Big Jim's PA

By L.E. Leone

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS

Out one window it was raining sheets and out the other, on the opposite side of my shack, the weather was sunny and beautiful. I put on a boot and a flipflop and went and stood with the chickens in the yard, looking up. If there was a rainbow, it was hidden behind the redwoods.

There was a hawk. Unfazed and fearless, it hang-glided competently between weather systems, checking us out.

The chickens ran under a bush. I went back inside and pushed a button on my computer, a button I'd been looking at almost all week, and now, just like that, I was going to go to Pittsburgh.

"Tomorrow . . . will be a good day to die," I said out loud to Weirdo the Cat, paraphrasing many a brave warrior. Weirdo looked at me and blinked. For dinner I sliced an onion into the bottom of an oiled bread pan, poked four pork sausages with a fork, set them on top of the onions, and set it on a piece of applewood over the coals in my stove. I closed the damper and opened a bottle of wine.

I am not a brave warrior and never will be. I don't believe in anything, but if I did believe in anything, it would be fear, the most beautiful and most useful of animal feelings. This is why I hang with chickens and cats. I'm studying them, learning fear. My favorite fears so far are unreasonable ones. If you think about it (but don't think about it for too long), this is entirely reasonable. Unreasonable fears, like the fear of flying, are the least likely to bite your ass, so hooray for them!

All week long, trying to decide to fly to Pittsburgh for a short weekend, in the front of my mind I knew that statistically I'd be safer in an airplane than driving around here like I do in the rain in my crumbling Chevy Sprint pickup truck without a working horn or low-beam lights or seat belt. This windy, wintry weather especially, a redwood tree is more likely to fall on my shack and crush me than I am to go down in a plane. I know that, but still it takes me a week to push the button. A week, the cheapest tickets imaginable (for which I will never forgive Expedia.com), and, of course, Ativan.

I savored my "last meal" sausages with a befittingly ceremonial sadness, stopping now and again between bites to wipe my eyes on my shirt sleeve. Every little thing in my little shack looked colorful, clear, and alive. I drank more wine than usual, went to bed early, made love to Weirdo the Cat, woke up before dawn, blew a kiss to the chickens, and drove more carefully than usual to the city.

Bikkets shuttled me to the airport. "Tell everyone I love them," I said.

And next thing I knew I was alive and well in Pittsburgh, PA, watching Haywire outdo himself, and Gilbert, and Sullivan, in his operettical debut, as Koko, the Lord High Executioner, in The Mikado. Which was about the goofiest, funniest, outlandishest thing I ever seen — until a few hours later at the Henry Darger exhibit at the Andy Warhol museum. Which was the goofiest, funniest, outlandishest thing I ever seen — until a couple hours later at my new favorite restaurant in the world, Big Jim's, where the calzones make Ann's Café's five-pound omelet seem like an hors d'oeuvre.

When I finally stopped laughing, I looked around at my dear, beautiful, beloved Pittsburgh friends and I said, "Does anyone have a tape measure?"

Someone did! Do my friends rock, or what? Tom had a tape measure, a paper one, all folded up in his pocket, and this one's for him. I'd also like to thank Nancy for the geometrical support, and Gabrielle, Tom's daughter, for the math by which I am now able to give you my most quantitatively informative restaurant review ever: 225 cubic inches of crust-encased sausage, sauce, peppers, onions, and melted provolone for $9.95.

There was a lot of beer behind all our pi-r-squareds and such, and Gabrielle is not exactly a calculator so much as a milk-mustachioed and entirely fallible eight-year-old, so, please . . . don't check our math. Suffice it to say that I ate myself silly, ate myself even sillier when I briefly came out of my Ativan coma on the plane ride home, and will eat myself silly again, back home now — unsafe and unsound — as soon as I'm done saying all this. All on one 13-inch x 7-inch x 3-inch half-circle of heaven. *

BIG JIM'S

Mon.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–midnight; Sun., 10 a.m.–11 p.m.

201 Saline, Pittsburgh, PA

(412) 421-0532

Takeout available

Full bar

D/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible