waitchild. Sixth-grade tops. Do we have child labor laws here? My German wanted to know. I think so, I thought, but maybe they don’t apply to family-run restaurants in tiny middle-of-nowhere towns. Clearly that was what this was, a family. There was a strong resemblance between the kid, a slightly older kid also waiting tables, a slightly-older-than-that kid, and the cat in charge, their father, who seemed too young to have three kids, including at least one teenager, so maybe he was the oldest brother, I don’t know.

Anyway, it was a school night.

And I still can’t decide if the whole thing was cute or creepy, so I’ll just tell you that the burger was great. Even though it may well be mean, unfair, and irresponsible of me to tell you so, according to a whole pile of e-style mail waiting for me upon my return to civilization.

Apparently a popular restaurant that I slagged a couple weeks ago is run by a positive force in the community, and so therefore I shouldn’t say anything bad about their carne asada. Which sucked. But most of the people who called for my resignation, apologies, do-overs, and so forth, admitted that they were vegetarians, and so presumably have never had the carne asada (which sucks) at their favorite restaurant.

Really, I doubt I’ll like the vegetarian food there either, because the rice and beans didn’t impress me and the salsa was even worse than the meat, but I am nothing if not a good sport. I will re-review the Sunrise, and I will order something vegetarian this time, provided one of the vegetarians calling for my head/job/apology agrees to a) pay for it, and b) sit across from me and eat carne asada.

You’ll get your do-over, and I’ll get to watch a vegetarian eat meat. Which is one of my favorite pastimes.

Just so you know though: I’ll say exactly what I think about anything I eat, I don’t care if Jesus Hisself runs the joint. I calls ’em like I tastes ’em, and if I don’t like His bread and wine, or carne asada …

Oh, but I did like that buffalo burger, very much. What a shame, that a child labor law scofflaw and/or mean dad can be a better cook than a sweetie-pie.

Cruel world!

MOUNT WHITNEY RESTAURANT

Daily: 6 a.m.–9 p.m.

227 S. Main, Lone Pine

(760) 876-5751

Beer & wine

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Flourescence

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS It looked like a good place to sit and so we sat there, basking in the relative fluorescentlessness. Compared to Joshua Tree National Park, there are a lot of restaurants to choose from on San Bruno Avenue in San Francisco. Dive after dive after dive, it’s a Cheap Eats mecca. Whereas Joshua Tree has lizards. Stones. A bee that won’t leave me alone.

My sweetie and me are under a rock, or rather, under a complex formation of rocks, sharing an apple and writing on our laptops. We are sitting side by side on a blanket, leaning against one wall of our cave. I just had me my favorite siesta ever. Hold on a second … Her too. You wouldn’t believe how in love I am. Hold on a second … Her too.

You wouldn’t believe how hot it is just a few feet away from us, and how pleasant the weather is in our cave. Tomorrow with the air conditioning on we will drive through Mojave to Death Valley Junction, home of the Amargosa Opera House.

A woman named Marta rented then bought it 40-some years ago, but no one would come, so she painted an audience on the walls of the place, and now she’s 90 and still performs there even though sometimes she has to sing sitting down.

Anyway, it seems like a monument to what I love about life: kooky people making limeade out of lemons. That’s one thing. So we’re going to go see it, maybe catch a show, if we’re lucky. If we’re really lucky, a standing-up one. And if not, we’ll drive on. There are hot springs that side of the mountains.

I haven’t camped in Joshua Tree for a few years. Ever since I first moved to my witchy shack in the woods, I have not felt the need to camp, go figure. But the desert is something else. And this one is my favorite place on the planet. The surreal rock formations, the moony landscape, the irrepressible joy of headlight-lit ocotillos, and the cartoonishly contortionistic joshua trees reaching every which way at once.

What we don’t have here is beef with tender greens, or pork and preserved cabbage noodle soup, or chicken with bitter melon. In fact, there are many ways in which Joshua Tree National Park is not a Chinese restaurant.

It’s so quiet you can hear the air, sometimes.

At night there are a lot of airplanes. Blinking beelines to Palm Springs, or Los Angeles, or back, their silent exclamations are almost welcome in a sky dotted with periods and comets.

I don’t think I ever brought a laptop before to Joshua Tree. But I’m with a writer now, and she’s got a reading tour on the East Coast next month, a slow-going story to finish, and a new one to start. Whereas I have a restaurant to tell you about.

It’s a little less fluorescent than most San Bruno Avenue joints, yes, but it’s still cheap. San Bruno Café. Or 2546 Café. Or 2546 San Bruno Café. They have $5.25 rice plates from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., even on weekends. Gotta like that.

What you don’t gotta like (and won’t) is that every meal starts — no matter what you order — with a bowl of bean water soup. That was our name for it. I mean, you can’t argue with free, but … come on! A bowl of murky brown water with nothing in it? Maybe a half of a bean, or two, lurking somewhere beneath the cloudy, greaseless surface.

If you look around the restaurant, you’ll notice that people are leaving unfinished bowls of bean water all over — on ledges, on chairs, on other people’s dirty tables, on clean ones … Eventually the management will notice too.

Bean water aside (very very literally), nothing else was especially great either. Although: everything was good and cheap. You’d be hard-pressed to find any 10s on San Bruno’s menu. There are even some things under five, like instant noodles and porridges.

But it’s so weird to be writing about Chinese food in Joshua Tree. I’m going to stop doing so, abruptly, kiss my hard-working sweetie, and walk until I find an Internet café.

2546 SAN BRUNO CAFE

Daily: 7:30 a.m.–9 p.m.

2546 San Bruno, SF

(415) 468-8008

No alcohol

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Sunrise

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I take back everything I said about Kaiser. Not because the receptionist at the Oakland lab asked if my semen sample was my husband’s, and not because not one sperm was seen in said sample (although both these little details did make me smile) … but because the day after my incendiary diatribe hit the streets, causing widespread rioting or at least a knowing chuckle on the 21 Hayes bus, I got a phone call from an endocrinologist in Martinez.

A Kaiser endocrinologist, mind you.

Who was not a buffoon, mind you.

Rather, he spent more than an hour on the phone with me, which is longer talk-time than I had with my previous endocrinologist in four years, total. Whereas my previous n-doc said, and I quote, "Hormone therapy is not rocket science" (which is true, I admit, but still a pretty dumb thing to say while you are getting someone’s hormones all screwed up).

The new guy, who had researched my entire Kaiser career before he called, got it all back together, my hormones, my head … He knew every single thing about my medical past. He asked me questions no one else had ever asked, about my work, my mom, my kids, my opinions. He even asked me what my questions were, and when I said what they were, he answered them intelligently, patiently, and in detail, in many cases contradicting what other doctors had told me. An hour plus … on the phone!

While I was at work!

I’d never had a medical experience like this, where somebody both seems to care and has the time to do a thorough job of it. After we talked I got a long e-mail from him, putting it all in writing.

While we were talking, he completely rewrote my hormone regimen, likely adding 13 1/2 years to my life (just a guess). He made sure the new, safer prescription would be ready at the pharmacy of my choice by the next day. (It was!) He figured out the probable cause of my eight-week headache, effectively ending it on the spot. And, as if all that weren’t enough, he went ahead and gave me a hysterectomy.

"Excuse me?" I said.

He said he was putting it in the computer that I’d had a hysterectomy — that way I’d stop getting bugged by computerized notices and nurses about my next Pap smear.

To perform such a delicate operation over the phone seemed above and beyond the call of medicine; it bordered on miraculous. Dazzled by my new favorite doctor’s medical prowess, I neglected to mention that I actually love it when nurses try to schedule me for a Pap smear, or ask about my period, or if I’m pregnant — stuff like that. But I’m glad I didn’t say anything, because in retrospect I would gladly trade those fleeting moments of real-girl-glory for the even gloriouser distinction of having had an over-the-phone hysterectomy.

Who wouldn’t want one of those? I mean, Pap smears and periods come and go, but a hysterectomy is forever, even if you have it in a doctor’s office or operating room.

But speaking of carne asada, there’s the Sunrise Restaurant on 24th Street between Shotwell and Folsom. Judging from its name, and the extensive Latino and Americano breakfast choices on the menu, it’s more of a morning place. I went there at sunset, and wished I’d had breakfast for dinner.

The carne asada plate ($9.95) comes with black beans, rice, and salsa. OK: the steak was tough, and there’s nothing you can do about that but shake your head, maybe make a mental note to get something else next time. But: the beans and the rice really really wanted flavor. They didn’t taste like much of anything.

