L.E. Leone

A story goes with it

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

"Were you nervous you would miss?"

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

"Your table’s ready" … for example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOONEY’S SOUTHERN BBQ

Daily: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

5319 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Oakl.

(510) 652-1238

Full bar

AE/MC/V

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

By degrees

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

"What’s that mean?" he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was hot. The soup, the sun.

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

SPUD POINT CRAB COMPANY

Thu.–Tue.: 8:30 a.m.–5 p.m.

1910 Westshore Road, Bodega Bay

(707) 875-9472

No alcohol

Cash only

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

The loneliest number

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

"Um," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did I mention I was in love?

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

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

I got off the freeway.

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

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

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

NEW YORK BY THE BAY

Mon.–Fri.: 7 a.m.–5:30 p.m.;

Sat.–Sun.: 8 a.m.–3 p.m.

1005 Northgate Dr., San Rafael

(415) 472-6674

No alcohol

MC,V

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

Leftovers

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said, "I don’t have kids."

BRICK PIG’S HOUSE

Tue.–Sat.: noon–8 p.m.

5973 Shattuck, Oakl.

(510) 923-1789

No alcohol

MC,V,D,AE

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

Buttered up

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com


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

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

Then: who knows?

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

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

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

"Fabien," I say.

He says, "Chicken Farmer."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BRICK PIG’S HOUSE

Tue.–Sat., noon–8 p.m.

5973 Shattuck, Oakl.

(510) 923-1789

No alcohol

M/V/D/AE

March madness

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or was. Now I don’t know.

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

Happy pride!

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

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

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

I’ll pass.

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

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

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


TAQUERIA LOS POTRILLOS

Mon.–Fri., 9 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Sat.-Sun., 8 a.m.–10 p.m.

355 E. Washington, Petaluma

(707) 763-4220

Beer & wine

MC/V

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

The odds

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and, yum! But where?

CRAIG’S PLACE

Daily: 7 a.m.–4 p.m.

598 Guerrero, SF

(415) 461-4677

Beer & wine

MC/V

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

The zone

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I didn’t know, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where would I be without this column?

MARIN BREWING COMPANY

Sun.–Thu. 11:30 a.m.–midnight;

Fri.–Sat. 11:30 a.m.–1 a.m.

1809 Larkspur Landing Circle, Larkspur

(415) 461-4677

Beer & wine

MC/V

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

Disorderly

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0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

The husband mumbled something I couldn’t hear.

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

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

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

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

What can I say?

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

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

But really I should leave these matters to the medics.

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

It’s too easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TON YONG THAI CAFE

Daily 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

901 Kearny, SF

(415) 986-6218

No alcohol

MC/V

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

Love story

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0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wiped off and went to the beach.

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

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

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

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

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

KING SING

Daily 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

501 Balboa, SF

(415) 387-6038

Beer & wine

MC/V

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

Fear itself

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0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHAT PHILLY

Daily 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

3388 24th St., SF

(415) 550-7428

Beer & wine

AE/D/MC/V

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

Sour grapes

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0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Wish I could take the two parties I went to on Saturday and superimpose them onto each other, so that the Rockridge moms and dads could mix with the young trans men, drag kings, and queer burlesque performers.

When I mentioned this seemingly surreal idea to Alice Shaw after our soccer game Sunday, she said, simply, "Do it. You can!" And she teaches photography, so I decided to believe her.

Not only that, but since my own training is technically as a fiction writer, I think I’ll bring my buddy Earl Butter with me to both parties, even though in real life I only ate lunch with him and then dropped him off at his house.

Earl Butter deserves a bigger piece of pie. Don’t you think?

"My whole life has been a series of disappointments," Earl Butter really did say, at lunch. "One after the other after the other, and eventually you reach the point where one more thing … well, it might just be the one that breaks you."

We were both looking at his piece of pie, and it was, in fact, astonishingly small. Small enough to put inside a teacup. Small enough to break anyone’s spirit.

I gave him half my piece. To be honest, I didn’t miss it. If I go back to Mission Pie, it will be for a cup of coffee.

Now, to show you what a great friend and altruistic farmer I really really am, after lunch I took Earl Butter with me to this Kentucky Derby party in Oakland. Of course you heard that a 50:1 long-shot won, by a mile, and that gives me more hope than Susan Boyle gave everyone else.

But I already had more hope than is good for me, anyway.

Anyway, so I met this big fat queer stripper chick stage-named Kentucky Fried Woman at a burlesque show. "I’ve heard all about you," I said, because I had. I’d heard that she has a Derby party every year and makes buttloads of the Best Fried Chicken Ever.

Praise the Lard … it’s true!

And there were biscuits, and corn bread, and mac ‘n’ cheese, and every possible shade of white and yellow things to eat, but I have a confession to make: I went to two shows in one week and didn’t get the burlesque thing. I mean, song and dance and comedy I understand, but the part that ends in swirling pasties? … Nothing. I’m sorry.

This probably seems like sour grapes coming from an uncurvaceous woman with sour grape-sized tits, so it probably is sour grapes. And/or to me, life itself is almost unbearably sexy as it is, with it’s fried chicken and red umbrellas, its beautiful people, licking their lips.

A friend had to explain it to me. But I still didn’t get it. Maybe the striptease, like fried chicken itself, is simply not for everyone. That was how I decided to leave it.

Then I went to this party. Then, later that night, I went to this other party. I was on the dance floor talking to my two new favorite people: the woman whose children I watch, and the mom next door, our hostess, who was wearing a wig, false eyelashes, it being her birthday.

Perhaps giddy at having found sitters, one or two other people were wearing wigs. That was it. Oh, and one guy was wearing a cowboy hat. I was wearing what I always wear: a skirt, a shirt, and a little mascara.

"I’ve been watching you," Cowboy Hat blurted, as soon as we’d been introduced. He seemed unable to contain himself. "And I have to say," he spilled, "that you have really impressed me with your outfit!" I think he was a doctor. He had to notice the life leaving me as he went on and on, congratuutf8g me on my get-up, my costume, how well I’d done!

Worst of all, he meant all this as a kindness, so vodka and tonic in his face was not an option.

The only way to shut him up, which didn’t hit me soon enough, sadly, was to unbutton my shirt, swing it over my head, and let it fly. I undid my bra, my skirt, the music erasing the rest as I danced down to my exact body, the song, finally getting it. *

MISSION PIE

Mon.-Thu., 7 a.m.-9 p.m.;

Fri., 7 a.m.-10 p.m.;

Sat., 8 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.-9 p.m.

2901 Mission, SF

(415) 282-1500

No alcohol

Cash only

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

Not in attendance

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0

le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Greg handed me an open can of beer and it slid right through my fingers; that’s how greasy they were from eating meat, and that’s why this week’s love-letter-slash-restaurant-review begins in a puddle of foam on a beach blanket, and with the general sense that I very literally can’t hold my liquor.

Earl Butter had some napkins. Also: two homemade balsa wood airplanes, which he had left, intentionally, in a brown bag in my car. The napkins were in his pocket.

"I don’t want no kids touching my airplanes," he said as we were walking from the car to the party, bag of barbecue, a blanket, and a six-pack in tow.

We were not at the beach. We were in the Golden Gate Park, celebrating the recent arrival and impending departure of our old pal and ex Cheap Eats irregular Satchel Paige the Pitcher. He lives in Thailand now with his wife Ann Paige the Pitcher and their two little Wiffle-ballers, Nellie and Kelly Paige the Pitchers.

Every two years they all come back here just to get cold a little and see if they can make it into my column. Probably they have other reasons too. For years, for example, they’ve been trying to talk me out of my fear of flying and into visiting Thailand so they can take me to this restaurant near their house.

Greg is a vegetarian. I offered him the opportunity of a vegetarian’s lifetime: to smell or even lick my fingers, but he passed on this. Probably because his girlfriend was sitting right there — although it’s possible, I suppose, that he just didn’t want to lick my fingers. Or even smell them. Stranger things have happened.

Not that this is one of them, but Kid Coyote found a corner of a piece of old bacon in his backpack and ate it. He said it tasted like cologne. Now, a cologne that smells like bacon … Don’t do this to me! I’m practically a cannibal already.

Speaking of which, and bearing in mind that I recently renewed my poetic license, the love letter portion of this restaurant review will be in passionate, almost psychotic tribute to a red umbrella, not in attendance. It was cold out, and windy — too windy to stand up straight — but no threat of rain. Which was a good thing, because it was also too windy to open an umbrella anywhere but indoors, and everyone knows that’s bad luck.

The umbrella, just to be perfectly clear about it, is in no way associated with last week’s little number about the stuff guys leave at my apartment. Neither museum piece nor talisperson, this umbrella is an umbrella. It was given to me by a tall, dark stranger wearing mirror sunglasses, a funny hat, and a crooked, possibly fake mustache. He said something in French that I have not been able to translate any more precisely than, "Collect your family."

"Thank you. It’s red," I said, accepting the gift with a polite smile, also in French (the smile, not the sentences). And it hasn’t rained since.

Earl Butter hadn’t had lunch so we detoured to George’s, the new 24th Street barbecue, on our way to the park. It looks like it used to be a taqueria, but I’ll be damned if I can think of which one. Anyway, it’s a barbecue now. A kind of a smokeless barbecue. They admit it themselves on the back of the menu: "all meats are slow roasted continuously throughout the day." Technically that’s roastecue.

The three-way George’s special ($12.95) has chicken, beef, and ribs, so those were the three kinds of grease that lubricated my spilt can of beer at the picnic. And it was good meat, and good sauce, and good bean salad and salad salad by way of sides. I let Earl Butter eat the potato and roll, as I’d already had lunch once.

It was a great and windy and cold party, with kids and soccer balls and croquet, potato chips, Oreos, friends I hadn’t seen in a while … and all I could think about was my red umbrella, not in attendance.

At night now, if I sleep, I dream weather reports, and, yes, it’s May, it’s California, but I simply can’t wait for it to rain.


GEORGE’S BBQ

Daily, 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

3231 24th St., SF

(415) 550-1010

Beer & wine

Cash only

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

The body count

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0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

I pushed a peanut shell through a hole in the tabletop. We were outside, upstairs, on a wraparound deck and the left side of me was getting burnt. The right side of him. Hot day …

There were boats. Water. There was a view of the Oakland skyline.

"I had my first lesbian lover," I said, to get his attention. I was tired of talking about snowboarding and soccer, sports, his and hers. I was ready for some he-said-she-said, the good stuff.

"Really?" he said, with the big smile with the perfect teeth.

Our beers were half-empty, the peanut basket half-full. I told my story, watching his face, pushing peanut shells through the many holes in the iron tabletop. I thought they were scattering on the floor below, on the deck, but in fact they were piling up on my skirt.

He dates a lesbian. His name is Ratatat and he has black hair and thick, black, old-fashionable glasses, an Asian Woody Allen or Elvis Costello, only a lot younger than both of them, put together.

He also dates me. Although … as our dates get funner, they get farther apart. And we talk more about who else we’re seeing … Which is fine. Really.

No. Really, I have a bad attitude about polyamorousness. Polyamorless, I call it. Luckily, my bad attitude is in this case trumped by a really very good attitude about the nature of reality. The nature of reality is that it is real. It’s what’s for dinner. No. It’s what we are left with after dinner, the bones, dirty dishes, and in some cases, indigestion.

I have started a kind of a museum of Things Guys Left At My Place Because They Leave In Such A Hurry. See? I’m a realist. In lieu of the return visit, let alone flowers, let alone love, I smoke the rest of their cigarettes and wear their big stinky shirts like a nightie in the morning, with my coffee. It’s a cool twist on cross-dressing, and I love it. I love the smell. I love the way guy-grade cotton feels against my bare skin. One man left a pair of sunglasses and I wore them and loved the way the world was.

But how can I explain all this to Ratatat, who treats me truly like a friend? Who leaves nothing and does come back, who picked me a flower one time …

I can’t! So I gave him the fantasy, the body count, instead: one woman, one man, since last we met. And he gave me his. The ongoing lesbian. A cute girl upstairs. Somebody else …

Besides peanuts, which are on and all over the house, we split an appetizer with our beers: Quinn’s signature, a halved tomato dressed with pesto and piled with shrimp. Perfect for the hot day, a midafternoon snack, and the bayside setting. Place used to be an actual lighthouse! Now it’s a split level, split-themed restaurant, yacht club style downstairs, peanut-littered pub up.

