L.E. Leone

True colors

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CHEAP EATS Red. Green. Yellow. Dark green. Orange. Light green to the point of being almost yellow. Earl Butter was showing me his peppers, which is not a euphemism. If it were, I wouldn’t know what it meant. So lucky for all of us, this was literal Truth. There they were, true peppers, in all their shapely and colorful glory, on Earl’s kitchen table. Some of them were in bags.

"Weren’t you born in Texas?" I said.

"No no," he assured me. "I lived there when I was little."

I said I hoped he didn’t intend to ever go back, because they might not let him in if they knew the way he made chili. As many kinds of peppers as possible, no meat.

For my part, forgiveness was automatic, not only because I love my buddy Earl, but because I wasn’t staying for dinner anyway. What a guy! When he cooks, he cooks for the whole floor, and some of the people on his floor are vegetarian.

Sure, I would do things differently. Either cook for myself, or move to a different floor. But I’m not Earl Butter, and this is an important point: I don’t know who I am.

Not the chicken farmer, that’s for sure. I gave my girls away and moved to a fancy-pants neighborhood in Oakland, arguably Oakland’s fancy-pantsiest: Rockridge. I’m mobile (new car), I’m upward (new car); if only I were young, I would be a yuppie.

And, to the extent that yuppies are kind of antithetical to, say, hippie new-age energy healer/poet types, I would embrace my new identity so hard its ribs would crack. I love where I live, and I love the people around me. On the other hand, I’m still as poor as pickle juice. I can afford to live in Rockridge because my apartment is free, in exchange for taking care of the kids sometimes, like picking them up at school, playing music with them, kicking a ping-pong ball in the park, and other things I love to do anyway, like helping with dinner.

Which reminds me: Earl Butter was making chili. But you can’t make chili on an empty stomach. I needed me a bath. But you can’t exactly bathe on an empty stomach either, if you’re me. So I tugged on his shirt sleeve until I’d tugged him out of the kitchen, clear out of his apartment, down the stairs to the Mission District, and into my car.

And we drove off in aimless search of cheap eats.

Found ’em! On Ocean Avenue, of all the crazy places, riding off into the Sunset. Eat First. What are you gonna do, name like that? We ordered hot and sour seafood soup, spicy chicken wings, kung pao chicken, and sliced pork with preserved mustard green.

But they wouldn’t let us have that last one. "It’s Chinese food," our waitressperson kept saying, shaking her head.

I countered with the unassailable argument, "And …?" But it wasn’t until I’d persuaded her that I’d had the dish before, many times, and loved it, that she agreed to include it in our order.

Reluctantly. Mutteringly.

Earl Butter pointed out that we were the only whities in the place, that everything else we’d ordered was classic whitey fare, and that no matter how badass I felt on the inside, I looked "irretrievably dainty" — even all sweaty and disheveled from back-to-back soccer games.

Waitressperson came back and said they were out of the pork with preserved mustard greens. Earl thinks she was lying. I believe her.

New favorite restaurant.

As for my new-age trucker mother … maybe you guessed already: he turned out to be more energy healer than truck driver, damn him. On our first date we walked and danced on the sidewalk, looked over a railing into a stream, then sat on a bench and kissed like crazy.

What a wonderful woman I was, he whispered in between things. Deep, oniony, complex, cute …

I had to say what else, and that was, more or less, it. He showed his true colors. I don’t know what shade of pale would describe them. Maybe new-age gray. He was not the color of peppers.

EAT FIRST

Daily: 5–9:30 p.m.

1540 Ocean, SF

(415) 587-1698

Beer

MC/V

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

Trucker song

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CHEAP EATS I dreamed a bear was after me, and it chased me into a craggy and impossible landscape from which, if I survived the bear, I would never find my way back to exactly alive, either.

These kinds of things don’t bother me anymore. I’m too busy being bugged by spiritually advanced, old-soul new-age dinks who think me visually and verbally attractive, then find out that in spite of their evolved, complicated mysticism and unflappable belief in reincarnation, they simply can’t wrap their brains around a funny and beautiful woman who used to be a dude.

I say, "Well, so what about your arms then?"

They laugh, but I’m serious. Whatever happened to a sense of adventure? A kiss? A touch? A taste? Finding out via the body? You know: the here-and-now incarnation, the one with spinach in its teeth. To me, good old-fashioned sensory perceptions are a gazillion times more valuable than extra-sensory ones, or energy fields or even Ouija boards. Meditation … prayer … thought itself can’t do what teeth and fingers can. So don’t pay too much attention to your dreams, books, guides, and all that other dumbass brainy bullshit, OK?

And if you think it’s bad in Berkeley …

Where I live, in the woods … well, the woods were lovely, dark, and deep until I came to crave less chickeny company and, a year or so ago, started venturing away from hearth and shack. And was horrified to find that my neighbors were not farmers and lumberjacks, but hippies. All of them! Even the farmers and the lumberjacks!

Yesterday evening, for example, I was killing time, half-pints, and fishes and chips down at my local neighborhood cider pub, when I was hit on by a big ol’ truck driver. Yay! A truck driver! I thought. Oh, and he was very sweet and forward, and was wearing a cowboy hat. I almost certainly would have gone home with him, except that I had accidentally left my chicken door open, on purpose … so farmerly duty called, eventually, and I excused myself from his embrace.

