Today is Friday, October 2nd. I arrived in Louisville yesterday afternoon. I came here to see my mother and my brother, to get some work done, to read a little, and to watch football on a big television. I also came to look for jerky.

While San Francisco, my city of residence for the past seven years, remains in the grips of a giddy street food obsession, Louisville, an over-achieving restaurant town boasting the likes of 610 Magnolia and Proof on Main, has little in the way of pavement cuisine -- although my Saturday morning trip to the neighborhood farmer's market revealed a lively scene. In a June 2009 article published in Velocity, one of Louisville's local weeklies, Marty Rosen assailed the perceived deficiency as one of several standing in the city's path to gastronomic greatness:

"We live in a temperate zone...We have sidewalks. We have sidewalk dining. We have folks who walk on sidewalks. What we don't have -- except for a few downtown exceptions and a few taco trucks -- is an entrepreneurial crew of sidewalk vendors hawking falafel, chaat, shawarama and sausages..."

I haven't really lived in Louisville since I was in high school. My sense of the changes time has wrought on its physical and cultural landscape arrives in swells and swoops, when I'm back for pockets of time, around holidays mostly. On every ride from the airport to the house where I grew up, my mom rattles off a reel of news -- which shops have closed, major construction projects of note, the revitalized waterfront, the new basketball arena, the growing art scene -- as if I'd been gone for a decade. Then I realize, when you're used to looking closely at a smaller place, such shifts are more palpable, and they can seem so major. Me, I don't even remember how to get around town anymore. Most of my friends have left. Hunting for jerky, I had no leads beyond knowing where I'd first had it.

I started my search on the computer. Googling is an unromanticizable form of sleuthing -- no stake-outs, no disguises -- but it often works. First, I uncovered a 2006 night-on-the-town chronicled in LEO, Louisville's other, more venerable alt-weekly. A drinking party wound up at The Back Door, where a bag of beef jerky made the rounds as closing time approached. Next, I came across a 2004 piece in The Courier-Journal running down the 50 coolest things about Louisville with, at #39, a likely reference to the man I had encountered: "Rusty Sturgeon's homemade varieties [of beef jerky]...are a well-kept secret among meat-o-philes."

After that, a Courier-Journal article from two weeks ago popped up, a short list of favorite local foodstuffs offering more details to corroborate my fleeting experience with what I'd already read:

"Rusty Sturgeon is a Louisville food artist. The overall-wearing gentleman wanders the Highlands selling homemade beef jerky to Louisvillians after a night at the city's myriad clubs and drinking holes. Sturgeon is a friendly guy, but some folks might be (understandably) concerned about buying food off a guy on the street. Don't be. Sturgeon's jerky is way better than anything you'll get at the convenience store. May we suggest the flaming ass, a particularly spicy jerky strong enough to shake you out of a bourbon stupor."

I knew the trail was flaming ass-hot when I tracked down Sturgeon on Facebook, or at least a page someone had created in his honor. A benevolent face sprouting tendrils from the chin grinned out at me, frozen in a streetlight's unflattering glow. I immediately became his "fan."

Of course, I still wanted to find the dude in the flesh. His Facebook page didn't link to Twitter -- or otherwise suggest he ever announced his intended schedule prior to hitting the streets, basket in hand. Later in the afternoon, I called The Back Door to ask when he usually came through. "Speak slower, please," a deflated female voice yawned on the other end. I repeated the question. "Oh yes," she said, perking up just the slightest bit. "Sometimes he's here during the day, sometimes at night, sometimes during the day and at night as well. He's everywhere."

Louisville KentuckyLouisville Kentucky

Looking for Louisville's King of the Cool Jerk