Blueberry fields

By L.E. Leone

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS

Bikkets was sick and had to miss Scotty the House's surprise party, so in the morning I brought over three pieces of pie and five pancakes. The pie was my favorite kind, blueberry, and homemade by me. Deevee made the pancakes. They had bananas and nuts in them. My brother believes Deevee's pancakes to be the best pancakes ever, and he should know because he's her boyfriend.

Crawdad had already gone shopping for Bikkets the day before, so she was well stocked with cans of organic health-food soup from Rainbow. One of them was setting on the kitchen table, looking healthy and organic. I picked it up and turned it over in my hand, reading the ingredients.

That was so sweet and neighborly of Crawdad! The Chicken Farmer was touched. However, while cans of organic health-food soup from Rainbow may well help you to not get cancer or heart disease and therefore live longer and blah blah blah, what do they do for you in the short term? You're already sick. Does organic health-food soup from Rainbow bring down your fever or help you to sleep and feel happy?

I don't know. Do pie and pancakes? Inspired by Crawdad's thoughtfulness, I went ahead and offered some of each to my poor sick buddy while she was fixing me my coffee.

Of course, I'd already had coffee and pancakes once, over in West Oakland, where I'd first woke up that morning. And now, at the bottom of Bernal Hill, all double-buttered and super syrupy, caffeinated and sugar-coated, I was waking up to newer and newer levels of wakefulness. In terms of receptivity, those satellite dishes up the hill had nothing on the Chicken Farmer. Plus all the antioxidants in the blueberries ...

In other words, I was the height of health. Bikkets laugh-launched a little speck of spit across the table onto my pancakes, and I ate it right up, what did I care?

Time flew and it was time to go play baseball in the rain. I talk too much when I drink too much, and it occurred to me that Bikkets could probably use a nap. She hadn't been sleeping too good. I don't know what codeine can do that pie and pancakes can't, but anyway I offered to pick up her prescription cough syrup for her ... if nobody showed up for baseball. The game was in the Golden Gate Park.

Halfway there, the rain pounding onto my windshield and dripping onto my lap (my pick-up truck leaks), I decided that nobody was going to show up for baseball, not even me. And I turned right on Divis and went to Kaiser. Because you know what? I had something more important to do: outdo Crawdad on the being-there-for-a-friend-in-need front.

Funny how do-goodery begets do-goodery, care and love multiplying themselves by each other and snowballing into all sorts of senseless acts of soup. Driving back down Divis toward Bernal, codeine cough syrup in tow, I started to think that perhaps what sick people really need can't be bottled or canned, and won't be found at any pharmacy or health food store. You have to go to Safeway. You have to get one of those 99-cents-a-pound Foster Farms chickens, and homemake a big, loud, complex pot of homemade soup.

To be in bed napping, and to hear, out of the corner of your ear, all kinds of kettle-clanging and chop chop from the kitchen ... Or are you dreaming? To wake to the sting of onions, to steamy windows and the smell of simmering chickens!

Couple more blocks and I was entirely out of my mind, boiling over with altruistic inspiration. Just in time for Brother-In-Law's Barbecue on the corner there, on my right. Or what used to be Brother-In-Law's and is now a painted-over no-name place, sometimes open.

Not this time, but the damage was done: I'd blown my friendliness fuse. What Bikkets really needed, Safeway be damned, was barbecue. And that barbecue was my favorite thing to eat, not hers, would only make the gesture that much more, um, personal. I'd make soup out of the bones. I'd get chicken. Ribs, and chicken, and if she wanted any she could certainly have some, but the bone soup would be all-the-way for her. And healthy!

Anyway, it wouldn't be canned, like Crawdad's.

Now where, between here and there, was I going to find barbecue? *

BIG NATE'S

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

1665 Folsom, SF

(415) 861-4242

Takeout and delivery available

No alcohol

AE/MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible