By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Jim Frise, January 3, 1948.
Jim and Greg disagree over the most fitting method to dispose of a 50-pound gift of Maritime lobsters
“Hurray!” yelled Jimmie Frise, waving a letter aloft.
“From the income tax department?” I inquired sweetly.
“Lobsters!” exulted Jim excitedly. “Good old Joe Havelock down in New Brunswick has shipped me a 50-pound box of lobsters. They’ll be here Saturday.”
“Fifty pounds?” I suggested. “That’s a lot of lobster. They won’t keep. You’ll have to divide them up among your friends.”
“To heck with that!” cried Jim. “I’ll give a stag party.”
“Whenever you get a barrel of oysters or a box of sea food from your Maritime friends,” I protested, “the tradition up here is to scatter them around among your friends.”
“Tradition be hanged!” enthused Jim. “I’ll stage a stag party. Fifty pounds of lobster! Man, we’ll put on a party that the gang won’t soon forget.”
“Lobsters,” I pointed out doggedly, “are a delicacy, Jim. You don’t want to stuff anybody with lobster. The best thing to do would be to keep what you can use in your own family, then distribute the rest around among your immediate friends.”
“I’ll get the womenfolk,” interrupted Jim, “to crack up about 10 pounds of them and make a nice lobster salad, with mayonnaise, on lettuce, in a great big salad bowl. Then the rest…”
“Nobody,” I pursued firmly, “wants to be surfeited with lobster, Jim. You invite five or 10 of the gang here…”
“Five or 10?” scoffed Jim. “I’m going to invite 20. Maybe 30. The whole gang. Everybody we know. We’ll have Skipper and Bumpy and young Art, and Bill Sparra and Billie Milne…”
“Some of them may have ulcers,” I pointed out. “Maybe they can’t EAT lobster. Now, my idea, if you want my advice, would be to keep a few pounds for yourself and make a nice little holiday season gift to…”
“I’ll have that big salad, with mayonnaise,” ignored Jimmie, “and then, whole lobsters on platters, trays, cake plates. Every dish and platter in the house, I’ll have spread out all over the dining room table and on the buffet and on side tables. Lying on big lettuce leaves, whole lobsters by the dozen, with little pots of mayonnaise scattered handy, to dip the delicate morsels in, as they crack them.”
“Crack them?” I pointed out. “How many tools are you going to have lying about? Eh? Have you thought of that? How are your 20 or 30 guests going to crack their lobsters? Have you got 20 or 30 sets of nut crackers, pliers, wrenches, hammers?”
“They’ll be cracked in advance,” said Jim triumphantly. “You and I will spend the afternoon, preparing the whole lobsters the way they are done in restaurants. We’ll crack the shells just enough so as not to spoil the looks of the whole lobsters, but enough to let the boys get at them. Man, there is no way to eat a lobster except right in your hands, breaking it open and extracting the luscious meat.”
“You want my help,” I accused, “But you don’t want my advice. I assure you, Jim, that the traditional way of disposing of one of these wholesale gifts from our friends and relatives in the Maritimes, a barrel of oysters, a crate of lobsters, is to distribute them around among our intimate friends. Just a few of our closest, most intimate friends…”
“All right,” announced Jim. “I’m starting a new tradition, right now. From now on, when I get a load of oysters or lobsters, I stage a party and serve the whole business at one swoop. It’s the only proper, decent thing to do. It should be a celebration. If your friends down east wanted you to have a taste of oysters, they’d send you a dozen. If they wanted you to have a little lobster for supper, they’d send you a couple in a candy box. But when they send you a BARREL or a 50-pound crate of lobsters, they expect you to do something about it in a style befitting the occasion. If those Maritimers knew what we did with those barrels and crates, they’d never send them. Puh! We either hide the barrel away until half the contents spoil, or else we hastily call up our friends to come over and get a dozen oysters or a lobster. Not me! I’m staging a celebration, in honor of the great Canadian Lobster!”
“Well…” I sighed helplessly: I had done my best to get a half, a quarter or even an eighth of that box of lobsters.
Without more ado, Jim sat down and began writing out a list of the gang he was going to invite: It did not take him long to write 10 names. The next five, bringing it to 15, took a little more time and thought. To get it to 20, he had to rumple his hair and stare out the window. Not many men have 20 friends. Friends, that is, close enough to come in on a Saturday afternoon, at 4:30 and crack lobsters.
But he got it. And then started phoning.
“Saturday!” he said to them all. “Come around 4:30. Just a stag party. I got a whole crate of lobsters from NB. Yes. Fifty pounds. Okay! Around 4:30.”
So, one by one, I saw those lobsters vanishing into thin air.
Saturday morning, as soon as we got to the office, Jim telephoned the express company and inquired if there was a box of lobsters for him from the Maritimes.
After a lot of delays and being shifted from one department to another, Jim finally got hold of a man who said that the express from the East hadn’t been sorted yet. He would look up the manifests and call back. Jim gave him our number.
By 11 o’clock, Jim was in a tizzy. He telephoned the express company again. And after another long delay and after being shifted again from department to department, he at last got hold of the same guy, who said he hadn’t had a chance to examine the manifests yet. But he’d call back. Jim had the good sense to get the man’s name and branch telephone line.
