L.E. Leone

Winning big

Andrew Lam
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0
Winning big

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS In Lovelock at the Saddest Little Carnival Ever I threw ping-pong balls into little glass cups of water and in this manner won two goldfish. Live ones, looping insanely in a small plastic water cup with a lid on it.

“What do you have to do to win a stuffed one?” I said, indicating with a tilt of my head one of the strings of orange-and-white-striped Nemo fish adorning all four posts of the booth. These would have made much better travel companions. Then I could have given it to one of the chunks when I got home.

The carny flashed a piano keyboard smile and drawled, “Those are just for show.”

“I see,” I said, wishing I could have those five-for-a-dollar ping-pong balls back and miss this time. What was I going to do with a plastic cup of goldfish on a 10-day road trip?

There were about 14 other people at the Saddest Little Carnival Ever, and about 13 of them were not on the Zipper, the Orbit, the Spaceship 2000, or the merry-go-round. I found a 10-year-old mark who had gotten away from his parents for the moment and looked like he might know what to do with some goldfish on a 10-day road trip. Or maybe he lived in Lovelock.

“Do you want them?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

So I handed him the little plastic cup and got the hell out of there before his parents came around.

I should have gambled, because lately I’ve been hitting my marks. In San Francisco, weirdly, I scored goals each of the past two Sundays. One was in a 14-4 win, so everyone was doing it, and the other — in a 6-5 win — was lucky cause it grazed off a defender’s head or their keeper surely would have gotten it.

But that’s what I’m saying. Lucky. I should have gambled in Lovelock. On money, not ping-pong balls and goldfish.

Alice Shaw the Person, my teammate and old friend, wanted to go to a barbecue with all the Brazilian boys on our team, and — having grilled the meats with Brazilian boys myself, once or twice — I wanted to go too.

Alas, I had me some childerns to tend to that afternoon, so Alice Shaw the Person went to the feast with someone else and lent me her car to get home.

In life, no one has lent me more cars than Alice Shaw the Person. The last thing I want to do is get onions all over her upholstery. But I was not only hungry as a fullback, I was running late for work and needed of course a bath.

So I did. I ate in the car. First I had to find a parking spot between Ghirardelli Square and the Mission, and that happened at Gough and Hayes. So Kebabs of Hayes Valley seemed like a pretty good idea.

Kebabs in cars, right? It’s like a giant toothpick only it’s putting in instead of taking out, and in the end everyone is happy, give or take the onions.

Yeah, but I didn’t get kebabs. They had Mediterranean wraps, and that seemed even better. Lamb and beef gyro on lavash, with lettuce, tomato, pepper, cukes, and tahini. Sounds to me like shawarma.

Whatever, it was so good, and I was so hungry, that I’m pretty sure none of it — not even a crumb — made it to the floor or even the seat of that car.

One thing, though: there wasn’t any lamb, or beef, in my lamb and beef gyro wrap. It was chicken. All chicken. And it was so juicy and delicious that instead of being mad I was like, yeah, that’s what I meant.

So: New favorite restaurant, for reading my mind. And for being there. It seemed like an okay place to eat in, too. Some people were. They looked happy and clean.

But what do I know?

I know there’s a little boy in Nevada whose parents are yelling at him, right now, and while this isn’t ideal, I’ll take it. 

KEBABS OF HAYES VALLEY

Sun.–Thu. 11 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat. 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

406 Hayes, SF

(415) 252-5100

kebabsofhayesvalley.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

 

Farmville

Andrew Lam
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1
Farmville

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I probably could have picked a better route to the restaurant. Maybe if I’d gotten off at the Powell station instead of Civic Center. As it was, at not-even-9 a.m. on a Saturday, I had to step over piles of shit and vomit.

It was like reading one of my restaurant reviews; it’s part of life, yes, but not necessarily the part you want to happen before dinner. Or in this case, breakfast.

But, so you know, I would step over dead bodies and piles of fish guts to caffeinate and chew things up with my friend Kayday. Especially at farm : table, which I had heard about and have been meaning to get to for forever. High on my list of Things To Do this year is to find my way back to my former farmerliness. Because I miss the eggs, but also because I’m tired of myself in my shit-kicking city-fried people personhood. I long for the smell of a chicken coop.

Kayday, who was essentially nudged out of San Francisco for the same reason I will be one day — for not being the cool kind of queer — was down for the weekend from Seattle. Not for Pride — for the weekend before, to consign and collect her guitars and things.

I do hope everyone had a happy and proudful Pride month, and weekend, and parade. I encourage this forward-thinking bubble, being the self-proclaimed beacon of queer acceptance that it, um, proclaims itself to be, to start opening not only its mouth but its employment opportunities, its hearts, and even in some cases (gasp) its zippers to transwomen before we lose more good guitar players to Seattle.

Mine had about a gazillion job interviews in the one year she was here, but no job offers, whereas she was one-for-one in both Los Angeles and Seattle. Which reminds me of my romantical track record, home and away. Not that we talk about this. You just can’t help wondering.

“I feel like I was dumped by San Francisco,” Kayday said.

We were sitting at the inside table. That’s officially all there is, inside, at farm : table, is one pretty big square one, seats maybe eight, and then a couple more on the sidewalk.

“That sucks,” I said, biting into my fresh pea and pecorino quiche, which didn’t. It was light and fluffy, and I could almost hear the hens that laid those eggs, clucking softly in the kitchen. I was almost halfway done with it before Kayday figured out how to even approach her baguette-bacon-hard-boiled-egg pileup. By which time everyone else at the table had weighed in with their own techniques.

“Turn the egg over and smash it into the bread,” one woman offered. Another said she just takes the pieces off and eats them à la carte.

“Me, I get the quiche,” I said, chomping on clouds. Christ, I love San Francisco. And the Tenderloin.

One nice thing about sharing a table with a bunch of strangers: Kayday was spared the gory details of my recent bad butt health. I only told her what the surgeon told me: that if it doesn’t heal in two to four weeks, the next procedure is so uncomfortable they will have to put me to sleep. Those were his words.

“I hope he doesn’t come from a veterinary background,” Kayday said.

“I know. Right?” I said. “I’m getting my affairs in order, just in case.”

FARM : TABLE

Mon.–Fri. 7:30 a.m.–6 p.m.;

Sat. 8 a.m.–6 p.m.;

Sun. 9 a.m.–3 p.m.

754 Post, SF

(415) 292-7089

No alcohol

Cash only

Busted!

Andrew Lam
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0
Busted!

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I have already written a restaurant review, a poem, and a cheerful pop song about my anal abscess. I don’t know how else to celebrate the cursed motherfucker. I could curse … But I guess I’ve done that too.

I’ve already had it lanced twice. Those were the good times. Except that on the first occasion I missed a day of work, and on the second I missed a baby shower. I felt so badfully about the missed baby shower that I invited the moms-to-be, Pod and the Attack, to breakfast the following Saturday. Technically I guess maybe I invited myself to breakfast. At their house.

Bless them, they made my favorite: waffles! With fresh strawberries! They made bacon! They made eggs! They made roasted tomatoes! It was the perfect meal! It was a masterpiece! It was culinary genius! It was the time of our lives!

Problem: I forgot to go. I don’t know, I was looking forward to it all week and then I woke up on Saturday morning, went, “Dum-de-doe,” and decided — oh, I don’t know — maybe do a little recording, or something.

I record in my kitchen because it’s the quietest room in my apartment, if I turn off the refrigerator. My cell phone was in the closet. At the designated hour, Pod went to West Oakland BART and waited for me.

When she called to say what-the-where-the-fuck-are-you? I was in the kitchen. I had my headphones on, refrigerator off, and was laying some blistering electric ukulele tracks onto Garage Band, singing: “It’s a new day/ It’s a driving rain/ I’m gonna have anal surgery/ It’s gonna be OK/ Gonna feel no pain / Or if I do it will be good for me.” La la la la la la.

And so forth.

Then.

I saw my cell phone while I was getting ready for work. It was lit up like a Christmas tree: texts, voicemails, e-mails. What-the-where-the-fuck-was-I? Oh my sweet baby Jesus, you can imagine my horror, and self-hatred — nay, loathing — as it all sunk in. How did I do that? How could I? Was my head so far up my ass that … ?

Well, technically it was, damn me. Clobber me in the kidneys with a golf club. I felt as low as a horse’s hoof cheese. And that was before the Attack sent me a picture of their spread, Pod in all her pregnancy sitting down to eat those wonderful things I said, plus cantaloupe.

Minus me.

I’ve done some dumb-ass things in my day, but don’t know if I’ve ever hated myself more. I couldn’t imagine how I was ever going to forgive myself. I still kinda can’t. I mean, the bacon alone looked so good in that picture.

They were of course very gracious and forgiving, and I was of course determined to make it up somehow. I invited them over to Berkeley that evening for some of the chicken pot pie that me and the kids were making. They declined.

I invited them to breakfast the following morning. Out somewhere, on me, and they accepted. We went to the Sunny Side Café in Albany, which was alleged to be kind of fancy-pants, and great.

Never in my life, before this, have I wanted a meal to cost more than it did. But, alas, it didn’t. It was like normal weekend brunch prices, roughly $10 apiece. Less tragically, but more to the point, I didn’t think the food was that good. Let alone great. I may have malordered. Maybe I was still traumatized by my brain fart from the morning before, but my spinach-and-sausage scramble was bland city, even with salt-pepper-Tapatío. The roasted tomatoes … meh.

Pod’s pigs in blankets … that was better. And the Attack, she got it right. She hit the jackpot with the Alameda, a stack-up of good stuff — ham, cheese, french toast, eggs — and some other things I personally don’t go for, which is to say mushrooms and Hollandaise. Oh, and a balsamic reduction.

It’s her new favorite restaurant.

SUNNY SIDE CAFÉ

Mon.–Fri. 8 a.m.–3 p.m.;

Sat.–Sun. 8:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

1499 Solano, Albany

(510) 527-5383

Full bar

AE/D/MC/V

 

Cheese bits

Andrew Lam
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1
Cheese bits

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS K. Chunk’s favorite restaurant is Caffe Venezia so that’s where we went for her third birthday. She was having a fruitful, productive, and all-around happy day until — just before dinner — she fell off the slide and cut her mouth. Now some things were going to be hard to eat, like crusty bread. Poor little carb loader.

I tried to distract her from her discomfort in the usual way: by talking about mine.

I’m kidding! We talked about love, of course. I had just come back from Nola for the umpteenth time, and was, well, in it. But I’m not going back for the rest of the year, because Hedgehog won’t be there. And Li’l Edible’s fambly already up and moved to Los Angeles, damn em, so I wouldn’t have any kind of babies to squeeze at all. Ergo: what’s the point?

Hedgehog is driving up to Pennsylvania as we speak, stopping to watch Minor League Baseball games along the way. She has work in New York, and then back to Nola, and then back to New York, and then we’re going to go camping a little out here before I leave the country for a couple months, to write.

She keeps score. She sent me a snapshot of the scorecard from last night’s single-A game in Hagerstown, Md., and in a blank square where she’d missed an at-bat she’d written: “BBQ pork.”

So you see?

“I see,” K. Chunk said. “Did she meet your mommy?”

K. Chunk’s ma and pa looked at me like, Yeah, what about that? Are you going to introduce her to your mom?

“Sure, if she wants to meet her,” I said. “I want everyone in the world to meet my mom. Then they’ll finally cut me some slack for being like I am.”

But it’s my dad who’s really going to hit it off with this pokey, spiny, pointy critter of mine when they cross paths at my nephew’s wedding in the fall. I wish I could say he’ll like her ’cause she obviously makes me happy and proud and inspires me to make songs and other things, and treats me with more care and respect than any of my other recent loves. But really it will be because she keeps score at baseball games.

Our food came.

Wagon wheels with butter sauce and lots of cheese for the birthday girl. Her older sister, whose birthday it wasn’t, had ordered wagon wheels too, but seemed to prefer eating all the little seafoods out of my linguine de mare. Her favorite — get this — was calamari. She might just have been trying to impress me, though, like when she sat with me on the couch in the dark, when she was three, and ate raw onions.

I was impressed with Venezia’s fare. I didn’t expect to like it that much, because it seemed at first glance like a place place, where the point was going to be the village square setting, complete with a fountain, muraled store fronts, fake pigeons, and line-hung laundry.

Cheese city, in other words. I loved it!

Mind you, it’s not cheap eats, but it’s good uns. The pasta was great, the tomato cream sauce was perfect, and the calamari, shrimp, clams, and mussels were not only fresh and delicious, but plentiful.

I got to taste some carbonara too. Next time I’m getting that. And I might not even wait for K. Chunk to turn four.

Venezia is a great place for a big group, and, of course, the childerns. They bring out little plates of carrot sticks, celery and olives for them right away, and they get jars of crayons to color on the paper tablecloths.

In this case, the kids were tired, bleeding from the mouth, and whatnot, so perhaps not surprisingly nobody finished their wagon wheels. Still, pennies were tossed into fountains, pigeons were spotted on rooftops, nourishment was achieved, and all-in-all somebody fantastically special to me turned three. So happy birthday to her.

And happy Father’s Day to her dad, and mine. And yours, I guess. Why not?

CAFFE VENEZIA

Mon.–Thu. 5:30–9 p.m.; Fri. 5:30–9:30 p.m.;

Sat. 5–9:30 p.m.; Sun. 5–9 p.m.

1799 University, Berk.

(510) 849-4681

Full bar

AE/D/MC/V

 

Cold comfort

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Cold comfort

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I write to you from Dot’s Diner in Jefferson Parish, La. Hedgehog is getting her knee looked at down the road, and I thought I would find me a place to sit that wasn’t the waiting room. Or a pool hall. Or bar. Or fast food joint or automotive shop. Or warehouse, thrift store, or — but only because it’s 9:30 a.m. and I ain’t the slightest bit hungry — a fried seafood shack or po-boy shop.

Jefferson’s got good eats in its own right. Crabby Jack’s is here, and at the French Canadian Quarter Festival this spring they fed me the best boudin I ever had, but at 9:30 a.m. the only way you can get a table, apparently, is if you’re an upside-down chair.

If it were 10 a.m. or even three hours later, I would have been in heaven. All’s I really required was a good strong cup a coffee and a seat, but this ain’t California or Seattle or even New Orleans. It’s the parish, as the locals call it, where you can’t exactly sit down without having a meal.

But how pretentious of them to refer to their parish as “the parish.” Don’t you think that’s pretty arrogant? Louisiana has a lot of parishes. They’re like counties everywhere else.

Whatever, I’m sure you’re more interested in what I’ve been eating San Franciscowise than Dot’s Diner’s biscuit with a fried egg on top, smothered in crawfish julie.

I will tell you: duck soup.

As always I have been on the prowl, trying to find the city’s best bowl of cold medicine and antidepressant.

It ain’t at Big Lantern here in the ‘hood, I can promise you that. Me and Hedgehog went there the last time we were in the city together, and I was fighting a cold. A fight, by the way, that I lost.

I’m human. I get sick. In fact, I get sick more than most people, being not only human but a hypochondriac. (Not that I’ve been diagnosed with hypochondria. I can just tell I have it.)

Anyway, I had wanted to show Hedgehog something special like Zuni, Delfina, or Slanted Door, but I felt too much like crap to eat anything but duck noodle soup, pea sprouts in garlic, and string beans with smoked pork.

There were dumplings, too. I forget what they were called on the dim sum menu. Some kind of “little buns,” I think. The ones that were soupy inside, they were great, but some weren’t so soupy. They had lost their juice. Not so great.

I can’t really complain about the duck soup because it wasn’t technically on the menu. Nor was it all that half bad. But the pea sprouts needed a lot of doctoring to taste like anything, and the beans with smoked pork were some of the worst things ever. About half of the beans were lifelessly old tough shriveled ones, overcooked. And the pork was like pork jerky. Very dry. Very tough. Which — granted — maybe that’s what smoked pork means in Chinese restaurants. I don’t often order it, and won’t often order it again, to be safe.

To their credit, the garlic pea sprouts and the beans and pork got better the next day for lunch, and better still the day after that, because I doctored and doctored them back to life.

The soup hit the spot, but as long as I’m healthy enough to get on BART and buses, I will be having my future duck soups in Chinatown, at Great Eastern Restaurant, thank you.

The legendary Jackson Street standby, it turns out, has a rich, flavorful dark broth with perfectly succulent roast duck and great homemade noodles. Or wontons. Or both. For $9, it’s the reigning duck noodle champion, in my book.

I would like to thank John’s Snack and Deli for being out of kimchi burritos again, or else I might never have found this out.

Oh, and Great Eastern also has crocodile soup and soft-shell turtle soup, by the way. In case you’re not sick when you go there. *

New favorite restaurant! *

GREAT EASTERN RESTAURANT

Daily: 10 a.m.–1 a.m.

649 Jackson, SF

(415) 986-5603

Beer and wine

MC/V

Onward Toilet Bowl

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Onward Toilet Bowl

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS The top four teams in the San Francisco Women’s Flag Football League can all beat the 49ers. My team cannot, but we can beat the bottom four teams and have proven it. By winning the biggest game of our storied one-season history, we established ourselves as the top of the bottoms: a solid fifth-place finish.

Yep, last week’s last minute comeback in the playoffs earned us a berth in the Toilet Bowl this week against a team that had shut us out in the regular season. We were losing again, 13-12, with less than five minutes left. Again our defense exploded: three touchdowns in the last three minutes. Final score: 31-13, us. Toilet Bowl MVP: Gene-Genie the Gold Standard, one of our many rugby converts, who spent less time on the ground than usual and scored two of our touchdowns, one receiving and one intercepting.

It was a brilliant performance, and a sweet note to end our first season on. Our goal was to win one game, and we won two, then both of our playoff games. Our goal for next season, in the fall, will be not to lead the league in penalties, and for our offense to outscore our defense. If we don’t and it does, we might have a shot at upper brackethood come next playoffs. Which would be nice. I kind of miss getting my ass kicked.

Unfortunately, there’s no way I can run fast enough to play soccer right now, so — by way of distracting myself from despair — my plans for summer include New Orleans yet again, camping, France, Mexico, New York, camping again, Ohio for a wedding, and the Bloomsburg Fair, where I will be researching a whole different, more Pennsylvania Dutchish take on chicken and waffles.

Who wants to sublet my apartment?

It’s cute. It’s cozy. It comes with the lovingest, lickingest cat in the whole history of felinity, and it smells like me. Come on. You know you want it.

Christ, I still can’t get over that we won. Enough already, you’re thinking, but you don’t understand. We were like the Bad News Bears, except none of us were very bear-like, so maybe we were the Bad News Honey Badgers. Or something.

Anyway, after the game and the champagne and a bowl of old cereal that a dog had been licking on the sideline, I went to eat something real with Hedgehog. We intended to have either sushi or Turkish food, but wound up eating Irishish at the Liberties ’cause it was nice enough to be outside. God bless plan C.

Hedgehog had a Reuben, and I had Irish sausage with eggs on a potato pancake with a red wine reduction gravy. Talk about your breakfast of champions: it was way, way better than dog-licked cereal with warm milk. The potato pancake was perfectly crispy outside and soft and creamy in the middle; the eggs were overeasied just so; and the sliced-lengthwise sausages tucked in-between the pancake and eggs were juicy and delicious.

Not as delicious as at the Phoenix’s Irish sausage, but that’s where wine gravy comes in. Yum. Yum.

Yum. And for less than $10 — I think like $9. And no waiting, even though it was brunch time.

Hedgehog’s Reuben looked good too. I tried her sweet potato fries, and they were pretty good, but I don’t much go for sweet potato anythings, so mostly I just left her alone.

They have regular fries, too, and you can get them with a curry dipping sauce, and more good news is that the kitchen stays open until 1 a.m. I’ve never drank there, but I have walked by a lot at night because Kayday used to live around the corner and it always seems like there’s something fun going on inside.

I think they have a quiz night or something.

QUESTION: Where did the not-very-Dutch Roscoe’s style of fried chicken and waffles originate?

ANSWER: Fuck should I know. Hedgehog says Harlem, not the South. Anyway …

The Liberties Bar & Restaurant

Mon.–Fri.: noon–2 a.m.;

Sat.–Sun.: 10 a.m.–2 a.m.

998 Guerrero, SF

(415) 282-6789

Full bar

MC/V

Hail Marys!

Maria Poblet
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2
Hail Marys!

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

We ate chicken and waffles on the loading dock at farmerbrown’s Little Skillet, and garlic fries at AT&T Park. We ate chicken at Limon Rotisserie and chicken wings at San Tung. Tried to get a kimchi burrito, but John’s was sold out. We split a sandwich from Tartine.

She was interested in food, and naps. We did not go to the wharf, the bridge, the beach, the park, the Palace of Fine Arts, or Alcatraz. In fact, the only non-culinary landmark I even tried to sneak past her was The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at the Castro. That day, between meals, snacks, and shenanigans, I would occasionally put my lips close to her ear and go, “Boodi-boodi boooo. Bwa bwa bwa.” Only sometimes I would whistle it.

Didn’t happen. We went to Clement Street — me, Hedgehog, Earl Butter, the Choo-Choo Train, and King. There, at the Clement Street Bar & Grill, we met Baseball Mary. Who knows Choo-Choo, so he got a hug, and we all got baseball cards. Her position is “Lower Box 128, Row 3.” She has the biggest, cheerfulest smile, and has been to every MLB park.

Baseball Mary is from Portland, Maine, and therefore throws “wicked good parties,” according to the stats on the back of her card. In the interest of one day being invited to one, let me tell you that she is my new favorite waitressperson. Not that she waited on us. We didn’t eat. We just sat at the bar and drank and swapped Yogi Berraisms with the dude down the corner.

Truth be told, I was already happy. My three-week run of dark thoughts and existentially important-ass problems snapped the moment my new favorite airline, United, touched Hedgehog down safely at SFO. Of course, now I hate them again for taking her away.

But at least my ass feels better. As for the hamstring … well, there’s Burma Tea Leaf 1, for dinner. And to give you an idea how contented and all-around mentally stable I was feeling by then, they have duck noodle soup and I didn’t even notice! Who needed it, with mango salad, pork with pumpkin coconut curry, spicy catfish … everything under $10. And a waitressperson who gave Baseball Mary a run for her money, smilewise.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were writing this up?” Earl Butter said when I picked up the bill. “I would have been funnier.”

I wouldn’t have noticed. That whole long weekend was all about Hedgehog and me being us, me trying to impress her with chicken wings and so forth. For entirely selfish reasons, I want her to love San Francisco like I loved New Orleans while I was there — thanks largely to her plying me with fried things.

Our last night here we made the sweetest love two people have ever made, with due respect to everyone else in the world. Then, like in movies, I woke up early and snuck out of bed. I was going to be Rocky, and run and jump and run and just generally stretch my hamstring. There was a game at nine. It was the playoffs. I was going to play. Yeah: Rocky.

I got as far as cracking the eggs, then, being me, decided to cook them. With potatoes. And draw a bath. We had breakfast in the tub.

The game was on our way to the airport. On the first play I of course reinjured myself. But I had doctor’s permission now to play through the pain. So I went back in and was able to go about 65, 70 percent. With two minutes left we were losing by a safety and a touchdown.

I had nothing. On the sideline, I found out later, Coach said to Hedgehog, “Too bad you didn’t get to see her A-game.” I didn’t hear this, but must have felt it, because on the next play I wrestled a touchdown pass away from a defender, and a teammate.

But we were still down a safety, with a minute and a half left. For some reason instead of killing the clock, they passed, and for some reason I intercepted — and hobbled it back for a touchdown. Now we were winning with less than a minute left. So they had to pass — but I intercepted that one too. And one week after fearing my life was over because I couldn’t play sports, I was being carried off the field on shoulders, in front of my lover.

So. There’s that. 

BURMA TEA LEAF 1

Tues.–Thurs. 5-9:30 p.m.;

Fri.–Sun. 11:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m., 5–10 p.m.

731 Clement, SF

(415) 2221-3888

Beer

MC/V

 

Duck soup

Maria Poblet
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0
Duck soup

I shouldn’t be so hard on Kaiser. I myself am prone to misdiagnoses. Example: the knee injury I sang the blues about two weeks ago that turned out to be a hamstring problem.

When I passed out in the bathroom at 5 a.m. and came to, all bonked and a-crumple, my first thought was Too Much Whiskey. Then I realized I hadn’t drunk anything for at least two weeks. So I must have been dehydrated.

Whatever. As you know, my cure for almost anything — including the common cold, uncommon anxiety, hammies, depression, and dehydration — is roast duck noodle soup. So when I saw Thailand Restaurant on Castro Street across from the theater, after all these years, I wondered if they had it.

The last time I ate at Thailand Restaurant, just to give you an idea, might have been the first time I had ever eaten Thai food. I’m pretty sure it was the first time I had tom ka gai. We’re talking early ’90s.

I was hungry. Then, I was always hungry. Now I’m just hungry when I’m awake. Like last week when I renoticed Thailand Restaurant. I was awake, depressed, dehydrated, and hamstring challenged. Plus some other things, so even though it was only 5 p.m., I ascended the steps.

And they did have roast duck noodle soup! Like a regular walking into a bar, I ordered it before I even sat down. Then I sat down. In the window. And I looked out the window and thought about my old friend Satchel Paige the Pitcher.

He lives in Thailand now. Teaches English, is married to a Thai woman named Ann Paige the Pitcher, and they have cute little half-Thai, half-tall kids. Every couple years or so I get to see them, usually in Sacramento.

I would like to go to Thailand one day.

I’m not sure what I would do there, besides eat, but the other day Satchel Paige the Pitcher surprised the pus out of me by knocking on my door.

I opened it and just blinked and blinked.

“Hi Dani,” he said. It’s dark in my apartment. It’s also small.

“Satchel Paige the Pitcher!” I said. And I gave him a big hug and welcomed him to my small, dark apartment. Which he barely fit into.

Embarrassingly, I was still in my pajamas, even though it was afternoon. I was writing; I just hadn’t bothered to get dressed yet because sometimes, you know, I don’t. On writing days. I am rarely visited, and even rarelier by Satchel Paige the Pitcher.

I mean really, the only person who ever drops by besides Earl Butter — who doesn’t count cause he lives upstairs — is the Maze. And the Maze comes at night, so I tend to have clothes on. Lately he brings chicken saag from my new favorite restaurant, Pakwan, because it’s one of the worst restaurants in the city to eat in at, and I happen to live two blocks away.

And I happen to love their chicken saag.

But that ain’t what this is about. This is about me being in the darkest of moods, for the third week in a row, and sitting in a second-story window, looking down on Castro Street, thinking about Satchel Paige the Pitcher and waiting for duck soup to come fix everything.

He’s moving back, you know, he thinks. Maybe. Probably, but to Sacramento. And do you know why? Because in Thailand, he says, girls don’t play team sports.

His cute little kids being girls, and Thai ones, I can’t think of a better reason to move to Sacramento. Where would I be, for example, without team sports? I could draw a line all the way back to my earliest memories: football, soccer, baseball, football, volleyball, baseball, golf. Ironically, that was where I started: golf. But that ain’t a team sport, and I already said I’m not going to golf.

There must be a gene. Before I am a writer, a musician, a woman even, or a queer, I am an athlete. Satch has got it. His kids, probably. And if I don’t get back out there, soon — happy birthday to me — I am going to go absolutely fucking bonkers. Here’s my soup. 

THAILAND RESTAURANT

Sun.–Thurs. 11 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat. 11 a.m.–10:30 p.m.

438-A Castro, SF

(415) 863-6868

Beer and wine

MC/V

Ass backward

Maria Poblet
-
2
Ass backward

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS The good news is that my asshole itself is just fine. It took me almost three days to convince the imbecilic network of Kaiser phone reps that no, it weren’t hemorrhoids, you’re going to have to actually fucking see me. Apparently my $350 a month isn’t enough to warrant them having a look at my ass once every six years. Let alone sticking a finger in it.

“Probably hemorrhoids,” they said. “Someone will call you.” Which they didn’t, so I called back, and back. Five, six times.

And they said hemorrhoids.

The fifth or sixth time they said hemorrhoids I said, “You don’t understand. I haven’t been constipated since the late 1970s. Constipated people call me from across the country. To chat! Just talking to me makes them have to use the bathroom. I’m serious, it’s what mothers love about me. I get all the poopy diapers, and they get a regular baby. One mother called me — you’re going to love this — I was on vacation, and her kid hadn’t pooped since I left. Could she please just put him on the phone with me, maybe the sound of my voice would loosen him up. Which it did. And now you’re trying to tell me I have a hemorrhoid? Do you know who you’re talking to? Trust me. I wish I were sexy, like everyone else in the world. But I’m not. I’m good for something else: eating with, and talking shit. And yes, the two go hand in hand. As it happens, you probably-entirely-blameless representative of a crock-of-shit company, even what little sexy I am is mostly my mouth and my asshole, so can we please get this taken care of please, because I don’t get a lot of love as it is, and my lover is visiting from New Orleans in a week. Plus I’m afraid to eat hot sauce, which is my muse and antidepressant. So …”

“I’ll have someone call you,” they said.

And, you know, eventually, someone did. My old Rohnert Park doc, who is a superhero, must have called San Francisco (after talking with me) and explained that the crazy lady they’d been ignoring, losing in the system, and silencing with red tape really was the world’s Most Regular Person — seen in a strictly gastroenterological light — and was more likely to be carrying the seed of an alien civilization in her asshole than a hemorrhoid.

I don’t know if those would have been her exact words. But finally, after being in pain for nearly 60 hours — sitting, standing, walking, lying down — and 24 hours after the onset of general achiness and chills (possible symptoms of systemic infection, by the way), I was able to make an appointment!

It took the doctor less than 30 seconds to determine what I’d been trying to tell them for two days. It wasn’t a hemorrhoid. It was an abscess or cyst or something, and it was infected. He put me on antibiotics and went to get someone to cut me.

And it was she, my cutter, who put her finger in and said that, yes, my ass was fine.

I’d been trying to tell people that for days, and in a larger sense, for years and years. “Thank you,” I said.

My whole right cheek was red and swollen and incredibly painful to the touch, but she decided not to cut me for two days. I’d have argued otherwise, but I was already an hour late for dinner.

Luckily it was with Mr. Wong, my patientest of friends.

Over Korean fried chicken (or KFC) at Red Wings, just a hop, waddle, and short 38 ride down Geary, I related my Bukowskiesque ordeal, complaining about Kaiser much as I have just done toward you.

Minus the chicken, which was pretty not-all-that-half-bad — at least the fried. Mr. Wong got his roasted, with garlic and herbs, and I tasted it: dry dry dry.

“Well, look at it this way,” Mr. Wong said, chomping chicken. “At least you have health insurance.”

