Cheap Eats

By L.E. Leone
 

A spring in her step

YOU SEE DIFFERENT things in the Tenderloin than in Noe Valley. Smells different, different looks on different-looking people's faces. Sounds a lot different. Instead of babies, dogs, and deck construction, you hear crazy people saying crazy things, like, "What the hell happened to your face?" I think I vowed a while back to stop Noe Valley bashing, so I'll try not to say which neighborhood I prefer to walk around in. (Hint: the Tenderloin.)

It was a beautiful day. Last week – you remember. One of those summery springlike late-winter West Coast wonderland days, with blue skies and actual heat, when colors look more colorful than usual and smells smell even smellier. I had to pick up some tax forms, but first things first, meaning: eats. The Tenderloin is one of my favorite neighborhoods to eat in. I was hungry, but not crazy hungry, so there was plenty of time to stop and smell the urine.

I wandered up Leavenworth to O'Farrell and then I wandered down O'Farrell toward Jones. There was a sorry, skeletal bedspring in the middle of the sidewalk, entirely unstuffed, if it had ever had any stuffing to it. It was all metal, a rectangular framework filled with rows and columns of coiled wire. The old lady walking in front of me stopped to test it with her foot, pushing down gently on the cornermost spring, and then moved on.

Now there's a woman who knows how to live life, I thought. I don't know what she was thinking, but it seemed like the right thing to think, so when I came to the bedspring, I did what she did. The difference being that my foot got caught. It slipped off the slick metal and slid down in between coils, which wedged around my ankle like a really good, solid, heavy-duty, well-researched, impeccably designed, all-purpose, American-made Cheap Eats Guy trap.

I couldn't get out. I tried taking off my shoe, but I couldn't even get my shoe off. It was in there. I tried pulling the coils apart with my hands, and I was strong enough to make them move some, but there were four of them. I was four-cornered in, and I could only do anything about two springs at a time, while the other two held me all the tighter. I was good and gotten.

Tell you something about me: I don't like to draw attention to myself. I'm not a wacky or wild and crazy guy. If you imagined otherwise, you must only know me through my writing. But the side of me I put down on paper is not the side of me that lives and breathes and walks around in the Tenderloin. In real life, I prefer not to be noticed – which is a lot to ask when you're wearing a five-by-six-foot bedspring on a city sidewalk around lunchtime.

And this is what I love about the Tenderloin. In many other neighborhoods, in my particular predicament, I would have drawn a crowd. Almost certainly, someone would have called the fire department, if not the newspaper.

In the Tenderloin, I was possible to ignore. You see things like this, in neighborhoods like this. Far, far worse. And so you learn not to see. It's sad, but now that I was the spectacle instead of the ignorer, stepping over the homeless man in a twist of blankets one block back, I was thankful for the urban human capacity not to notice.

Neither the one-inch blade nor the little nail-trimming scissors on my key-chain pocketknife were kind enough to cut through metal, so I was going to have do like those rock climbers and car accident victims you hear about. I was going to have to saw off my foot at the ankle. Which, whether I worked with the blade or the scissors, was going to require a lot of time and blood. So, first things being first, as I already said: lunch!

The closest place was one of those Laundromat cafes, Joey's. I might have eaten there anyway, because the sign said: Ice Cream. Espresso. Sausage. I liked that, even though I really only love one of those three things. Sausage, of course.

So I dragged my new shoe a hundred feet or so down the street and hollered in my order from the sidewalk. I know that's rude, but I didn't think I could fit through the door without breaking or at least severely spraining my ankle, and I feared the swelling would only make my afternoon's work more tedious.

They were kind enough to bring me my sausage, a hot Italian one on a roll with onions, tomato, and lettuce ($3.50). And it came with a free small soda!

Mitchell's ice cream, Internet, and coffee – all while you do your laundry! Or, as the case may be, while you stand outside with a bedspring wrapped around your ankle, trying to act casual. 
 

JOEY'S. 517 O'Farrell (at Jones), S.F. (415) 567-4401. Daily: 6 a.m.-9 p.m. Takeout available. No alcohol. Credit cards not accepted. Wheelchair accessible. 

L.E. Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).
 

March 17, 2004