And there really was a pirate sitting near the door when we left, after only one beer apiece. Anyway, he was a salty old-timer with a parrot on his shoulder.

After we walked past him I turned to Ratatat and said, "That guy works for me."

Because he did. I’m a fiction writer.

I gave Ratatat and his flat-tired bicycle a ride home and a hug, then went to be with the children. Then went to be with the chicken. Cakey, who I had successfully cured of broodiness by bringing her to the woods and basically traumatizing her. As I write this, she is kicking leaves and looking for bugs right next to me, a healthy, happy, and functional member of society.

Well, what’s good for the chicken …

I will get on an airplane, which is the scariest thought I can think of. My passport application is all filled out. I forget how long it takes but I got a packet of alphabet pasta in the mail yesterday. While I’m waiting I will nitpick these A’s, B’s and C’s into top-secret international love letters, then eat the evidence.

QUINN’S LIGHTHOUSE

Daily 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m.

1951 Embarcadero East, Oakl.

(510) 536-2050

Full bar

AE/D/MC/V

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

Angels

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0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Not even duck soup can save me now. The children I put to sleep … they want stories.

“I had a black eye,” I began, “a swollen, purple nose, and tears streaming down my face.” I was lying on my back on the floor in the dark, next to their bunk beds.

“No no no,” the voice on top said. “Make one up this time.”

“When I was a little girl,” I began, as I always do when I’m making one up.

The voice of the bottom bunk interrupted. “In this one make the fox eat the chicken.”

“No no no,” said the voice on top. “Make one up where the chicken eats the fox.” He laughed his angelically evil laugh.

“Yeah!” she said, laughing hers. “Yeah, where — ”

“This story doesn’t have any chickens in it,” I said.

The silence was spectacular, my audience mine. I promised the usual: that if neither one said another single word, from that moment on, I would stay right there in the room with them when the story was over, until everyone was asleep. I said that in any case I would see them in the morning, and if anyone had any questions or comments we would discuss them over pancakes. “But if you want me to stay in the room right now,” I said, “you have to put your heads on your pillows, close your eyes, and just listen.”

This they did, the sweeties, but Top Bunk, being a little too eager to please, overshot the pillow and bounced his head off the headboard, necessitating an ice pack. When I came back from the kitchen, Bottom Bunk was cold and wanted me to snuggle with her.

The story I told, finally, from the floor, once everyone was properly iced and snuggled and re-sworn to silence, started with “When I was a little girl, between your age and yours,” and ended last night at the International Terminal of the San Francisco Airport.

In between there was plenty of time for two little children to fall asleep, wake up, go to school, grow into adults, and surrender to the cold, stark reality of make-believe, or — who knows — maybe even experience, just once, the upending shock of true, fiery, electric, and impossible love, the kind where whole worlds, not just bodies, collide.

Kids aren’t angels. They’re kids. They kept their heads on their pillows, their eyes presumably closed, and bravely just breathed. Then afterward I could hear their wheels spinning, the little coughs and sniffs, restless repositioning of arms and legs.

Their questions went without saying, but I knew what they would be, and had marked them all, along the way, for later, for morning, for pancakes …

What does pneumonia feel like? What’s an exchange student? Oxygen tent? How can duck soup taste so dark and good and still be medicine? And why couldn’t you finish it? Can you go to jail for stealing a roll of toilet paper from a ladies room? What does Fung Lum mean? Can people really fly higher than airplanes? If you liked the same stuff and never wanted to stop playing together, why did you stop? How come we wish on stars but not the moon?

Adults aren’t angels. The dishes needed done, the counters wiped, and the kitchen floor swept. It was garbage night. I hadn’t slept since Sunday, bathed since Monday, or changed my clothes since Tuesday. I’d cancelled meetings, missed deadlines, left work early, and concocted a really very unforgivable dinner that no one, not even parents, could quite fathom. That was Wednesday. On Thursday they ordered pizza.

And I lay on the kids’ room floor long after they’d both spun down into differently delicious dreams, forgetting every single thing except and until pancakes. Awake as always, as low, loved, and lonely as the kid-beaten, bent-tailed, poopy-butt cat curled up next to me, I lay with my black eye and almost-broken nose, tears brining my crows feet and basting my ears, thinking soft fingers on faces and wondering how in the world I would answer the one about the moon.

Fung Lum Restaurant

SFO International Terminal, SF

(650) 821-8282

Beer & wine

AE/D/MC/V

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

Tending the brood

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS The young couple next door to me in Rockridge is building a chicken coop, and I love them for this. They aren’t married and don’t have kids, which makes me just want to squeeze them and look at them, and invite them over for every single thing I eat, even oatmeal.

But that would be creepy, so instead I offer to bring them some straw. Do they need a feeder? A waterer? I still have my place in the woods. I have rat traps, chicken wire, and rusting 55-gallon drums that would look real nice against the falling-down barnlike outbuilding on the edge of their lot.

Together, I think, we can shake up this neighborhood. In just a couple months here I have made more friends (or at any rate met more people I want to be friends with) than I did in five years living in Occidental. In five years in Occidental, I made four friends. Two couples. One I actually met in San Francisco, and the other through a mutual friend in Oakland.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the woods, or I wouldn’t still keep my shack, which I go to when I can for writing and/or romance, and sort of sublet to my artsy bohemian city peeps for same.

The family I work for in East Oakland, Boink’s family, they have a chicken. Used to have three, but two died, and the one that’s left has gone bad. Her name is Cakey. She’s brooding, which means she’s set her mind, and ass, on hatching eggs that no amount of setting will ever induce to hatch. Save maybe a visit from Gabriel.

This is actually a dangerous condition for a roosterless hen to be in, because she might get over it, and she might not. I have girlfriends like this.

It falls on me, while Boink’s family is away in Florida for the week, to traumatize their chicken. I’m surprised Boink hasn’t already achieved this, by accident, but the best way to get a broody hen to snap out of it is to harass the hell out of her.