This proves, if my math serves me, that a bird in the hand is not worth four birds in the coop. With the door open. By the way, please think of the bird in the hand as me, and the hand as his. Personally, I don’t care, one way or the other, but I don’t think truck drivers like to be thought of as birds.

My point is that he gave me his business card, and I fully intended to use it some time, say, if I needed a cargo container full of corrugated tin roofing material hauled from here to Fresno, or a date. But when I took a look in the sobering light of morning, there was his name, his address, cell phone and e-mail, sure, but where it should have said "truck driver" instead it said, get this: "energy healer/poet."

And the foxes and skunks and tit-mice and deer that inhabit these lovely, dark, deep woods with me are still trying to shake the haunting wail of utter despair and frustration which emanated then from the Shack of the Nutty Girl With All Them Chickens — or SONGWATCH, as they call it for short. Because while I have no doubt that a trucker is 100-percent capable of seeing that a chicken farmer is a chicken farmer is a chicken farmer, no matter what else in the world she usedta be … my experience has been that these energy-addled new-age seer dinks are about as sightful as buttons on a sock monkey. Seriously, it’s happened more than once or twice. It’s happened three or four times now. Maybe five.

Belief in anything at all is kinda counteradventurous, innit? But as far as non-nonbelievers go, my funnest dates so far have been with fundamentalist Christians and Mennonites.

Of course I will give this guy and his cowboy hat a try. He doesn’t know yet the kind of girl I am. So it will be interesting to see if (as I can only hope), truck driver trumps energy healer.

Oh, and I do have a new favorite restaurant. Chinese joint goes by the wonderful name of Eat First, in case you want to look it up online. I’d a done it here but story trumps all, turns out. And anyway my Chinese New Year’s resolution is to renege on all my other ones, which were torturing me like a bear in a dream, so …

Maybe next time. Now I have to get going on a trucker song.

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

Counting chickens

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CHEAP EATS When it’s cold and dark in the trees, and drippy. When I get cabin feverish. When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when Weirdo the Cat camps out on my forehead and taps my cheeks all night to make sure I don’t drift … when my witchy, woodsy ways bite my own bad ass and instead of chicken farmerly I start to feel isolated and scared, that’s when my bathtub steps up. Or, more literally, I step in.

If you ask me, I’ve got the sweetest bathing situation in the whole Bay Area. Yeah, rats in the chicken coop, yeah, skunks under my shack, yeah, my clothes and me smell like smoke all the time (at best), yeah, it’s been three days since I saw another human being, yeah, raiding Dumpsters for firewood, yeah, washboard washing and an indoor clothesline … but at least I get to take a bath like this. Outside. Smell of eucalyptus, sight of my raspberry-tipped toes against a California-blue sky, the creaking of redwoods, taste of popcorn, or chicken.

And then the sound of chicken too, a live one making that very particular sound live ones make when something has teeth in them. Or, in this case, talons. A hawk’s got my chicken.

But a farmer who bathes out of doors has a say in this, see? Indoor bathtub, or worse, a shower … forget about it. Your girl is someone else’s dinner. There was a corner of a woodpile and a wall of a coop between me and the action. I couldn’t even see my adversary, at first, let alone get a good angle on it, from where I soaked. But if there’s one thing the English-speaking predators of west Sonoma County will tell you, it’s that the pretty little kook in the old white boat does not throw like a girl. She’s got toys, shampoo bottles, stiff-bristled brushes, bars of soap, and a big, slow, loopy curveball that she’s not afraid to use, behind in the count or behind a wall and a woodpile.

This is me talking again, and I mean to tell you (in case you don’t know from personal experience): there’s something enormously gratifying about spooking off four-foot wing-spanned, razor-beaked, bloodthirsty birds of prey with a rubber ducky. You wouldn’t think it possible, but then, you haven’t seen my rubber ducky. It’s black with a pink mohawk and an A-for-anarchy tattooed to the side of its head. Not no standard-issue Bert and Ernie model, no.

So it turns out that big bad hawks are every bit as skittish about anarchy as, say, my dad, or most people. Fwop fwop fwop fwop … and awayyyyy.

Who knew?

But this isn’t the Nature Channel. Sockywonk, who happens to have given me my punk rocker rubber ducky, moved and then moved again, as I was saying. Me and her little hockey player boyfriend Flower "The Fury" Flurry helped with the haul. Two weekends in a row! And after the second one Socky took us to dinner. Technically, we didn’t know she was going to pay, or we’d have held out for sushi instead of ducking into the first cheapo Mexican/Salvadorean joint we saw, which was Restaurante Familiar, Sockywonk’s new neighborhood being the Excelsior District.

It’s a cozy, comfy, cheerful, friendly, tasty little place. The fried plantains were great. The black beans were great. The pupusas were great. Chicken soup, great. Enchiladas with green sauce, great.

The chicken tamale was great. It had whole chickpeas in it, and was wrapped in a banana leaf instead of a corn husk. That’s Salvadoran style. Great.

Everything was great, but for my money (or, for the sake of accuracy, Sockywonk’s) the tamale is the way to go, because for $5.75 it comes with beans, rice, and salad. And that’s more than a meal. It’s a meal and a nap.

I count chickens in my sleep. It’s not like counting sheep, or blessings, for one thing because I’m already asleep. I don’t need help going to sleep. Thanks to Weirdo the Cat, I don’t need help waking up, either. I count chickens because, in my heart of hearts, I suppose, they are exactly what I have.

