Lobster By Guest: Kelly

I had been told by a friend of mine that you can cut a lobster’s spinal cord before putting it into the pot to boil, thereby eliminating any “suffering” the lobster might experience on its way to becoming dinner. Never mind the fact that the lobster has already “suffered” a great deal if you count the hours spent caught in a trap, the hours spent piled on top of one another in a tank, and the hours spent in a paper bag in the refrigerator slowly asphyxiating into senselessness.

Whatever. I believed in the idea of a quick and painless death. But in my life I have never touched a live lobster. I had never even seen one out of water. When Ellen, who sells her son’s catch of lobsters out of the front porch of her house, pulled the three unfortunate lobsters out of the tank they each splayed out their legs, reared up their gigantic banded claws and looked at me with what I can only imagine to be panic. I did a little girl shriek in the back of my throat and tried to stand still. I almost asked her to put them back in the tank. But, I didn’t. This was food. I would not be a coward and back off from the responsibility of killing my own luxury meal. You can only have so much sympathy for your food before you eat it. After a point it’s like eating your own sadness which is wrong, has negative nutritional value and is psychologically fucked up. It’s a lobster, my brother reminded me, the cockroach of the sea.
So they sat in the fridge until dinnertime.
I boiled the salted water in the lobster pots that came with the cottage. These are wonderful pots, the picture of sufficient use. Enormous and dented, whose size completely belies how light they are. I prepped the counter space with a cutting board and a sharp, oversized knife and I cleared a path of approach from counter to pot. The first lobster came out of the bag and, although it was almost completely inert from its time in the fridge, my mother and brother and I were no less freaked out by its presence on the cutting board. We were nervous. My friend had told me to cut at the back of the head armor. As I looked at it, I guessed it was where the tail joins the body. I positioned the knife, took a breath and, with a move that was intended to be swift, decisive and merciful, proceeded to chop the lobster in half. Oh, Jesus. The front part of the lobster was awake at this point. It moved like a chicken with its head cut off. And there was some yelling. “Oh jesus, Kelly, you cut him in half!”
Again, whatever. Okay. I was mortified. But the shock wore off and I realized there was nothing more I could do to this lobster except throw it into a pot of boiling water. The poor bastard went in in two pieces and the other two lobsters received a peremptory salute and were tossed into the pot with no attempt to put them out of their misery. They would be there soon enough.