“You’ll call me back?” pleaded Jim. “It’s very important.”
“You should have waited,” I explained, after he hung up, “to invite your stag party AFTER you got your lobsters.
“Joe Havelock SAID they’d be here Saturday,” declared Jim hotly.
“Aw, you know the express,” I comforted.
When there was no telephone call from the express by 12:15, Jim telephoned again, direct to the man. And a stranger informed us that the man had gone for the day. He quit at noon. So, after a lot of recapitulation, repetition and backtracking, the new man said he’d look up the manifests and see if there was a package addressed to Frise. And call us back.
“If it’s come,” he explained to Jim, “it will be out in the delivery now.”
“That,” Jim informed him, “is exactly what I have been trying to avoid. Goodness knows when it’ll be delivered.”
We took turns going out to lunch, so one of us would be in when the express man telephoned. But there was no call. And at 2 o’clock, Jim telephoned again, and here was NO answer.
So we got in the car and drove down to the express company warehouse. It was 2:45 when we found the correct department of the warehouse. It was 3:10 when we found the right official to deal with.
He led us on a tour of exploration.
“What’s that over there?” demanded Jimmie, pointing to a pile of gloomy boxes.
“Oh, that’s fish,” explained the express man.
“Might lobsters not be among the fish?” inquired Jim wanly.
We looked. We shifted 20 boxes of fish. And there, right as a dollar, was our box, addressed in bold large characters to Mr. James Frise.
“Aw, it just got mixed up with the fish,” explained the express man.
It was 3:45 when we hoisted the box of lobsters into the back of Jim’s car. It was 4:20, due to the icy streets, when we pulled up at Jim’s house. And already three cars were in the driveway.
“Gosh!” chuckled Jim. “The boys must be hungry!”
They were enthusiastic, anyway. For half a dozen of them, Bumpy, Skipper and Sparra among them, came tumbling out of the house to help us carry the big box into the back kitchen.
“Leave it here,” commanded Jim. “We’ll open it here in the back kitchen, so as not to get ice and water all over the linoleum.”
“They’re well packed,” remarked Skipper. “The box, isn’t leaking at all.”
No wonder it wasn’t leaking! Jim got the hammer and screwdriver, and started prying the lid off.
“If it hadn’t been for this express mix-up,” grunted Jim, “Greg and I by now would have had these all cracked and on the platters.”
“Don’t fret,” consoled Old Skipper. “It will be all the more fun. Every man cracking his own…”
With a squeak, the top board came off.
But instead of cracked ice, we beheld to our astonishment a soggy mass of dark purplish brown.
“Seaweed!” remarked Old Skipper promptly.
Jim pried off another board.
We stared down at the sodden mass.
And it MOVED!
“Live!” shouted Old Skipper. “Live lobsters!”
I looked at my watch. It was 4:30. And at that moment, the front door bell rang.
“Here they come,” muttered Jimmie dully. We lifted the top layer of seaweed off.
There, slowly waving a huge, vicious olive green claw with yellow ruchings, emerged a great big five-pound lobster.
Skipper gingerly reached in and picked him free of his encumbering weeds. He was a beauty. His long whiskers moved mechanically. His bulging claws, tied together with a chip between them, waggled and twitched. His eyes – on stems – clicked to right and left.
As the gang poured in from the front of the house, we unearthed a dozen large and several small lobsters; not pretty red, packed in ice; but dark sea green, olive green, packed in dank seaweed.
“I thought,” announced Jim to the gathering, “I thought they’d be boiled lobsters. It never occurred to me…”
“We’ll boil ’em!” encouraged Old Skipper heartily.
“What in?” demanded Jim hollowly. “What can we boil all those great big things in?”
“Get the cook book,” I suggested.
Jim read from the cook book: “Take a large cauldron and fill with sea water…”
“Sea water!” he halted. “See?”
“Aw, don’t boil them,” put in Bill Sparra, anxiously. “It’s horrible! Every time you drop a lobster into the water, it screams.”
“No!” denied Old Skipper.
“Yes!” insisted Bill Sparra. “A little high scream. You can hear it all over the house.”
“Utter nonsense,” protested Bumpy, hotly. I’ve seen dozens of lobsters boiled…
“Broil them!” I suggested brightly. “Broiled live lobster? It’s a feature on the best sea food menus.”
By now the back kitchen, the kitchen and the hallway, were filled with the stag party guests.
“What on earth…” muttered Jim, helplessly, “… do I do? What’s in the house to eat?”
Well, there were ham and eggs in the house. I skipped over to the corner and bought another three dozen eggs and two pounds of ham.
And Jim and I functioned as chefs and did the cooking.
We had the stag party on ham and eggs; and it was pronounced a great success by all.
The lobsters we took down Monday to our old friend and restaurateur, Arnold Taylor, who got his fish chef to boil the lobsters for us.
And Jim divied them up Monday evening among a few of his closer, more intimate friends.
Editor’s Note: A stag party might now more commonly refer to a party for the men in a wedding party, but it can also mean any party where only men are invited.
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