So I’m going to East Oakland in a moment, I’m stuffing Cakey into a cardboard box with holes poked into it, for air, and I’m driving her out to the country. To the woods. To my shack. Where I can annoy her for three days with sticks, Pere Ubu records, and buckets of cold water — and no one will hear all the squawking. I tried this once with one of my girlfriends and got arrested.

I love Pere Ubu, by the way. But chickens … and perhaps all poultry, for all I know — their capacity to withstand ’70s-era punk rock starts and ends with the Ramones. So you know.

But speaking of traumatized girlfriends, my friend Alice Shaw, after whom I named my great car, Alice Shaw, was mugged at gunpoint in the Mission District. As if I weren’t already mad enough at muggers for stabbing a friend of a friend in Seattle!

And do you know what Alice Shaw said to us, over deep-fried hamburgers after a soccer game? She said, Well, in a way it was nice to be noticed, for a change. I’m paraphrasing.

It is comments like this that make me love human beings even more than chickens. I mean, to be fair, we have no exact translation for the could-be clucks-of-wisdom that chickens call to each other from the jaws of foxes, but it’s a safe bet they are not so laced with humor and sadness as, for example, Alice Shaw’s odd comment.

I wanted to squeeze her and feed her oatmeal, but we were already eating fried hamburgers. Outside, and over rice, with fried eggs on top, and smothered in gravy. What could be better, after a soccer game? It’s a Hawaiian thing, called loco moco, and in fact it was invented 60 years ago, according to the menu, in honor of a barefoot Hawaiian football team called the Wreckers.

Whose players apparently liked to eat, because I, at my hungriest, couldn’t clean half my plate, or even imagine ever being hungry again, so I brought the rest to Earl Butter. We all agreed: Really really dong-dong-dicky-do great, in a school lunchy kind of way.

You want to know where, don’t you?

HUKILAU

Mon., Wed.–Thu., 11 a.m.–2 p.m. and 5–10 p.m.

Fri.-Sat., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

5 Masonic, SF

(415) 921-6242

Full bar

MC/V

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

Morality

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le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

Morality

CHEAP EATS Intoxicated by how pretty flowers are in the dark and wowed by the sheer size of the lit TVs in all my neighbors’ windows, I accidentally hit my head on a tree. Hard. The rest of my life is going to be a dream.

Here’s the part where Earl Butter sends a messenger pigeon saying he’s sick, but not sick, and will be sitting home and crying unless anyone comes over and drinks and eats vegetables with him.

Well, I have no particular plans for the evening. I was planning to stay home and cry, myself, so I tell Earl Butter’s bird to tell Earl Butter I’ll be right over. If I don’t hit my head too hard on too many trees, walking to BART.

Which I didn’t. One tree. Hard, but not hard enough to make my life much more than dreamy. What I failed to account for was all the distractions that would bonk and bewitch me on the other side of the pond, walking from BART to Earl Butter’s. Namely, and in no particular order: Pizzeria, the Mission’s first (that I know of) stone oven pizza, good ol’ Good Vibrations, and of course New Yorker’s buffalo wings because I needed some lube.

Butter and hot sauce, babe. That’s what I’m made of.

Buffalo wings remind me of Earl Butter, who got made in upstate New York and introduced me to buffalo wings and bowling as a way of life.

But a friend of a friend of mine died yesterday of either cancer or knife wounds. She had cancer and then got mugged and stabbed, see, and then died in her sleep after she got out of the hospital, hard to say why. So my friend wrote to me, even though I never knew her friend, and it was like an obituary.

"She loved camp comedians, naughty jokes, show tunes, Ireland, bubble baths, and take-out curry," my friend said of her friend. She said she wished she had a blog because she finds herself wanting to talk and write about her deceased pal. A lot.

And a light went on over my head. It’s rare that you get to do something concrete for a friend in need. But the thing is that I kind of do have a blog, or something very much like one. So why don’t I make myself useful for a change and write about my friend’s friend for her, a lot, in this restaurant review?

Her name was Mandy. She died at home, at night, in bed with her long-distance girlfriend Kristen, who had come that day from Kansas City to be with her, to help her get well.

Mandy was a psych nurse and sometimes kept baby hedgehogs under a heat lamp in her guest room, according to her friend (my friend), "rising during the night to bottle feed them." She didn’t have any brothers or sisters, yet had eight godchildren. Think about it. So whoever stabbed her stabbed someone who didn’t have any brothers or sisters, yet had eight godchildren and nursed both baby hedgehogs and human head cases.

Plus there’s the take-out curry factor. Nothing pokes the unfunny bone like an extinguished hankering for curry. Or the smell of paint. I could go on and on, on my friend’s behalf.

But I know a lot of my readers are muggers, so I’ll be succinct: If you take anything at all from this important restaurant review, take this: stop stabbing people, you fucking morons. We’re all dying anyway, of breast cancer and heart disease, and we don’t need knife wounds on top of it all, so fuck the fuck off. If you lack the skill or finesse to eke a living or pick a pocket cleanly, turn the knife inward and cut your gutless bowels out.

For those of you who aren’t muggers, your moral is quite different. When your friend sends a messenger pigeon, and sometimes even if they don’t, go to them. Bring lube, and/or vodka. Bring buffalo wings. Bring pizza.

Yes, Pizzeria has a dumb name, and a posh (and therefore empty) interior. But its pizza has that nice, thin, stone oven crispness. Which I so so so so love.

My friend’s friend Mandy did not like pizza.

PIZZERIA

Tue.–Thu., 3 p.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., noon–11:30 p.m.; Sun., noon–10 p.m.

659 Valencia, SF

(415) 701-7492

Beer & wine

AE/D/MC/V

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

Yelped

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Hardly anyone names their cat Dave. In fact, no one. That I know of. And yet, every 11 years, like clockwork or a comet, I find myself in the position of having to explain Lou Reed to someone. Why this task falls to me, I will never know. I am not in particular a fan, although I do like and sometimes love and generally "get" and occasionally even listen to Lou Reed.

