LEGENDARY OHIO GUY Rube Roy Perrotta, a.k.a. Vernon "Shortribs" Mosel (who taught me how to review restaurants and intimidate groundhogs and all sorts of other useful things), is out our way for a spell. Eleven or 12 days, to be exact, which would have been a nice little vacation except that he lost his job delivering car parts just before he left Ohio.

So I figured I'd put him to work in exchange for his room and some boards, not to mention a little spending money. I offered him 20 bucks to ump our pickup baseball game, and I offered him 25 bucks to write this review for me, but he was entirely uninclined, I think because he thought he wouldn't be able to collect unemployment if he did. Another problem is he's been out of the restaurant reviewing business so long that he no longer knows what to say about restaurants. We've been out to eat four or five times already, and every time I ask him afterward what he thought of the place, and every time he says the exact same thing: "The waitresses were pretty."

So I guess he's lost his grasp of nonsexist usage too.

"You mean waitresspersons, don't you, Rube Roy?"

"What did I say?" he says.

It's sad, but it's human nature: people need to feel like useful, contributing members of society – I know because someone told me so a long time ago, and I think I wrote it down. So, mostly as a favor to my old pal Rube Roy, I went and got him a hard hat and a clipboard and I said, "Here. Supervise me."

"Doing what?" he said.

"I need to build a better chicken coop," I said. "I need to reestablish myself as a chicken farmer. I need to feel like a useful, contributing member of society. Don't worry, I'm not going to pay you." I told him to tell me what to do.

Rube Roy has never exactly owned chickens himself, but he has grown a lot of corn in his day, and he likes to fish, and he lives in the country and knows a lot of things in general and loves to eat chickens and his name is Rube Roy, right? Which ought to account for something when it comes to chicken-coop construction.

It did! Next thing I know – plus or minus a good bit of head scratching and hard-hat scratching – I'm digging trenches and unrolling chicken wire, pouring concrete, laying bricks, sawing wood, hacksawing metal, hammering, and drilling and so on until now, after 10 excruciating days of chickenlessness, I'm back on the bicycle. Almost. Soon as I finish telling you about Modern Thai restaurant on Polk Street, me and Rube Roy are going to go into town for "dollar sushi" for lunch, then stop by the feed store for chickens. Then tonight, to celebrate, we're going to fry us up some chickens. But not the same ones, of course.

Modern Thai is a Thai restaurant on Polk Street between Bush and Sutter. The waitresspersons are pretty. The place itself is funky as hell, with this weirdo white-lattice-fence-and-mirror wallpaper, a beautiful antique dressing table (or dresser or bureau or piece of furniture, at any rate) with a cool old antique painting of columns and shit where a mirror would be, and an equally beautiful if inexplicable old organ – which I wish someone would have been playing, instead of the bad oldies radio station. Cloth napkins, paper place mats, fake flowers ... and last but not least, the food:

Pad kee mao ($6.95) was excellent, with those wide rice noodles, red and green peppers, great strips of steak, and basil, cilantro, and lettuce. The sauce was tasty as heck and spicy as hell – one of those spicinesses that extends to everything else you eat, conveniently.

Everything else: tom kha gai (chicken coconut soup), conveniently priced at $1.95 a bowl (no argument there). Silver-noodle salad with "grounded" chicken, red onions, roasted peanuts, lettuce, basil, cilantro, and maybe even seaweed ($5.95). Crawdad ordered that, but I ate most of it. Plus Rube Roy got sweet-and-sour chickens and shrimps ($6.95).

"How is it?" I asked him.

"The waitresses are beautiful," he said.

I reached across the table with my fork and tried a bite. It was not only sweet-and-sour but also hot-and-sour, or hot-and-sweet-and-sour, to be concise. (Unless it was the residual spiciness of my pad kee mao talking.) In any case, it was good. So there you have it: very good, quite spicy, and pretty damn cheap Thai food in a pleasantly odd atmosphere, and nobody there at seven-thirty on a Tuesday night. Check it out.

Modern Thai. 1247 Polk (at Bush). S.F. (415) 922-8424. Lunch: daily, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Dinner: Sun.-Thurs., 5-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5-10:30 p.m. Takeout available. Beer and wine. MasterCard, Visa. Wheelchair accessible.