There are things you can do about that, one of which is called salsa. But the little tiny tin of what-they-call-salsa was surprisingly shockingly inedibly yucky.

Meaning: there won’t be a next time. When even the salsa sucks, you are sitting in an irredeemable restaurant. Or, in other words, ugh.

If it wasn’t for good old table top Tapatío, I would have gone away entirely undernourished. As it was, I went away caloried, but not much else. No nice taste in my mouth. No plan of ever returning. No good stories to tell.

SUNRISE RESTAURANT

Mon., Wed.–Thu.: 7 a.m.–8 p.m.;

Fri.–Sun.: 7 a.m.–9 p.m.

3126 24th St., SF

(415) 206-1219

Beer and wine

MC,V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books).

Pho la love

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Don’t worry, I sat down at the conference table in my office in Oakland with Earl Butter, a big bottle of gin, a small bottle of grapefruit soda, a bowl of ice, and two small glasses, and we talked until almost midnight. It’s taken care of. We’re all going to be okay. Even you.

He’d brought a couple bones over from Looney’s Barbecue, around the corner, but I’d already bloated myself on takeout pho from Kang Nam, around the other corner. While we were talking, a mosquito came in through one of the many open windows in my hot hot upstairs apartment, and established itself in the bedroom. Weirdo the Cat blinked.

Earl Butter is a peach. Technically, this isn’t true, but in some respects it’s the perfect way to describe him. He’s soft and furry and sweet, and there’s a little stem sticking out of the top of his head.

He grows on trees, for another example.

One of my favorite things about pho (pronounced pha) is that it’s pronounced pha (but spelled pho). Those crazy Vietnameses! The good thing about getting pho to go (pronounced pha to ga) is that — if all goes well — you will find they have packaged the "rare beef" separately. So it’s raw beef, sliced really very thin, and it cooks in the broth when you put the two together. That’s the idea. But you can always let the broth sit in your bowl, and go to the bathroom, and make a couple phone calls, and check your e-mail, and lecture your cat, and clear off your desk, maybe put a load of laundry in, and then add the beef to the broth. That way it won’t cook so much as warm up a little, and that’s how I like it. Jalapeños, bean sprouts, fresh basil and cilantro …

We go back a long way, me and all those things, but especially Earl Butter. It’s one of those friendships that, in spite of everything — remote control ownership disputes, abandonment issues, actual abandonment, bad advice given (and taken), pork-related deception, petty jealousy, petty thievery of hats, grand theft of an automobile, grand jealousy, strange smells in the bathroom, botched interventions, band blowups, automotive breakdowns, nervous ones, and, you know, everything, tube socks … you get the sense that nothing can stop you, no one can beat you. You go back a long way and you’re going to go forward an even longer way.

Being which as it may, the fucker brings me two cold bones, one spoon’s worth of black-eyed peas, onion rings (and I don’t like onion rings), and a half of a crab-cake with mayonnaise in it. True, I had already eaten, but did he know this?

No. He did not. Wait, maybe he did. I’m trying to remember our phone conversation while I was waiting for my broth to cool off.

Anyway, this isn’t about Earl Butter, or me, or barbecue, or pho, or even my love, Romeo (pronounced Romea), who will be here in five, four, three days. Watch out, everybody. You are about to be absolutely grossed out. If scenes of romantical bliss make you barf, close your eyes, OK? I’ll tell you when to open them.

Really the person I really meant for this one to be about was the mosquito. But you know what? I’m in love, and feeling intoxicated and insane. I’ll let you imagine the cartoonish battle of wits that went down in the bedroom. All. Night. That. Night. And the bloody mess I left on the bathroom door the next morning, when, Popeye-armed and pissed off, I finally found him, or her.

Call me crazy, but I’m going to leave you with a few words about Kang Nam: it’s a both is and isn’t kind of place. Nice track lighting and big, ugly overhead fluorescents. Nice art on the wall and taped-on paper flyers for specials. Of the two waitresspersonpeople I encountered, one was calm, the other running around like a waitressperson with her head still on.

I didn’t see what the hurry was.

I did like my soup. A lot.

KANG NAM PHO HOUSE

Daily: 10 a.m.-10 p.m.

4419 Telegraph, Oakl

(510) 984-0900

Beer & wine

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

In the pipeline

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Bedazzled, bewildered, and bejuiced, I dream that I start an already started car, and instead of the grind of everyday catastrophe I get another level of startedness. An overdrive. An engine firing on more cylinders than it even has. This bodes well. For the first time in over three weeks, I wake up without a headache.

Still, I keep my appointment with my doctor. How could I not? I’ve been waiting to see her for 23 painful days. God bless Kaiser Permanente, it’s the best I can do!

And I love my doctor. Ever since she recommended duct tape for my warts (which worked), she has held a special spot in my heart. Speaking of which, there’s something else I want to talk to her about: my heart. Not in the ticker sense, but the other one. I’m in love, madly, and it is weirdly reciprocal and, even weirdlier … well, my girlfriend is a girl, this time.

Sorry for the deception. It was necessary, on account of complications.

True, her name is Romeo, and she’s boyishly beautiful and sooo oh oh oh, but the fact is the plumbing is female, and when we are together, which is becoming increasingly possible, sex is complex and constant, and the question of pregnancy does come into play.

Now:

Until now, I have only had sex with men since becoming a woman, so it didn’t matter. When I first started on hormones, my endocrinologist told me I would be irreversibly sterile within six months. It’s been four years. On the other hand, I come from a family of 11 with a history of post-vasectomy procreation, virgin births, etc.

So in addition to heads and hearts, we chatted — my primary care doctor and me — about genitals and such, and in the end she ordered me some labwork: the usual blood stuff, plus a semen analysis.

This is going to be fun, I thought.

Then, for good measure, she threw in an MRI. My eyes got wide.

"Well, every time you mention your headache you point to the same exact spot," she explained.

"An MRI would not only rule out a tumor, but also a leaking blood vessel, which could lead to an aneurism."

For the next three days I was in what would best be described as "a state." The headache was back, full force, and I needed constant acupuncture and/or massage therapy just to stop crying, let alone breathe. You know how it is … when you meet the love of your life, then die.

So as soon as the results of the MRI came back clean and I got over my initial euphoria, I started thinking about semen. I’d watched my doctor put the order into her computer, but when I went to the Kaiser lab with my little empty cup and a plan, the order wasn’t in the system. And the mean-ass bitch of a receptionist, whose name I would publish here if I could remember it, wouldn’t even call my doctor and ask. She wrote down a number for me to call.

Which turned out to be the advice nurse. Who eventually was able to leave a message with my doctor. So for the next couple hours I had to keep getting in line to see the meanie again, until finally the order was in, but it wasn’t for semen. It was something else.

So I had to call another advice nurse, and explain the situation again, and in case you didn’t know, it’s hard to be a woman with a semen sample, or trying to get one. Every person I talked to started out addressing me as ma’am, and ended up calling me sir. And the receptionist seemed to be enjoying making me talk to as many people as possible. I hate Kaiser. I hate my country.

I love my Romeo. After I gave up and was driving down to Berkeley, to work, she/he called again, from Germany. The other thing about being a woman with a semen sample is that it ain’t easy to come by. Pun intended. Testosterone, in my experience, does it any time, any place. Estrogen … unh-unh. Plan was to find a cozy bathroom stall, or broom closet, and have phone sex with Romeo, who had been looking forward to this all day. And calling me every 15 minutes.

"Not now," KP’d made me say again and again, to my love, to my life, who I crave like air. "I have a headache."

Later that day, while the kids were napping, Kaiser finally got it all sorted out. I got a call from the urology department, wanting to schedule me for a vasectomy.

I said, "um" …

Corn on the curb

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I pick up my brother at the airport. It might not always be the Oakland airport, but I will always pick up my brother at the airport. Besides love, there’s corn in it for me. Ohio corn. I didn’t know about this angle when I tried to lift his suitcase, while he was busy with a big ragged box with duct tape all over it, situating this in the back of my little car — just so, because that’s the way he is.

Me, I’ve been struggling with the Meaning of Life a little lately, and you never know where you will find a sense of purpose. Why not at the curb outside of baggage claim? I didn’t know, I just thought I would make myself useful.

I got the suitcase about an eighth of an inch off of the ground, then decided to just wait quietly for my hug, and let it back down.

"I’ll get that," he said. After he got it, after the hug, we were driving away and he said, "Do you know what’s in that suitcase?"

"Something really very heavy," I said.

And that was when he said, "Corn."

"Ah," I said, as if corn, all things considered, made perfect sense.