On the other hand I have never enjoyed hearing Bob Dylan sing a Bob Dylan song. Somebody else — pretty much anybody else singing a Bob Dylan song … sure! On the radio the other day they were talking about whether or not white guys could be "hip," and the name that kept coming up was Bob Dylan. Someone mentioned Tom Waits, and Tom Waits mentioned Chuck E. Wise, and somebody said Quentin Tarantino and the whole time I was screaming at my radio and shaking it, because that’s the way I am.

I am exactly the kind of person who would name their cat Dave. As it happens, my cat came with a name already: Weirdo the Cat. But if I ever get the chance to name another one … Dave! Dave the Cat.

Now, if I ever get to name a person, humanity’s going to be in serious trouble. As is that person, Bing. Boy or girl. After the coolest white man that ever lived. I’m not old enough to even know, really, but then, most people who think Jesus was cool never actually jammed with Him, or heard or saw anything He said or did first hand, or even watched His television special — except on South Park. And that’s animated.

My point being that I’m done with dating (again!), or at least writing about it, and so now you get to read about food, lucky you.

Eats. Cheap, yes, but gourmet? Not that making sense is my specialty, but why would you name your restaurant Eats and then describe it as a "gourmet breakfast and lunch restaurant"?

It’s not gourmet. It’s Eats. Clement and Second Avenue. Just look for the line of people waiting on the sidewalk. You’ll never guess what they’re waiting for: eggs. Toast. You know, potatoes … Eats has the standardest menu on Clement. Nothing’s special, not even the specials. Huevos rancheros? Yeah, special maybe in Iowa. But I ask you, Eats, is this Iowa?

No.

Wait, I made a mistake. This is Iowa. Naw, there is one thing special on the menu. It’s the ricotta cheese pancakes! I found out not by sampling them, but by going to Yelp.com. Which is how I plan to review restaurants from now on. Who knew? There are 134 reviews of Eats on Yelp, and almost all of them mention the specialness of the ricotta cheese pancakes.

Hmm … 134 people versus me. I don’t know about you, but I would trust 134 voices over the evidence of my own senses. Especially since, out of any random 134 people, somewhere between 130 and 133 of them are likely to know more about food than I do.

I am a fan of cornmeal pancakes, and pancake pancakes. Word on the Web is that ricotta cheese is the way to go. They’re so good, apparently, you don’t need butter or syrup. (Many, many, many people said this.) I say: why in the wide, wonky world would I order pancakes except as a vehicle for butter and syrup?

In fact, I ordered the cornmeal pancakes, short stack, with a side of sausage. They gave me three cakes, and only two packets of butter. What the — ? I had to go find four more for myself, ’cause the service was kind of slow. The grillfriends I was with, they ordered cornmeal and regular pancakes. And we all agreed: ho-diddly-hum.

The sausage was dry.

And seriously: it may be that the ricotta cheese pancakes are as amazing as 134 people say, but my guess is they’re not. If they were, the cornmeal and regular ones would at least be good, one would think. *

EATS

Mon.–Sat., 8 a.m.–3:30 p.m.; Sun., 8:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

50 Clement, SF

(415) 752-2938

No alcohol

MC/V

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

Desperado

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I did the math. This is Part Five of a Three-Part Series, and therefore the last part. Henceforth, I will leave my neighborhood alone and just live in it.

Speaking of five, I had five first dates in five days. I should say, I made five dates but only had four of them. The first was in an accident on his way to see me and wound up in the hospital.

He sent a picture of the car. One of those ones where you wonder how the driver survived. Well, he’s a fireman. My best guess is that firemen know how (to survive). Which is dangerous knowledge to have. He calls every day, addresses me as dear, and is in a lot of pain.

Shhh. He doesn’t know about my man on the train, to whom I am not technically betrothed, but committed, yes, because I looked deep into his bloodshot eyes and said what he wanted to hear: that I would represent him.

One of my favorite things about being romantically connected to a recovering gangster who was being taken into police custody the last time I saw him is that you can pretty much start fooling around immediately.

And I use the words "fooling around" loosely … No, really, I only actually carried on with one of the five first dates. Meaning my very very seriously irretractable vow to never ever EVER under any conceivable circumstance have sex on a first date, not even once, is still 80 percent intact! For the week.

Nobody approves of the choices I make. Except this one guy. But most of my girlfriends and all of the women’s magazines and dating advice columnists … it’s unanimousish: don’t be desperate. Whatever you do, you’re not supposed to be, or seem, desperate.

"But what if you’re desperate?" I have to ask. It is almost my job to ask, and I think maybe it is my job to answer. Or try.

Well, desperation has a bad rap. Which is easy for me to say. I embody desperation. I am one of desperation’s foremost practitioners and appreciators. Desperate people who don’t embrace, or at least act out of desperation, will never get to lick a ruby in a dangerous drunk’s front tooth, for example. Or …

Or …

There are other examples too unmentionable to mention.

This one isn’t: The best kisser I ever kissed, the man who will now, for me, set the standard for quality kisses, was of course All Wrong, by the book, and an act of desperation on my part. He was the one-in-five, and technically still married. I kinda knew I’d never see him again, and I definitely knew I would want to. Oh, and he wasn’t even very good-looking, nor well-spoken — which turns me on more than good looks. But: none of that. He was an amazing kisser, and I wasn’t wrong to guess that that would translate to great sex.

Minus my being starved for affection, however, it never would have happened. And I never would have made the five dates in five days, probably, if I hadn’t been so impressed and/or horrified by my shenanigans with that man on the train. Not because he was a gangster; because, cool dentistry notwithstanding, he was a terrible, terrible kisser, all force and no finesse.

Somebody save me! Right?

This is not what I want. It’s what I’ve got. I will work with it, laugh and enjoy and wrangle it into words, as always, for your amusement, but it wouldn’t be true desperation without the underlying fact that it ain’t what I want. I want sweet, sexy boredom and juicy burritos with a reliable, commitment-capable man with a soft, spicy tongue, safe driving habits, something to say, and question marks for eyes.

I know you’re out there. Sort it out and step up, please, sir. It’s hard, I know. I know it’s scary. But imagine the meals we will make, and all the great restaurants in our oystery world, as simple as salt plus what?

You’ll figure it out.

