Bill's Notes

I took my girlfriend down to the shore for the weekend, to visit the shore house. Decided to make it a lazy weekend — yes, some cleaning out, but we took time to get to the ocean (the house is on the bay). After a day of shore breezes and cold water, she asked me what I wanted to do. I said, get some steamed lobsters, and go back to the house and eat them.

So I stop by a place that says, "Live crabs," figuring they wouldn't discriminate against other kinds of crustaceans. She waited in the car, and I asked the guy behind the counter. Got a funny story about how he hadn't set up his lobster tank yet 'cuz it's the most expensive piece of equipment to run. Anyway, he gave me a couple of places to try, and some directions.

So she tells me that I should stop and ask where we can find live lobsters. I said the guy just told me. She ignored that and repeated it, and I said, "He JUST told me." And she said, "Well maybe someone else has another idea."

I ended up going to the place he suggested. She looks at the prices and realizes it's like another $8 a pound for cooked lobsters, and says we should just cook them ourselves.

"Do you realize they scream like banshees when you try to kill them?"

She laughed.

"Really, they're like, 'Ow. This water is really hot. This really fucking hurts!'"

She laughed. I figured with the amount of money we waste, an extra $20 is no big deal to avoid having to friggin' kill my own food.

Nope. She insisted.

We bring the lobsters home. Now, I was just going to drop them in the pot. But she called her ex-husband and asked him, well, what do we do? He said jab a knife in between the eyes and then hold them upside down, to drain out all that water inside them. Then toss them into the pot.

I have since looked this up on the Internets. You have to actually stab it all the way through.

So I tortured the lobsters instead of killing the lobsters properly.

Now, I sorta have two sides, a softer side that wants to live in peace and harmony with all living things and then there's the side that punched a rat to death in my kitchen. (It was stuck in a glue trap. I was a little pissed at it by then. I said, "Stay. The. Fuck. Out. Of. My. House." The periods are punches.)

Anyway, I was feeling ... well, softer that weekend. Just peace and harmony and ocean breezes and sandpipers twittering through the wash and all that, and here I have to drag out the caveman to friggin stab and boil a crustacean that looks you in the eye.

I jabbed the sucker, cracked its shell, picked it up, emptied out the water — and the thing's still alive. It's scrambling and squirming and all its little legs grasping.

Into the boiling pot, still wiggling.

Take out the other one, which was not pleased. Claws brandished. I was afraid it was dead. Nope. Very much alive.

"What's his problem?" I asked.

"He saw what you did to the other one."

"Think they're that smart?"

Grab. Jab. Crack. Flip. Empty. Into the pot. He squirms for like 20 seconds.

They came out well. We set the table overlooking the water. We even had a side table on wheels for the dismembered body parts we didn't intend to eat. Broke out the new lobster crackers we bought at the five-and-dime.

I may have overcooked the tails, but the claws were perfect. A good time for all but the lobsters, which were refrigerated, murdered, boiled, eaten, and their dead carcasses discarded in the trash, while the rest of them were digested.

Now she's like — "We gotta get a bigger pot and do that again. That was really fun."

And it was.