True. And at the end of a week when two of my aunts died, I have my overall health, and life. But honestly, between an infected abscess and the health care provider I pay to take care of such — er — bumps in the road, I don’t know which is the bigger pain in the ass.

RED WINGS

Daily: 5 p.m.–2 a.m.

3015 Geary, SF

(415) 422-0012

Beer and wine

MC/V

 

Knee-jerked reaction

Andrew Lam
-
1
Knee-jerked reaction

CHEAP EATS I left my uke in New York City — technically in Boston, in the back of a station wagon headed for New York City. I left my baby, my toothbrush, my second-favorite pillow, and my other baby in New Orleans. My rabbit-fur jacket that I only ever wear to Rainbow Grocery … I left that in New Orleans too. I left my stomach in Dallas. I left my left knee in San Francisco, on the 50-yard line of a football field at Crocker Amazon. I don’t know where I left my pink cowboy hat. I can’t find it, and it’s pink cowboy hat season.

I got the ain’t-got-no-cowboy-hat-or-left-knee-neither blues.

One thing: I do have a new baby. He’s four months old and lives upstairs in my apartment building, so the commute’s real easy compared to Louisiana or even Berkeley. And he likes to suck on my left bicep sometimes while I’m rocking him to sleep, which gives me cute little hickies there.

In Dolores Park, a live dog’s got a stuffed bunny by the throat. He’s thrashing it this way and that, hammering it into the ground, growling, and beating the living fuzz out of it.

In various states of revelry and/or reverie, my friends and I are occupied in just generally occupying a couple of blankets, watching this big dog do its thing.

“My money is on the rabbit,” I say, because it is. I love an underdog.

In fact, we all are one — back in last place, our one-game winning streak having come to an inglorious end earlier that morning. Dig, who had an important sack on a third-and-short, our play-of-the-game, goes, “Look! It’s playing possum.”

Sure enough, the rabbit is lying very still in the grass, the dog standing over it, watching warily. I’m not a dog person, but I almost feel bad for this un. Its prey, this shattered, chewed-up Easter bunny, is limper than limp, is missing an ear, and arguably never had much fight in it; Nevertheless, I more than half expect it to at least jump up and run away, if not kick the dumb dog’s ass first.

Next week is the Kentucky Derby, and now that I officially “play the ponies,” I will have to find me a long shot to get behind. And get shat upon.

I got the ain’t-got-no-cowboy-hat-or-even-no-left-knee-neither blues.

My own Hedgehog says I ain’t no spring chicken farmer. I’m afraid someone’s going to buy me golf clubs for my birthday. Please don’t buy me golf clubs please. I got some team sports left in me, and contact ones at that. I know I do. Get me a knee brace, an ice pack, and a Costco-size bottle of ibuprofen, I got the ain’t-got-no-left-knee blues is all.

When that happens — that is, this happens — there is only one thing for me, and that is some quality Chunks de la Cooter time. It puts everything else in perspective. So I went and made a chicken pot with them, and bathed them and sang them to sleep and woke up with them in the middle of the night, and in the morning I took them to their Chunk Fu class, and then to Arizmendi and then what they call “the new park” because it’s probably the oldest park in all of Berkeley and therefore not on their beaten path. And I took pictures of them on the big-girl swings.

It was hard to say goodbye, so I didn’t. I went to dinner with the whole de la Cooter fambly down to Solano, to the new-to-me Korean bowls-of-things place, called Bowl’d.

The idea here — at least the main one — is bibimbap in stone bowls with your choice of meat or tofu. They also give you a choice of white rice or mixed grain. Either way it’s going to get all crusty and delicious at the bottom of your hot hot hot stone bowl.

At the top: cabbage, carrots, sprouts, greens, bulgogi if you’re me, and one nice sunny-side-up fried egg.

 

 

I wish there was a little more meat in it. But the meat there was good, and so was everything else. They don’t give you so many little bowls of things for the table, but they’ll refill what you love. In my case: kimchi. Super spicy. New favorite restaurant. 

BOWL’D

Sun.–Thurs.: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat.: 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

1479 Solano, Albany

(510) 526-6223

Beer and wine

AE/D/MC/V

 

Victory, victorious

Andrew Lam
-
0
Victory, victorious

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS He’s only in high school so far, but Coach’s little brother Coach is a football genius of Bill Walshian proportion. Here’s how I know: He came, he coached, we won.

Us. Yes. 12-0. He practiced us twice the day before the game, put people in their proper places, and called all the plays on offense. He’s 17. His even younger brother, Coachy, 14, taught the “cover four” to our defense, which includes me. I’m 47. And … well, 12-0! Compared to the 54-12 combined trouncing we received in our first three games, this was quite the minor miracle, this li’l shutout win. Four interceptions, two by me, one of which I returned for a touchdown. It was so unprecedentedly monumental that afterward I dumped about an eighth of a bottle of Gatorade over Coach’s brother Coach’s head.

And then, grinning, blushing, and just generally dripping electrolytes, he and his fold-away traveling coaching staff, which included their dad, folded into their car and drove back to San Diego. But not before Papa Coach thanked me again for taking care of that rooster back on New Year’s.

Which is important because no matter how much of a sexy celebrity hot shit football star I may become (with proper coaching) in my old age, I will always still be a chicken farmer at heart. Not to mention that offing this here rooster really gave me good luck this year.

For example: Boston. For example: New Orleans. For example: Hedgehog. For example: 12-0.

So the coaches left, except for Coach, and we were just us again, our ragtag women’s football team, basking on a plastic tarp on the sidelines, no longer winless, and no longer even I don’t think in last place. At least for one week. I wonder what happens next.

Next, I hug and high-five my teammates, and leave them sucking orange wedges to go eat something substantial with our fan, Kayday. That means Red Café on Mission and 25th streets, because Toast has a line, and we can’t find the Ebb Tide on account of existential crisis. Not ours; we’re still here. Well, I’m still here. By the time you read this, however, Kayday will have moved back to Seattle, which is kind of like ceasing to exist, except you can fly back on weekends. And she still wants to be in my band, so … There’s that.

As for Red, why haven’t I eaten here before this?

It’s good, it’s basic, it’s great, and most important, no line! If you don’t mind sitting at the counter, which of course we don’t.

Kayday was just getting over some stomach bug, so she ordered something bland and not worth talking about. I, on the other hand, had just won the first football game of my new career. So I ordered beans, tortillas, fried plantains, and a plastic bag with ice in it.

My knee was sore.

Actually, I’d thought I was ordering eggs too, and one of those balls of rice and beans, but I must have messed up.

Well, the plantains were good, although I couldn’t finish them because there were way too many. The beans were great, and my favorite part of everything was the tortillas, which were fresh and warm and I melted butter in them, rolled them up, and used them to scoop the beans.

My only real criticism of Red’s Café has to do with the ice course. They must have Ziplock bags, right? Or something strong enough to contain your drip when the ice starts to melt. No?

No, my ice was served in a small, handled shopping bag like the drug store might put your tube of toothpaste and hair pins in. No way is that gonna hold water.

Drip.

I’ll be OK. I’ll be back out there next weekend for more football, soccer, and maybe even baseball just by way of being a complete lunatic about it. I’ll also be back to Red’s Café for the nopales omelet, which I had meant to order before the thought of plantains foiled my plan. Drip. Drip.

Drip …

RED CAFÉ

Daily: 7 a.m.–9 p.m.

2894 Mission, SF

(415) 282-1515

No alcohol

D/MC/V

 

Kill your TV

Andrew Lam
-
0
Kill your TV

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

Dear Cheap Eats Lady,

Where did you go? New Orleans? That is great.

It is the news. It is the unkind heart of government, our American government, that makes me want to stop what I’m doing, which is watching television, and go to sleep. This is easy, because I am lying on the couch anyway. All it requires is a rollover and the determination to jettison my responsibilities for the day. Students be damned, the government got me so down, I could not grade your papers.

The thing that’s great about me is that, I do roll over and go to bed for the day. It is a habit I’ve had all my life. I didn’t get to use it so much when I worked full time in an office. But those days were, in the scope of all the jobs I’ve had, short-lived.

There was a time, during the Bush eras, when I thought I would simply drop out of society. And I did. It was too much to take. I felt like democracy was over, and nobody cared. So I quit. I quit the whole thing. I am a man of accomplishment and purposefulness. Especially when it comes to not doing anything. The complete quitting. Oh, how I excel.

This has been kind of going on for a few weeks. My job doesn’t seem to notice. But I know I can’t go on like this and maintain any sort of a paycheck. Eventually the work will pile up so much that I will not be able to get it done anymore. I feel like the mailfolks who stash all the mail they don’t feel like delivering in their houses.

I have a tiny bedroom filled knee-deep with research papers about gun control, abortion, global warming, and how cell phones are very convenient. You would think that someone would be interested.

Yers,

Earl

Dear Earl Butter,

Goddamn it, man, deliver that mail! Seriously, you don’t have to worry about the government. David Byrne and I have that taken care of. What you do need to do is put every one of those student papers in its own private individual envelope, address them to as many different mail carriers as you can think of, and: stamp, boom, gone!

The USPS is in fact an evil institution, point taken. But I don’t know why you are letting the TV news roll you over. This is Cheap Eats! Switch to sports. I mean, not that it’s any less depressing than what may or may not be happening in the world of … the world, for all I know. On my way to the basketball game last night, for example, I learned that there might not be a pro football season next season. But wait, shouldn’t you be downstairs playing with my cat?

Yes, New Orleans. Where else is there? The first thing I ate this time was crawfish pieroghi. And it’s so hot here now that Hedgehog and I almost have no choice but to lick Hansen’s satsuma-flavored snow-blizzes off of each other.

Technically, hers may have been coconut-flavored, unless that’s my sunscreen I smell, typing this.

Other than that, it’s pretty kinda weird, living with someone you don’t live with in a town where you don’t live. I mean, in the morning she goes off to make TV (of a very different nature than the kind rolls you over), and I go off to change diapers, and then after work we go eat crawfish pieroghis just like any other northeast Ohio/central Pennsylvania bred couple in New Orleans.

Except some nights last week there was the French Canadian Quarter Festival, where we were not only rocked by brass bands and zydeco, but by Crabby Jack’s boudin sausages, which changed my life, and then Love at First Bite’s cochon du lait po’boys, which changed my life.

And then, as if my life weren’t different enough already, on the weekend we went to the mall. We went to Metarie. That’s like going to San Mateo. Except after we stopped for refreshment at Acme Oyster House, which changed my life.