"Ohio corn," he said. "Picked this morning. Four dozen ears of Ohio corn."

"OK then," I said.

He had me go through his old neighborhood, which is West Oakland, because he wanted to leave some on his ex’s steps, and his buddy Ron’s steps, and for all I knew some other people’s steps.

But it was 10:30 at night and I wondered about raccoons and other terrorists. I wondered this out loud.

"You’re right," he said. "I’ll deliver it in the morning." And we got back on the freeway.

We went to my house and started eating the corn in my kitchen, standing up. We didn’t bother to boil it or anything, and it was pretty good, but I still didn’t know about bringing four dozen ears of fresh corn on an airplane to California. It seemed a little illegal, if not — I don’t know — pointless.

"The fact is," I said to my brother, halfway through my first ear, "we do have corn here." To illustrate my point, I opened the refrigerator and showed him an ear. I’d just bought it at the grocery store. It seemed pretty fresh too. This is California.

"Ohio corn," he said. There was a piece of it on his chin, and his eyes looked glazed, maybe because of the time difference.

I’m supposed to be a food writer, and I wasn’t sure I could tell the difference. It was good, yes. I ate another piece, steamed, at my cousin Choo-Choo’s house the next day. It was great.

But sometimes I get a great ear of corn at the farmers market, too. I guess the meaning of life is that corn means different things to different people, and while a lot of people have little brothers, few if any of them arrive at the Oakland airport with a suitcase full of corn. So there’s that.

Grateful, charmed, and educated, I offered him my life. My cabin, the kids, this column. He said he’d take my records, and my car. "It’s all or nothing," I said. And for the next couple days I went around buying ears of corn at all the local markets.

I’d pay 99 cents (in some cases) for one ear of locally grown organic corn, and eat it raw, or in some cases cooked, and of course in other cases barbecued. And you know what? It never tasted as good as my brother’s suitcase-smuggled Ohio corn.

Which is gone. My brother’s still here, for a couple more weeks. I called him and said, "OK, you can have my records."

He deserves them, but mostly I just love to think of one of my sisters picking him up at the airport in Ohio, trying to lift his suitcase, or his big taped-up box, and not getting it more than an eighth of an inch off the ground.

"Do you know what’s in there?" he’ll say. And she’ll never guess. I wrote this while eating a Vietnamese sandwich at:

TAY TAH CAFE

Mon.–Fri.: 8 a.m.–6:30 p.m.;

Sat. 9 a.m.–6:30 p.m.; Sun. 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

1182 Solano, Albany

(510) 527-8104

No alcohol

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Man in the mirror

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I love the fog. I love a street lamp. I love my log pile. I had just driven down from the shack so I needed to pee, plus lunch.

"Lamb burrito with chile lime sauce," I said, because I had to know.

"You like spicy?" he said.

"Yes."

"Then you should get the tropical lamb."

"Tropical lamb burrito," I said. "Do you have a bathroom?"

He motioned over his shoulder, through the kitchen, and I went there. But it was unclear. There was a guy sitting in a chair, an unmarked door behind him. I wondered if he was waiting.

"Bathroom?" he said.

When I nodded, he motioned over his shoulder, and as I walked past he said, and I quote, "Flush the toilet."

I closed the bathroom door behind me and took a deep breath, which I don’t normally like to do in unfamiliar bathrooms. But this particular breath seemed called for. I thought I might be maybe going to have a nervous breakdown.

Instead, I peed. I felt good about this decision.

There was no lock on the door. No toilet paper. No paper towels. I washed my hands, wiped them on my skirt, and carefully considered what to do next. Besides go sit down and eat my burrito, I mean. The thing is, I was pretty sure this guy outside the bathroom worked for me. He’d started out as a character in one of my old stories, sitting on a bucket at a gas station in Nevada, I believe, with a rotten spot in his forehead and maybe a worm in it. Uncle Somebody.

I’d made up the worm, of course, but I’m not making this other stuff up. Maybe he wanted a promotion. Tired of being a wormy character in an obscure old literary magazine, he waited for me in restaurants. Or maybe just this one. Who knows how long he’d been sitting there, saying to people, "Flush the toilet."

This rarely happens in movies, let alone restaurant reviews — that a fictional character (within the fiction of the movie, of course) charms, heel-clicks, or brute forces their way into "real life," or, for our purposes, Cheap Eats.

I tried to remember if I’d based my character on someone real, maybe someone I’d seen on the street in, oh, Albany, California, say. San Pablo Ave. I tried to remember what he’d said, in the story. It seemed important — the kind of detail that could make or break me. To give you an idea of my frame of mind, at the time.

I looked in the mirror and did not look good.

And now I was going to have to walk past him again. The way I saw it, not saying anything wasn’t an option. The question was what to say. I decided I would inform him they were out of toilet paper and paper towels. That way I would find out if he worked for the restaurant, and, if so, know that I was off the hook.

But when I went out there, finally, and walked past him and stopped and looked at him, sitting there with his legs spread and his elbows on his knees, leaning forward, I froze. He looked at me looking at him, and I said, in a flash of inspiration, "I flushed the toilet."

Sometimes you have to meet these people on their terms. It’s the last thing they expect, to be embraced by a parrot or a mirror. In fact it’s hard for even me to imagine, when I put it like that.

"What?" he said.

"I flushed the toilet," I said, and I turned and left him there, staring at the floor between his feet, either lost in thought, or defeated.

Either way, I enjoyed my weirdo burrito to the best of my ability, and its. Lamb in a spicy honey curry sauce, with black beans and rice in a tortilla. Chips on the side.

You don’t believe me, do you.

THE HOT SHOP

Mon.–Sat.: 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

909 San Pablo Ave, Albany

(510) 528-9011

No alcohol

Cash only

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Hard-headed

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS The wheel came off the shopping cart and the whole thing went over. Cans clanged and rolled. Plastic milk jugs bounced, and the toddler in the kid seat crashed down with them, helpless, tangling with cereal boxes and plastic bags of produce.

Her mom, who was also holding a baby, had the look of a mom who was watching her two-year-old fall on her head. In between the bonk and the scream, there was that split second where question mark and exclamation mark meet. And stare at each other. While tumbleweeds roll silently by like a lone little wheel down Aisle 7. The sun moves a little. There’s so much space in that flat, hard moment that you could land an airplane on it.

Then: the long, loud, first breathless wail, like being born all over again. In automatic sympathy, everyone else holds their breath too, thinking: Breathe, kid! Breathe! But I know how hard kids’ heads are, compared to their mothers’ hearts. I’m more worried about the mom. In the time it took her to drop to the grocery store floor, still cradling her baby in one arm, and gathering up her now bawling toddler in the other, a crowd had formed.

Two store managers, displaying athleticism rarely seen outside track meets, were first on the scene. Before all the cans had even stopped rolling, they were offering the hurt and/or scared shitless child Popsicles and juice boxes. But the kid was inconsolable. "I’m not feeling well," she said, between wails.

For the next 15 minutes, nothing changed. The kid cried. The baby, heroically, stayed calm. While the mother, squeezing and rocking and there-there-ing, checked her older child’s head for bumps, or worse.

While the two store managers divided their labor, one serenading the mom with an endless stream of apology, the other scrambling for still brighter colors of Popsicles. While a couple of the bystanders, in a desperate attempt to be byuseful, bytapped the scattered groceries into a pile with their feet. While the woman in the business suit said, "You need to take her to see a doctor, right now."

To her credit, at least she said this just once. Whereas the woman who wasn’t in a business suit, speaking on behalf of all the rest of Berkeley, Calif., where this happened, would not stop repeating one word, "Arnica."

So, then, the song goes like this:

"Oh sweetie, I’m so sorry. There, there, sweetie. Show mommy where it hurts."

Crying crying. "I’m not feeling well." Crying.

"How about purple?" Crying.

"Arnica."

"Ma’am, do you want me to hold the little one for you? We’re so sorry. Does she need ice, ma’am?"

"How about green? Do you like green?"

"Arnica." Crying.

"Sweetie, sweetie, it’s OK sweetie." Crying. "Mommy’s here, sweetie. It’s all right."

"Arnica."

"Ma’am." Crying. "If there’s anything at all." Crying. "We can do, Ma’am."

"Arnica."

And on and on and onica, until finally the mother, briefly wondering why she lives where she lives, pried her attention away from her crying child to look this woman in the eye and say, "Will you please go away?"

