I cooked a lobster tonight, and this thing was a 2.5 lb. monster. I asked the guy at HMart (Asian grocery store where you can buy duck penises and shit) for a small lobster and the asshole gave me one that, given a few millennia, would have ancestors that could fly its claws were so big. I didn’t notice until I got up to the register and it came up as $30.18 instead of the $12 I paid last time, and if I’m honest, it’s sort of my fault. There was a giant bubbling tank in the way, and between his accent and my short attention span when the potential of eating seafood is nigh I probably should have paid a little more attention. Regardless, once I was cashing out I didn’t want to be “that white guy” who screams “I told you in plain English that I wanted a small lobster!” in an ethnic grocery store in 2016. Or 1816…
So I haul this thing home in a pterodactyl-proof double-bag, and boil the water.
Oh, I forgot to mention that I was cooking seafood crepes for people and nobody except two of you knows how delicious they were. Just pointing that out, "every individual who bailed at the last second." Also, you almost missed a home cooking Sigfried and Roy show equivalent to when the white tiger drug Roy away by the neck.
I don’t know if any of you have cooked a lobster that weighs over 2 lbs., but these things have an outer shell that makes Iron Man’s jockstrap look like a Turbot fillet. Here is a picture of part of the claw I broke open, and is integral to the story:
It’s got bigger molars than I do, and they’re covered in barnacles and shit. I would not want to fight this thing, and frankly, despite the irritation about how ridiculously the Asian fishmonger and I communicated, I’ve got to take my hat off to the fact that he reached in there with no more protection than a rubber glove that could have been made out of five Durex Extra Sensitive Condoms and Saran Wrap. At least I assume it was five. Given what he had just done, he may have had to stump it between his palm and what was left of his opposable thumb.
Now this little analogy is no accident—crude and unnecessary as it may seem, it is actually a subtle and carefully calculated transition to your dear hero’s experience breaking the thing down.
Once it was boiled and cooled, I had to crack it open. For those of you who have spent time at Red Lobster, you can go fuck yourself; I don’t know if they boil them in vinegar or gasoline to soften up the shell for Midwesterners, but a 2+ lb. sea-saurus has an exoskeleton that requires a garage door with the safety features disabled to crack open. Or a gigantic meat cleaver such as the one I have. After futilely failing my way through the culinary weaponry equivalent of the aforementioned prophylactic, I said “fuck” and got this object:
This is one of my favorite and least delicate pieces of kitchen equipment. It operates on the same principle as a depleted uranium round except the business end is sharper and just holding it makes you feel like an extra in the opening scene of Gangs of New York. Seriously, I had to unzip my fly just to pull it out of the drawer. To give you an example of the emotional place the average cook arrives at when frustration causes this object to be brought out of the realm of serial killers and into the kitchen, here is the most famous picture of Marco Pierre White from his seminal cookbook White Heat:
I cannot for the life of me figure out what word is coming out of his mouth. I know of no swear word in any language that starts with the mouth shape that produces an “o” sound, so all I can imagine is that he was either midway through saying either "fuck" or "cunt" as a linguistic binding agent to the object of his culinary hatred when the camera snapped, or the infuriating necessity of bringing this thing out caused him to start speaking in ancient profane tongues like a Southern Baptist’s first day in the Church of Satan.
I will now start at the end and work my way backwards. I did get it open. In order to do this I had to bash the living fuck out of the shell with the flat of the blade, as all the cutting edge did was annoy the still-hovering spirit of the lobster that was just boiled for my tasting delight. Shit went everywhere, and I mean everywhere. There were wet bits of soft tofu-like lobster fat extending up the front of my shirt, and there was an outline of my body on the black casing of the refrigerator behind me like a burned in nuclear shadow after the bombing of Hiroshima. There was fucking goddamned shit on the ceiling, and I was so pissed at the resistance a corpse was putting up I didn’t care. But I should have…
After the first few whacks, it was clear that I was merely annoying the chiton shell by tattooing it very badly and indiscriminately with small nicks for someone who has two degrees in the arts and should have some semblance of aesthetics regardless of the medium. Then I hit upon a plan.
Remembering that, similar to small children, blunt force trauma is more effective against belligerent crustaceans, I turned the cleaver over onto the flat back edge with the blade pointing upwards. Then I did something that should have ruined my entire life.
With all the thought that one puts into spilling a pan of hot soup onto the ground because they checked their watch while holding the pan…
I took my left hand…
…and smashed it down onto the blade of the cleaver with the intention of aiming the shot, in the words of Mike Tyson, “three inches behind the opponent’s head.” In this case, a claw.
For those of you psychologically incapable of conceiving of the idiocy, here is a staged example of what I did. All you have to do is imagine me sporting a wry little smile of anticipated success and my hand traveling at slightly below the speed of light, thus ensuring that according to the law of Relativity everything from my wrist to the tips of my fingers will live slightly longer than the rest of me:
The only thing I couldn't reproduce was the bow shock of my palm as it broke the sound barrier. By all rights I should have sliced my hand clean off, and I do mean that. This wasn’t barehanding the handle of a pan out of a 400 degree oven, this was trying to win the world championships of a game of pencil break using a karate chop against a samurai sword. How I didn’t destroy myself I’ll never know, and all I’ve got to show for it is a very small indentation—not a cut, an indentation, now—on my left palm. The palm I theoretically need to play the violin as it connects my metacarpals to my wrist in much the same fashion as bicycle spokes attach a tire to the axle.
To bring home the miraculous nature of this, here is a picture of my hand after the fact:
Frankly, I'm considering taking up a job as the anointed Son of God and dispensing miracles for a nominal fee. I'm not kidding. Even Jesus is going to have trouble keeping up on Playstation after what he went through, and I'm not even scratched.
The one thing I can take pleasure in regarding this contest of wills is that, in the end, this is how that motherfucker ended up:
Fuck that lobster. Fuck it.
Holy shit. Anyway, I’m still here. Also, the crepes were delicious. The most fucked up part of the entire thing was that, while they were eating, all I could think about was the extra annoyance of having to wipe the plate with extra care because of the spurting blood from my idiot stump. No, seriously—I actually thought that.