L.E. Leone

Change of heart

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CALAFIA TAQUERIA

1445 Webster, Alameda

(510) 522-2996

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

Beer

MC/V

Skunked

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

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

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

Either way, not a cheerful scenario.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trying to get it back.

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

FRUITFUL GROUNDS

1813 Fulton, SF

(415) 221-1876

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

Beer and wine

Cash only

The drop

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

"Good night, Jolly Boy," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not saying I’m smart.

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

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

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

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

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

DRAGON ROUGE

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

2304 Encinal, Alameda

(510) 521-1800

Beer, wine, sake

MC/V

Duck me, I’m sick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ask for extra hot sauce."

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

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

BAI SOM

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

2121 Clement, SF

(415) 751-5332

Beer, wine

MC/V

Snowed

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

"It’s going to snow," I said.

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

Except sometimes it does.

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

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

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

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

"Why?" Dreadlocks asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s complicated economics.

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

METRO KATHMANDU

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

311 Divisadero, SF

(415) 552-0903

Beer, wine, cocktails

MC/V

Platforms

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

"What time should I be there?"

"How soon can you be here?"

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

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

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

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

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

I could.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CITRUS CLUB

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

1790 Haight, SF

(415) 387-6366

Takeout available

Beer, wine, sake, and specialties

MC/V

The thaw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TOOMIE’S THAI CUISINE

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

1433 Park, Alameda

(510) 865-8008

AE/MC/V

Beer/wine

Good luck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why are you laughing?" Boomer asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don’t know," he said.

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

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

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

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

——————————————————————–

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

TAQUERIA REINA’S

Daily, 9 a.m.–11:45 p.m.

5300 Mission, SF

(415) 585-8243

Takeout available

Beer

Free range

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

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

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

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

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

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

You do the math.

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

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

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

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

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

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

HAPPY HOUSE KOREAN BBQ

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

1560 Fillmore, SF

(415) 440-1990

Takeout available

Beer/sake

MC/V

Pork opera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A typical phone conversation between us goes like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAMA’S ROYAL CAFÉ

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

4012 Broadway, Oakl.

(510) 547-7600

Takeout available

Beer/wine

Cash only

Chopped liver

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CHEAP EATS What I like about technology is iTunes, because you can do a search for songs about rivers. It’s coming up on Christmas. People are cutting down trees, putting up reindeer, singing songs of joy and peace. I wish I had a river I could skate away on.

This week’s column will attempt to answer the oft-asked and seldom fully explored question, "What am I? Chopped liver?"

There’s an easy answer. That’s why the question’s seldom fully explored. But you know and I know that easy answers don’t tend to be any righter than convoluted ones. Plus, they’re not nearly as fun. So let’s put on a pot of coffee and our thinking caps and work this one out. Shall we?

Speaking of breaking it down, thank you for riding in the nervous breakdown lane with me last week. Like a lot of other people and Joni Mitchell, I don’t do too well during the holidays. Not anymore. I think it’s because I have friends and parties and now even dates and shit, so I get desperately nostalgic for the happy days when I would spend Christmas camping out by myself in the desert, or holing up in Idaho with Mr. and Mrs. Johnny "Jack" Poetry and some llamas.

Now, alas, I am popular and neurotic. I was at an art opening at this sex club, on my hands and knees on the floor … cleaning up the wine I’d just spilled all over my pretty dress and everything, when I overheard the following from somewhere up and over me, where heads were:

"Are you ready for your Hanukkah party?"

"I can’t find anyone to make the chopped liver. Nobody knows how to make chopped liver. Do you know how to make chopped liver?"

"No."

I jumped to my feet and located the owners of the voices. "I don’t know how to make chopped liver either!" I said. "But I love liver and would like to learn!"

Luckily I knew the conversationalists. They were friends of a friend and had no choice now but to invite me to their Hanukkah party. Didn’t I tell you I was popular?

The art show was on a Saturday, and the Hanukkah party was on Wednesday, so I had four days to learn how to make a dish that I had not only never made but also never eaten. I’d never even seen it. I’m not Jewish. I started calling all of my Jewish friends and exes and asking them who makes the best chopped liver. And, being good Jews, they all said the same exact thing: their mother.

The Liver Lady, the only one I know who loves liver more than I do, gave me the general idea: chopped-up chicken livers, some chicken fat, chopped-up onions, and hard-boiled eggs, also chopped. She would have been more exact, she said, but her mom was out of town.

I e-mailed Crawdad de la Cooter’s mom, my favorite ever ex-mother-in-law and kitchen comrade and, according to Crawdad, the best chopped-liver maker in the world. She sent a recipe, but I didn’t exactly follow it, even though it called for enormous amounts of butter. I figured if I was going to impress the Jews — which is, after all, my ultimate goal in life — I was eventually going to have to learn to make schmaltz.

Now, schmaltz … schmaltz is a beautiful thing. Especially considering what a goofy word it is. What you do is, you cut all the fat and skin off a chicken, throw it in a frying pan with some onions, and render the bejesus out of it. What you wind up with is not bacon grease, but it’s up there. Bacon fat, butter, schmaltz. I fried the chopped onions in it, broiled the chicken livers, boiled the eggs, and then brought everything together and chopped it some more.

So that’s chopped liver. As for the rest of the question, the "What am I?" … Um, the punctuation? The mark at the end of the question, the dot dot dot. Period. Pause. Your huckleberry friend?

Oh, and the chopped liver, yes. The host said it was the best he’d ever had. Out of respect for his mother, I won’t print his name.

My new favorite restaurant is Pho 84. Its hot and sour soup not only is the hottest hot and sour soup going but also has — get this — okra in it. Swimming with the shrimps and celery and pineapple and tomato. Only thing: try getting out of there for $10 or under. Definitely a date place. *

PHO 84

Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5–9 p.m.; Sat., noon–9 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.

354 17th St., Oakl.

(510) 832-1338

Takeout available

Beer/wine

AE/MC/V

Antidepressants

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CHEAP EATS In the morning I dropped him off at the bus stop and he jumped out of the car, a big meeting at nine. Work. I smiled and waved through the window, blew him a kiss that I don’t think he saw, and pulled away.

Went to Crawdad de la Cooter’s to see her baby and her, but they were on their way out the door. Inside, her man was in bed sick. I should have stayed and made him soup, or something. We talked a little through the door, and I got back in my car and went.

Stopped at my favorite dumpster for firewood, and the gate was closed. I lingered, looking through the chain-linkage at an inviting overflow of sawed-off two-by-fours and scrapped corner cuts, all with everyone-else-in-the-world’s name on them, not mine.

It was a long drive home. And cold. Oh, the sky was sunny and brilliant, but all that was, like everything else in life, on the other side of my windshield. I turned the heater on and my chest tightened. My breathing became irregular. Goddamn, I hate these little heart attacks. I turned the heater off and rolled down my window.