Which is where I, in the spirit of Lou Reed singing, "I’m just the waterboy<0x2009>/the real game’s not over here," admit that I wasn’t there. I’d hear all about it … how they escaped to the parking lot, to their car, only to find the store managers, through the miracle of pole vaults and sheer speed, had collected, bagged, and long-jumped their groceries to the parking lot, to their car, ahead of them. And free! I’d help put those groceries away. But I wasn’t there. I was in San Francisco, in a swirl of pain and fear all my own, eating duck soup by myself at my new favorite restaurant.

THE OLD SIAM

Daily: 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

201 Ellis, SF

(415) 885-5144

No alcohol

MC,V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Worth it

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS He signs his e-mails Romeo. I sign mine Juliet. It’s cute, but you try not to think about how that one ends.

You know … well, you probably don’t know, so I’ll tell ya: if you’re a trans woman dating men, you can spend years and years and years trying to find one who doesn’t either cream his pants or throw up as soon as you take your clothes off. And then, by some miracle of shifting continents and a spectacularly rare alignment of stars, planets, and good hair days, you do! You find, in fact, the one. Now, like everybody else in love, you have to kinda wait. And see. What happens.

There are questions. There is distance. There are Capulets and Montagues, jobs, exes, currents. There are riptides and undertows, sharks, lions and tigers and bears … and there are days when you feel like you are on Cloud 10. I like those days. They’re way better than the other ones, where you feel like you are hacking your way through a jungle of impossibility with a plastic butter knife and without mosquito repellent.

Yo, Shakey, is this what love is supposed to feel like? A million mosquito bites? Probably not, but I’ll take it. I’ll take it because it’s perfect. It’s perfect! It really is — give or take 5,822 miles and a logistical conundrum that would make Alfred North Whitehead reach for his binkie — perfect.

My head hurts. Again. (And again and again.) The last time I remember feeling really physically good, let’s see, I was sitting in my new favorite restaurant with my soccery girlfriends, eating grilled meatball and green apple spring rolls dipped in this insanely delicious orange pork sauce.

And if you think that sounds slightly odd, the next item on the menu is a grilled shrimp Popsicle on sugar cane.

No, it’s not some kind of funky fusion foofoo place, it’s Pot de Pho, Geary and Parker streets, and I love it. Yeah, it’s a little pricier than most Vietnamese restaurants, but worth it because it’s worth it, and fun. They don’t overly worry about authenticity. I like that. It’s like, let’s do Vietnamese food with all the best ingredients possible, well-researched recipes, and a sense of fun.

Our waiterguyperson, like the menu, was full of enthusiasm. He told us he was starting a new happy hour thing, making cocktails and punch and stuff using just wine and sake by way of alcohol.

The pho was good, I didn’t order it, of course, because I’d eaten noodle soup for lunch and dinner the day before, and still had a big pot of it at home in my fridge. But I did taste.

It’s $10 for a large bowl, $8.75 for a medium, and $5 child size. And, although they do offer a chicken pho, a vegan pho, and even (for a couple bucks more) an ahi tuna pho, they don’t offer tendon and tripe as options for their beef pho.

That’s the kind of thing I might have made fun of them for a few years ago — even though I would have been snickering over a bowl with just rare steak, every time.

Oy.

Bean sprouts are in the soup, not on the side. Wide rice noodles instead of vermicelli. They have a Vietnamese sandwich, but in a green onion crepe instead of a crusty French roll … The authenticity snobs will complain. But you know what? The older I get, the more I couldn’t care less about words like authentic and traditional, and grammar in general.

If it wasn’t for inauthenticity and maltradition somewhere down the line, we’d all be having bananas and bugs for lunch. Thank you, I’ll try the green apple spring rolls and green onion crepes.

Speaking of crepes, I’m pretty sure the French gave pho to the Vietnamese, not to mention French bread.

That’s why Pot de Pho is my new favorite restaurant, for giving us grilled shrimp Popsicles. And because the teacups are a pretty shade of green, and the chairs there are cushy and comfortable. I need that right now. Pretty shades of green and a soft, comfy chair.

POT DE PHO

Tues.-Thurs., Sun.: 11 a.m.-10 p.m.

Fri.-Sat.: 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; closed Mon.

3300 Geary, SF

(415) 668-0826

Wine, beer

MC,V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

A story goes with it

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS There’s something reassuring about this, that, blink, 15 years later there’s still a line outside Kate’s Kitchen on Sunday morning. And they still haven’t figured out how to make home fries taste like anything. And their homemade sausage patties are still only slightly more flavorful than hockey pucks — but not nearly as succulent. And I will still wait in line for half an hour to eat there.

The good news is I won’t have to do so again until 2024, at my current rate of amnesia.

There’s more good news. I’d scored a goal in a soccer game that same Sunday morning, so while the Maze and me were waiting, he in his bicycle sweat and me in my soccer stink, I got to describe this great goal in great detail, the ins and outs, overs and unders, the intricacies, the outricacies … there was all the time in the world.

Having seen me play soccer before, the lucky fuck, my Maze’s amazement was palpable. His forehead wrinkling into a labyrinth of wonder, he asked, "You didn’t get lonely?"

Now, to appreciate the excellence of this question, one would have to be an avid Cheap Eats reader, which I’m not. So he had to explain it to me, but I don’t have the time to explain it to you because, contrary to all appearances to the contrary, this is not a review of Kate’s Kitchen, and we haven’t even sat down yet. Suffice to say, it was a good question, and the answer was, no, I didn’t get lonely.

"Were you nervous you would miss?"

"I wasn’t nervous," I said. "I was sure I would miss." Have I explained this already, to you nonathletes? There’s the zone, see, and then there’s the no-zone, and the cool thing is that in either of them anything at all is possible.

"Your table’s ready" … for example.

It was so loud inside Kate’s that a little kid was holding his ears. It was so loud that, once seated, I kind of wished we were still standing outside on the sidewalk. And that was before our food was served.

Another thing about this day was that it was the San Francisco Marathon. So the Maze and me were not the only sweaty smelly people in town. We’d watched some of them staggering along Haight Street, way after the fact, looking like death and saying, "Thank you. Thank you." Because everyone was congratuutf8g them. Marathoners inspire me, too. Big time. I wanted to pat them on the back, but was afraid they might fall over.

The Maze tried to explain bike racing to me. The last stage of the Tour de France was that day, too, and he’d been watching and following it. These ‘uns ride 100-plus miles a day for weeks and there are mountains and sprints and teams and packs and stages, and all I kept thinking about, the whole time he was talking, was their butts.

But that night we watched a little bit of it on his computer, and I thought I understood. Bike racing, like any other sport, has stories in it. And that’s what makes it, and life, interesting. I think it was a Damon Runyon character who used to say this, about horses: "There’s a story goes with it."

I say that sometimes about a restaurant. Maybe it’s what used to be there before this place. Maybe it’s something important that happened to you, like divorce. Or a particularly transcendent chili.

Looney’s in Berkeley just opened a second Looney’s in Oakland, on MLK Blvd., making it the closest barbecue to my house. I go by it many times a week. I’ve eaten their pulled pork sandwich, and french fries, and I’ve studied their menu, which is extensive for a barbecue joint — and expensive, for a barbecue joint. I’ve sampled a few of their many sauces, but I still don’t know their story. Sign says they were voted Alameda County’s best barbecue. Really??? I might eat there four more times this week, in the company of 12 more question marks. They have a lunch buffet, beef stroganoff, and clam chowder in sourdough bread bowls.

Something tells me they ain’t going to make it until 2024. Help me understand.

LOONEY’S SOUTHERN BBQ

Daily: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

5319 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Oakl.

(510) 652-1238

Full bar

AE/MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

By degrees

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS It’s summer, smack dab, so I don’t mind taking you to Bodega Bay with me. And Henry. He’s my seven-year-old, Top Bunk, literally and figuratively. I have two four-year-olds, two twos, and a one. Henry, he’s my uncharted territory. My antennae, my tugboat, my scout.

If I say "I love you," he says, "I like you." Sometimes he doesn’t say anything at all. But he runs to me fastest and hugs the hardest. Little sweetie! Once he asked me out to the movies.

"You mean like a date?" I said, because at the time I was available.

"What’s that mean?" he said.

"A ‘date’?" I said. "That means you have to pay."

I know, I know … that’s probably inappropriate, I know, but the fact is I was also, at the time, strapped for cash.

Now I am practically rich. For me, I mean. The whole time we spent together at Camp Chicken Farmer, I swear, I paid for everything. It’s fun watching kids start to learn about money. Like at the grocery store yesterday when he saw a cheap toy gun he wanted … mere weeks ago he would have asked me to buy it for him. Now, knowing better, he begged.