Earl, I’ll be back next week. Our beloved Bay Area is not exactly unknown for its oysters, either. If you can find me a place that has char-grilled ones as good as this, or even half as good, if not better, then I will take you there.

And grade your papers.

And kill your television.

No you worry,

Your L.E.

 

Infrequent flyer

Andrew Lam
-
0
Infrequent flyer

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS My flight was cancelled so I did my taxes. I tried to do my taxes. What I did, I wrote to Coach and said, “Let’s play catch. My flight was cancelled.” She was at work.

I went to get my nails done. After, I saw Sockywonk sitting on the step of her soap store, so I sat down next to her.

“I’m sorry I’m a bad friend sometimes,” I said. “Here.” And I handed her a small bag I’d been carrying around. Inside: the sexy nightie she lent me to go roller skating in last fall.

It was decided that I wasn’t a bad friend.

I went in the store and bought two tubes of Chapstick and deodorant. Then it was time to throw the football with Coach, but something had come up, for her, so I went home and unpacked my suitcase, then repacked it, only with Chapstick. The deodorant, I decided, smelled worse than me, so I filed it in my medicine cabinet.

Can I tell you how hungry I was? And I had eaten my refrigerator the evening before, in anticipation of two weeks away. Coach was in Dolores Park with cookies and crazy people, and kept texting me to say be patient, we would throw, we would eat. “Wait for it. Wait for it,” she said.

I have blood sugar issues, everyone knows. One thing, it gets harder for me to make decisions, the farther away I get from my last meal. So when, having waited for it, my time came, I was not as prepared as I should have been. I was, in fact, unprepared.

In other words, I needed Coach to step up, and, being Coach, she did! With flair and brilliance. She grabbed the first rubber-band-stuck paper flyer menu from the first gate we saw and said, before even looking at it: “Let’s go here.”

So we did. We walked to Market and 15th streets, to Bombay. The menu had a picture of an elephant parading a banner between its trunk and tail: “Best Indian Food in the Castro!”

I don’t know about that. I had eaten there once before but didn’t have much to say. I think they dogged me on the spice factor. This time I ordered better, in part because I was with a goddamn vegetarian, which shows to go you. So instead of ordering chicken tikka masala or something predictable, I got chana palak, which is spinach and garbanzo beans (two things I love) and, in honor of the sad fact that I wasn’t in New Orleans, a bunch of fried stuff. Pakoras, samosas …

All of which were just dandy, drenched in the tabletop hot sauce and green stuff. But what stole the show for me was my own personal li’l bowl of chicken and lemon soup that I tacked on by way of having some meat in my day, and therefore not going completely crazy.

This soup, it was fantastic! It was spicy, creamy, and wonderful, and it was called mulligatawny — which in itself is cause for celebration.

I was all set to love the best Indian food in the Castro this time around, except that something happened to ruin everything. And it wasn’t that we were fighting, which we were, kind of. I forget why. I remember I showed Coach my fingernails, how shortly manicured they were. She wants to help me be a better lesbian, see, as surely as I want to help her be a better outside linebacker. “Trim your fingernails,” she’s always telling me. “Lesbians don’t like long fingernails.”

I think I understand why, but then (not that I ever said this out loud, or ever would, it’s such a fucked-up thing to say:) most lesbians don’t have as many fingers as I do. Ba-dum-bum …

Um, but that wasn’t it, either.

The paper menu had a coupon for one free entrée, but we tripped up so much over the fine print ($25 minimum, one coupon per table, dine-in only and between 5 and 10:30 p.m.) that we neglected to consider the bigger print, the point: that to get one free entrée (of lesser value, not to exceed $8), you had to of course order two entrees. They dazzle you with so much fine print you miss the point. Tricky, innit? 

BOMBAY

Daily: Lunch 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.;

Dinner 5–10:30 p.m.

2217 Market, SF

(415) 861-6655

AE/D/MC/V

Beer and wine

 

Tilt-A-Whirling

Andrew Lam
-
0
Tilt-A-Whirling

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Coach worries. She wakes up thinking about her social calendar instead of Libya.

Personally, I don’t sleep with my cell phone under my head. By the time I wake up, Coach’s texts have accumulated like little pieces of folded white construction paper cut into snowflakes. We live in sunny California, but the drifts are downright Northeastern. School is cancelled.

Before I know that though, before I even find my phone, let alone look at it, let alone listen to the weather on my transistor radio, I need to use the bathroom.

As soon as I sit on the toilet, my cat Stoplight jumps in my lap. It’s the only time he loves me, or the only time I have time for him. Or both. To this point in my morning, I have not thought about Libya either, and I pee without thinking, as usual, anything.

Stoplight jumps from my legs to the bathtub as soon as I reach for the toilet paper and, as is our custom, while I look in the mirror at the way I look, he looks at me. The sense of judgment is intense, almost palpable, but I’m used to this.

My hair is mussy, so I muss it more. Then I bug my eyes, lean down over the tub into my poor cat’s face, and go, “Mwa-ha-ha-ha.”

“Meow,” says he.

Now I am ready to brush my teeth. Tragically, I drop the toothpaste cap and it bounces off the tile and under the tub. While I am brushing my teeth, I wonder where that little plastic cap might have gotten to, how I’m going to find it, and how — if I don’t find it — I am going to store this brand new, full tube of toothpaste without fear of it oozing out all day while I’m away, and taking over my apartment, speaking of snow days. Speaking of drifts.

I spit. I rinse. I get down on my hands and knees and look and feel under the tub, not thinking at all about Libya. I can’t find the toothpaste cap, so I stand the tube up in the glass where I keep my toothbrush, and I go about my business, which for the morning consists of not thinking about Libya, going to Java Supreme for coffee, and reading my many text messages from Coach. Maybe answering one or two.

1) You are not shallow or dumb, don’t worry; and

2) You have chosen your friends wisely.

Last night we went to this thing called Girl Talk and were inspired and informed. Tonight there is a poetry reading. Me! And Moonpie! Inspired, informed, and entertained. Tomorrow there’s a dance party, and the next day a game.

A week after that, I’ll be back in New Orleans with Li’l Edible and my other baby, eating fried things and just generally going to the zoo. Maybe when I come back I will make a date with my friend Coach, set aside a little time for thinking about Libya, for worrying about world affairs instead of worrying about not being worried.

Once the caffeine kicks in, I feel lucky to be alive, and impervious to personal injury and cardiac arrest. I should write a poem, but all I can think about is the hamburger I ate last night, before Girl Talk, with Coach, Papa and Papi, at that new circus-y place, Straw.

It was a bacon cheeseburger served on a glazed donut. And I am still amazed, alive and well.

But I’m only staying in New Orleans for two weeks this time. Here’s why: that donut burger, chicken and waffles, sweet potato tots with blackberry barbecue sauce, cinnamon sriracha buffalo wings, truffle-oil popcorn, and cotton candy. All the entrees around $10, the service is super-friendly, and if you feel like sitting close to like, your date, you can sit in the date seat, which is taken from a carnival ride, probably the Tilt-A-Whirl.

Great place. New favorite restaurant.

STRAW

Mon.–Fri. 5–10 p.m.;

Sat. 10 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun. 10 a.m.–9 p.m.

203 Octavia, S.F.

(415) 431-3663

MC/V

No alcohol yet

 

Stuck on my craw

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Stuck on my craw

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Finally! Business as usual, here at Cheap Eats. But before I start talking about sports, there’s a little more I want to say about the poop in Coach’s garage.

It came with a few sheets of toilet paper on top. And when her landlord found it he said, “Hey, was there a dog running around in the garage?” I stayed in the house while Coach went out to see for herself. She was pretty sure that dogs didn’t use toilet paper, she said.

Then they both cleaned it up, and Coach started down that long, rocky road to forgetfulness. You know, at first I was on her side, but now it’s one week later and she keeps bringing it up. So I guess that means I’ll keep writing about it.

Blame Papa for not letting us talk about football last night, over sushi.

We lost 32-6. Speaking of shit. Maybe that had something to do with why Papa, our Center, didn’t want to talk about it. Actually, 32-6 was less than we expected to lose by. This would have been the first time in sports history that a 32-6 loss went down as a “moral victory” — except for one minor problem: they only had six players, and we had 14.

Athleticism is a wonderful thing to watch, even when you are covered in mud with cleat marks in your cheek. I’m not saying that’s what happened. We play on turf, so I was covered in little black turf balls with cleat marks in my cheek.

You know how they say that winning isn’t everything? Well, neither is losing. Traditionally.

We might change that, but in the meantime the troops remain optimistic and cheerful. My favorite moment was watching our quarterback chasing down yet another interceptor, late in the game, while laughing her head off.

She’s a rugby player. We may be the most bad-assedly bad team in the league, if not sports. We have a couple field hockey players, two to three soccer players, a basketball star, and maybe a little softball experience. But only two of us have ever played American football outside of bed and/or high school gym class.

We will have our day. It just might not be in my own personal lifetime.

After the trouncing, I made the mistake of going to Rockin’ Crawfish on Lake Merritt with the de la Cooter fambly. As if I didn’t already know what it means. To miss New Orleans.

While I was there — down South, that is — I kept sending pictures to Crawdad de la Cooter’s mister, Mr. Crawdad de la Cooter, of all the wonderful things I was eating, which included of course fried oyster po’ boys with bacon and cheese, and even more of course, crawfish etouffe, crawfish pie, and crawfish.

First he kind of begged me for mercy. Then he gave up on mercy and wrote me about a place they found in Oakland with “passable boiled crawfish.” When he brought it up again, upon my reentry, I thought he was trying to be helpful. I should have known he was plotting his revenge.

Passable? Maybe, if you haven’t been anywhere near Louisiana for at least four years. Mere days after feasting on Kjean’s with Cherry, B.B., and Hedgehog … forget about it.

I love Cajun. I love Asian. I love fusion. Authenticity means nothing to me. Berkeley has better Chicago pizza than Chicago, and the best pizza I ever ate was in Germany. I’d pit Just For You’s po’ boys against any I had in New Orleans.

Rockin’ Crawfish … just … doesn’t. Like Red, here in the city, it’s like they’re trying too hard. They crash the garlic over your head and blast you with hot sauce. And I love both those things but don’t associate either one with great crawfish.

The ones I was making love to last couple months, they don’t give you five choices. They come one way, with a subtle, more blended and complex zing to them.

It ain’t fair, I know. I should have waited four years. Anyway, I’m here. Sigh. My new favorite restaurant?