Meanwhile, when I am absolutely desperate for a burrito:

THE BURRITO SHOP

Mon.–Sat.: 10:30 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sun.: 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

5259 College, Oakl.

(510) 658-7646

No alcohol

MC/V

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

Representation

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I’ve lost track of how many parts there have been in this three-part series. Hopefully more than three. Hopefully not more than six. I wouldn’t want to rock anyone over the ridge. Same time, I do want to show off my new neighborhood.

So: Rockridge Cafe. Been there twice, and both times I got the same thing, the Italian scramble, which is great. They also have ricotta cheese pancakes, and a lot of other cool stuff, but I’m telling you: Italian scramble. Sausage, provolone, some other things, eggs of course, and I think parsley. The potatoes aren’t real good.

But speaking of scrambled Italians … I’m on the train again, coming home, and my right eyeball is all a-wobble in its socket. I needs me a night of completely horizontal, unrattled sleep, and of course a long bath.

When I returned up from one of many trips to the toilet, I accidentally attracted the attention of a black man of color, who addressed me as Sweetie or Baby or Honey — I forget which because I was so astounded by the next words out of his mouth. He liked my perfume, he said. What was it?

"My perfume?" I said, stalling for something smart-ass. It worked! "Oh, that’s Eau de Three Days On The Train," I said.

He laughed and all the people in the seats around him laughed.

I’d have left it at that, but he was wearing a black doo-rag and a Raiders jersey and he had a beautiful ruby set in the middle of his one front tooth, so, recognizing the potential for a date with a hometownish boy (I just know there’s a cooler way to say that) … I sniffed myself and said, "Gee, do you like it? Really?"

"Come here," he said, still laughing. And that was it. The whole train had to put up with us for the rest of the way. Which was Sacramento. I’d misread him.

He didn’t misread me. There is a class of man, thank God, which recognizes and appreciates the Kind of Woman That I Am. A chicken farmer. Well, a recovering chicken farmer.

Whereas my man is a recovering gangster. Between slow deep kisses, copped feels, and heartfelt professions of "representation," he explained to me about L.A., drugs, drug dealing, and how, if I understood him correctly, he’d killed some people.

It’s important, especially in the early stages of romance, to establish common ground, so I told him about having killed my chickens. "But not these last ones," I said, to be clear. "I gave them away."

He kept looking at me, into me, smiling, laughing, and shaking his doo-ragged head, saying things like, "Girl, you are so cool." And, "Girl, you are the bomb." And he liked my hat and how did he find me and he knew every time he watched me walk down the aisle how real I was. And how real he was.

What else he was, of course, was drunk. And worried about his breath. So you know, there is something very touching about an ex-gangster who is self-conscious about his breath.

Which was fine, by the way, so I gave him my number, and agreed in spirit to the terms of our "representation."

I think I’m his woman.

Yeah, that’s how it goes: I am his woman, and he is my man, and when we are out with his homos, or homies (or something like that), I represent him and he represents me, and when we are not together I have his back. He has mine. I like this!

In fact, we both had the chance to prove ourselves on the train. A young white rap-ripping poseur from the suburbs of somewhere disrespected my man’s woman by "informing" him, when he went to get a beer, that, yo, he was kicking it with a dude.

As if after half a day of heart-to-heart and hand-to-body he didn’t know exactly what kinda woman his woman was! Well, my man is no poseur. He comes from a sexually diverse family, and a tough, diverse, forward city, and, in fact, he did have my back.

However, in the aftermath of the ensuing hard feelings, the bigoted wannabe’s racism gurgled to the surface too, and she had the bad sense to call my man a "niggah." Then, when that didn’t go over so well, she changed her pronunciation to "nigger." And spitted the word, repeatedly, with venom.

I had to pull my man away before something happened that might be construed as drunk and disorderly. Back in our seat, he cried. And I represented him.

ROCKRIDGE CAFE

Daily: 7:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

5492 College, Oakl.

(510) 653-1567

No alcohol

MC/V

What I’m not

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I never should have given away my chickens. I should have bonked their heads off and plucked them and cut them up and put them in the freezer. How unfarmerly of me to give them away! I knew I would regret it, but didn’t know it would hit me like this, right here, right now, in New York City.

Tomorrow night I’m doing a reading here. It’s so cold. I keep clicking my heels together and not going anywhere. It’s so, so, so, so cold, like, zero. I’m wearing everything I brought, including three pairs of panties under my tights and jeans and skirts and dresses, and two coats. And I’m still cold all the time. And then I go into a building and it’s 110 degrees, and I’m stripping down to just poetry.

People keep looking at me, outside and inside, and I want to be able to say, "I’m a chicken farmer."

But I’m not.

Tomorrow night I will stand up in front of a lot of people (I hope) in a place where a lot of great writers have stood and read, and I will want to take off my clothes and say, "I’m a chicken farmer."

But I’m not.

After my reading here I get to go to Pittsburgh and read and then Cleveland and read and then after that I get to be on a train again, to Chicago then Oakland, where there aren’t any chickens waiting in my freezer, because I couldn’t be bothered and gave them away.

My new favorite coffeehouse is in SoHo. It’s called City Girl Café, and it’s better than Joe or Joe’s or any of the other million places where I’ve thawed out over coffee in this cold, slushy city, last couple days.

My new favorite Thai restaurant, in spite of great red curry duck last night, is in Oakland, you’ll be happy to hear. Rockridge, of course. Sabuy Sabuy, a cozy, unpretentious hole-in-the-wall on the corner of College and Broadway. I ate there with Kiz on the night before I left, and it was raining and cold, come to think of it.

Kiz had just come back from St. Louis, where she’d helped her brother, who had had his nose changed by a sidewalk. I have walked on St. Louis sidewalks; they are not nurturing. As a result of which, it didn’t heal right and they had to re-break and reset it, in a slightly happier way.

I know Kiz’s brother, and I like him. His name is Kez. Kiz said he was doing well and wasn’t being all mentally bothered by all this. Which, I would of been. Sidewalks, noses … are you kidding me? But now that I am a city girl and not a chicken farmer, I suppose I should get used to such combinations.