And when that didn’t work, he promised to reimburse me tomorrow, after we get back home.

To raise capital for the not-so-cheap Nerf gun of his dreams, Henry manages a plum jam stand with his friend Clara and sister Emily on the sidewalk outside the house. For fun, I haggle with them over the price, then lower a belt-tied basket from an upstairs window. They put in a jar of jam. I have the exact amount, but I send down a ten to make it more interesting. They make my change and it is thrillingly perfect.

It might be inadvisable to have a financial advisor who is seven, but Henry is full of ideas for me too. I should collect my stories into books, and my songs onto CDs, and sell them on the sidewalk outside the house. He thinks I could make $1 million this way, and I don’t have the heart to tell him I’ve been there and done that, and made about enough for a Nerf gun.

I’m proud of this, that when his parents picked me to be their childern’s live-in-ish babysitter, they picked me over someone more qualified and less queer with graduate degrees (possibly even a PhD) in babysitting, or child development or some such.

In spite of my euphoria, I thought they’d made a huge mistake until I realized just how into stories these two are. They are insatiable, demanding, and discerning, and their babysitter’s graduate degree is in fiction writing, lucky them. (They say babysitter. For rhyming reasons, and because they ain’t babies, I prefer nanny.)

Anyway, I’ve just spent 40 straight hours alone with Henry, and he has squeezed all the story out of me. It’s not just a bedtime thing anymore. Here at Camp Chicken Farmer he wants bathtime stories too, and I have to admit that they will go real good with the bowl of popcorn he’s eating in the tub, on my porch.

And of course you have to have stories with your hot dogs on a stick and can-cooked beans around my hobo fire pit.

Speaking of 55-gallon oil drums, we lugged one to the beach yesterday and started making Henry’s steel pan out of it. We took turns hammering, and for lunch we went to Spud Point Crab Company, my crab shack of choice.

Their clam chowder has been voted Bodega Bay’s best four years in a row, and they only just opened in 2004, so maybe this year the votes aren’t in yet. Anyway, that’s the kind of hyperbole I can sink my teeth into. Not New York’s Best. Not the world’s. Bodega Bay’s. And by consensus, including mine!

My apprentice was less exuberant. "Pretty good," he said, after I asked three times. "Not the best?" No. "What’s the best clam chowder you ever had?" I asked.

"My mommy’s," he answered, but couldn’t quite put his finger on why, when I pressed him, except that she "makes the temperature just right."

It was hot. The soup, the sun.

After, we crossed the street, sat on a bench overlooking the Spud Point marina and decided, after much discussion and weighing of pros and cons and such, that it would be pretty cool to be a boat.

SPUD POINT CRAB COMPANY

Thu.–Tue.: 8:30 a.m.–5 p.m.

1910 Westshore Road, Bodega Bay

(707) 875-9472

No alcohol

Cash only

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

The loneliest number

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

It does strike me as odd that New York’s best deli is in San Rafael. But I am willing to believe anything, at least for a minute and a half. To date, this capacity has served me pretty well.

I don’t know about New York by the Bay. Their logo is a white on black drawing of the Statue of Liberty holding a tray of bagels in her other arm, in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. A sign on the window says "New York’s Best Deli." That’s where I got the idea.

But when I asked for matzo ball soup, which was also advertised on the window, the guy behind the counter looked confused and pointed at something on the specials board with mozzarella in it.

"Um," I said.

They have a cooler advertising New York Egg Creams, but it’s hard to tell from looking inside it what New York Egg Creams are. Unless they are Snapple, or Coke, or Pepsi. Or Dr. Brown’s cream soda. Which they are not and not and not. And not.

I did wind up with a bowl of matzo ball soup, and without having to go in the kitchen and cook it, which was nice. One big matzo ball in the middle of it. You know the old song, "One Meatball"? I’m sure I’ve sung it before in this column. Anyway, the reason I love that song so much is because I am 100 percent certain it will not be the song that is playing on the radio, or in my mind, at my moment of death. So I figure, as long as I am hearing, or humming "One Meatball," then I am very much alive. And not going anywhere.

If you want in on this, just look it up and learn it off of YouTube. I’m sure it’s there. And it’s a pretty simple one to learn.

The little man walked up and down /He found an eating place in town /He read the menu through and through /to see what 15 cents could do … One meatball /one meatball /he could afford but one meatball.

That should be enough to guarantee any non-tone-deaf person immortality, but for the curious, and because it fits the Cheap Eats theme, and because one can easily substitute matzo balls for meatballs, and while we’re at it, waitresspersons for waiters:

He told the waitressperson near at hand /the simple dinner he had planned /The guests were startled one and all to hear that waitressperson loudly call … One matzo ball /one matzo ball /This here gent wants one matzo ball.

The little man felt ill at ease /He said, "a bagel, if you please" /The waitressperson hollered, down the hall: You gets no bagel with one matzo ball. Repeat chorus, and so on.

Did I mention I was in love?

Well, yeah, and I am learning to distinguish between anxiety attacks and heart attacks, but still when I get this way I prefer to eat in hospital cafeterias, just in case.

So I was getting this way. I was in my car, driving from Occidental to Berkeley, and even though I knew for sure I wasn’t having a heart attack, I didn’t know about strokes. I’ve had a headache now for three or four weeks, and I’d started to feel weak and shaky. I held my hand out and it was making like an old lady. So it was lunchtime, so I decided to look for a hospital cafeteria to have lunch at.

I got off the freeway.

And that was when I saw the matzo ball sign at New York’s best deli, next to a gas station across the road from Kaiser in San Rafael. Immediately I felt better.

Even though the soup was pretty lame. And it only came with one matzo ball. And it didn’t come with any bread, or bagels. And, well, anyway it just generally wasn’t to die for.

The little restaurant reviewer felt very bad /One matzo ball was all she had /and in her dreams she hears that call: You gets neither bread nor bagel, nor butter, with one … matzo … ball.

NEW YORK BY THE BAY

Mon.–Fri.: 7 a.m.–5:30 p.m.;

Sat.–Sun.: 8 a.m.–3 p.m.

1005 Northgate Dr., San Rafael

(415) 472-6674

No alcohol

MC,V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Leftovers

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS To a lover, love is bigger than anything, including reality, including practicality, reason, distance, sense, and in many cases, cornbread. So when a lover speaks to a lover of "the reality of," you know, "the situation" … you might understand or even agree, but afterward you will need to put a sweater on.

Reality checks, like hip checks, send you. What can you do but regain your skates and glide along?

What I meant to say about Brick Pig’s barbecue is: yum. Well, like a lotta barbecue, it’s inconsistent. Both times the brisket was great. But the pork ribs wavered from bone to bone. One would be tough and dry, another just fine, and anothernother fantastic.

Same with the beans: first time, great. Second time overly mustarded and therefore not so great.

What was consistent was the sauce. Get hot, you’ll be fine, and it’s excellent. And the brisket. And the place, which is small and perfectly atmospheric, with faux brick wallpaper and a couple of small tables for eater-inners.

How I found it was, well, I already knew about it for a while, because I would always see it after I’d just stopped at Flint’s for barbecue on my way to band practice. And I would always make a mental note, driving by, to check out Brick Pig next time. But I’m not known for my mentality, where barbecue is concerned. It’s more like an animal thing, so, so long as Flint’s entered my field of vision first …

Well, I don’t live in the North Bay anymore. I live in Oakland, meaning I have to drive up Shattuck to get to Flint’s, meaning I now see Brick Pig first. Still, when my new neighbor Lennie asked me where to get barbecue, I said, out of habit, "Flint’s." And then I went to work, which in this case was cooking dinner for the kids downstairs.

Lennie peaked her head in a little later and said, "We’re going to Brick Pig’s. Want us to bring you anything?"

I wasn’t hurt they weren’t taking my advice. I was hurt because I was on duty and would not be able to join them. "No thanks," I said, stirring whatever was cooking. "But if you have any leftovers … "

You don’t have to know me long to know me. She finished my thought, or rather, perfected it. "We’ll save you some," she said.

And she called while the kids were in the bathtub. They’d saved me some. I would only have to run across the street and back, but if anybody drowned or anything on my watch, I knew I would never be able to enjoy barbecue ever again. I decided to play it safe. I said I’d come by once the kids were sleeping.

So story time was hard. I kept losing the thread, and mixing metaphors. My point-of-view character accidentally died, very near the beginning, and then, because I’d stopped talking, perplexed, the kids took over. Once they start telling the stories, forget it. You may as well put on a pot of coffee and light them each a cigarette. They’re that talented.