At the Ping-Pong table in my mind, nothing and Nothing were duking it out, and no one was winning. I was dripping sweat, gritting my teeth, stomping and grunting, darting and lunging. Takes me an hour and a half to get home to the woods. That’s a lot of Ping-Pong. Final score: 0-0. I made a mental note to call my therapist.

Inside my shack it was in the mid-40s. I resisted the temptation to go to bed. Let me rephrase that: I went to bed, but first I got a fire going and only slept for a couple hours. Then, instead of my therapist, I called the feed store. It’s not the next best thing; it’s better. I may be hopelessly hopeless, useless, clueless, and gutless, but I’d be damned if I was going to stay chickenless.

"Got pullets?" I said. And for the first time in six weeks they said yep. So I called Mountain Sam’l. "Mister," I said, "your chickenless chicken farmer is about to be chickenful."

We met down at Western Farm, and after, while the new girls peeped and pooped on my passenger seat, we stopped for my favorite antidepressant, duck soup.

What friends are for: Sam’l talked to me, long after our noodles were all slurped up, and, with poetic patience and kind, country eyes, he reminded me How To Be Crazy. That’s golden. It’s practical, realistic information, especially compared with How Not To Be Crazy. And after way more than an hour, he not only didn’t charge me $60 or even $25 but even insisted on picking up the check.

Next day we went for a hike. He showed me some things you can eat, like cattail root, acorns for mush, and madrone bark for tea. Mountain Veronica made a pot roast and we watched A Beautiful Mind.

The chickens were not still in my car. They were digging their new digs in the redwoods — redecorating, unpacking: you know, settling in. On Sunday I drove down to the city, played three consecutive soccer games for three different teams, then, lunch-breaking only for a slice of pizza and a glass of water, I went and played baseball. Caught four innings, pitched three, and never knew the score, but it was a nine-to-five sports day. Imagine my soreness.

I could barely shift gears on my way back to the Mountains’ for salmon, mashed potatoes, and green beans. When I hit their hot tub at 11 that night, the cure was complete. But Mountain Veronica, ever the big sister, wouldn’t let me drive home.

In the morning, Monday morning, I would go to work: I would sing to and sit with my chickens. Help them paint. I would cook them a coop-warming corn bread with the buggy cornmeal and stinky flour I’d been saving. Welcome home!

And this, from Mr. and Mrs. Mountains: me! — your new, improved chicken farmer, and a can of worms.

My new favorite restaurant is Pizza Orgasmica, not because their thin slices are as good as you can get here in Not–New York. No. Because I play on their soccer team, and that must mean they bought our uniforms. The butts of our shorts say: "We Never Fake It." And we don’t, but we tend to lose anyway. The pizza’s good, though.

PIZZA ORGASMICA

Mon.–Wed. and Sun., 11 a.m.–midnight; Thurs., 11 a.m.–2 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–2:30 a.m.

3157 Fillmore (at Greenwich), SF

(415) 931-5300

Takeout available

Beer

AE/MC/V

Dirty girl

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CHEAP EATS I washed the dishes. Put my clothes away. Emptied the compost. I let the fire go out and sat on top of the wood stove in my underwear. The phone rang: how was my weekend?

Let me think about it, I said. I said there was blood on my bed, every single thing smelled like smoke, my eyes burned, I hadn’t shat since Thursday, and my cat was lucky to be alive. Me too, but for a whole different reason. In short, it was my new favorite weekend ever, I said. Yours?

What reason?

Because I care. You said, "How was your weekend?" I say, "Fine, thank you, yours?"

No. I mean why are you lucky to be alive — compared to why the cat is.

Life is good, I said. We have fun, we make a mess, we clean it up, we listen to music. And the mess keeps creeping back in and we keep cleaning it up. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Yes I would, because eventually, I’m told, it wins. It dirties us.

Are you in love, or just weird?

Lost signal. What I was was dirty, so I took a bath. I thought about scrubbing the smoke damage off of my walls with a sponge. I thought about the look that cats get in their litter boxes, the glazed place that they go, at once so far away and yet never more at home.

We can get there too! Weed’s too easy. Try hot sauce. Try three years of almost nothing followed by three days of almost-nothing-but.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. The Mountains hosted and I, the Woods, cooked. Our guests were Cities. Smoked turkey, sausage-and-cornbread-and-biscuit stuffing–stuffed red peppers, mustard greens, apple sauce, cranberry relish, cranberry sauce, and an apple pie.

Everything had meat in it. I had asked 10 times if any of the Cities were vegetarian, and the Mountains had said no (no no no no no no).

There was a vegetarian. For me, the novice cooker and enthusiast-at-large, all will and no clue, this was a dream come true. A last-minute vegetarian at my meatfest, like a drowning kid to a teenage lifeguard, and the boy she’s liked all summer is watching…. Splash!

I looked at Mookie, the Brick, my Chief Number One (and only) Assistant, who I was going to go home with but nobody knew that yet, and I smiled.

He looked neutral. Maybe he was tired of taking orders, chopping this, grating that … everything else was in the oven. And on the grill, chilling in the fridge, or simmering on back burners, waiting for the bell. This was supposed to be Miller Time, not a cross between Baywatch and Iron Chef.

Now the Mountains, as you know, are two of my favorite people ever, even though — or maybe partly because — neither one of them likes to cook. But they both love to eat, so I get to express my devotion, my gratitude, my love, my little sisterhood, my best-friendship, and my unwavering appetite with trays of homemade-noodled lasagna and huge pots of gumbo. If I wasn’t there, they would have had Stove-Top stuffing with their store-cooked turkey.

One of the guests brought Rice-A-Roni. I’m not a snob. While Mookie cored two more peppers, I got that going and scoured their refrigerator for doctorings (carrots, asparagus, a tomato, fake sausage links, and leftover chickpeas). We stuffed the peppers with the San Francisco treat, mixed with all of the above, and put them on the grill with the others. Main course: mushroom burgers. And I had not figured out a way to get bacon into the cranberry things, so he could have that too.

Well, the vegetarian looked about as happy as anyone else at the table. "Hey Mookie! He likes it!" But this was supposed to be a poem, and it had turned into bad television.

For almost all of November I’d been trying to write a song about being a dirty girl on the low road. Which wasn’t working, probably because I’m too fucking angelic. In the bathtub on Monday morning or whatever the hell it was, I gave up on writing the song and just started singing it.

The phone rang. From the tub I could hear the same cellular voice screaming into my answering machine: Who was he?

My new favorite restaurant is El Delfin, mostly for the guacamole. It has some interesting main dishes too, with a recurring natural disaster theme, like "Salmon Tornado" and "Volcan en Molcajete" — which is beef, sausage, cactus, onion, cheese, and red sauce, all a-sizzle. And not as good as it sounds.