RESTAURANTE FAMILIAR

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

4499 Mission, SF

(415) 334-6100

Beer and wine

V/MC

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

Eating out

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CHEAP EATS Earl Butter had just called out for Chinese food when I called him to see if he wanted to go out for Chinese food, or any kind of food, for that matter. I didn’t have anything in particular in mind. Just food and seeing Earl, because it had been a week. And you start to miss a guy like Earl. I do.

"I just ordered Chinese," he said. "It’ll be here any minute."

"Delivery?" I said. "Why would you do that?"

He said he gets bored, he gets lonely, his cat won’t even sleep with him anymore. He’s been sleeping in the kitchen. The cat.

"Wait, you get bored and lonely, so you order in?" I said. "That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t make any sense. That doesn’t make one lick of sense."

If making sense were my strong suit any more than it’s Earl Butter’s, I might have pointed out instead of repeating myself that people and changes of scenery tend to happen in restaurants at a greater frequency than in one’s own studio apartment.

But I’m not a logician. I’m a restaurant reviewer. So I asked him where he’d ordered from.

"Red Jade," he said. "I got two things. Do you want to eat them with me?"

I thought about it while I was pulling into a parking space near his house, my mind clacking through a Rolodex of names of Chinese restaurants I’d been to. I knew I’d been there. I knew I’d written about it. The tricky part is remembering what you had to say, and whether or not you made it up entirely, or just parts of it.

I turned my car off, closed my eyes, thought, and said, "What did you get?"

Chicken with something, and chicken with something else, he said.

"I’ll be right up. I’m already here." But I had just played soccer, first game back after a more-than-one-month layoff, and after that I’d helped Sockywonk move from her new apartment to her even newer one. I might have fallen asleep for a minute.

For sure I was moving slowly, and by the time I climbed the stairs to his 3rd-floor studio, the delivery had been delivered. It was in a tied-up plastic bag on his kitchen table, and Earl Butter had changed his mind. "Let’s eat out," he said.

So we walked back down and got in my car. "What do you want to eat?" I asked.

"Anything but Chinese."

"Vietnamese?"

"I like bun," he said. So we beelined for the ‘Loin, and Pho Tan Hoa, where I’d tried to eat before but failed because, astoundingly, they close at 7 p.m. Why a red-blooded restaurant would close at 7 p.m. I will leave for better minds than mine to figure out. But this one does. So it was a good time to go there, not quite six.

I’d heard about their pho, and that’s what I ordered, a small bowl with rare steak and beef balls ($6.50). Small = gargantuan. I took some home for lunch.

Earl Butter got bun, vermicelli with imperial rolls and grilled pork ($7). I tasted, and I liked.

We also noticed, after we’d ordered, that they had Bo Tai Chanh ($8), the raw steak appetizer that I love, you know, sprinkled with ground peanuts and mint, and marinated in lemon juice and fish sauce. So we after-ordered that, for dessert.

When it came, it took my breath away. It was a mountain of meat, thin sliced and folded over on top of and on top of and on top of until you had, basically, well, yeah, a mountain of meat. Roughly the size of the biggest burrito you ever saw. Except it was all meat.

Except it wasn’t, we found out soon enough. Hiding under the just meat was a somewhat smaller mountain of just onions. Which barely broke my breathlessness because I love onions too. And anyway, even with the oniony underpadding, it was still way more meat than anyone else gives you with this plate. And it was raw and red and just delicious. I can’t stop thinking about it.

Atmosphere: fish tank.

New favorite restaurant.

PHO TAN HOA

Daily: 8 a.m.–7 p.m.

431 Jones, SF

(415) 673-3163

No alcohol

Cash only

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

Fanning the flames

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CHEAP EATS When your rats grow bigger than your chickens and you can hear them at night in the chicken coop, laughing at your traps … them’s hard times.

I mean to pack it in, as a chicken farmer. But what am I going to farm? Rats?

What am I going to eat for lunch? What am I going to give to my friends for their birthdays?

What am I going to give to complete strangers when I love them for one reason or another? Besides eggs, eggs, and eggs, respectively?

Is it even possible for a chicken farmer not to be a chicken farmer? I have gone through brief periods of chickenlessness in my life, but I forget what they were like. Purgatory, probably. And in my theological opinion, purgatory is worse than hell. Hell, you can bring hot dogs and a stick, settle in. But purgatory is waiting by the phone, or running to the mailbox, or checking your e-mail 999 times an hour, wondering if you got the job.

I looked down and my slippers were on the wrong feet. Instead of switching them, I stood up and walked around like that for a while. I’m eating leftovers that are more than a week old now, and when repercussions happen, instead of throwing out the rest I go, hmm, better eat this for dinner too, to get rid of it.

Hey, maybe that’s why my chickens are smaller than my rats. The rats are eating their feed, and the farmer’s eating their scraps. That’s hard times.

I intentionally left Fanny’s off my little list of Hard Times Handbook cheap cheap chirpies because I wanted to give it a whole fat column of words to itself. Not that it’s the best, or the cheapest place out there, but it’s good and cheap, and it’s my new favorite restaurant simply for having duck soup, which is rare for Chinese restaurants, period. It’s even rarer for Chinese/American greasy-spoon dives.

Which is of course what Fanny’s is. South of Market, Bryant and Eighth streets, plain, spacious, and unspectacular. But the pa of the presumed "ma and pa" was talking passionately to their one sit-down customer about some recipe or cooking technique when I walked in, and I took this as a good omen.