Meaning my first taste of Brick Pig barbecue was cold and crusty by the time I got to it, but still: I licked the plastic clean. For my second taste, I took the childerns with me, and Lennie took hers, and that equals four childerns. Ma and Pa Brick House were happy to see everyone, at first, and broke out games and puzzles for the little ‘uns while they put our to-go order together.

Kids aren’t known for tranquility. They’re cute, as a rule, but peace is not their strong suit.

By the time we left, of course, Ma Brick House was singing a different tune. The lyrics were, "You know, you can call your order in, next time."

That was the time of the over-mustarded beans and pork-related inconsistency problems. As testament to the resilience and/or forgetfulness of adults, the next time I went, which was just a couple weeks later, first stop back from Berlin, Ma House remembered me and asked where my kids were. She said I shoulda brought them in with me.

I said, "I don’t have kids."

BRICK PIG’S HOUSE

Tue.–Sat.: noon–8 p.m.

5973 Shattuck, Oakl.

(510) 923-1789

No alcohol

MC,V,D,AE

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Buttered up

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com


CHEAP EATS First I want to say that, in spite of everything, there is no danger of me not coming back. That sentence is dedicated to Jennifer and all my other friends, moms, and childrens. Yes, I am having the zeit of my leben, but the restaurants here in Berlin charge extra to put butter on your bread. Ergo …

At the top of my list of Things To Do upon repatriation: invent a purse with a small, stick-o’-butter shaped cooler in the bottom of it.

Then: who knows?

Now I want to tell you about my love. It’s not going to be easy, because there’s a language barrier. Between me and him, between me and my heart, his and his … I am studying German. It’s like: I want there to be more ways to not be able to express myself. I want to be bilingually speechless. If possible, I would like to be incoherent in even more than two languages.

For example, he’s French. Of which I know merde.

The language of love is easy when you’re in it. You want to say everything in the world, but don’t have to say anything at all. Maybe just each other’s names, half-whispered, half-begged in the half-dark. And his does sound pretty dang pretty this way, you should hear me:

"Fabien," I say.

He says, "Chicken Farmer."

In candlelight he looks a little like David Bowie, only with even happier eyes and way better lyrics. A smile that would melt Gary, Indiana. We do this, the looking and laughing, sometimes even crying, and very very often other things. And occasionally there’s the outside world, and, you know: beer. Coffee. We walk on wind and raindrops, and kiss on streetcorners, intoxicated and oblivious. Many times have we been pert near creamed by rent-a-bikes.

And tonight when I see him, he has promised to massage my back with butter. At least I think that’s what he said.

Berlin has outdoor Ping-Pong tables like we have basketball courts, so we play a lot of Ping-Pong. He’s good. So far we have not kept score. I can count to 21 in four languages, none of which are French. But we don’t keep score, and that, not French, is the language of love.

The language we have most in common, of course, is this ‘un. Yo, the one I writeth. So that’s how we conduct our truly important business, like ordering lunch and deciding who gets to sit at which end of the bathtub. Then comes German. We can both say some things in Italian, too, like ti voglio bene and la bella luna. I should probably know more Spanish than uno dos tres, and so on, but all else I have retained from two years of college classes and 20 years of exposure is "Me llamo Miguel Gomez," which is a patent untruth, so I rarely if ever find occasion to use it.

Although … dada does go well with googoo and gaga. In case you were wondering.

Everyone said, "Don’t get your hopes up about the eats in Germany." I’m glad they said this because one of my favorite things in life is being taken completely by surprise. With my Frenchy, the surprise was not complete. I mean, we met months ago in person, if not exactly by name, and although I couldn’t have possibly imagined the depth or height or width or the dizzying scent of it, I guess I kinda knew I’d stepped in something wonderful.

But the news news here is the food, and the Ping-Pong. Who knew, and knew, respectively? And I don’t just mean currywurst. There’s great Turkish, some good Asian … I’ve had excellent brick-oven pizza, some wonderful pasta dishes, spätzle of course, and the one night I cooked in, guess what I cooked: pork liver!

You never even hear of pork liver in the states. I was just wondering about this, and then: boom, Berlin! Saw it on a menu, got all excited, ate somewhere else, checked the meat counter at the grocery …

So, I’m just saying. Trying to say. There’s the butter thing, or maybe truthfully it’s more than that. More like the butter "situation," or "crisis." Oh, and one other flavor missing, but it’s a biggie: barbecue. That might help me get onto three more airplanes, in spite of everything, oh merde merde merde, because I just discovered this one before I left, and do sorta somewhat miss it. My new favorite restaurant:

BRICK PIG’S HOUSE

Tue.–Sat., noon–8 p.m.

5973 Shattuck, Oakl.

(510) 923-1789

No alcohol

M/V/D/AE

March madness

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I can tell you where to get pork tacos if your car breaks down in Petaluma and you have to wait for Kragen to test your battery, which for some reason takes an hour. I speak from experience; it’s just not mine. My only experience with experiences like this are vicarious. Now. As you know, I drive a new car and have gotten in the bad habit of getting where I’m going.

Which is nice, in a way, but my chances of marrying a tow truck driver are greatly reduced. Not to mention a Good Samaritan with a wrench. Not to mention early lunch at an unexpected hole-in-the-wall next to Kragen’s. How am I supposed to discover such discoveries?

That’s where friends with unreliable cars come in. And where would I be without them? Not at Taqueria Los Potrillos No. 1 in Petaluma, contemputf8g soccer posters, soccer trophies, and pictures of a guy named Hector Murillo with his arm around various and sundry soccer stars and, for all I know, stars who are stars of other things that aren’t soccer, such as …

Well, I can’t think of any examples right now.

"Today I got up at 6, left at 7, and broke down in Petaluma," my friend the Jungle had written in his e-mail. He described his consolation tacos as "out of this world" and "amazing" — "the best al pastor taco I’ve ever had in my life, I swear."

And to think he was having it at a time of frustration and despair. And for breakfast!

I had mine later that same day, for dinner, and I would agree with my buddy’s alacritous taco take whole-stomachfully, except that in my life, "the best al pastor taco I’ve ever had" doesn’t amount to very many beans. I’m more of a carnitas chica.

Or was. Now I don’t know.

I love it when life or pork shakes you up like this. Don’t you? You think you’re straight, and then you’re gay, or vice versa, or you think you’re bi and then it turns out that in fact, you are bi, but your favorite kind of taco is al pastor, not carnitas.

Happy pride!

As you may know, I am hyperbolically fickle when it comes to food, incoherently queer when it comes to sex, insane in love, and queerly incoherent as a writer. What else is there? For me, pride is not possible. But I wish you all the very best. While you’re reading this I will be dancing with animals, I’m pretty sure, at the Berlin Zoo. Not being proud so much as slightly drunk, I predict, and very very happy.

I’ll be being the B and the T. You bring the lettuce.

I write to you from an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean, at twilight. Tomorrow morning I will wake up, if I sleep, 5,658 miles away from the nearest Guardian news box. In other words, now would be the perfect time to say something really really offensive. I wish I could think of a way to piss off almost everyone, but I’m in this sort of uncaffeinated slow and soupy Ativan cloud right now, and, realistically, the best I can hope to do from here would be to mildly annoy a handful of lesbians.

I’ll pass.

Well, let me just pose it as a question, and then finish talking about tacos. What’s the difference between a march and a parade? That’s the question. My thinking is a parade is for showing off, being proud, putting on a show … and a march is all that too, only less organized and more to the point: the point being to rally the troops, gather momentum, numbers, spontaneous support. No? Now go look at the Web page for the dyke march that happens here every Pride weekend on Saturday night, and wonder with me: they talk a lot of talk about inclusion, then ask roughly half the population of San Francisco to politely stand on the sidelines and clap.

Sounds like a parade to me. Sounds like, if you don’t need men out there in the street with you, congratulations, your work is done.

The tacos were awesome. The green salsa was delicious. The chips were fresh. Oh, and check out the bleeding Jesuses in the window of the grocery store/carniceria two doors down, all crucified and shit, sad eyes turned toward heaven, wondering: "Is there a bi march?"


TAQUERIA LOS POTRILLOS

Mon.–Fri., 9 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Sat.-Sun., 8 a.m.–10 p.m.

355 E. Washington, Petaluma

(707) 763-4220

Beer & wine

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

The odds

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Speaking of clocks running down, here it is, the second half of June, meaning by the time you read this I will be either in Germany, or dead. I’m pulling for the former.

My favorite ex-therapist, who shares my fear of flying, once told me every time he got on an airplane he had to first live his own death.