ROCKIN’ CRAWFISH

Mon.–Fri. 2–11 p.m.; Sat.–Sun. 1–11 p.m.

211 Foothill, Oakl.

(510) 251-1657

MC/V

Beer and wine

Synapse lapse

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Synapse lapse

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Dear Earl Butter,

That’s great about the synapse package. Synapse packages are very important, as the Pod surely knows. I can only imagine what having had yours brought “to the fore” has done for your creative output and pulled pork with barbecue slaw. Because in terms of thinking and cooking and playing Scrabble and guitar, I mean, it all boils down to synapse packages. Wait. What’s a synapse package?

What I know is — and this is a beautiful thing about reality and air travel — your most recent pulled pork and barbecue slaw samwich kept me up until 2 a.m. in the morning. In a good way! I got a lot of important work done, like studying the 1985 Chicago Bears defense and inventing an eight-woman version of their famous 46.

Did you know that when the Attack was telling you about having “the most fun she ever had” playing football she was talking about playing with me and my friends? And this is saying something, since we are a respectable 0-1, and her old team is something like 58-3 in league history. We play against them Sunday and it is my goal, as defensive coordinator, to not lose by more than 80.

So the next day I tried feverishly to explain my late-night 46-inspired 242 defense to Coach, but unfortunately a human being had pooped in her garage, and she was despondent. Not even taking her out to Chilli Cha Cha 2 and sitting under the mural with boobs on it could revive her zest for life and interest in defensive schemes in general.

Will try again tonight.

Meanwhile, I just wanted to thank you for keeping Cheap Eats unreal while I was away, and for accidentally even throwing in a little sports talk. In light of recent developments, and speaking of keeping it unreal, I see us becoming this fine, radical, and all-around conscientious alternative weekly’s sports section.

Sssh. I’m trying to sleep.

Your Dani

Dear Mrs. Downstairs Neighbor,

That all sounds great and, of course, welcome back, but the point is that Kris and I went to the Great American BBQ in Alameda. I got the brisket with beans and greens ($12.75) and she got the St. Louis style pork ribs, coleslaw, and beans ($10). I’m in the middle of this cleanse and am not supposed to be eating stuff like this, but I thought you would be proud of me if I could say that I cleansed with beef.

We liked it there. It had a good, classic BBQ place feel. We talked about Matt Stahl, whom we have in common, and how Matt and I teach similar things but he probably teaches them better. He is like my hero in all sorts of ways, but mostly in the guitar and singing and being-Matt way. I think we probably talked about music. We also have that in common. Remember? She used to play in Fibulator, back in the day.

We evaluated the place like good critics. We thought the meats were very well done. We decided that the heat of the sauces could be upped a notch so order your hotness one past what you would. If you like medium, get hot.

Anyway, a little bit of the table hot sauce fixed it up for us. At first we were like, maybe this is not the best BBQ we’ve ever had. But then we both agreed, that, wait a minute, if we lived a little closer, we’d be eating here all the time.

The owner came out and gave us a nice chat and some peach cobbler, which we thought was very good. Then our time together was over. I was supposed to watch either the space station or an iridium flare on my roof with my across-the-hall neighbor, Hazel, and had to get home. I would eat here again. I enjoy BBQ. You taught me how.

Yers,

Earl

GREAT AMERICAN BBQ

Tues.–Thurs. 11:30 a.m.– 8 p.m.; Fri. 11:30 a.m.–-9 p.m.;

Sat. noon–8 p.m.; Sun. noon–8 p.m.

2009 High, Alameda

(510) 865-3133

MC/V

Beer and wine

Man w/ parking

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Man w/ parking

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Dear Earl Butter,

Really??? Really, Earl? Really? Do you really think the source of your romantical problems is lack of parking? If so, by buying a motorcycle, a car, and a parking space, won’t you be setting yourself up for the opposite sort of problem: too much love.

As it is, almost every straight lady in San Francisco wants a piece of you, except for most of them. Still, that’s a good 10 or 12 good women who don’t need no parking spots or a motorcycle helmet to come see you, see?

So … and don’t forget, exactly one year ago the other day I myself proposed marriage to you in this very column because I thought it would make good copy. My being the consummate journalist aside, did I care if you had a parking spot, or wheels of any kind? No. I live downstairs.

Granted, not all women live downstairs from you. I’m just saying. The other night Hedgehog and me went out dancing to Cajun music. Technically, she didn’t dance; she played the washboard, and I danced.

In short, we had the time of our lives and in the process got what would best be described as drunk. I invited the 87-year-old man I was dancing with to come home with us, just in case his last remaining unfulfilled fantasy was to watch two highly carnivorous wimmins in bed together, but he just wanted to keep dancing.

Hedgehog and me went to a grocery store across the street and we bought, among other things we might like to later lick off of each other’s bodies, a bottle of wine. Being already sloppy, as soon as we got outside the store, I accidentally dropped the bag with the wine bottle in it. Her graceful little flower, Hedgehog calls me, mostly for throwing silverware around restaurants. Now this.

She wanted to just leave it, which is kind of a uniquely New Orleans approach to problem-solving. I hailed a cart collector and showed him the mess we’d made so at least they could clean up the glass. “No problem,” he said. “Go get another bottle.”

Not thinking enough to leave the soggy plastic bag there, I dripped purple back into the store to customer service. They said, “No problem. Go get another bottle.”

Never even checked the receipt. Hedgehog could have gotten something twice as expensive, while I stood there bathing in fluorescence watching the mopper mop up my mess and thinking: “What a unique approach to public drunkenness.”

But she didn’t.

Yours,

Me

Dear Mrs. Butter,

That is great. Mod and Kat said you guys tried to go to the Brown Sugar Kitchen before, but could not get in. The thing being that it is always so crowded. We had to wait a little while at noonish on a Tuesday. But then we did get in and got to eat.

Kat had the chicken and waffles ($15), Mod had the BBQ pork sandwich ($9.50) and I got the blackened catfish ($15). We all got the biscuit made with bacon, although I do not remember it being bacony, but it was good.

Kat was very excited about some football league she’s joined and says she’s never looked more forward to getting slaughtered on the field. She says she plays with gals who have never played football before, and it is the most fun she has ever had.

Mod learned how to do some weirdo therapy that brought all my knotted synapse packages to the fore before the food came. It also made my eyes tired and got me interested in the sidestep, like in gym class.

Kat thought the waffles were a little less than substantial, but I found them to be light and delightful. The pork sandwich seemed delicious, but Mod ho-hummed it a little. And I found the catfish to be very subtle, and in need of hot-sauce. We all agreed, good. But maybe not worth the wait.

Yers,

Earl

BROWN SUGAR KITCHEN

Tue.–Sat. 7 a.m.–3 p.m.; Sun. 8 a.m.–3 p.m.

2534 Mandela, Oakl.

(510) 839-7685

MC/V

Beer and wine

Beadeviled

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Beadeviled

CHEAP EATS Dear Earl Butter,

As it turns out, the whole purpose of Mardi Gras is to catch beads. There are also little plastic cups and stuff, but what I want is a football. I want to make a leaping spinning catch, like a halftime Frisbee dog, bring it on home, lay it at Coach’s feet, and pant.

Do you think she will pat me on the head?

Do you think she will let me play in the season opener (this weekend!) even though I’ve missed every single practice since training camp?

I don’t know.

She texted me yesterday to ask how my lesbianism was coming along. I said, We’re at a parade, recording the crowd and the sounds of feet, and taking pictures of the childerns. I said I was trying real hard to catch a football for her, but so far … beads.

She expressed her disbelief (which I share) that I was ever even thinking of France over Mardi Gras. Then she texted again and said, for clarification, "Boobies!!!!!"

I paraphrase. There might have only been four exclamation marks. The point is, Earl, that when people think of Mardi Gras, they think of tits. Well, I am here to tell you — you, Earl, of all people, because I know you are more interested in subtlety and nuance than most of my two lesbian friends — that this is about so much more than that.

For example: ass.

I’m kidding. I’ve been to four parades already and I’ve seen about as much skin as I would have seen if I went to church. Admittedly, I haven’t been hanging out in the French Canadian Quarter, let alone on Bourbon Street, which is what everyone associates with Mardi Gras, not to mention New Orleans. But that’s like thinking of San Francisco as Fisherman’s Wharf.

Which would be what? Ridiculous. Yes. So my own personal, privately-held, and highly journalistic insider’s impression of Mardi Gras so far is that it’s a family affair, featuring marching bands of pimply teenagers and cute-ass kids punctuated by horses, trucks, and tractor-pulled floats from which ridiculously attired adults shower the citizenry and streets of New Orleans with insanely cheap and even more insanely coveted toys and trinkets. You can imagine my joy!

Boobs be damned, Earl, I am catching Coach a football or my name ain’t whatever my name is.

Dear Li’l Sister,

That is great. Me and Diane went to Katana-Ya in downtown San Francisco after seeing the greatest western movie of all time. Diane called my tongue unsavory, which you would think would put me in a funk, but, I don’t know, I just blew it off somehow.

Which is kind of what happens in this western we seen. This guy kind of gets his tongue blew off. It’s an odd way to start an afternoon when you are going to write about food. But it is not too odd.

We both got ramen. Big bowls of delicious noodle soup with prizes, like pot stickers. Hers was vegetable with soba noodles ($11) and mine was the katanaya, which had fried chicken and pork and pot stickers (get to the pot stickers early or they get a little chewy) and corn and fried potatoes and seaweed and scallion and barbecued pork and boiled egg. That is a lot of prizes ($12.90).

We talked of how we were both going to find us mates. Her plan was, I forget. And my plan was to get a garage space in my building and then get a car and a motorcycle. I believe it is the parking inconvenience that has hindered me all these years.

We also had edamame.

And Diane had a lollipop, seeing that there was a bowl of them on the counter and they were free. That is supposed to be a good sign.

Yers,

Earl

Katana-Ya

Daily: 11:30 a.m.–1 a.m.

430 Geary, SF

(415)771-1280

MC/V

Beer and wine

Adieu, Paris

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Adieu, Paris

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Dear Earl Butter,

Here’s a funny thing. I am supposed to be on a plane right now, and I’m not. You know in movies when the tearful lover is in line at the gate, wearing sunglasses, even while the other lover, the one with better sneakers, is dashing through the airport, leaping over luggage, dodging go-carts, and generally knocking over ordinary citizens in a desperate attempt to stop her?