Sabuy Sabuy’s signature "special duck" dish is double-cooked (I’m guessing roasted and fried), and served with spinach and pickled ginger ($11.95). Very, very good. The duck was crispy and juicy and just wonderful. And … pickled ginger! It’s about time people start plopping down pickled ginger next to something other than sushi.

I was even more taken by a soup I’d never seen before on a Thai menu. Soup woonsen, which was a clear broth with glass noodles, napa cabbage, and these great meatballs made out of an unlikely roll-up of marinated pork and chopped prawns ($7.95).

We ate something else too, but I can’t remember what it was.

Someone wrote to me, a fan, and asked how to butcher a chicken. At least I think that’s what they asked. After you sever the head, they said, what next?

OK. You let the blood drip (oh, and stop reading two sentences ago if you don’t want to know), but you dunk your feathered ex-friend into almost boiling water for a half a minute or so. Then, while it’s still pretty warm, you pull out all the feathers, and scald off with a flame what you can’t get with your fingers.

There is more than one way to outside the insides of a chicken. I like to use poultry shears. First I cut around the "vent" (or "butthole"), then … then …

Oh, look it up online, why don’t you. This is not my thing.

SABUY SABUY

Lunch: Mon.–Sat. 11 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

Dinner: Daily 5–9:30 p.m.

5231 College, Oakl.

(510) 653-8587

Beer & wine

MC/V

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

Twister

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I love how, on the train, you can see into people’s backyards. Backyards are so much more interesting to me than front ones. What you don’t see from the road … it’s the same in California as Iowa as Pennsylvania: piles of colorful plastic trash, tarp-covered mounds of mysterious not-yet-trash, broken-down swimming pools with bikes sticking out of them, neurotic dogs and malicious children tied to trees …

Sometimes, just outside of cities, between the tracks and the freeway, you see tent towns or hobo jungles, cluttered camps tucked into clusters of trees or just trying to hide in weeds and bushes. Sometimes there is smoke billowing up from a fire pit and you are free to think about coffee or a can of beans.

But litter is more beautiful than people think, especially blooming in an otherwise pristine "natural" landscape. Although … I would argue that our trash is natural too, that Coke cans and candy wrappers are to rocks and leaves what Miles Davis is to wind and rain. We make stuff that outlives us, get over it. Or not. Either way, detritus makes me want to dance.

What I don’t like about train travel, on the other hand, is the museum piece doofus who gets on in Sacramento and blabs about the Donner Party and this scenery and that history, PA system crackling, fracturing, and feeding back, all the way to Reno. I tried to drown him out with my headphones but Utah Phillips wasn’t loud enough. But Abba was, thank you for the music.

After Reno it doesn’t matter. You are too rattled and fuzzy to care — about the sunset or canyons, or the Colorado River, or the Great Plains. Of course, without the voice directing you to look at this, look at that, you tend to notice every single thing.

Two nights in a row I dreamed about tornadoes. The first night I was home in bed, and the second night I was on the train. Only thing tying the two nights together was what I’d had for dinner: Zachary’s pizza. So if I dream about tornadoes tonight, after eating Zachary’s yet again, then we will know the cause.

I’ve got a little cooler and am the envy of this choo-choo train, because I’m holding Zachs.

My thinking: nothing packs more caloric and nutritional value per square inch than a slice of deep-dish pizza. One little piece is a whole big meal. Plus pizza is good hot or cold, as every rocker knows, and it travels well. Well, it travels well in a cooler on a train. Not so much so in a pizza box in the rain. I had to walk five or ten blocks in a downpour, trying to hold my little umbrella over both me and this two-ton pizza. We both got soaked, and the toppings slipped off of the pie and my hat fell off of me. But we made it, and reassembled, and dried off, and by the time I get to Chicago I will have eaten Zachary’s for four straight days, and presumably will have dreamed about tornadoes for four straight nights.

But I mean to tell you about Christopher’s burger joint, which is my new favorite burger joint by virtue of being a little closer to my house than Barney’s. The burgers are made out of Niman Marcus designer cows, but the place itself has a lower brow feel to it, which of course I like.

And they have shoestring french fries, which I like.

Just be ready with the salt and pepper and hot sauce, because nothing, not even the spicy burger, was seasoned very much.

I ate there on a date (speaking of flavorlessness) with one of those guys who only really knows how to talk about himself. You know, the one with an hour-long answer to every question you ask, but he doesn’t have one single question for you. While not exactly what I’m looking for, these dates always go well for me, because while he’s talking, I get to focus on my burger. And fries. Which is ultimately what I’m more interested in.

My date said (among 9 million other things) that he’d met the owner of Zachary’s and, ha ha, told him that Zachary’s was the second-best pizza he’d ever had. And when Zachary asked whose he liked better he said his own homemade pizza. Dude makes better pizza than Zachary’s! And I have no reason not to believe him, except that — and this is pretty flimsy as well as retroactive — I did not dream about tornadoes that night.

CHRISTOPHER’S BURGER

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

5295 College, Oakl.

(510) 601-8828

Beer & wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

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

Entropy

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I’ve been eating a lot of spaghetti and meatballs lately because it’s Boink’s favorite thing to make. Meatballs. Makes sense, right? Making meatballs has everything that kids love: pouring milk somewhere that milk doesn’t belong (on bread), smushing with a fork, cracking eggs, beating, tearing parsley leaves off of stems, sticking your hands into meat and other slimy things, rolling it into balls …

And then the key to cooking with kids, I learned the hard way, is to get the unfinished product, in this case a tray of meatballs, out from under them before they give you a lesson in entropy. To Boink, who is almost four, there is as much fun or more in the act of catastrophic dismantling as there is in the act of ordered creativity. One time a carefully assembled counterful of ravioli turned into a mountain of sludge while I was using the bathroom, for example.

I’m old enough to know about entropy in a firsthand, personal, and bodily way. I don’t need these demonstrations. I mean, conceptually at least, three- and four-year-olds have got nothing on me when it comes to an understanding of thermodynamic principles. I love entropy; it’s just that I prefer ravioli. Especially for dinner.

So I have learned to hover, watch like a hawk, hold my bladder, and time my dive perfectly. From the counter to the stove, virtually no time at all passes — so that from Boink’s point of view, the meatballs were there, then they were gone.