"Hmm. Tell me more about this," I said, crossing my legs and scribbling in my note pad, because that’s the kind of student of life I was, at that time: the kind who takes notes about every single thing, but learns nothing. "For instance," I prodded, because he was just sort of staring at me, speechless, "by ‘living your own death’ do you mean imagining it, accepting it, facing it face-to-face, kissing it on the lips? …" I looked at the box of Kleenex on the coffee table between us, and I looked at him. My goal in therapy has always been to reduce my shrink to tears. "Or do you mean wanting it, like anal sex," I said. "Take your time."

Now I am a different kind of student of life: the kind who stays out late drinking, sleeps through her first class, spends more time in the bathtub than at her desk, and couldn’t find the library with a map and eight weeks.

There’s a lot I don’t know. Give you an example: does my plane go down on the way there, or on the way back? My personal preference, and it’s a strong one, would be the way back. Kiz, who is coming with me but returning earlier, shares this preference.

My friend, my friends, I’m good at math, and philosophy. Death doesn’t listen. It kisses you back, but doesn’t care a lick about personal preferences. There is a 50 percent chance I will be dead by the time you read this. And a 50 percent chance that I will be a donut. And then dead when you read next week’s column, which I’ll hammer out as soon as I finish this, to be safe.

Plus, I don’t want to have to work while I’m on vacation. Which word (vacation) I use very very poetically. Are you listening, IRS? I am doing a reading in Berlin, I am meeting many times with my German translator, and we are pitching my book, our book, to publishers there. Honestly, I’m not just saying this in case the taxman is a fan of Cheap Eats. I mean, I am, obviously, but it also happens to be true.

I would like to look pretty while I’m there. To this end, I had another laser treatment to my chin before I left. Now, please don’t misunderstand me: I think the world of bearded ladies. I think they rock. I think they are the most beautiful people in the whole wide freakshow, and this is coming from a huge fan of both contortionists and strong men. But I have no idea how the Germans feel about them. Us. And, given what I am going through to get there (50 percent + 50 percent = let’s face it, 100 percent) I really really really REALLY would like to be loved in Berlin.

So, yeah, laser. Now, the thing about laser hair removal is you can’t pluck for a few weeks before, and then after, it takes a few weeks more for the hairs to fall out. Meanwhile you still can’t pluck. So that’s all together, what, a whole month of being kind of grizzly and self-conscious, learning to talk and eat and even in some cases kiss with your hand over your chin. Being naturally pensive, and thoughtful, I’m pretty good at this.

But the day of the treatment is the worst, because then you’re all red, too, and there are tears in the corners of your eyes and snot on your nose. Plus I had decided to get something else done too, while I was there, so my overall discomfort was, well, pretty dang discomfortable. Let’s just say that neither walking, nor sitting, felt quite right.

Still, you gotta pay the driver. Steak and eggs for Earl Butter, and, since I was moving, standing, and maybe looking a little bit truckerish anyway . . . chicken fried steak for me. These things — like death — you go with them.

Oh, and, yum! But where?

CRAIG’S PLACE

Daily: 7 a.m.–4 p.m.

598 Guerrero, SF

(415) 461-4677

Beer & wine

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

The zone

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I believe it’s called "garbage time." Can’t speak for soccer, but in American football it’s when the team in the lead runs the ball up the middle, again and again. The game is decided. It’s just a matter of letting the clock wind down.

That’s where we were at. In this case, my team, the good guys, had a big lead. The other team, the bad guys, had just scored but it was way too little, way too late, and we were going to win the championship. In 40 years of playing team sports, three different ones, three cities on two coasts and a cornfield, in two pretty different bodies, it would be my first championship. Well, second. My first since I was 11.

I’m 46. Just to give you some idea how great everyone else on my team is. To win it all, with me on your side, takes 35 years!

My team is an old team, the oldest in our league. We don’t have a lot of subs, none for the women, and it was our third game of the day. The other team had played three games too. You have to, in a tournament, if you keep winning. So everyone on the field was in a similar boat. Outcome decided. Garbage time. Tick. Tick.

I thought: if ever I was going to score a goal, now would be the time, while everyone else was sleeping. And as our goalie returned the ball to midfield, I sneaked myself from my usual position (fullback), right up there too, along the left sideline. I leaned in a slightly droolish way that let our forwards know exactly what I was thinking.

One tapped the ball to the other, and there was my pass, the pass, the one you wait for all your life, perfect and perfectly unexpected by everyone on the field but me. Nobody was there. The ball rolled like a lullaby on a green sea before me. Nobody, nothing, between me and it, and the net. Even the goalie seemed gone, as I hoofed and huffed and entered into "the zone." You know that zone where athletes go, where they are the ball, where the roar of the crowd, the elements, everything else just peels away and you can pretty much do whatever in the world you want?

This wasn’t that zone. It was a different, dreamier one, where everything peels away, including the ball and the goal. I realized in that moment what an intensely, insanely sociable creature I have become. I felt lonely. Actually lonely. Where was everyone? It just seemed all wrong all of a sudden.

What I did … I stopped running and stood there, and the ball just dribbled slowly away from me and over the end line. Then I turned to face my incredulous teammates and the whistle blew. Game over. Winners!

I didn’t know, though.

I touched hands with the other team and said, "Good game, good game," and they said so too. I posed for the team picture. I took off my uniform and put on my jeans and my new championship T-shirt. I checked my cell phone to see if President Obama was trying to call or anything. (He wasn’t.) And then I got in my car and drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin Brewing Company, because that’s where the team was going to meet for pitchers of not-cold-enough beer and overdone, overpriced hamburgers.

It was three in the afternoon, and I had just played three soccer games on basically a bowl of oatmeal and some cherries. So you can imagine my hunger. Are you imagining? The reverberating weirdness of that breakaway loneliness moment, with all its psychological and philosophical implications — on an empty stomach!

And the guitar duo out on the patio, where we sat, played "Amy," and "Sweet Caroline," and worse.

Boasts the menu: "The Marin County Health Dept. is of the opinion that any meat cooked below medium-well (157 degrees) is undercooked. We proudly prepare your burger to any temperature you request."

"Rare," I said. (Are you still imagining my hunger? My excitement?)

It was one of the deadest burgers I ever ate. It was over well-done, gray, not a drop of moisture to it, save ketchup. Yet I was too insanely hungry, or nice, or sociable, to send it back.

Where would I be without this column?

MARIN BREWING COMPANY

Sun.–Thu. 11:30 a.m.–midnight;

Fri.–Sat. 11:30 a.m.–1 a.m.

1809 Larkspur Landing Circle, Larkspur

(415) 461-4677

Beer & wine

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Disorderly

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS A lime green flip-flop on the shower floor of a gym I don’t go to … Somebody stole my compost pile. The old woman I am not was rehearsing what to say to her doctor. "I have an eating disorder," she rehearsed, in the waiting room. Her husband was sitting, she was standing. Both were 80. "Anything else?" she said.

The husband mumbled something I couldn’t hear.

"I can’t wait to see him!" she said, and kept saying, to the receptionist, to me, to her husband. "After all this time! I can’t believe I’m going to see him." She actually said that. She was way too excited to sit down. There were pictures on the wall of all the doctors who shared this office, and she excused herself for climbing on my lap to get a better look.

But I don’t think he was up there. I know my doctor wasn’t.

Her doctor, I gathered from something else overheard, had retired and recently unretired. "I hope he notices that I lost some weight," she said.

I sneaked long looks at the husband, who was playing his part perfectly, part trooper, part crank. What could he say?

What can I say?

"There are restaurants around here," she said, apropos of very little. Her husband nodded.

I smiled and felt very healthy, and very confident in the health of the old woman I am not. To be honest, I might have under-overheard her, initially. She might have said "reading disorder." That was what it sounded like, but my brain must have substituted "eating disorder" because it didn’t know what to make of a reading disorder.

But really I should leave these matters to the medics.

For example, I was fully prepared to describe to my doctor not only the symptoms of my ailment but the diagnosis, the prognosis, and the cure.

It’s too easy.

The old woman’s time came and her husband, for better or worse, followed her in. I opened my book.

Me? My pulse, temperature, and blood pressure were, as always, pathologically normal. My cholesterol? Low.

For my birthday everyone made me bacon cupcakes, and pulled pork, and mac and cheese, oh, and a Rice Krispies cookie cake shaped like a roasted chicken. But even before any of the above indulgences indulged my palate, I had a stomachache.

Stomachache is not the right word. I had nausea, no appetite (or a lot less than usual), mild dyslexia, pins and needles in my legs, a slight spin to my head, sleeplessness, and the giggles. I was way too happy for my own good.

