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CHEAP EATS And then there was Kiz’s wedding, and I was honored to be a part of her get-ready team. Although: I had nightmares about branding her face with a curling iron or, worse, catching her hair on fire.
She must have had the same nightmares, because when the big day finally came, she barely let me touch her hair. This was probably for the best. She looked awesome and entirely unmismanaged by her get-ready team, and anyway the ceremony was held outside, at the lighthouse in Santa Cruz, in a wind so strong that the four women holding the chuppah damn near missed the vows for parasailing to Reno. Kiz’s naturally fantastic hair was pretty much horizontal the whole time anyway. It stayed fantastic, but horizontally fantastic.
Wind notwithstanding, both she and her dude went ahead and said they did, and that was it, give or take a lot of other things.
For example: three times in the past 30 days I have heard straight newlyweds include, as a part of their ceremony, shout-outs to California gays. Meaning straight people with a conscience are feeling increasingly weird about their participation in a bigoted and discriminatory system that excludes many of their close friends.
Cool!
Cooler yet will be when straight couples start to stop getting married, in protest. Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact antiquated marriage laws undermine marriage, whereas queerness might could rejuvenate it.
Coolest of all will be when I get married. Won’t that be a hoot? Won’t that change the cynical way everyone feels (or at least I feel) about the eroding, outmoded institution?
For the moment, of course, there is nothing preventing trans people in most states from being married — legally (as long as no nasty dispute ever arises inspiring someone to prove for the sake of financial gain or custody or some such that their marriage was never really valid — which, really, how often does anything like that happen in this neat, clean world we live in?)!
My more immediate concern is one no amount of legislation can ever redress, undress, or even approach: how to get on the menu. As it is, there are not a lot of guys willing to be seen in broad daylight with girls like me, let alone take us home to mother. Let alone stand on some windy precipice and say they do. I’m working on this. I have ideas. Big ‘uns.
But speaking of going behind a rock and yipping like a coyote, there’s Los Coyotes right there near the 16th Street BART station. I’ve walked by it a zillion times without it ever registering, until Earl Butter was kind enough to notice the picture in the window of meat and melted cheese all over a bed of french fries.
He did what you’re supposed to do: he told me, so at the next imaginable mealtime we were there, sharing a big plate of carne asada fries and a pretty small bowl of birria.
The birria was greasy and bare-bones. In this case, that means we found a lot of weird pieces of bone without any meat on them. But there was a lot of meat too. And nothing else. Oh well … that’s birria, as the saying goes. Just goat and goodness, and you gotta love that.
Well, I do. Points for serving it any old day of the week. And points for adding carne asada fries to the Mission District burrito scene. It wasn’t the best carne asada. Or the best cheese, or the best fries, for that matter. But somehow when you added them all up, it was a damn great thing to be eating.
And we each drank a lemonade and each ate some green chips with a variety of salsas, including a mango one. And one that was just strips of pickled nopales and onions, speaking (still) of coyotes.
The atmosphere is really good, too. A lot of cool, colorful tile work, and color and brightness in general, plus Mexican soap operas on TV.
New favorite taqueria? Next time I’ll get a burrito, and weigh back in.
Taqueria Los Coyotes
Mon.–Thu. 9:30 a.m.–10 p.m.;
Fri.–Sat. 9 a.m.–3 a.m.
3036 16th St., SF
(415) 861-3708
MC,V
Beer and wine