Cheap Eats

By L.E. Leone
 

The World In the Evening

I GREW UP in the country and spent a lot of time in the woods and in fields, walking with my head down. One thing I was looking for was a four-leaf clover. I always wanted to find a four-leaf clover. Given math, it's probably more remarkable that I never did.

Given me, what would I have done with it anyway? I never knew the proper make-a-wish routine or good-luck recipe one follows with four-leaf clovers. What do you do with it? Blow it off your fingertip like an eyelash? Wishbone it into quarters, saying four little prayers? Press it into the dictionary in wax paper next to an important word like paintbrush?

Given me, it's also possible that I would have eaten it. Now – given the amount of time I spend with chickens, studying philosophy – it's almost a certainty. What else would you do with a four-leaf clover? Eat it.

I don't believe in juju anymore. I told you, weeks ago, in this column. Luck, god, the godless void Nothingness, Nature, astrology, purity ... unadulterated bullshit, all of it, especially compared to a little stick sticking out of some dirt, or a crumpled McDonald's wrapper in the ditch. It seems to me now that real live reality, which isn't always exactly natural, let alone pretty, is the luckiest thing we can hope for.

I have empirical evidence. I was sitting outside with the chickens, not believing in luck, not believing in nature, or god, and not being an atheist. If anything, I was approaching a sort of state of chickenhood – which is not a meditative state. It has everything in the world to do with hunger. I was hungry. I was so hungry I was hunger itself, and I was this close to being able to eat bugs.

Noting that fact, I did a thing I hadn't done in probably 15 years: I got down on my hands and knees and started pecking around in the grass and weeds. I'm not good at it, of course. I scratched the dirt with my hand, but I couldn't see what chickens see, so I stuck with the green stuff, grazing.

Do you ever put your face that close to your planet?

It was evening. It's a beautiful thing, the focus with which chickens, and sheep – probably all non-nocturnal outdoor animals – chow down toward dark. It's going to be a long, lonely time before they can see what to eat. It's going to be a long, dark, empty time, and their instinct tells them to fill up for it. Five chickens were right around me, going to town on anything green and anything meaty and moving between the green.

(In the kitchen, in my shack, a couple of sausages were thawing out in the sink next to a strainer full of salad stuff.)

One chicken was off by herself in a patch of clover, and I crawled toward her. I crawled into the clover and tasted some. Wow, if ever I was going to find – . And before I could finish the thought, I already saw it. And before I could fully see it, before I could register in my head the name for what I was seeing with my eyes – a four-leaf clover, my first – the other chicken had beaked it. Plink. Just like that.

Do you know what a scrum is? It's a rugby term, I think for when they all pile up and fight for the ball. All those big guys, one little ball. I've seen chickens scrum over big crusty locusts and white plastic plant markers. I think I wrote about the mouse they got, and the rolled-up purple condom they fought over for hours. My first impulse was to pounce on this chicken and beat the prize back out of her, tear her apart with my claws and teeth, if I had to.

My second thought went something like this: What the fuck ... are you doing on your hands and knees in the dirt with a bunch of chickens, eating grass and clover? Sheepishly, to use a word more accurately than it's ever before been used, I stood up, dusted off, and bipedded inside to see to my sausages and biscuits and salad.

Next day after a nursing-home gig in Burlingame, I found a great Chinese hole-in-the-wall with an indoor picket fence. Happy Chef. "Happiness to Go!" the sign says. I don't know if I buy happiness anymore, either, as a pursuit or commodity or even appetizer. But the egg rolls ($1.75) were fantastic, and the chow mein was huge, delicious, and dirt-cheap: $3.95, with chickens, pork, shrimp ...

Never even opened the fortune cookie. 
 

HAPPY CHEF. 1520 Trousdale Dr. (at Magnolia), Burlingame. (650) 697-6449. Mon.-Sat., 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Takeout available. Credit cards not accepted. No alcohol. 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).
 

April 20, 2005