When my doctor walked in I broke it to her: "I have a writing disorder."

She lit up. Young, unjaded, unhurried, and beautiful, she seems to actually like it that I come see her once or twice a year for no good reason. "Tell me about it," she said.

"A lime green flip-flop," I said, "on the shower floor of a gym I don’t go to."

"Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm." She nodded, wide-eyed. Mind you, this is a general practitioner, not my therapist.

"That wasn’t a dream," I said. "This was: somebody stole my compost pile. I went outside and it was gone. Who would steal compost?"

"I wonder," she said, wondering with me. And the rest was academic, easy questions with obvious answers.

I’m a bad Italian. I can have too much garlic. It gives me anxiety attacks, whereas raw white onions calm me down. I had a cousin visiting from Ohio, and she and my nephew wanted to go to the stinking the Stinking Rose, so I went, to be sociable, but held back on the eats.

After Vesuvio, I hugged them goodbye and walked toward my car. They went the other way, toward more beer. Once they were out of sight, I ducked into a cute little downstairs-upstairs Thai restaurant I’d never noticed before, probably because it wasn’t there. Ton Yong. I’d much rather eat duck soup than over-garlicky overrated Italian food. As you know, it’s medicine to me, and Ton Yong had it, $8.25.

It was good, a little salty maybe, but a lot of ducky, and good noodles. Still, it was not exactly what the doctor ordered. I said this already, before I knew what it meant, but not even duck soup can save me now. I’m in love. Pass the Ativan.

TON YONG THAI CAFE

Daily 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

901 Kearny, SF

(415) 986-6218

No alcohol

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Love story

0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I have never needed a hammock more. Heat wave, it had been a long time since I’d haunted my woodsy shack … accidentally work 40-hour work weeks all of a sudden (not counting this), and have no idea how y’all have been doing it. As it happens, I love my work. Some don’t, I am led to believe. And I just want to buy these ‘uns a bagel and pat them on the back. I can’t imagine. But I kinda can.

So, for the first time in my life, I get weekends. I understand the need for them, crave them, and don’t exactly have them. Six days I work. On the seventh day, I flip Yahweh the bird, lazy fuck, and go play soccer. Sometimes as many as three games in one day.

But this day was hot hot hot, so I only played two, and then needed me a hammock like never before. A little lunch with my teamies, an over-an-hour drive up into the woods, open the windows, peel myself out of the salty shorts and sweat-sticky sports bra, finally, a soak in the tub on the porch … and I was ready.

I put on some clean short shorts and a husband beater T-shirt. I gathered up the book that I am re-rereading, Love In The Time Of Cholera, a bottle of very cold well water, a bowl of cherries, and I went to it.

My hammock is strung between redwoods. Between uses, it becomes nested with dried needles and twigs. You have to shake and shimmy it off into the bed of same underneath. This I did.

Then I nestled in with my book, bottle, and bowl (of cherries) and within less than a second we were all scattered on the forest floor. Well, I wasn’t technically scattered so much as shoulder planted. Damn thing gave, winter-worn ropes ripping, and left me a little bit hog-tied, blinking up at my bare feet, which did look pretty against the green-screened blue sky, but now there were redwood needles sticking out of my upper back and neck, spider webs and twigs in my hair.

As testimony to my insecurelessness, or, rather, the precise flavor of my insecurity, it never even crossed my mind that I had gained weight. Just that I was an idiot for not taking better care of my hammock, and therefore needed another bath.

I washed my car with the still slightly warm water from my last one, then took a shower, which I can do now because I reconverted the shower from a storage closet back into a shower. But it had been years since I used it, and the shower that I took was orange. Pipes rust.

I wiped off and went to the beach.

What a beach the beach is, where I used to live and now visit. The drive there is enough to break your heart. Then, if you know where to go, you don’t get sand but tiny stones which store the sun in them and kind of adjust to your exact shape, given wiggle. You can be held and hugged by the sun itself!

And you can eat cherries, and drink cold well water, and not re-reread Marquez, the greatest love story ever told, because you are making one instead, in stones. Sifting through them, picking out the ones-in-a-gazillion that sing to you with unexpected streaks of color or peculiar shapes or a special resemblance to beans, for example. It’s like choosing your words very carefully.

Christ, I love a language barrier! Lying on my stomach in the sun, almost literally, I made a song of stones and held it in the palm of my hand. Then, when the cherries were gone, I poured my heart into the Ziploc bag, a handful of California, me. Stones.

Yahweh laughs last: Post Office ain’t open on Sunday, ha ha, the working girl, on her one day off, looking forward to Monday — good one, you card you, king of kings of comedy.

Hopeless romantic, I stayed for sunset, climbed the cliff, and drove home very carefully, very recklessly in love, and dedicated to survival. Nothing more than — nothing short of — the very next breath. For dinner: two small chunks of warmed-over roast duck and something slightly somewhat potstickerish, left from lunch at my new favorite restaurant: King Sing.

KING SING

Daily 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

501 Balboa, SF

(415) 387-6038

Beer & wine

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Fear itself

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS It was the stuff that nightmares are made of, two little kids, shrill and shrieking with maniacal laughter, chasing me around a cluttered house with huge, dripping spoonfuls of mayonnaise.

My bad. I’d made the mistake of showing them my Achilles heel. Still it’s remarkable how innately merciless kids, sharks, and hyenas can be. I begged. I pleaded. I tried to reverse my position: I LOVED mayonnaise, I’d in fact been overjoyed, appetized, and positively heartwarmed to find them dipping tablespoons into the jar and filling their faces.

Nothing worked. They were foaming at the mouth, lipslick and shiny, sticking out their whited tongues, baring their dripping teeth, spitting and tearing at me with greasy fingers, little glistening dollops flying every which way from their spoons and hair. If I didn’t already have PTSD now, after years of my mother’s cooking … forget it!

I’ll be surprised if I can open a refrigerator ever again, even in the safety of my own home, my own refrigerator … let alone order a hamburger in a restaurant. Let alone a turkey or ham sandwich.

And the sad thing is: I was just about to get over it, I think. After a lifetime of all-out avoidance, I had knowingly and ungaggingly ingested things with mayonnaise in them on three separate occasions in 2009. A dip, a dressing, and (I shouldn’t say this because it was a secret ingredient) a birthday cake.

Enjoyment would be a strong word for what I felt on each of these occasions, but after tolerance comes appreciation, right? And after that, enjoyment can’t be far behind.

My new favorite expression has to do with jumping over your own shadow. Which, of course, can’t literally be done, but once you make the decision to live poetically, as opposed to, say, politically, polemically, pedagogically, or potlucklessly, well …

Give you an example: I have three things, a passport, an airplane ticket, and a really very thick fear of flying — which, although it is not as deeply-rooted or legendary as my mayophobia, nevertheless requires more anti-anxiety medication.

Or did, but that might be about to change. Things do.

After the kids chased and caught and slimed me, I couldn’t get the gag reflex to go away. No amount of bathing helped. No amount of laundry detergent could induce me to ever again wear the clothes I was wearing. Dips, dressings, and birthday cakes I regard with tight lips and at least one eyebrow raised.

Yet I look forward to being with the little doodooheads. I admit I especially look forward to their bedtime, where my storytelling has taken on an uncharacteristically moral tone. Essentially, any chicken or other animal who exploits any other chicken or other animal’s weakness winds up being eaten by snails.

Hey, not my favorite kind of ending, either; just another hazard of the profession, like being sick most of the time and needing vacations. Why I am going to Germany for said vacation is a long, untellably excellent and delightfully moral-less story, more my speed, entailing swirls of dragons, dragonflies, butter, the color blue, my friend Kiz, punk rock, and the Loma Prieta earthquake …

Anyway, I’ve got one month left to live, for sure, and then a layover in Philadelphia, so I thought I’d practice on a cheesesteak. Enter Phat Philly, stage left. Make that stage 24th Street near Valencia, in the Mission. This is my new favorite-smelling restaurant, for sure. I would like to be laid to rest in there, unboxed, maybe taxidermed onto the wall, or just propped up in an out-of-the-way corner, even for a week, in case our sense of smell survives us some.

Classic pepper steak with provolone … I’m telling you, and the rolls are imported from Philly, which you wouldn’t think would be a good thing, normally. But: they work! They’re great.

And Sockywonk let me taste her onion rings, and did not pour ranch dressing in my ear. Adults are so cool!

PHAT PHILLY

Daily 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

3388 24th St., SF

(415) 550-7428

Beer & wine

AE/D/MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.