Also not particularly cheap, most dishes at or over $10.

But the guac! … *

EL DELFIN

Wed.–Mon., 9 a.m.–9 p.m.

3066 24th St., SF

(415) 643-7955

Take-out available

The importance of inches

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CHEAP EATS I’m gettin’ some. Don’t worry. But a couple of months ago I was singing the blues to a trans woman friend who is a lesbian. I sang a verse about how no boys would go out with me, and she said, in effect, that she wouldn’t go out with me either.

This was discouraging. Not that I had any idea in the world of dating this woman, or vice versa. And not that she meant to be mean. On the contrary, she was sincerely, simply trying to help me understand a thing.

"Look, I’m into women," she said, "and I don’t know if I would date a trans woman." Why? "Because," she said, and she started to choose her words very carefully. I don’t think she liked saying what she was saying any more than I liked hearing it. "What I love about women is … they’re soft. Delicate. Fragile …"

Soft. Delicate. Fragile.

I’m those things! I swear! I’m soft. I’m delicate. I’m fragile. And I encourage you, dear reader, while those three words echo and retreat in the background — soft (soft soft), delicate (delicate delicate), fragile (fragile fragile) — to envision a montage of Your Chicken Farmer Truly holding a bird down on a stump and swinging the hatchet (soft), shoveling shit (delicate), flying through the air drenched in soccer sweat (fragile), skinning knees, muddying socks, playing tackle football, swinging from trees, chopping wood, climbing in and out of Dumpsters, slam-dancing to punk rock, hammering oil drums into musical instruments, and just generally kicking this world’s ass.

Now … there are two things I crave and have always craved even more than sucked-clean chicken bones or sex. In no particular order: athletic glory and to be female.

I never once wanted to be taller. I was the third-smallest boy in my class, and I envied the first-smallest. I was cut from my high school baseball team; reason given: "too short." But I never in my life, wanted to be taller than I was, ever. When I got my first female driver’s license, I lied about my height, not weight. I said five-six instead of five-seven.

So I play on this Brazilian soccer team. I can’t speak Portuguese, but I pass for Brazilian. I love playing with this team because they’re good. The guys, the girls, they know how to pass the ball and where to be when. I am the weak link. Only three women showed up on Sunday, so I got to play the whole game. I got to play forward, which I never do.

We were playing the best team in the league, and I was open the whole first half, but they would not pass me the ball. We were winning 3–1 at halftime. In the second half we were losing 4-3, then tied, then down 5–4 with time running out.

We’re Brazilian, but old. I’m 44, and I was not so open in the second half as in the first. However, in the final minute of the game, down by one, we had the ball and we had a shot. Our guy crossed it in front of their goal, and it sailed over the head of one of our best players, who was making a brilliant run up the center. I didn’t realize until the last second that I was sneaking in, uncovered, behind the pass’s likely intended target, toward the far post. I tried to time it just so, and I leaped for all I was worth, wishing for the first time that I was just one inch taller, as the ball skimmed the very top of my head, parted my hair down the middle, and is still rolling, as far as I know.

The whistle blew, and I clunked off the field with my head in my hands, knowing that any other player on the team would have made that goal. Hell, if I’d put five-seven on my driver’s license, I’d have made it.

I once asked a straight male friend about a straight male friend of his. "Oh, he’s single," I was told, "but there’s no way he’d go out with a dude." I pointed out that I wasn’t, technically speaking, a dude. (Which of course my friend already knew.)

He said, and I quote, "Yeah, but, you know …"

Oh, that.

So, OK. Yes, so … whence will my moment come, this athletic glory, this (soft, delicate, fragile) femalehood? I am one inch short and, oddly enough, two and a half inches long.
———————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Lilly’s on Divis. Don’t let them talk you out of the hot sauce (it’s not that hot) or into the chicken (it’s not that great). The pork ribs, though! Great atmosphere: as in, no atmosphere. Just you and your meat and Wonderbread and the smell of smoke. Most people get it to go. Oh, and there’s a parking lot. You know the corner.

LILLY’S BARBECUE

Daily, 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

705 Divisadero, SF

(415) 440-7427

Takeout available

MC/V

A certain way

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Georgie Bundle came creaking into my shack in the middle of the night. Weirdo the Cat wigged a little and went under the bed. I rolled over. The refrigerator snored. Georgie Bundle stood his stand-up bass in the doorway and wound down on the floor without any lights on.

In the morning I stepped over him and put the coffee on. I started a fire. There was an apple pie, and there were leftover ribs I’d slow-smoked for dinner the night before. Oh, and there was applesauce, of course, with bacon in it. Starting to sound like breakfast?

Wake up, Georgie Bundle. Wake up and smell the barbecue.

I never lock my door. It’s the woods! I’m a chicken farmer! Visitors are rare, but always welcome. It was Bundle’s idea to put the ribs on the pie, like ice cream.

"Georgie Boy," I said half a bite later, my mouth full, my eyes bugging, "you are a genius."

He hemmed and chawed, blushed a little, and said, "No, no, no," but I tell you, world, this was a chicken-and-waffle moment. The smoky sauce (borrowed from Big Nate), the juicy meat, the flaky, buttery crust, the sweet, gooey apples … it was a taste sensation that will likely color — or flavor, I should say — the rest of my apple pie–eating life.

Yours too, if you let it. Don’t be afraid. Look, open your eyes. It’s walking distance to pork chops and apple sauce, with pastry crust for biscuits. It’s almost classic. I, for one, will not be able to eat apple pie now without smothering it in barbecue, or at least wanting to. Just like I crave fried chicken instead of blueberries on my waffle and buttered, syrupy waffles under my fried chicken.

End of story. Bing. I take back everything I ever said about anything. I love applesauce, I love apple pie, and Mitsuhiro is wild about burritos.

He’s the Japanese tourist whom I met on the train and then helped find his way around Chicago. I made a phone call, drew a map, walked him to the El, and pointed him north. It was nothing, really — I had a five-hour layover there. But to him this was tantamount to saving his life. Come to think of it, he might be right.

Anyway, we’d already agreed that when he came back West we’d go eat. I’m a slow thinker and a patient listener, and this makes me popular with non-English-speaking people in general. I’m also a one-track conversationalist. After hours and hours of broken sentences, backyard sign language, and bee dances, I had gleaned that Mitsuhiro, in one week in San Francisco, had only eaten Chinese food.

I gave him my phone number and e-mail address and tried to think how to say he was "in good hands" without potentially transutf8g that into Japanese as "I want to blow you." Even though, of course, I did.

"Mexican food," I said, starting safe. "Vietnamese food. Caribbean food. Indian food. I love to eat. I will show you."