Well, this was nothing like that. Not even a little. Hedgehog has an ingrown toenail and is in no condition to dash, dodge, or leap. In consideration of which I had tried to get her to purchase an airplane ticket to somewhere, but she was all like, why?

“Um,” I explained, “because — hello — my feet are fine?” In fact I am training for opening day of the SFWFFL on March 12, and running through airports is pretty good for me.

She was all like, oh. Still … did she buy herself an airplane ticket? No, she did not. At 11 a.m. this morning, when my flight to France took off without me, I was sitting on my slave quarters bed, calmly sipping coffee and reading the Sunday Times.

Hedgehog was home reviewing post offices for Yelp. Sure, she is happy I’m still in New Orleans, as am I. In fact, tomorrow afternoon we are going to sit on her porch! So you know, though, two other people are even happier than we are that I didn’t get on that plane. I speak of course of the Doughboy’s moms, Butterby and Super Duper Flashlight Mom, who have been threatening since my arrival to cut off my feet by way of keeping me here.

Time and again, I have argued that without feet I would not be much use to their baby. Eventually, after many repetitions and PowerPoint demonstrations, they “got” this — thankfully because I wouldn’t have been much use to my football team either.

Butterby cried when I told them I was staying. She had to leave the room. It wasn’t the first time I made her cry. The first time, I was explaining barbecued eggs to her, and when I got to the part where I wrap the bacon “scarf” around the bell pepper, she started to go emo on me.

Super Duper took me to the Krewe du Vieux parade and caught throws for me. She’s tall, aggressive, and Southern by birth, so she says “y’all” with authority. But you know what? So do the Asian people at Nola’s many fine Vietnamese joints.

My moms’s child, my charge, is perhaps the most edible thing our planet has ever produced. It’s all I can do to keep my own teeth out of the fuzzy skin behind his ears, let alone ward off the dogs and coyotes of New Orleans. When we are at the zoo, all the animals, even the vegetarians, come right up to the edge of their domains and stare at him in a kind of a trance.

Do you think he might be Jesus?

Dear You,

That is great. Me and Joel went to the Pad Thai Restaurant near where he now lives, which is Bernal, and that’s sad for me in that he no longer lives in the building, but great all-in-all because he has a great setup with a great lady and a terrific little boy wherein he can now get a little weepy listening to pop songs when he thinks about how wonderful life can be. It was Presidents Day, and I was wondering if it was all presidents, including the Bushes.

Joel said no, just two of them.

At Pad Thai, there is no confusion because they have pictures of all the dishes they serve. No lunch specials to speak of, but everything is around $8 or $11. We split a mango salad, which had shrimp and squid and was lime-y and good-spicy. And I got the Egg Bomb because if it’s on the menu, you have to get it. And Joel got the chicken with green beans. Except for the egg, our dishes were very similar. Delicious.

Yers, Earl

Pad Thai

Mon.–Fri. 11 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Sat.–Sun. noon–10 p.m.

3259 Mission, SF

(415) 285-4210

MC/V

Beer and wine

Pony up, kids

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Pony up, kids

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS From Crawdad’s house in Berkeley, you can see Golden Gate Fields racetrack. I take her kids to the soccer pitch next door, to watch and run, and I walk their dog along the water behind the track.

When I was little, I used to circle my favorite-named horses in the sports section, then check back the next day to see how much I’d won. My uncles and aunts played the ponies. Punker and Gatorgator, they play the ponies. I have been invited. And invited.

I associate three of my favorite writers with horse racing, but have never been, not even once, to the track. Until last Saturday.

Damon Runyon, Charles Bukowski, Mike DeCapite, and now me. Finally, finally I can say with authority that I pulled a kazoo out of the septic in the sixth at Fair Grounds to show and he did! He seconded, paying 51-1.

Now, Hedgehog had a Li’l Loveable visiting from her hometown and this ‘un was marking her daughter’s 21st birthday by redefining herself, running a half marathon, eating weird things, and just getting a tattoo. Loveable was the only one of us with prior track experience, except, I think, that Hedgehog might have been once or twice too. A succincter way of saying this might be that I was the only one without track experience.

And therefore the only winner. Yep, after dropping tacos in the fourth and fifth on a couple of popular pinstripes who failed to impress, let alone deliver, I thought I would change majors — which was good timing because a can-do named Mayo was odds-on incumbent just then, and … yuck!

Hedgehog head-cheesed Mayo, and I — being a world renowned mayophobe — looked for the oppositest entrée, which was the horse called Crispy. Crispy was 20-1 when I placed my taco, but by gate was 51-1. Or, more than twice as losery in the imagination of the wagering public.

But the hard part was I couldn’t even scream as my quantum leap long-shotted across the finish line because we watched that inning from the field announcer’s booth, Hedgehog being the wig that she is. Our host was on mic, and that meant we had to be perfectly quiet, for the sake of the sport, while the unthinkable dreamed itself before my very blinkers. I bit my tongue real hard.

The integrity of horse racing thus preserved, I windowed up to collect my Cheerios. Come to think of it, I’m surprised more of my San Francisco friends didn’t come visit me in New Orleans once they got wind of the kind of column inches I was ethering home to this rag. Just Kayday, and I don’t even think she reads me.

Anyway, she was waiting at her hotel piano bar, so I nut-jobbed my winnings, kissed Hedgehog, high-fived her townie, and went. We had a two-dinner, three-bar date with Frenchmen Street, whereas Hedgehog and the Loveable were updressing for some gala or something. Oh, I was invited, but didn’t have anything to wear. Since Kayday ain’t my fairy godmother, the Cinderella story ends right there.

Things we ate that night included grilled oysters wrapped in bacon, fried crawfish, fried pickles, mac ‘n’ cheese with meatballs, and gumbo. So probably the ball-goers didn’t have anything on us, save maybe a higher dry-cleaning bill.

The next night I cooked for everybody, and the day after that, Kayday’s last, we thought we would go up to Riverbend, get a bucket of crawfish, and sit on the levee, which, my little master’s mama assured us, would be “the right thing to do.”

Except they didn’t have boiled crawfish at Cooter Brown’s, so we got raw oysters and pecan pie and that was when I blew my New Orleans food fuse. “I’m done. Tell me about home, Kayday,” I said, sitting on the grass, on the levee, watching barges on the Mississippi.

She said she had the best burger ($10.50) she ever had at Chez Maman in Potrero Hill. She said the waiter said everything in French, then English. She said the frites … the burger! she said.

“Was there peanut butter on it?”

“No,” she said.

Next week I write you from France.

CHEZ MAMAN

Mon.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.;

Sat.–Sun. 10:30 a.m.–11 p.m.

1453 18th St., SF

(415) 824-7166

MC/V

Beer and wine

Gum-choux seduction

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Gum-choux seduction

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS She made me a gumbo-reduction taco, then took my hand and led me to her bedroom. At the time, jazz did not exist yet. There was something on TV, but the sound was off. Hedgehog was wearing a Saints jersey, No. 73 — Someone Evans, who made the Pro Bowl and came from her home town. I already had a picture of her in her Saints shirt, but there was something else in the world where jazz would be. Maybe some dishes, or a paper bag full of paper bags. Holding the spot.

In bed, I licked taco juice off my fingers. I mean gumbo-reduction. I mean, Appalachian moux-choux gumbo, or for short, gumb-choux, pronounced gumshoe, like a detective. I licked the detective, I guess, would be the least sexy way to say this.

It wasn’t the first time we went to bed together, and it wouldn’t be the last, but it is the one makes the paper, because never before in my life has anyone reduced a gumbo for me by way of foreplay.

And I have to say, from the smell alone, while I was waiting on her tiny couch, New Orleans, I was ready to be led to bed. Dang, I’d of followed that lesbian into the snake pit of hell, or Houston, on the wings of the smell I was smelling.

One bite and I was butter. So the next night, over Korean, when one of her friends asked me what was the best meal I had eaten here so far, I said the right thing and didn’t even have to think about it, let alone lie.

“A gumbo-reduction taco,” I said, high-fiving Hedgehog, who was sitting next to me and blushing out of either culinary pride, horrified embarrassment, or civic duty. “It’s true,” I said. “What can I say?”

I started saying a lot of other things … about all the other meals we’d eaten. Like that very morning, at Slim Goodie’s Diner, where I had the Jewish Coonass, potato latkes with spinach and fried eggs on top, smothered in crawfish etouffe.

And that wasn’t even all that great compared to the boiled crawfish and raw oysters and hot roast beef with ham sandwich we shared the afternoon before at a sports bar called Cooter Brown’s. Where we brought our laptops to write but instead of being productive got grease and hot sauce all over them.

And that was nothing compared to the fancy pants hanger steak and pork chops we overwhelmed on our first date date night at Patois.

In other words, it’s going to be really hard for me right now to say anything at all very exciting about the soup I ate in Berkeley a few weeks ago, or the other soup I ate in Berkeley a few weeks ago. Hmm. Let’s try my new favorite Indian restaurant in Albany.

Remember? I went there one night with the Maze when we were both working up the hill, but I forgot to ever say anything. But I still remember it, even though the rest of my brain has been erased, because Indian food is something that does not happen so well in New Orleans.

Ah, but if you head up San Pablo Avenue into Albany, you will find a gem of a new, nice, friendly, cheap, and awesome Indo-Nepalese joint called Hamro Aangan, where the chicken tikka masala is out of this world. And the naan is top o’ the line.

We loved it, me and Maze. “Tell your friends,” the hosterperson guy suggested. And I assured him I would.

OK, so I got that out of the way.

Now I can devote myself to the Story of Last Night at the Spotted Cat, where the Jazz Vipers, a great old-guy front-lined brass band, inexplicably imploded midshow. The sax and the trumpet, both aged enough to know better, times four, start arguing right in front of everyone. The young guys in the band, and the trombonist, act casual. Some people leave. The bartender’s getting pissed. And Sax is berating Trumpet, off-mic but on-volume, just generally being a big baby, when Trumpet turns to what’s left of the bewildered audience and shrugs. Apropos of I-don’t-know-what, he says, “And that’s how jazz was born.”

I don’t know. I just thought I would take his word for it.

HAMRO AANGAN

Daily: 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

856 San Pablo., Albany

(510) 524-2220

MC/V

Beer and wine

Meat-cute

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Meat-cute

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS The things that New Orleans throws at you! Example: a wall of doors, so metaphoric it hurts. My goal is, for the length of this column, to not let it mean anything, just … a wall of doors. Yep.