An even better omen: how easy it is to eat for under $5. Two eggs with bacon or sausage, hash browns, and toast, omelets, French toast, pancakes, sandwiches, or two-item combos of Chinese food … all five and under. And then even if you’re going to splurge, say, on a big bowl of roast duck soup with wontons or noodles, you’re still talking sixes and sevens.

Not bad!

The catch is that I haven’t actually tried the duck soup, because I went there at eight in the morning on my pre-caffeinated way to work, ordered off the wall, to go, and grabbed a take-out menu (by way of reading material) on the way out.

I didn’t read my reading material until days later, the same way I read everything I read: rocking chair, toasty fire, cat on lap, hot tea … ah, literature!

Under the chapter heading, Soup (Wonton or Noodle), I read the words "roast duck" and followed the dots to the six and the fitty. My rocking chair squeaked to a stop, Weirdo the Cat woke up, the fire popped, I bookmarked my little fold-up take-out menu, and set it on the side table.

My eyes blurred with hot tears (I am easily moved), I scanned the bookshelves next to my wood stove: Jane Austen, Robert Benchley, Chekhov, Dickens … I didn’t have any E’s, so would file Fanny’s between Dostoyevsky and Fante.

I would go there again first chance I got — for lunch, because they’re not open for dinner. If anything is amiss or astounding, I will get word to you. Meanwhile, for me, it’s enough to know that it’s there, like Moby Dick.

And I can vouch for the breakfast: great hash browns, eggs done right, toast whatever. True, I ate these things in my car, driving over the Bay Bridge and listening to a recording of an old Booker T & the MGs LP played at 45 rpm … but that doesn’t mean I’m not a real restaurant reviewer.

Does it?

FANNY’S RESTAURANT

Mon.–Fri. 7 a.m.–4 p.m.; Sat.–Sun. 9 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

1010 Bryant, SF

(415) 626-1543

No alcohol

MC/V

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

New year, new pho

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CHEAP EATS Rang Dong happened out of anger. So don’t let any new age it’s-all-good hippie dips tell you that anger is not a constructive emotion. Without it I never would have been ranting about Pho 84 in the first place.

And Mod the Pod wouldn’t have heard me and wouldn’t have said, "What were you doing at Pho 84 when you could have been at Rang Dong?"

And I wouldn’t have said, "Rang Dong?"

Because, see, I’d never heard of it. It’s in Oakland Chinatown, at Webster and Eighth streets, right where Vi’s used to be, and it might be as good as Vi’s used to be, only better, because it’s still there.

Pod and the Attack have been on this place forever. And such is my trust in my buds’ buds … I’d have grabbed them up and gone right then, even though we’d all already eaten, except it was after 10 p.m. and everyone had to work in the morning. Oh, and Rang Dong closes at 9:30.

Not that I was going to get any sleep anyway, having just dropped over $30 with Deevee at Pho 84 for a bowl of soup and a bowl of bun, no drinks. And here’s the worst part: it wasn’t even good!

She had to pick all the catfishes out of her soup, and I — me, your simple-minded chicken farmer, L.E. for Loves Everything — left pork on my plate! When was the last time I left anything on my plate, let alone pork? Let alone grilled pork in a Vietnamese restaurant? But it was inedibly overcooked.

Just to be sure we weren’t having some weirdo shared hallucination or nightmare (Pho 84 having been pretty good to us in the past), I tried Deevee’s catfish and she tried my pork and we agreed that they both sucked ass. It’s one thing to raise your prices. Everybody does it. When the price goes up and the quality comes down … that’s just bullshit.

So Rang Dong. Next chance I got I gathered up all my West Oakland grillfriends — the Pod, the Attack, Deevee, and Kiz — and Kiz had a pal visiting from New York. So there were six of us, but me and the friend were the first ones seated, and she looked at me and said, "So you’re going to review this?"

"Well, I don’t want to jinx anything," I said. "I’m sure going to try. It’s kind of a New Year’s resolution sort of thing."

She gave me a look. "Wait," she said, "aren’t you a restaurant reviewer?"

"Fifteen, sixteen years," I said, proudly.

"And you’re going to try?" she said, still giving me still the same look.

"To write a restaurant review, yes," I said.

"So … your New Year’s resolution," she said (still the look), "is to do precisely what it is that you already do."

"For a living, yes." I said. "But I’m not making any promises."

The look. She’s a math teacher, turns out, and is rather accustomed to things adding up. Speaking of which: $9.95 + $6.55 + $7.50 + $7.50 + $7.95 + $9.95 + $10.95 = not a lot, really, for six people, especially compared to Pho 84, where hardly anything is under 10 bucks anymore.

And Rang Dong is many many times better. The raw beef salad was as good as any I’ve had anywhere. The thin slices of steak were actually raw, as in red. A lot of places give them too much of a citrus bath and they start to actually cook in it. I get a little turned off by browned "raw" beef.

The salt-and-pepper calamari was lightly breaded and perfectly fried, and I tasted some imperial roll out of someone’s bun, and that was perfectly fried too. The pho was fantastic, really flavorful. In fact, the only dish — out of seven — that I wasn’t absolutely gaga over was the lemongrass chicken. But it wasn’t bad. It was a matter of taste. Other people loved it.

See? So there wasn’t any chicken left on the plate at the end of the meal. And there wasn’t any grilled pork left on any of the plates either. Well, maybe just a little in Kizzer’s New Yorker friend’s bowl, but you better believe I was eyeballing it.