It’s sad in a way to have to scramble such a pure, scientific mind with a sense of magic. But dinner has to happen. It’s in my job description.

Speaking of which, since I’m still trying to review you a restaurant now and again, and since I have a whole new neighborhood of restaurants to explore …

What’s that smell?

Oh yeah, I almost didn’t recognize it, it’s been so long, but here comes a three-part series. What I love about Rockridge is that for all the hoity-toit and hullabaloo, it turns out there are plenty of down-homey, down-to-earth, and downright reasonable restaurants to duck into, if you’re me.

And I don’t mean Pasta Pomodoro or Barney’s, although both those places have their place.

Soi 4, the great date destination, is not that much more expensive than other Thai restaurants, as I recall. And Zachary’s, for all its lines and overknownness, is manageable during off hours, and you can always order half-baked to take home. I’ve been back to the Crepevine a couple times, and still love it.

But what I didn’t know about Rockridge was the Rockridge Café (which rocks), Christopher’s burger joint (which is up there with Barney’s but has a much more jointlike feel), Sabuy Sabuy (cheap cheap Thai food), and a pretty gritty looking burrito place, the name of which escapes me.

I should rein it in before my little three-part series turns into a five-part three-part series. On the other hand, reining it in is not exactly my style.

So, to add a fifth to the mix, I was standing outside of Currylicious with the Maze, debating between going on in or crossing the street for an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet we’d passed on the way.

This rarely happens: the owner of Currylicious walked up from the other direction, handed us take-out menus, discussed the small matters of rice and tea with us, and we were sold. Well, the Maze was sold. I was already planning on Currylicious because my new landlordladypersonpeople had recommended it.

I think it’s the newest place on that part of College Avenue, but what do I know? I’m even newer!

Great food, good free tea, labyrinthine layout…. What a dumb name, though. They sound like they were named by Yahoo, or some dating site, because their first five choices were already taken.

I’m not going to hold it against them. Lamb cholay, which is garbanzo beans and three big lumps of lamb in a nice, spicy curry ($6.99), naan ($1.49), and the Maze got vegetable biriyani ($6.99), and that was good too.

New favorite restaurant! Across the street from my new favorite bar, McNally’s, which has a fireplace and a pool table. Exactly on the way to my new favorite post office … and, by the way, I mean it. I’m not a post office reviewer, but this one looks like it is run by three-year-olds. It’s a mess! I can’t wait to go back.

CURRYLICIOUS

Daily: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

5299 College, Oakl.

(510) 450-0644

No alcohol

MC/V

Solo album

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS John Campbell’s Irish Bakery is famous for its scones and pasties. My friend the Maze is famous for grinding his way through medical school and then choosing to work in publishing — freelance, at that. A feat of audacious and lively present-tensitivity for which he will forever be cemented into my heart, no matter how many crumbs he leaves in my car.

We have this sweet new routine where he runs across town to USF, where I play soccer Sunday mornings, and that way we can both be smelly and sweaty when we go out for breakfast. The camaraderie is killing me. But what are you going to do? If it wasn’t that, it would be the bacon.

Which reminds me: I’ve been challenged by my current favorite online suitor to write a song about bacon. And I use the word challenge loosely. This guy has no idea! By the way, I am famous online, completely separate from my in-print and on-stage famousnesses, for being one hot bacon-obsessed chick.

Datingwise, I have an unfair advantage over my g-g-girlfriends, and it isn’t that I stutter. Having been on both sides of the surface of the pond, I know exactly what bait to use. Bacon. The advantage is short-lived, however. I get all the bites in the world, but can’t keep anything on account of tiny tits.

I keep three very very separate mailboxes in my e-mail program: one for friends, one for Cheap Eats, and one for online dating. When that so-called "bacon explosion" rocked the Internet a couple weeks ago, all three mailboxes filled up simultaneously with links, invitations to barbecues, and pictures of the divine rolled-up weave of sausage-stuffed bacon, which, I admit, was one of the sexiest things I ever saw.

Me? Write a song about bacon? That’s like asking a kitten to be cute. As anyone lucky enough to have heard Sister Exister’s obscure first album, Scratch (available at cdbaby.com, ahem), knows, my songwriting has been, shall we say . . . a wee bit chickencentric, with occasional brave forays into eggs, and butter.

Predictably, my second solo album, about one-third written, is all about heart disease. But not the kind that comes from high-fat diets, no, the kind that comes from online dating.

Whateverwise, as much as I would love to bring all three of my bacony famousnesses together by writing a date-commissioned bacon song right here in Cheap Eats … well, to be honest I would but, incredibly, I’m drawing a blank.

So by way of stalling for rhymes, John Campbell’s Irish Bakery is famous for its scones and pasties, and me and the Maze stocked up on both. We got three scones ($1.50 apiece), a sausage roll ($3), and a beef pasty ($5).

They have glass cases just filled with piles and piles of these delicious looking things, and other things, like bread, sweet tarts … They have soup, breakfast sandwiches.

What they don’t have is anywhere to sit, except for the bar next door, the Blarney Stone, which is a great bar, so you know, with soccer on TV and all, but we were both running low on dollars and didn’t feel like feeling like we had to drink, so we took our greasy brown bags of goodness around the corner to my car. My new car. My beautiful new car. My clean and beautiful new car.

And I put on the classical music station and we ate and talked and passed the pasty and talked and laughed and just generally steamed up the windows. Everything was great! Actually, I didn’t think the scones were anything special.

They are "traditional" scones, and, I know I know, we’re people. We tend to dwell on the past, to go on living in it. Ergo: traditional = special. But I personally can’t afford to think that way or I will dry up and blow away. To me they were scones, and great, and the pasty, by virtue of being something new, was special: ground beef in gravy with carrots, onions, and potatoes all wrapped up in this sopping greasy flaky crumbly pastry dough.

Which I am still picking out of my seats.

And the camaraderie is killing me. But what are you going to do? I live in a world that defines itself, and its parts and people, historically. It’s a song. About bacon. And it’s over now, so stop dancing already and wish me weight.

JOHN CAMPBELL’S

Daily: 7 a.m.–8 p.m.

5625 Geary, SF

(415) 387-1536

Full Bar next door

Cash only

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

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