So this wall of doors separates our yard here from the neighbor’s, which isn’t a yard so much as a couple of feet between houses, a walkway. And, instead of a picket fence, door door door door door. All wooden, all weathered to varying degrees and in different ways. A few still have their knobs on, and these sparkle in the sunshine — albeit meaninglessly. One has no knob, but yes hardware, which is rusty and does not sparkle.

Shine or no, each door is beautiful in its own way; some are bare, others getting there but with swaths of prehistoric primer still, or paint. One had been covered so thickly, so many times, in a now-yellowing white, that the cracks in it resemble giraffe skin. Another has window panes, four quarters: two still have glass, and two are blank space. I could pass a cold beer through to the workers working on the dilapidated house next door.

New Orleans is a ragged and broken city, which is of course part of its charm. The streets have potholes the size of swimming pools. The sidewalks end, drop off, bend and crack. I’m afraid to ride my bike. Walking is an extreme sport. The zoo is just across the street, and I take the Doughboy there because it is safe and smooth. We are becoming friends with the zookeepers, and already they have let us pet a snake.

End of the day, when I told his mummy about this snake-petting business, she wondered what my own personal “spirit animal” was.

“Giraffe,” I said, without even thinking about it. Before, as you know, it was chickens. Why — since I am famous for eating me my meat — do I always identify with the vegetarian, and the prey?

My new New Orleans friends, the human ones, are meat meat meat eaters, and music music music lovers, which makes perfect sense because food and tunes are what this town is all about. You can imagine my giddiness. Hedgehog, the one I am kissing, works on a TV show I’ve never seen, because I don’t have a TV, let alone HBO, so I feel especially qualified to give it an especially objective review. I mean, how much more objective can you be than to never have even seen a thing? So: not enough plot. Or character. Oodles of fantastic music.

I base this impression solely on comments made by my TV-having friends back home when I’ve mentioned that, yo, I’m hanging with someone from Treme. Then when I tell them that she does sound, then they are impressed.

On Monday, Hedgehog and me walked along the Mississippi River, drank vodka in a gay man bar, and ate at a place called Green Goddess, which (hee hee hee) is all about meat — pulled pork flapjack for me, and a bacon meatloaf samwich for her.

Mind you, that’s at the Green Goddess. So you can imagine what goes down at the restaurants called Butcher, and Pig — but in French, which here doesn’t mean pretentious. I’m in heaven!

Next evening, four of us gathered after work for $2 taco night and $2 Red Stripes at the Caribbean-influenced Rum House. Just some of the stuff my own personal tacos featured: lamb vindaloo, barbecued ribs, roasted duck, and goose cracklin. Um, that’s four different animals crammed into only three $2 tacos.

You know how after-work gatherings go: the televisionistas are unwindingly griping, their shitty day this, their shitty day that, and I’m just serenely sipping my Red Stripe because I’d had an awesome day, changing diapers.

Tomorrow we’re eating at Patois, and Sunday we’re having a little Super Bowl party. I’m making my patented barbecued eggs, and Hedgehog is bringing her patented gumbo tacos, and what the fuck? I can’t get me no lesbian love in queer central, San Francisco, where I’m popular. Or in Boston, where I rock. Whereas one week into New Orleans, where my most ardent admirers are a nine-month-old boy and a handful of zookeepers, and I’m squeezing me a hot hot hottie who’s won a goddamn Emma.

Or whatever that’s called. Bragging? Not really. I’m just looking out my window at a wall made of doors.

NEW ORLEANS

The only place in this country that’s cooler than San Francisco.

Po’ girl

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Po’ girl

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS It was minus two in Boston when I got on the airplane. I was all bundled up in borrowed and stolen clothing, trying to tap what was left of the warmth from our show there. Between 200 and 300 bodies, and, no, I didn’t get laid, but on the other hand I never felt more loved. There may have been one or two dry eyes in the house, but there were not a lot of dry pairs of underpants. Myself, I was completely creamed by the whole thing. I’m still a little shaken.

At the airport, on the weather on the news on TV, they showed a live shot of San Francisco, just before dawn, and said that it was 60 there, that San Franciscans would wake up to a clear, beautiful day.

But that wasn’t where I was going. I was going to New Orleans. New Orleans is where I am, and I intend to have a lot to say about the food scene here. Crawdad de la Cooter, who grew up in this neck of the swamp, thinks I’m not going to want to come home. I think it’s going to take more than red beans and rice and gumbo to change my life at this point.

Now Kayday, she gave us all a scare. After nine months of not finding a job in San Francisco, she found a job in L.A., and on the day before the big move, she got a call from her new employer saying that she’d been, in effect, laid off. Talk about cutting it close! She called me right afterward.

“I have good news,” she said. Then she told me the bad news.

“How are you feeling about this?” I asked.

She was shocked, she said, and also euphoric.

I said, “I’m sorry.” I said, “Congratulations!”

This was, unequivocally, bacon for my own musical future. When I come home now, my new band will be all in one piece and place, which is important for things like bands and chandeliers.

Last night while I was sleeping, a curtain rod did not fall on my head. However, almost the whole rest of my household here was of the opinion that one had. New Orleans is like that. It’s a haunted city. Things go bump in the night, and clang and crack and “Ow! Goddamn it!”

So far I am charmed. My first meal was a fried oyster po’ boy, and the first thing I saw when I left the house this morning was three giraffes — real, live, leafy-toothed giraffes that were not in any way a figment of my imagination, because it turns out there’s a zoo just across the park.

Tell you why I’m here: one of the families whose cute little nine-month-old childern I care for just moved from Berkeley to New Orleans, just for the semester. This childern, both his moms are perfessers, one at State, and one — uh oh — at Tulane. I’m here to help, but also to eat myself silly and have scary adventures to write home to you and/or Earl Butter about.

Since the fried oyster po’ boy I imbibed last night was, as the saying goes, nothing to write home to you and/or Earl Butter about, I will instead regale you with misinformation about a meal I ate with Kayday before I even left San Fran.

On a cold, cold and windy, windy night, the likes of which you haven’t seen and are not likely to see in some time, according to The Weather Channel, Kayday and I ventured our way over to Bernal Heights around dinner time. We were going to squeeze in one last practice at Bambam’s house before Kayday moved to the city of Angels and I to the city of Saints.

It all seemed like Not A Bad Idea at the time. To get something to eat first. So we wound up at Blue Elephant on Cortland Avenue. And we ordered imperial rolls, duck curry, and something else that I have forgotten. But the imperial rolls were not forgettable. They were great. And the duck curry, which is of course a red coconut milk curry with tomato, pineapple, and roasted duck, was fantastic.

Kayday told me she was going to make a blog about living in L.A. called “My Year of Living Los Angelesly,” and I thought that that was a fairly brilliant idea.

I still think so, but now someone else is going to have to do it.

BLUE ELEPHANT

Daily, Lunch: 10:30 a.m.–3 p.m.;

Dinner: 5 p.m.–10 p.m.

803 Cortland, SF

(415) 642-9900

AE/D/MC/V

Beer and wine

Derailment

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Derailment

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS The last thing I did before I left San Francisco, I promised Earl Butter that this time I would not kiss any gangsters on the train. I didn’t say anything about self-proclaimed hillbillies who burp a lot and don’t have front teeth — or luggage — so you wonder if they just escaped from prison or are only on parole.

This one, he flirted with me all the way from Emeryville to Chicago. That’s a long way to not kiss someone!

He was going on to Detroit and had less of a layover than me, but helped nevertheless with my luggage, which was considerable. He wanted to help more, but when he went outside to smoke, I stuffed my stuff in a locker, stepped out into the Windy City, and promptly got my nails done. Which was one of the best decisions I ever made.

One of the worst was early next morning when I stepped off the train into a frozen shit town not unlike, or far from, the frozen shit town where I was born. Did you hear me scream? Henceforth, when East Coast people in California say that they miss the seasons, I will put lettuce in their ears and flick them on the forehead.

Probably, to the residents of Erie, Penn., this snow was a non-event. But to an overtired, underdressed California girl without boots, it was the Big One, blizzardwise. To his credit, the snot-nosed station master did ask, before locking me out of the station, if I needed a ride.

“My friend is coming,” I said.

“Can I drop you somewhere?” he said. “Where are you going?”

“New York.”

He laughed at my apparent joke, pointed to where the Post Office was, in case I needed it, and left. In retrospect, I would have licked that booger off his upper lip for a ride to New York. Instead, I stood in the blowing snow and freezing cold, stomping my feet and, yeah, screaming, until the Post Office opened. Then I stood in there.

Probably I should have stayed on the train. I could have stayed on the train. It was going very close to where I wanted to get, but I’d thought I would keep my old ex-bandmate and good friend Rube Roy company on his way there and eat in diners for a day, instead of dining cars.

Rube Roy was two hours late and partially blind in one eye, but did buy me breakfast. On our way out of town we found a diner called Somebody’s “Dinor,” where, over eggs and potatoes and sausage and coffee and such, we talked about the old times, and the new times, and even some of the upcoming times.

There is so much time. So much time to think, in a car spinning around and around on a snowy interstate highway in Pennsylvania, bouncing between guardrails like a complicated bank shot off the cue of someone named Chuck or Lefty.

One of the things I thought about, boom, spin, was how I didn’t think I was going to die, but you never know, bang, spin. I never did like merry-go-rounds, or whirligigs, but the bumper cars I guess were all right. Now, I get motion sickness facing backward on BART. I didn’t think we were going to die, but when our car came to rest finally, facing traffic in the passing lane, I don’t know. I wondered.

Before I go, I would like to spell Papi’s name right, at least once, in the paper. They didn’t exact any promises from me, but Papi, Papa, and Coach did want one last dinner together before I left. So I said, “Brothers! Korean barbecue!”

And, like magic, that was where we went. For meat and meat for me and Papa, and some other kinds of things for the vegetarians. Ah, you know, it was all pretty good and everything, but not as probably good as the last time I went. Does it matter?

Not here.

“Rube Roy?” I said, as a semitruck whizzed by in the right lane. “Can I drive now?”

He flashed his headlights at the next one and said, “No.”

I write to you from New York City. Hi. Next time, I promise you, dear reader, dear gangsters, dear hillbilly, I will stay on the train. 

BROTHERS RESTAURANT

Daily 11 a.m.–midnight

4128 Geary, SF

(415) 387-7991

AE/D/MC/V

Beer and wine

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