Lobster Tales

According to the Maine Lobster and Seafood Company, Falmouth Maine, the price of lobster these days runs anywhere from $8.50 to $12.50 a pound, depending upon the size of the lobster. That averages out to about $11.00 a pound, rounded up. By that math, purchasing the Loose Lobsters Writer's Cooperative will run you roughly $15,000 on the hoof, should you want to pluck us wriggling and snapping from our respective tanks and dump us head first into boiling pot of whatever the fuck you dump lobsters headfirst into. And no, it is probably not lost on you that I'm loosely equating the big, brash bovine members of The Loose Lobster Writer's Cooperative to both lobsters and beef cattle; your basic fucked up simile or metaphor or whatever the fuck. But this is my essay and, what with the proverbial bar being set as high as it has by my Lobster brethren, I'm pretty much just dashing it off and not really working very hard. So deal with it, ungainly simile or metaphor or whatever the fuck be damned. Every year we show up for "writer's camp" at the designated host's abode on a Friday – in Pittsburgh, in Huntsville, in Denver, in Indianapolis – wondering how big (or small), heft wise we've gotten in the last year, whether or not Renny has let me cheat on her yet with the hot Asian chick she's been promising me for a decade; how much more gray Danny is going to be; whether or not Rick will have hair (and perhaps some kind of Civil War face bush) and all of his internal organs intact; whether or not Chuck finally bought a new shirt and, as always, how Brian gets so many clothes and sundries into a gym bag. We greet each other - at my house, Chuck's house, Danny's house, Rick's house, (we've yet to head to Scranton to launch from chez Kelly) ¬– we ask about our respective lovely and very patient wives and then we head out to treat the host family to some sort of fete. In Pittsburgh, it's Tom's Diner. In Indy, it used to be The Aristocrat Pub until it burned down. In Huntsville, it's Ding How Chinese Buffet or Rosie’s Mexican Cantina. And in Denver, it's usually pizza at Chuck's house because whenever we do Denver, it seems Chuck and his better half, Michelle, have just had a baby of some sort. Day two, Saturday, it's off to Sam's Club or some other purveyor of fine provisions for provisioning (which we do to a fair thee well). Steak. Chicken breasts for grilling. Chicken wings for...winging. Lunchmeat. Italian sausage. Beef jerky. Steak. Eggs. Bacon. Breakfast cereal. Corn on the cob (but not too much, Rick doesn't like to see corn in his stool). Fixins for Chuck's corn chowder. Pickled beets and eggs. Steak (according to Rick, we eat so much meat there's steak in our urine). Ziti (five pounds). Marinara sauce fixins (based on Danny's version of our Mom's famous sauce recipe; it really is famous, a restaurateur in Baltimore once asked if she could package and sell my version in her trattoria). Enough garlic to get True Blood cancelled. Pudding. M&Ms. Moon Pies (two cases). Pounds and pounds of cheese. Hamburger. Steak. Polish sausage. Potatoes for baking. Potatoes for mashing. Potatoes for stuffing. Potatoes for home-frying. Potato chips for snacking. A five-pound can of Folgers that we'll run out of by Thursday. A bag of apples so we can tell our wives we ate healthy. A pork loin. Two or three frozen pizzas. No asparagus (it makes your semen taste funny). A couple of cases of Coca Cola. At least one case of bottled water. Dr. Pepper for Brian. I almost forgot coffee filters...but then, we always forget coffee filters. And did I mention steak? I almost also forgot charcoal, which we always need but never have when the propane tank on the gas grill comes up empty. Anyway, that and upwards of $500 is our trip to Sam's Club. Then it's off to the liquor store. Four cases of cheap beer. Two cases of good beer because I won't drink cheap beer. Two gallons of Jack Daniels for mixing. Two bottles of red wine that we never drink but for some reason buy anyway. A hefty bottle of dark rum. Overpriced limes because we forgot limes, too, at Sam's Club. A hefty bottle of cheap vodka for Brian. Woodford Reserve or some other "good" whiskey for sipping (and Chuck, whose last name is Woodford). A bottle of something none of us have ever heard of for Rick who will use it liberally to get even more morose than usual. And, finally, a bottle of good single malt so I can pretend to be John Cheever and Danny can tell me that scotch drinking, a 10-foot-pole and the length of his dick is the closest I'm ever going to get to John Cheever. Maybe I should try Bloody Marys so I can be like Raymond Carver? Or maybe I should give up drinking altogether so I can be more like John Irving (who folks tell me I most write like and who has actually been more influential to my writing than anyone outside of Chuck Kinder, who has moved away from whiskey and become a Vodka martinitotaller at the urgings of his beautiful wife Diane)? After the booze, it's off to camp, proper. This can mean a caravan of cars to Dubois, PA and our friend Sean Eckenrod's cabin. Or we might be packed into a minivan heading from Chuck's to the mountainous wilds of Estes Park with its bears and stars and UFOs, with me sitting in a door well perched precariously atop stacked cases of soda. Or it could be another caravan to the curiously named Doublehead Resort outside of Huntsville (Alabama and Resort = oxymoron) where gunshots and screams in the woods abound and the river is covered with whitish foam that smells like Danny's feet. Or, on occasion, it could be in an even smaller caravan on an uneventful trip to an idyllic and uneventful cabin in Nashville, Indiana. The location dictates the number of vehicles and is based on who is leaving for where, when, at camp's conclusion (or whether Danny has to run home mid week because he misses Stevie). We've driven through snowstorms, downpours, relative boredom and flat tires; we've driven in bliss listening to the Book Of Mormon soundtrack on repeat; our wives have given us rides up and returned to pick us up; and once we drove over a cinderblock that Chuck straddled with ease in his Honda CRV and I plowed into with my Jetta leaving me unable to make right-hand turns the rest of the trip. Regardless of how we get there, we always get there. And it's always an adventure of some sort.