New favorite restaurant!

RANG DONG RESTAURANT

Daily: 10 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

724 Webster, Oakl.

(510) 835-8375

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

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

Leftovers

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Rack of lamb. Smoked turkey. Smoked salmon. Seared tuna. Scallops in a saffron cream sauce. Roasted beets. Couscous. These things are in my refrigerator. They are leftovers from a holiday party I helped cater. Two, four, five, six people I called. None could come, so that leaves me, one person, your chicken farmer truly, to knock it all over, all by my lonely lonesome.

[Insert sound of chomping and chewing, tearing, lip-smacking, the gulping of bottles of cheap red wine, the grunting of 5,000 pigs, the burping and farting of four fat football players, a symphony of jackhammers, chainsaws, and meat grinders … and one small sweet-and-greasy chicken-farmerly sigh.]

Thus endeth a pretty weird year. Politics, the economy, my personal life … I’m not going to montage you, don’t worry. I’m going to sentence you. One sentence: Near the beginning of 2008 I left a sexy city boy to find me someone closer to home, and what I found was a woodsy, wonky couple watching slasher movies over barbecue, a couple of local married men, a foot fetishist, and a guy with lots of bondage gear and a rifle leaning against his bedroom wall who wanted to tie me up and I let him.

This is another sentence, agreed, but there was also the neighbor whose young son came out as bisexual while we were dating and probably could have used a little fatherly camaraderie (just a guess) … but dad couldn’t bring himself to tell the boy that, hey, he was sleeping with a tranny.

When, near the end of the year, I finally did fall in love, it was not with a Californian. Dude lived a couple thousand miles away and across an international border. Ah, and he was a wonderful man, but by the time the article came out and everyone started congratuutf8g me on my feat of Sir Reality, it was over.

I have a feat fetish. I like to take on absurd challenges, try to find innovative ways around them (usually involving rubber bands, duct tape, and wax paper wings) … and then invariably crash my latest weirdo flying contraption into the first tree stump I see, or get all tangled in hammocks and chicken wire.

You try to learn a little bit along the way. Like all great and not-so-great inventors, I keep records and take notes … hey! That’s what Cheap Eats is. Has become. But I have to confess (because I always do) that there is a small, strange thought buried deep in my inner bucket of bacon grease, which sometimes gurgles to the surface and astounds the crap out of me. It’s that twisted — a hankering to write actual restaurant reviews.

Don’t get your hopes up. I’m just saying.

I tried to squeeze in one more Mr. Yeah, Right before the end of oh eight. There wasn’t a lot of time left, so things moved way faster than usual. Coffee turned into dinner turned into a walk in the rain turned into his arm around me turned into me pressed against a brick wall, his hands on my breasts and his tongue down my throat. The sex was terrible. He accused me of being a good Catholic girl, which hurt, even though he admitted I was a bad Catholic girl too.

I dressed in the dark, at the foot of his gigantic bed. He got up too, put his clothes on, and then offered to walk me to my car, which was how I knew I wouldn’t see him again. I said, "Nah. Thanks. That’s all right."

And drove home in tears, as usual.

I’m thinking of an Alanis Morissette song. I ask too many questions, I learn. I leap, I learn. I cling, I learn. I’m needy, I learn. Bad in bed, I learn. Beat myself up, I learn. I expect, I learn. I’m neurotic. I lack motivation. I can’t sing for shit or remember the words. I’m demanding, fickle, and a dangerous driver. When I need a friend, I withdraw.

My New Year’s resolution is to get an egg poacher.

But Christmas Day morning, driving home to the woods, scenic route, I saw a coffee cup on the top of a car in a driveway where there weren’t any people. I thought this was the most beautiful thing I’d ever see, until moments later I crested the big hill on Walker Road and there were the greenest fields spooning the bluest sky ever, and, on both sides of me, cows and cows and cows.

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

Mother trumpers

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS We had a slab of smoked salmon from Grocery Outlet, Ritz crackers, and a bottle of Crystal hot sauce. These things were on the coffee table. The Mrs. was in the bedroom, cracking up over something funny on television. She has a beautiful, booming laugh and a bad right shoulder. There’s a TV in the living room, too, but her Mr. and me were swapping crazy mom stories on the couch, and she likes to give us space when that happens.

"My mom believes in angels and space aliens," the Mountain said.

"My mom thinks people can live for 500 years," I said.

"My mom started a cult," the Mountain said.

"My mom’s been to jail," I said.

It wasn’t a competition. Now that I’m writing it down, though, I see we sound like school kids, instead of 40- and 50-something kooks-in-our-own-right. But it wasn’t a competition.

"My mom has visions, and students, and hears voices," the Mountain said. "An angel told her to move to Scandinavia."

"My mom calls late-night talk shows and the White House, and sends love letters to Garrison Keillor," I said. "She lives in Snow Belt, Ohio, without running water or electricity. Her phone’s tapped."

The Mountain pulled off a big chunk of fish with his fingers and hot sauced it and it wasn’t a competition but here’s where, if it was a competition, he played his trump card: "My mom has a beard," he said.

"My mom shits in a bucket," I said, playing mine.

And we sat there and shook our heads, chewing on smoked salmon with Crystal and Ritz.

"Do you want anything to drink?" the Mountain said.

I was already drinking a big glass of tomato juice with hot sauce in it, and as the glass got emptier and emptier, I kept pouring more and more hot sauce in so that now it was basically hot sauce, with a dash of tomato juice.