His mind stopped working at Mexican, I guess, because a couple of weeks later he e-mailed on his way back across the country and said, "Next Sunday date 11 I am free. I would try Mexican food."

We ate burritos, then drank at the only Mission District bar that was open at 5:55 p.m. on Sunday, date 11: the Make-Out Room. I didn’t know there was going to be music. At first we were the only ones there. Three pints later I started to realize that I, your chicken farmer truly, to whom every single thing is "a date," was on a date … a date date. I know because he kept saying sweet things and, more to the point, wouldn’t let me pay for anything. And right around that time, all of my friends in the world started moseying into the bar. There was Kid Coyote with a guitar, the Old Sack on drums. Here come the Mountains, Gator-Gator, Jolly Boy, Earl Butter. And nobody’s seen me for weeks, so there’s considerable hugging and hooting, and I tried to introduce Mitsuhiro in a certain way. But.

I can only imagine his confusion. I think he thought I was one of those kinds of women, or else maybe he realized finally that I was exactly the kind that I am.

In any case, the mood changed. He started looking at his watch a lot, then had to go. Back to Okinawa, and there is a song in that, yes, but it’s already been written. *

Praise the lard

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By L.E. Leone


› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS The problem is, I don’t like applesauce. The solution is to start liking applesauce. There is no other way, given the ridiculous bounty of Sonoma County’s apple harvest this year, plus the clanking, cavernous, empty chill I feel every time I open my checkbook.

I have two apple trees in my chicken yard. Since I wandered and roamed all summer and most of the fall, missing blackberries, missing peaches, missing the pears I poach from a tree down the street and the grapes I borrow from all of the vineyards around here, I am especially determined to use my millions and millions of apples — even the ones that have already fallen and have worms swizzle-sticking out of them since there ain’t no chickens yet to see to this.

I don’t like apple cider. I don’t like apple juice. Apple pie is not my favorite kind of pie. I mean, I eat applesauce, but it’s not a thing to get all excited about, like beet greens or getting to ride up front.

What I do like is apples — crunchy, juicy, crisp, ripe apples. In my hand, while I’m sitting in the tree, under it, or on a ladder. So I eat what I can, and I hand apples to people, like on the train. Or at Sockywonk’s art opening, when I went around the room and handed everyone an apple from my tree.

There’s something sexy about handing someone an apple.

I’m not religious, but sometimes a crazy-ass Bible story can point to something worth something in real life too, like how Jesus turned water into wine, and the next thing you know the French are making French toast out of stale bread. I myself have turned cream into butter, and my brother hammered spigots into trees and turned goo into maple syrup.

Voilà: breakfast!

To hand someone an apple is to say, Take a walk on the wild side!

Whereas there’s nothing at all sexy about applesauce. It’s baby food. It’s windfall, it’s "drop," it’s old. It’s easy to make. Just cut ’em up and cook ’em. Last year I made and canned a load of applesauce, and, so I wouldn’t have to eat it, I gave it all away. And no one made love to me. Well, that’s not true, but it was meat related. It had nothing to do with applesauce.

The year before that it was apple chutney, which didn’t go over so well with the Thanksgiving turkey. I’ve made and canned apple barbecue sauce too. It’s okay.

This year I am determined to learn to like applesauce.

Now, the number one tried-and-true all-time best way to start liking a thing that you didn’t like before, everybody knows, is to put bacon in it. I looked online, but none of the applesauce recipes had bacon in them. Cinnamon. Sugar. One said honey, but the closest any of them came to bacon was butter. I didn’t look real close. Anyway, the lesson of Jesus is to not use recipes. I shut down my computer and galloped into town to buy me some bacon.

My mother wonders if the serpent that spoke to Eve in the Bible story was perhaps actually honey, oozing out of a hive and slithering down the tree of life. Never mind that honey is even less likely to learn a language than snakes are — my mother has been wondering this now, she admitted to me recently, for at least 30 years.

I think she’s brilliant. And persistent. Yet flexible. Thirty years ago, for example, she was keeping bees and eating honey instead of sugar. Honey was good for you. Now it’s the root of all evil.

I never liked honey, and I found out recently that neither does Ruth Reichl, and neither did M.F.K. Fisher. So that’s my literary mom and grandma (they shudder and turn over, respectively, at the thought) and now my mom-mom too. My grandma-grandma couldn’t care less, being dead, but I come from a tradition of honey hating, apparently, and not even bacon is going to change that.

As for applesauce …

If there is in fact a root of all evil, I would like to find out what exactly it is and learn to cultivate and cook with it, like carrots, potatoes, beets.

If there is a root of all good, it’s bacon fat. I cooked the apples in it, slow and long, over the wood stove. Sprinkle of water. Speck of cinnamon. When finally I had what seemed like applesauce, I crumbled the bacon back into it, and now, praise the lard, guess who just loves applesauce?

Preservation

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS On my last night at my mom’s house, Jean Gene the Frenchman brought over a pile of greens from the garden where my sisters live. It was starting to get dark, so I had to wash and chop in a hurry. No electricity. What once was a hard-working, law-abiding kitchen sink is surrounded by white buckets and rust-tinted glass jars of water.

I didn’t ask where the water came from, just poured a couple of cups into a bowl and washed 10 pounds of greens in it, concocting a brackish sort of health food soup for chickens: all bugs and grit.

While I was working, Uncle Sonny and Cher, my mom’s brother, came over to talk about property. In question: 12 acres of swampy scrubland and prickly woods outside Youngstown, Ohio, the poorest place in America (small-city size and up). The property is worth about 85¢. My uncle uses it for hunting deer and harvesting mushrooms.

He bow-hunts — hasn’t killed anything there for years — but the land is important to him. It’s important to my mom because she lives on it. There’s another brother and another sister. Like me, they all grew up there and have strange, dreamy connections to the weeds and ditches, the crippled trees, the smell of mud puddles, and 85¢ worth of security. My guess is that they are going to need lawyers to sort it out.

"Papa said never sell the property," my mom assures or reassures her brother. "As long as you have the property," she says my grandpa said, "you will never starve."

The night before, for dinner, we ate dandelion greens and chicory. For dessert: purple-tipped clover — sweet but calorically wanting. After, I found some old popcorn in a closet, popped it in olive oil over a propane stove in the garage, and ate it at the wood stove, in the dark. My mom wouldn’t have any, on account of salt. Oh, and oil.

It’s very quiet at night. You don’t even hear frogs or crickets, let alone refrigerators, and I slept like a baby in the bed in the living room, which Grandma had just died in. After three nights on a train, sitting up, I was going to sleep no matter what, but my mom, on the couch, lullabied me with a soft, hypnotically cadenced lecture on the health risks of synthetic estrogen. In a nutshell, I was going to die. Blood clots, breast cancer, liver disease … somewhere between a stroke and a heart attack, I lost consciousness. My dreams were untroubled.

