Consider This Lobster

Clandestine Shellfish Espionage in the Bay

The giant pot of rotting lobster carcasses sat in the sun in Sean's back yard in Potrero Hill for several months. The lid still on.

I mean, months. Cold months then warm months. You can imagine what kind of smells would build up in a 30 gallon steel lobster pot full of shells, lobster meat, carapaces and tomalley, shellfish roe and old broth.

Part of my job as Chief Operating Officer of Batter Blaster was to do whatever Sean didn't want to do.

Sean is, alternately, a gourmand Blackbeard, presiding over massive foodie feasts he prepares in his home professional kitchen; or the best sales man I’ve ever met, who could sell steak tartare to a pescetarian Sikh; or, sometimes, he is a shaved Silverback ape, cutting his toenails during phone meetings or playing video solitaire and scratching his nether regions while giving you a performance review.

You can usually predict which one you are going to get, thankfully.

I say all this with a brother’s love.

Sean wanted to get this 30 gallon steel pot full of rotting lobster carcasses out of his house.

But the thing is, the only car he had was a manual 1998 VW Jetta. I barely fit in that thing. I didn’t have a drivers license at this point in time.

Sean had a plan. He would drive. I would sit in the passenger seat with the 30 gallon steel pot of rotten lobster carcasses on my lap, over straight vertical hills, potholed roads and windy San Francisco freeway undercarriage.

Every pothole, the lid to the pot would jar a bit. Steaming sickly sweet corpse death smell would slip out. I opened a window.

I was gagging. Sean was gagging. You could make Sean gag easily. He was one of those guys. Could toss out the most vulgar repartee, but say “Mayonnaise and clams” and he would double over a trashcan, dry heaving. Like the waiters nauseated by food in that old sketch.

We had just recovered from a bout with food poisoning because Sean had made lobster bisque from these lobster carcasses when they were still edible, and he and I separately woke up at 6 am and barfed up everything from the holiday feasts.

He claimed we got “poo fingered” by one of the waiters at Chavo’s, because the lettuce and raw onions and other toppings for the Caldo de Res we’d had were just sitting out on the table. Anyone could stick their fingers in the open produce. “Poo Fingered.”

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Food poisoning can take up to 72 hours to manifest after you’ve eaten bad meat or eggs. The longer it takes to manifest, the worse it gets, I am told.

I had had food poisoning once before. I had a brief dalliance with exotic game. I would order frozen game meat — cobra or rattlesnake or gator — from 1 800 EAT GAME (or maybe it was 1800eatgame.com).

I had a birthday party at Thee Parkside. Thee Parkside was the rock n roll roadhouse bar that Sean owned and ran before he started Batter Blaster. All roads to vomit for me start with Sean.

I had ordered reindeer meat (quite delicious, slightly citrus-y), yak (stringy), bear (made decent if tough chili) and llama. I guess the llama didn’t get made because it somehow made it back to our house. I assume at some point it defrosted and was then drunkenly thrown back in the freezer because, let’s face it, I was a stone cold idiot then.

I had pulled out the llama meat one night after bar and our friends Kelly and Hofer were over. Performative cooking, maybe? Kelly lived upstairs, Hofer had recently moved to San Francisco to play in a band, the Mother Hips. When I pulled the llama meat out and put it in a pan, Rose took one look and said “that food smells like a cab driver.”

This should have been my first sign.

I woke up the next morning feeling like I had distempered raccoons in my mouth and small colon and they all wanted to get out. They did. With expedition.

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But back to the lobster carcasses in the steel pot. We were still recovering from the lobster bisque vomit. I can still taste it if I think just wrong enough.

I will do almost anything for work. I have that midwestern sense of git ‘er done. I’ve stuck my hand in grease traps that smelled like Cambodian swamp ass. I’ve put life and limb over good sense and personal dignity.

And so we were driving across San Francisco to get this steel pot full of stinking death to the ocean, which was the only safe place to put it.

Luckily we were members of the Mariposa Hunters Point Yacht Club.

The Mariposa Hunters Point Yacht Club did not have any boats.. One might think you have to have boats to be called a Yacht Club but apparently you do not.

The Yacht Club was mostly cops, firefighters, a guy named Ringo or Reno who was a bookie. I went there recently and Rongo had just peed himself and was going to be removed; he stared straight through my friend Chris, not remembering him a whit, despite them being something akin to friends for years.

I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead. I don’t know if he is dead, but it didn’t look good.

Such is life at the Mairposa Hunters Point Yacht Club Which Does Not Have Boats.

I think they even have boats now. Bridgette the Commodore had seen to installing a dock. We were members for a good long time because you could drink for two dollars a pop in San Francisco, it had a full Yacht Club commissary where we could get our food ya-yas out — I once made a pot of gumbo so big I had to stir the roux with a boat oar — and the general vibe was unlike anything else in tech obsessed, vibe enslaved, yet to be destroyed SF.

It was also right next to the ballpark. Convenient parking!

And so here we were dragging something like 70 lbs of lobster rankness off my now sodden, stinking knees out of the 98 Jetta and trying to quietly, discreetly dump all of it into the Bay.

Larry, the semi-homeless caretaker who lived onsite saw us and our somewhat brazen clandestine shellfish espionage. He waited til all the lobster gunk had been dumped.

The 60 or so pounds of rank crustacean threatened to ride a wave back over our shoes, but at last sunk beneath the bay’s saltwater surface, consigned once again to the depths.

“You guys gonna keep that pot?”

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You just read Are You Experienced. I’m Nick Tangborn and this is a newsletter about work and life and pop culture and anything else I can think to write about, from the perspective of an aging hipster. I turn 55 in a couple weeks. If you want to get me something for my birthday, subscribe to this newsletter. Or a one time donation is cool too.

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