The Mountain was sipping red wine out of a beaker. I finished my juice and said I’d try some, and as he poured it he said it was leftover from Thanksgiving.

Oxidation builds character, but I realized, upon first sip, he meant Thanksgiving ’07.

"I ought to sue my mom," he said.

"I used to fantasize about killing mine," I said, swirling my swill.

"Here," he said. "Let me find a picture." And while he was rooting through his closet, I visited the kitchen sink and brought a bag of potato chips back to the coffee table. I noticed that our bottle of Crystal, which we’d just started, was already half empty.

Oh, and it’s great on potato chips too.

Funny, my case of fucking Floyd’s and fucking Fred’s hasn’t even fucking arrived yet, and already I have a new favorite hot sauce! Crystal is just cayenne peppers, vinegar, and salt. Floyd & Fred’s is lime juice, habaneros, salt, and xanthan gum. They both taste great, and are addictive, so now I’m going to have to start carrying two bottles of hot sauce in my purse, and pretty soon I’ll have a bad shoulder too, just like my mountainous seester.

But what’s nice about my new favorite hot sauce, compared to my old one, is that Crystal doesn’t break their bottle on a rock and then jam it shard-side first up your ass. My meaning here is figurative, and financial. See, Crystal is 79 cents for a 6 oz. bottle, compared to $5 for a 5 oz. bottle of F-ing F & F’s. You can get a case of 24 6-oz. bottles of Crystal for $18.93. Fuck and Fuck’s 12-pack of 5-oz. bottles? Fifty bucks. Um, that’s more than twice the price for less than half the goods. And, best of all, you don’t have to go to Whole Paycheck to get a bottle.

Now that that’s settled, I wish I could print a picture here of Mama Mountain, because she’s round, as advertised, and bearded and beautiful, in addition to insane. I’d sue her too, if I was her kid.


My new favorite restaurant is Talavera Taqueria in Berkeley. Two great green salsas, a tomatillo-based and an avocado-based. And the chips are good and fresh. It’s a nice place to sit and eat an al pastor burrito, or probably any other kind as well.


TALAVERA TAQUERIA

Daily: 9 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1561 Solano Ave., Berkeley

(510) 558-8565

Beer

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

Darkest day

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CHEAP EATS For all I know you are reading this on the darkest day of the year. And for all you know I am sitting in a rocking chair in front of my wood-burning stove, not rocking so much as reeling, hands in hair, trying to get my head straight.

Wondering:

Why do I water my cat? Most people water their plants. I neglect mine, water the cat instead, and the cat chews on the leaves and then pukes, or not, and everything works out somehow, except: possible liver damage.

Except everything does work out, and Weirdo the Cat stays weird and alive and well, at 15. In people years I am less grandmotherly than her, but for the record we both like afghans and rocking chairs.

Wondering: Why do I watch opera? Why do I read the wrong novels? Why do I fall in love in winter when I could do so much more with spring or summer? Why is love, the word, never enough, like a hot water bottle under the covers, at your feet?

I sleep in my socks. I wear long underwear, flannel pajama bottoms, and a sweater, sometimes a sweatshirt and sweater. I wake up drenched in sweat, wonder why. Really really cold nights I’ll wear a hoodie, or a hat, or pull my headband down over my ears.

First Weirdo the Cat and then I will cease to become point-of-view characters, and the bed, the litter box, the faux brick wall behind our wood stove will miss us equally, our opposite-of-vacant stares and songs of complaint.

Because it’s dark here in the woods, even in summer, I decorate my shack year-round with Xmas lights. It’s one small room, x by x, with three overhead lights, two floor lamps, a row of track lighting, a utility lamp, and 9,999 strategically placed unblinking Xmas tree bulbs. Then the power goes out and I have to battle seasonal affection disorder with candles and flowers.

On the radio they said to put olive oil on your chapped lips. I’m a bad Italian. I prefer butter to olive oil, onions to garlic, and kisses to both. I’m skinny. At my age! I don’t eat enough pasta and never go to church, unless it’s to make fun of their idea of bread and wine.

I was standing at the stove pouring bacon grease from the skillet into the jar, for the working of future miracles, and as I watched the stream turn to strings turn to drops of dripping drippings, I thought, These are the clogged arteries of Christ. Put them in your refrigerator, in remembrance of Him. And also so they don’t get rancid.

Ceremoniously, although no one was watching, not even a cat, I dipped my middle finger, right hand, deep into the jar of still-warm bacon fat, and rubbed it all over my lips. Olive oil, my ass, I thought.

But that’s another story. In this one, in the spirit of giving, declaring truce, peace, and eggs, I grant my Catholic peeps, Protestant hens, roosters, and religious people everywhere their saviors, virgins, prophets, crowing, and high holy holidays. In fact, I’m so out of gas right now that I even give you eternal life. It’s yours. If that’s what you believe, you got it. I won’t argue.

For me, I don’t see the point. It’s not life to which I am insanely attached, it’s my point of view. This very particular chicken farmerly capacity for watching, wondering, waxing poetic, and waking up alone and deeply disturbed. Like that hot water bottle twisted in the covers somewhere near your feet, it’s little comfort to me, on the longest night of the year, your concept of heaven, or energy, or yet another go-round. Even if … if I ain’t there to call it, in my exact eyes and language, then what the fuck?