Woke up to my mom’s voice complaining to a local politician over the phone about I forget which chemical in the water. Then I knew that she was going to be OK.

Aunt Sonny and Cher, Uncle Sonny and Cher informed me later that day, is jealous of my hair. I took the greens out to the garage and sautéed them in olive oil with garlic, onions, and hot peppers. I found two dusty bottles of homemade wine, one half empty, the other half full, both long turned to something beyond vinegar. I figured this would either preserve my room-temperature greens for three more days on the train or kill me immediately.

If there is one thing that I would like this column to accomplish, it is to dispel the myth that there is anything to eat on trains. Where did this rumor get started? Johnny Cash? ("I bet there’s rich folks eating in them fancy dining cars / Prob’ly drinking coffee and smoking big cigars.")

Well sir, while Amtrak might be one notch above the airlines, eats-wise, it’s many, many notches below your neighborhood greasy spoon. The burger, whether you get it from the lounge car snack counter or sit-down style in the dining car, starts out frozen. Pizza’s limp and lame. Even the grilled-chicken Caesar salad is prepackaged. Why? They have refrigeration.

I did not have a cooler. Without beef jerky and a bag of apples I would have perished on the way out. For the way back I had this 32-ounce container of preserved greens to keep me alive and, ur, regular. They tasted great until day three, until now. Reno just came into view. It’s lunchtime, and I’m afraid of my greens.

Last night, for the sake of argument, I had a half-chicken dinner in the dining car ($12.50). It sucked. Still, I highly recommend train travel. West of Denver the scenery is spectacular. And you meet people.

Guys are hitting on me, for example. Two guys, currently. One drinks beer for breakfast, and the other is wanted in New Jersey. "Nothing serious," he assures me.

I believe him and am charmed.

Butterflies

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS In the picture she is wearing a loose white gown, and her hair is white, and so are her eyebrows. In one hand, in her lap, she is clutching a white handkerchief, and upon the middle finger of her other hand, a monarch butterfly has landed. My grandmother is holding this butterfly to her puckered lips, as if to kiss it.

We didn’t want her to have a heart attack, so I would wear jeans and a loose T-shirt and put my hair in a pony tail. What we talked about was chickens. On the phone, in person … chickens. I considered naming myself after her. I did name one of my chickens after her. But I never "came out" to my Grandma Rubino.

I was thinking about this the other day in a Dumpster.

You do know I’m a Dumpster diva, right? And I say diva not because I tend to be more elegantly dressed than most of my fellow divers — although I do, to the amusement of many a construction worker — but because I tend to sing while I work. If I’m not wrangling out the words to one of my own original, lighthearted compositions, such as "The Absolute Nothing Blues," "I’m Pretty Scared Right Now," or "Agent of Entropy," then I’m mimicking something I halfway remember and in no way understand from Madame Butterfly.

Io credo a lasagna / E la grande soil / Senza chili con carne piangere taaaaaannnnnnto!!! . . . for example. I belt it out.

My new car, by the way, is a pickup truck. I know this to be true, even though it’s shaped like a station wagon, because I have already hauled a load of scrap wood and a lot of garbage in it. I drove it to West Oakland and then took a train to Pittsburgh, Pa. Moonpie was getting married.

She’s my oldest friend in the whole wide world, and a lot of my other oldest friends in the whole wide world would be there, including Shortribs, Bikkets, and Nada. Haywire, who lives in Pittsburgh, was out of town.

It was probably the best-written wedding ever, full of poetry and poets, and held on the top floor of a downtown artist’s studio. Me and Bikkets made the music, on steel drum and violin. The cat who married them was the most qualified marrier I ever heard of: not a minister, nor a priest, nor a justice of the peace, nor a ship’s captain, but a poet. The families just had to deal. And did, quite nicely.

I wear hand-me-downs and shop, if I shop, at thrift stores. I don’t know about fashion, or etiquette, so I called Moonpie a week ago or so, while I was still in the woods, packing, for permission.

"Moonpie," I said, "can I wear all black to your wedding?"

This was before I knew I’d be attending a funeral as well. I didn’t find that out until I was already on the train.

"Whatever makes you feel beautiful," Moonpie said.

Nor did I know that Bikkets would wear all black, and the three writers who read things. Even the Poet of the Peace: all black, even his tie. The bride wore whatever. It didn’t matter. Against a night sky like us, the Moon was going to shine.

After the wedding, after the reception, me and cousin Choo-Choo went to Moonpie’s new house, where we were staying with Nada and Shortribs. Moonpie and her man were off somewhere, so I got to sleep in their bed.

More important, I got to raid their refrigerator. The night before there had been a calzone and pizza party, and all I could think about before, during, and after the wedding dinner, was midnight snacking on last night’s leftovers. There had been a particularly excellent hot sausage calzone, which was for some reason not popular.

I knew there was a lot left, and I scoured their refrigerator but couldn’t find it. Shortribs and Nada had slept there the night before too. I asked and Nada admitted, a little sheepishly (but not sheepishly enough), that she’d thrown it all away that morning. "It sat out overnight," she said.

There was a huge Hefty garbage bag right there, and, in my wedding best, a butterfly in black, I dove in. I am my grandmother’s granddaughter. I have survived the Great Depression — and a lot of littler, not-so-great ones too. Like a lot of my family, I eat compost. I eat garbage.

I hold my grandma’s pretty picture to my own puckered lips and whisper to it. "I lied," I say.

She whispers back, "How are the chickens?"

Remantling

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I’m back in the woods! To get here I had to ask my ex-pickup truck one last favor: get me there. Here. It was the middle of the night. We were loaded down with all of my clothes and musical instruments, and I was singing (a capella, of course) that old World War II song "Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer."

Remember: my car dies every now and again for no good reason and stays dead for an hour or more at a time. First gear had been hit-or-miss for many months, then mostly miss. By the night in question it was a distant memory. But this was new: every time I turned on a turn signal the headlights went out, and I had to jiggle the doodad to get them back, in most cases before I killed any road signs or had a heart attack.

I patted my old ex-truck on the dashboard. "Come on, baby," I said. "We’re not into the woods yet."

It’s been a long time since I stopped all the way at a stop sign. Now I couldn’t signal my turns either. I’d gotten a hot dog in Petaluma, at a 7-Eleven, because nothing else was open and the last thing in the world I needed was to be pulled over by the cops on an empty stomach.

Before you get to the woods there are miles and miles of farmland. Small farms. In the daytime it’s bucolically beautiful. At night you can feel the weight of your own death, as real as the smell of cow shit. Mostly the farms are dairy farms.

The roads there are what I aspire to be: dark and curvaceous. There was a hot dog in my lap. Right when I started to lose my AM radio signal I felt a chill, so I turned on the heater, and the headlights went out.

I jiggled the heater thingy, and when that didn’t work I joggled the turn signal doodad, and when that didn’t work either I slammed on the brakes. The road was there, but I sure as hell couldn’t see it. The car stopped before hitting anything, but it stalled.

Then the lights came on. I was in the breakdown lane on the wrong side of the road. There were some cows on the other side of a fence, looking at me like I was flying saucers. I turned off the headlights, turned the key in the ignition, and it started. I tried to turn on the headlights, and the headlights came on.

OK. I was going to go the rest of the way without touching a thing, except the steering wheel and the shifter. And my hot dog. It was loaded with salsa, hot peppers, and pickles, most of which wound up in my hair and skirt.

If I’d known that my subletter had left behind a can of chili and a can of beans, I’d have saved the hot dog too for later. Of course, if I’d known that he’d also left behind three months plus of dirty dishes, a lot of little red beard hairs in the bathroom sink, and a good, thick carpeting of garbage across the wood floor of my shack, I’d have turned around and gone back to the city and put off my homecoming, or shackcoming, for another week or month. Or whatever, just so it was daytime when I arrived.

I told you I was dismantled. Well, I’m remantling. First things first: I made it back into the woods. For the first time since the end of June, I was home. There was the hammock, the bathtub, the chicken coop. The mess.

Second thing second, late afternoon the next day, while I was scrubbing and painting and vacuuming and scraping, Mountain Sam came over in Mountain Veronica’s car and gave it to me. I use the word gave because it makes them out to be exactly as heroic and generous and beautiful as these two are, but the journalistic fact is that they bartered it to me in exchange for services to be rendered later. I have to caretake their place and yard and hot tub while they are, indefinitely, somewhere else.

Sound nebulous? It is! Especially compared to a car. A less-than-10-years-old one, at that. Which is a first for me. Working horn, headlights, everything. How often does that happen? First gear …

As if I weren’t already blown away, there was more. They threw in sandwiches. Mountain Veronica had made us sandwiches, and Mountain Sam and I sat outside my old shack, in front of my new car, eating sandwiches and drinking sweet tea out of jars. *

By any other name

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Fish chili is still chili. Everyone else was wondering or grumbling, but there was never any question in my mind. Fish chili is chili. It just is. If you call a thing a thing, then it is what it is. Ask Popeye.

It was chili because it had chiles in it, or chili powder, and because it was at a chili cook-off and, most important, because the guy who made it called it chili. We live in a free country, and even if we didn’t, fish chili would be chili.

You don’t like that, move to Texas. In Terlingua, at the famous annual "international" chili cook-off, you are not allowed to put beans in your chili. Or pasta. Or rice. Or "other similar items."

Fish? I wonder….

I love Texas-style chili. I prefer it by a mile to your average ground-beef-with-bean varieties. And I love that you can call a chili cook-off an "international" event and then disallow beans and things, pretty much eliminating all the other kinds of chili in the world except Texas-style.

Oh, but chili was invented in Texas.

Give me a break. If so, it has since migrated to New Mexico, where, in Old Mexican fashion, it’s more about the peppers than the meat or the beans or whatever they happen to flavor. Ever been to Cincinnati? Chili has. It’s cinnamony. Beans, onions, and cheese are optional; spaghetti is standard.

Not to blow its cover, but chili lives incognito in Providence, RI, home of the oddly named New York system, which basically means chili dogs slapped together in a line of buns on a guy’s arm. They don’t call it chili, but it’s ground beef with chili powder and cumin, somewhat distinctified by soy sauce, ginger, and — my personal favorite — celery seed.

Now, Oakland is not Terlingua or Cincinnati or Detroit or New York City or New York system or New Castle, Pa. — or a lot of other places, if you think about it. It’s where Joe Rut lives, in a warehouse, and I’m jealous because he gets to vote for Barbara Lee and host chili cook-offs.

I get to go. I get to vote for my favorite chili. In a field of more than 20 contestants, which included a couple of excellent pork chilies, a wild-turkey chili (dude shot the bird hisself!), and an elk and bacon one, among the many beef-and-bean, just-beef, and vegetarian entries, my hands-down, hats-off, and belly-up favorite was the fish chili I’ve been trying to tell you about. It was ridiculously delicious, well stocked with several kinds of fish and shellfish, colorful with peppers, and just all-around pretty. Plus I liked its politics, and philosophy.

My only dilemma was whether to vote for it for best meat chili or best vegetarian. Joe Rut’s chili cook-off ballot, like life, gave me only two choices, neither one quite right, and I had to find my way around that.

This time it was easy: I put number five on both lines. The fish chili was the best meat chili and the best vegetarian one. This from a pork-barbecuing chicken-farmer chick whose favorite two things to eat are raw beef and green salad.

For the record, if there had been a line on the ballot for gumbo, I’d have fived that line too. Hell, if we were voting on pancakes, I’d have voted for the fish chili. You know how sometimes a bowl or plate of food just speaks to you, and speaks your language?

Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one listening. I just got forwarded a mass-mailed e-mail from Joe Rut announcing the winners: fish chili won best meat chili. I love the world!

My guess is about a hundred people voted. Very few were wearing cowboy hats. There must have been at least probably about 150 folks there, you gotta figure, because it was a warehouse and it was crowded. There were bands. There were pies for dessert and a big fruit salad just so everyone could at least have a chance of pooping the next day.

The name of the guy who made this fish chili, also for the record, is — hold on a second — Russ Leslie … and I publish that journalistic fact right here (of all the crazy places) in the wild but sincere hope that he will read this and invite me over for leftovers. Or next time he makes a pot, I guess, because it’s been more than a week.

I miss it.

Bad tryp

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS What’s this? I have finally bumped up against something that I can’t write about. Well, maybe if I … Nope, can’t write about it. I … goddamn it! Except to say that I can’t write about it, I can’t write about it.

So you know it’s not sex, because I write about sex. At the risk of desecrating the food section, I have written about my own poo. I have written about my dates, at the risk of not being asked out again. (Which works, by the way.) I’ve written about suicide, cancer, divorce, and inside-out chickens — all the things that people don’t like to talk about.

For years have I spilled my heart, and the beans, all over your bus rides and breakfasts. While all the other clumsy people in the world were spilling coffee on their newspapers, I spilled the newspaper on your coffee. I’m like one of those reality TV shows. I’m a reality restaurant review.

Except not no more.

Christ, I’m so fucking dismantled. A chicken farmer without chickens, a witch without brew or broom, a nun without a ruler, I don’t even exactly know where I live right now. I’m in between homes, cars, bodies, and bands. Hey — now would be a good time to work on that drinking problem! I want one bad. Like an alcoholic craves a drink, I crave alcoholism, but lack the strength of character to follow through. One glass, and I lose interest. Traditionally.

On the other hand, they say that every day is the first day of the rest of your life.

With renewed resolve, I knocked on Earl Butter’s door. He had vodka. I had tomato juice. All we needed was hot sauce.

"Do you still have those Buffalo wings I left in your refrigerator?" I asked, thinking we could dip the wings, like celery sticks, into our drinks. A little butter, a little chicken grease wouldn’t hurt a Bloody Mary. In fact, someone told me that Bloody Marys have beef in them. I don’t know, people tell me a lot of things, but I sure hope this one’s true, for vegetarians’ sake.

Anyway, it was a ridiculous idea. The likelihood of Earl Butter keeping Buffalo wings in his fridge overnight is like the likelihood of me keeping a secret. It could happen, but …

He laughed.

I happened to have keys to a couple of other apartments in his building, because that’s the kind of homeless person I am. I have more keys than janitors. This way, none of my friends ever has to clean their refrigerator.

My raid yielded no leftover Buffalo wings, but yes Tapatio. That’s that Mexican hot sauce. For our purposes Earl Butter wanted Tabasco, but none of my peeps keeps Tabasco on hand, not even Earl Butter. I looked in his fridge and he had Tapatio too. Somewhere in the world I have a refrigerator of my own, and I’ll bet you $10 it has Tapatio in it. It’s just the best all-purpose hot sauce there is.

I know because I recently lined them all up at a restaurant — I forget which one — and taste-tested them on different parts of my omelet. Tapatio was the best. Then that Asian one, in the fat squeeze bottle. Then Crystal, then Tabasco.

Tabasco is best in Bloody Marys, but nobody I know has Tabasco. Big deal, so we were going to have Bloody Marias.

They were great! We made them in small glasses so I could drink more drinks. And guess what? Earl Butter didn’t have the Buffalo wings, but he did still have the celery sticks that came with them.

I ate four celery sticks and passed out on the couch.

When I woke up it was morning. For fun, I pretended to have a hangover. Everyone else in the world was going to work. I rode my bike to Sockywonk’s, and she didn’t look good, which is rare.

"No sleep," she groaned, grinding our coffee. "Two nights in a row, no sleep."

I asked what she’d had for dinner, and she said donut holes. For dessert: Ativan.

"You don’t need no Ativan," I said. "Sweetie, you need tryptophan." I went to work. I went shopping, and I came back and I cooked. I stocked her refrigerator with a week’s worth of turkey soup and ground turkey stuffed peppers.

It didn’t work. I found out later: it’s a myth, the turkey thing! The tryptophan. To work, as a soporific, you have to take it on an empty stomach. And still you believe in God?

Eating Houdini

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Gatorgator, my guest for dinner, asked to know some things about the chicken we were about to eat, so I set down my fork and started talking. It was almost like Grace. There was a very simple chicken broth with just pastina and scallions, à la Grandma Leone. And there was chicken pie, à la me. Gatorgator is vegetarian.

As you know, one of my favorite things in life is feeding meat to vegetarians. I love it when their taste buds go ding. I love it when that other thing kicks in, part yin, part yang, mostly neither, as the meat rips through their incisors. I love hearing about their hallucinations and trippy gut trips they go on after, because they don’t have any meat-digesting enzymes anymore.

Anyway, Gatorgator hasn’t been a vegetarian for very long. I used to eat meat with her all the time. Then she got fed up with hearing about chicken industry cruelty, and instead of cranking the stereo, or holding her ears and going woowoowoowoowoo, she became an ethical vegetarian. These are the ones that I prey on.

Hey, I have a happy happy chicken for you to eat, I tell them. It lived a long, soulful, free-range life and ate bugs and grass, and I sang songs to her and tried to teach her how to play the steel drum and lied down in the dirt with her, because that’s the kind of chicken farmer I am.

They say, "Huh?"

Trust me, this chicken was highly entertained, and loved, I say. It died in my hands, and by my hand, and it died quickly and it died alive, and it will probably taste like crap because it was so old and outdoorsy. But it’s not a chicken industry chicken. Want some?

Sometimes they do!

"The chicken had a name," I said to Gatorgator, in lieu of God. It was Grace. Not the chicken. This. This is Grace. The chicken’s name was Houdini. "The chicken’s name was Houdini," I said, eyes cast down. "I don’t normally name them, but this one I did. I named her after Houdini, the other chicken that I named after Houdini Houdini, the escape artist." And I told my guest all the stories I have already told you, how she couldn’t stay on one side of a fence, just like me, and got in trouble with the neighbors, just like me, and really loved pork, just like me, and developed a taste for her own eggs, just like me, and thereby distinguished and endeared herself to her farmer, even while signing her own death sentence. Just like me!

"Did you cry when you killed her?" my guest asked.

I was almost crying just talking about it. Gatorgator seemed on the verge too, and I was beginning to question the advisability of saying Grace before eating Houdini.

"I always cry when I kill a chicken," I said. "I sing to them, and I cry, and then after the ax I hyperventilate. It takes my breath away. With Houdini, I almost couldn’t do it." I told her what I have already told you, how I had to go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night, practically, and do it in my sleep, in the dark, without coffee. Gatorgator didn’t know how close we came to having my hand for dinner.

"Delicious!" she said in her thank-you e-mail. "Houdini was awfully tasty," she said. "I feel privileged to have been able to take part in her life — or afterlife." No mention of any druggy dreams, or bursts of surreality.

Sockywonk, who came in late for leftovers, e-mailed, "That chicken pie was the best thing I have ever had in my mouth!"

I hesitate to review my own meals, but it was surprisingly good — the soup, but especially the pie. This was by far the best I’ve ever yet done with one of my own. So either I’m getting better at cooking down tough old hens, or Houdini had one last act of magic in her.

I know she had one last act of rebellion, one last laugh at my expense, as both Gatorgator and Sockywonk will attest, since they both saw me going around with packs of frozen peas rolled up in my shirtsleeve, and then bandages, salves, etc.

To them it probably looked like any old bad burn, but I’m being only partially poetic when I say that, three hours into her souping, while I was trying to break into her for some actual meat, finally, for the pie, Houdini jumped out of the pot and bit me.

I hope it scars.

Raw meat

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS It was a cooking party. The theme was mint. Sockywonk made peppermint ice cream sandwiches. I made bò tái chanh, that Vietnamese raw beef salad that I love. There was minty lamb, minty pork, salads with mint, shrimp cold rolls (with mint), and, of course, mint juleps and mojitos.

Earl Butter brought toothpaste.

The eating happened on a roof in the Tenderloin, and we did not catch the roof or the building or the neighborhood on fire. Although coals did spill. It’s the strangest thing. No matter how pretty I get, no matter how nicely I dress, no matter how long my nails are, I still wind up on grill duty.

If I stay in the city (and away from chickens) long enough, I will one day soon arrive at a dinner party in a long, low-cut, lime green dress and strappy heels, with a fresh professional manicure, or better yet white opera gloves, and the hosts will hug me at the door, hand me a crumple of newspapers and a lighter, and send me out to the deck to get the coals going.

I can’t even begin to tell you how proud I am of this fact, or how uncertain I am that opera gloves are even a thing. My point being that, what the fuck, am I the only one in the world who knows about charcoal?

Answer: yes.

Here’s how I know: I’m in the kitchen, right, having gotten the coals started — in a chimney starter on a Weber on the roof. Which is where the party is, too, so everyone is standing or sitting around sipping minty drinks and talking and laughing and probably smoking some things, if I know people. The pork is marinating, if I know pork. There is salmon. There are sausages. And all these things, and people, are waiting patiently for the coals to be ready.

My meat, don’t forget, is being served raw. That’s why I’m downstairs in the kitchen, with an apron on, alone, whistling, drinking mint juleps, squeezing lemons into a bowl, adding fish sauce, sugar, black pepper, hot peppers, and minced garlic. I’m slicing a neighborhood-appropriate tenderloin against the grain into thin slices, more or less dipping them into this pungent marinade, then arranging them on a plate with raw red peppers, raw white onions, crushed roasted peanuts, sesame seeds, and fresh-ripped cilantro and mint.

That’s how you make bò tái chanh, BTW.

How to burn down a house: when the coals are ready, pick up the chimney starter in one hand, and while you are cleaning off the grill with the other hand, accidentally pour the burning coals onto the roof, avoiding, if possible, your feet. (As that will alert you, and by extension your fellow revelers, and perhaps the whole neighborhood, to the situation. And hurt.)

I’m only guessing. I don’t know what happened up there. My mind was in the meat. My hands smelled like heaven, happiness seemed not only attainable but very near, and suddenly there was a commotion and Earl Butter and others were coming down the stairs and into the kitchen.

"The coals spilled on the roof," Earl said. "What should we do?"

I happened to be holding tongs. I handed them to him and said, "Pick them up." He looked at me like … like … like … I took the tongs out of his hands and went up to the roof myself.

The situation was well under control by then. A guy was pouring something from a glass onto the spilled coals and spreading them around a bit or grinding them out with his shoe. Everyone else was standing around talking and laughing and drinking minty drinks. The roof was smoking, just a little.

Not even all the coals had spilled, so there was still a chance of cooking stuff. I didn’t mean to go on and on about it, least of all at anyone else’s expense. Everyone knows I’m the clumsiest person alive. I also happen to be, apparently, a respected thinker and fire-prevention theorist.

My advice, in regard to accidental cooking fires of any kind, is to put them out. You do know not to pour water on burning oil, right? Or straight whiskey onto a fledgling flame. If it’s a mixed drink, use your judgment…. Who mixed it? With what? How much ice?

Tongs, spatulas, and small shovels are good things to keep near a barbecue, maybe a box of baking soda in the kitchen. Other ideas include always inviting at least one experienced fire fighter to all of your barbecues, or, hell, serving the meat raw. Now you know how.

Getting salad

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS We sat on a rock wall with our legs dangling over the lake. I didn’t have shoes on. Ducks came around, geese flew low over the water, the lights across the way twinkled, and buildings slowly disappeared as we ate that salad.

It was a pretty famous salad, with halved cherry tomatoes and chunked up cheese in it. Unlike a lot of salads, this one had been in a feature story in the Guardian, even before it happened. Not that it was a main player in the story, but it was there: educational, artistic, and conceptual. "A dude wants to make me a salad."

I believe that was the sentence.

The subject of the sentence, the dude, if you will, was an artist and an educator, so the object of the sentence, the salad, was destined to be artistic and educational. The indirect object, your chicken farmer truly, beneficiary of famous salads and author of sentences both famous and idiotic, was charmed by the suggestion.

Seduced, I believe, was the word that I used. You could look it up.

I’m almost perpetually confused, except when I’m sitting in the bathtub with a chicken leg or pork sandwich. When I’m eating in general, I am often not confused, come to think of it, even if it’s at a restaurant or friend’s house or lake.

One of the many things I love to eat is leafy greens. The way some people look forward to dessert, I look forward to my salad. In fact, I prefer to eat it at the end of a meal, and if it’s a good one, with colorful, crunchy goodies in it and lots of vinegar, I can eat and eat and nothing can stop me except the bottom of the bowl. I am known for this. At dinner parties, when it comes to clearing the table, my friends will, with the same automaticness with which they wrap meat and put it in the refrigerator, hand me the salad serving bowl with a fork in it. I am considered a part of the cleaning process.

The artist who articulated this particularly famous salad for me said, while he was making it, at the lake, "Do you know why I’m making you this salad?"

My bare feet were a couple feet above the water and I was looking down at my toes, at the color of them, which is called Raspberry Rush. It was a pretty color against the green gray depths of Lake Merritt. He was slicing tomatoes into a stainless steel bowl. The bowl was in between us on the wall. No, I didn’t know exactly why he was making me this salad. I just knew that I liked the idea of it.

"Because you said in your column," he said, "that you weren’t getting salad."

"I said that?" I said. (I have since looked it up. I said it. I said, "I don’t mind always minding the grill, but what happens is that by the time I eat there isn’t any salad.")

"This salad is a kind of an art project," he explained, tossing the salad with a very good, very vinegary dressing he had premade at home, and serving it on real plates that he pulled out of his backpack, like the rest of the picnic. There was bread, salami, olives, and something good to drink. "Taking literate people literally," he said.

I’m a literate person, but I’m also a chicken farmer. My eyes went automatically to the horizon, wanting ducks and geese and finding instead an airplane. Landing lights blinking and the sunset blasting off of it, this was pretty too.

How wonderful! I say I’m not getting salad … someone makes me a salad! And how appropriate that the gesture turns out to be an artistic one, since so many of my own gestures are plot driven.

In other words, my friend, an artist, is turning his life itself into art, even while I turn mine into journalism. Life decisions, like where to go when, and who with, may be informed by considerations like it will make good copy. Or in his case, perhaps, it will look nice to look at. And perhaps, because he’s an educator as well, it will mean something.

Meanwhile, inside our rib cages, real hearts slosh with real red blood. Inside our big hard heads real electrical connections get made, synapses fire, or don’t, and chemistry happens. Or not. More important, for our purposes, we have stomachs where everything goes that we swallow, such as — gut check! — salad … words … pride.

I am not getting kissed.*

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