Thinking these deep, ecclesiastic thoughts, I put my jar of bacon fat in the fridge, washed and dried the frying pan, did the rest of the dishes, then stood in front of the bathroom mirror and ran my fingers through my hair. Looking good enough, I thought, I went out into the world in search of vegetarians to kiss.

————

My new favorite restaurant is Los Comales in Oakland’s Diamond District. A regular meat burrito (carnitas, in my opinion) is under $5, but you have to sweet-talk them into chips, or pay 50 cents. Or, if you’re really really poor, you can get a bean and cheese burrito for $2.40, and kiss me by way of meat.

TAQUERIA LOS COMALES

Mon.–Sat., 9 a.m.–8:30 p.m.

2105 MacArthur, Oakl.

(510) 531-3660

Beer

AE/MC/V

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

Hot and bothered

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CHEAP EATS After breakfast we went to Whole Paycheck. I needed to pick up a chicken, an onion, and carrots and celery for work. Earl Butter needed a lot more than that, but of course couldn’t afford anything at all, since Whole Paycheck’s pricing is designed to keep out riffraff, such as teachers and newspaper columnists.

Earl was sad, so I bought him a bottle of hot sauce. Floyd & Fred’s, extra hot. My new favorite hot sauce. It’s made out of key lime juice and habanero, and comes in a cute little bottle with a cute little picture of a distressed lime on it, mouth open, eyes rolling, and flames licking out of its head.

I first discovered Floyd and Fred in Crawdad de la Cooter’s refrigerator. Except back then it was just one of them, I forget which. Probably Floyd.

You can’t fit two people in a refrigerator.

"What’s this?" I asked Crawdad, way back whenever, because I’m always interested in new kinds of hot sauce.

"You can have it," she said.

Crawdad is 10 times the heat demon I am. In fact, she taught me how. So as soon as I tasted Floyd & Fred’s, back when it was Floyd’s or Fred’s, I could see why she didn’t go for them. Him.

It was so mild, I used half the 5 oz. bottle on one little bowl of soup. Well, the good news is they make an extra-hot version, which is pretty much perfect. And the bad news is I only ever seem to see it at Whole Paycheck. For $5 a bottle! Those of you who are paying attention, and good at math, will realize immediately that we’re talking, let’s see … 5 oz. bottle, $5 a bottle, carry the one … what? Roughly a dollar an ounce.

At which rate my standard size (10 oz.) bottle of my old favorite hot sauce, Tapatío, for example, would have set me back (hold on, I’m going to use a calculator this time) … $10, exactly.

Actual cost: oh, $3.65.

So you see? This is why I never shop at Whole Paycheck, except when I’m shopping for someone else. My Canadian says they’re union busters. I think, at $5 for a cute little tiny 5 oz. bottle, they’re busting a lot more than unions.

But it is good stuff, Floyd & Fred’s. I’m an addict. I keep a bottle of extra-hot in my purse at all times, and rarely if ever mistake it for perfume.

The other day, though, I was in a public restroom, rummaging frantically through my purse, not quite exactly saying but almost audibly thinking, "tampon tampon tampon" (I do this sometimes, by way of establishing ladies room cred) … when I came upon my little hot sauce bottle and noticed, for the first time ever, that there’s a phone number just below the nutrition facts, 415-987-LIME.

"Cell phone cell phone cell phone," I thought, rummaging. I had one! Took it outside, dialed, and a man’s voice answered. Just: "Hello?"

"Hi … Floyd?" I said. "Fred?"

Silence. Then: "Yes?"

I briefly summarized my situation, that I was a starving artist slash chicken farmer and a hot sauce junky and where I lived, in the woods, and so forth, and he interrupted me after 15 minutes and said, "There’s a Whole Foods right near you."

"Whole what?" I said. "I can’t afford to shop there! Do you sell directly to people?"

By the case, he said. How many bottles in a case? Twelve. How much? (You’re going to love this …) Sixty dollars! He must have heard my mathematical wheels squeaking through the phone because he made a quick adjustment: $50, free delivery.

Well, $4.16 a bottle is still steep. But addiction is addiction, and delivery is delivery, so I made the deal, and now won’t have to worry about hot sauce for a long, long time, fuck Floyd. Fuck Fred.

———————

My new favorite restaurant is Moki’s in Bernal Heights, because Sockywonk picked up the check. Great sushi, but the chicken coconut curry soup (which we expected to be something like Thai tom ka gai), didn’t have no chickens in it. Nor even the flavor of chickens. Fuck Moki.

MOKI’S SUSHI & PACIFIC GRILL

Sun.–Thurs., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m.

615 Cortland, SF

(415) 970-9336

Beer & wine

AE/D/MC/V

Waxing fried

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I got a Brazilian. I play on a Brazilian soccer team. I pass for Brazilian. I pass to Brazilians. I figured, what the fuck, I’ll get a Brazilian.

My Canadian likes it like that. I happened to know this, and did it for him. That way, in case we become a couple and have a fight some day and he says, "What did you ever do for me?" I’ll say, "I got my ass waxed in the middle of winter," and, argument over, we’ll live happily ever after.

Why I don’t write restaurant reviews is illustrated by the following little story:

I ate at my always favorite restaurant, Just For You, three times in 10 days, and two of those times I ordered the hangtown fry. If you don’t know what a hangtown fry is … I feel so sorry for you that my eyes are watering.

My mouth is watering too, because what it is, see, is eggs with onions, oysters, and bacon. Or: everything that makes life lovable, give or take butter. And there’s always plenty of that on the table at my always favorite restaurant.

Just to be clear: this is not a review of Just For You. I already reviewed it eight or nine times. It’s my last-standing always favorite restaurant. This is just a story (true) that has a moral (iffy), and happens to be set at a particular place. In Dogpatch. San Francisco. California.

The hangtown fry’s creation myths center around Placerville, which used to be called Hangtown, and/or San Francisco, which used to be called San Francisco, during the gold rush. Miner walks into a bar, says, no joke, he struck it rich, what’s the most expensive meal they can make him? Cook invents the hangtown fry ($6) on the spot.

Six dollars!!! In the middle of the 19th century!! Do you see my point? Inflation be damned, 160 years later you can get the same damn thing for breakfast at Just For You for just four dollars more!

But that’s not my point. My point is that, if you ask me, the oysters should be breaded and fried — not because that’s the more authentic way to make the dish (although it might be, for all I know), but because it tastes better this way. Trust me. That’s how they made it on Friday. And if I were a restaurant reviewer I would have written, Ohmigod! Ohmigod! Ohmigod! I mean what else can you say about fried oysters and bacon on the same plate? With eggs and onions.

Cornbread …

And then when I went back on Wednesday, with Earl Butter, and ordered the hangtown fry again, the oysters were not at all breaded or fried and the dish was, like, yeah, whatever.

Don’t get me wrong, I love raw oysters. There is no oyster better than a raw oyster. But these wasn’t raw oysters. They were knocked out of a jar (I’m guessing) and cooked into some eggs. And there’s a world of difference between a not-raw jar-knocked oyster breaded and fried, and a not-raw jar-knocked oyster just knocked and notted and cooked into eggs, bacon notwithstanding.

Tell you what, I have never been madder at my always favorite restaurant than I was that Wednesday morning, Earl Butter as my witness. I was madder at them than they used to be at me 10 years ago for trying to keep the place a secret.

Which goes to show you that, in the words of Shakespeare, you never can tell, and therefore shouldn’t write restaurant reviews. You should get a Brazilian.

And a Canadian who appreciates Brazilians.

On exotic-bodied chicken farmers.

If you’re me.

My new favorite restaurant is Bombay. Indian. Only I’m madder at them than at Just For You. It was classic: small white girl orders something hot hot hot, and a knows-better waiterperson goes, "Oh, no no no, that’s already the spiciest dish on our menu." He talks her into medium, and the spiciest dish on their menu turns out to be as spicy as a bowl of corn flakes. Been in a bad mood ever since.

BOMBAY INDIAN RESTAURANT

Daily: Lunch, 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.; Dinner, 5 p.m.–10:30 p.m.

2217 Market, SF

(415) 861-6655

Beer & wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

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

Sticky buns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And did.

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

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

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

SUSHI MAN

Daily: 5 p.m.–10:30 p.m.

731 Bush, SF

(415) 981-1313

Beer & wine

MC/V

Meatballs

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

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

I use a towel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEE HOU

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

332 Clement, SF

(415) 668-8070

Beer and wine

MC/V

F-ing hippies

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

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

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

The daughter scares me. She’s three.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———-

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

GIOIA PIZZERIA

1586 Hopkins, Berk.

(510) 528-4692

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

No alcohol

MC/V

Can have

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How stylin’ am I?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My new blue beautiful car = can have.

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


—————————————-

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

HOMETOWN DONUTS #7

2315A Cutting, Richmond

(510) 237-2652

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

No alcohol

Cash only

Brilliant ideas

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————————

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

DEMPSEY’S RESTAURANT & BREWERY

Sun.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–9 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

50 E. Washington, Petaluma

(707) 765-9694

Full bar

AE/D/MC/V

Nostalgia

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

What I love about Canada …

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe next week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ZABB

Wed.–Mon., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

4440 Mission, SF

(415) 586-2455

Beer & wine

Bottom biscuits

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me have my fantasies!

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

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

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

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

Which I was. Alice Shaw, everybody!

——————————-

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

YUMMIE

Daily, 10:30 a.m.–8:30 p.m.

4104 MacArthur, Oakl.

(510) 482-1648

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Hope blows

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PATXI’S

Tues.–Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

511 Hayes, SF

(415) 558-9991

Beer & wine

AE/MC/V

Smoke signals

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Outside smoking," she says.

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

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

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

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

———————————–

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

LITTLE JOE’S

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

5006 Mission, SF

(415) 333-3684/5/6

Beer & wine

MC/V

Drama queen

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

Mystique is good.

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

I am prone to mouth ulcers. Hmm …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never mind.

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

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

HAPPY GARDEN

4112 MacArthur, Oakl.

(510) 482-3988

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

Beer and wine

MC/V

Daddy’s girl

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—————————-

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

GUERILLA CAFÉ

1620 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 845-2233

Tue.–Fri., 7 a.m.–6 p.m.

Sat.–Sun., 8 a.m.–6 p.m.

No alcohol

MC/V

Sex and salad

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0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

Tats means tattoos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————————-

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

SAIGON CUISINE

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

320 W. Third St., Santa Rosa

(707) 528-8807

Beer & wine

MC/V

Identity crisis

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0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

Kind of like mine.

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

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

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

Which …

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

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

And you say, "Duh."

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

—————————————————————————————–

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

LA VILLA TAQUERIA

2434 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley

510-843-0112

Daily: 7 a.m.–8 p.m.

No alcohol

MC/V

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