The Boil

“Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.”

This is about shellfish.

I pass by her loft twice after dropping off a steamer trunk full of unmentionables. Parking in these winsome Manhattan neighborhoods is not as difficult as in deep zealot Brooklyn, but it can take a few loops around the block. Try living between a neighborhood of only Hassidim next to only devout Muslims. Brooklyn parking is impossible - that is, except on Friday nights, when the Shabbos alarms announce that none of the devout can move their own cars. Here in Manhattan, it’s different. No one is that perverse.

Much of the erotic stockpile in my storage unit I’ve loaded onto her sidewalk has moldered away for two successive relationships. A sad but poignant waste of my talents.

Time: what we avoid; or Time: what we have never experienced, dictates much of our experience itself. We are just as much the assemblage of experience as we are the experiences we have not had - the willing and the unwilling, the things we put off out of fear as opposed to the things we put off as ennui. More on that later. Shells and husks.

On top of today’s events, my ex’s boxes have been stacking up in the building foyer. Along the way, people forget to change their addresses. The particularly forgetful will mail things two apartments back. My ex used to live here too, long ago. We arrange with the administrator of the secret downtown Neo-reactionary right-wing Christian-trans pagan-fascist trad-libertine Talmudic-network art-space for us to drop all of the other woman’s stuff there - not before test-driving every horrible thing in my steamer trunk’s arsenal.

Here now, I can drive anywhere with her. Maxine is her name in the hive-mind psychic-warfare myth machine, her many other names in whispers. On our drive, our constant playlists are slipped like love notes between monastery and convent walls. Every errand is communion. She lowers the rear seats before we lay the former woman’s boxes in as war chattel, returned to the other side like Iriquoi elders’ used gifts. A statement piece. The week prior, we moved an entire apartment’s worth of kitschy lamps to our film screening in a yellow cab. I stacked precious metals to Pythia in a hatchback - slightly tipsy, smelling like day-old perfume and stale office coffee. Errands.

Decked out in Moschino, we drop off our war booty at our subterranean Chinatown drop-spot and jet to Brooklyn to make new introductions. My brother and his couple friends are going to see Modest Mouse, but we plan on dropping in prior. The husband works as a high-school music teacher; the wife is an event planner for one of Uptown’s more prestigious museums.

On the way to my brother’s friends’, we pass a seafood restaurant: “The Boil?”

“We have to eat there tonight!”

My heart sinks.

Seafood and I have a thorny relationship. My mother kept kosher despite my being raised Catholic. These animals are bugs to me. They’re the Arachnids of Klendathu. They’re meant to be fired down upon from a distance by a unit of nationalist zealots with MG-42 machine guns on an alien hive planet as the hordes storm our trench line, entrails scattered on sand amidst sarin gas clouds. These are not edible animals. They’re abject. They belong in the abyss. I am above them.

I now have to eat them.

I’ve put off this experience as long as I can. “Let’s get oysters instead,” I bargain. Oysters are not just tolerable, they’re aphrodisiacs. Maybe the only seafood I enjoy. They’re understandable, like genitals. They don’t reinforce the primordial void like shell carapaces. I drive us to Maison Premiere in Williamsburg to avoid these sea scorpions, but our hostess tells us there’s a wait. “Thirty minutes.”

The sea bugs are rushing my trench, soldiers ducking into harsh wet beach shells as others marshal on to their guns. We lose our table. The monsters breach the line. I’m going to suffer.

Maxine and I drive to The Boil.

“The Boil” is the thinking man’s Red Lobster. They drown a pot full of still-living, still-screaming critters with fully-intact nervous systems and then heave them into a plastic bag before dropping them on your table lathered in butter, potatoes and corn soaking in the oils of their lymph fluids. This is bespoke seafood dining, mere blocks from the NYU Library and the intravenous vagrants of Washington Square Park.

I am a carnivore. I eat steak tartare relishing in blood. Rare is preferable - the rarer the better. I love eating mammals, birds, fish; I’ve hunted deer without mercy. Lycanthropic, I’ll eat any animal. Hell, I’ll dress any animal - with a maximum of two legs, that is.

The Boil’s hostess leads us into a brightly-lit restaurant with a bar and a mix of bench seats and booths. We grab the nicest table in the back corner. I’m anxious - anxious like I’m about to lock into a rollercoaster, trip on a psychedelic, or experience some terrible erotic humiliation ritual.

I typically don’t let my dates lead. I pride myself on being in control. Even in our colorful, fetish-tinged life, I tell Maxine what to do - despite the irony of her being a professional dominatrix. In my experience, women who get paid to obliterate paying men crave the opposite in their personal lives. Every “domme” has a dom. If you understand human nature, that is unsurprising. But - sitting at our table with its little paper tablecloth - this is the first time I’ve ever felt truly vulnerable to Maxine. The power dynamic has flipped. All of a sudden, I am the slave to a mistress…all because I’m deeply afraid of eating sea bugs.

I order a beer with the full knowledge I’m going to need many beers to get through this. Our waitress is a small, mysterious woman named Cassie with a COVID mask obscuring her face. She becomes our guide through an experience I will come to understand as religious. Maxine orders a margarita she describes as “if someone drew a cartoon of a margarita”. The glass is nearly ten inches long with a thick straw poking out of its top, a sliver of salt rimming the glass. My Blue Moon with an orange slice comes after.

We ordered two combos. They’re going to be brought to the table in whopping plastic bags: lobster, crawfish, crab legs. My fear is receding in the safe hands of our guide.

At this point we notice the music: it’s a desolate wasteland of old 2000s hip-hop, R&B and pop. “Buttons” by The Pussycat Dolls is the first one she notices, giggling under the bib she’s tying on over her blazer (a museum-caliber Moschino piece covered in Roy Lichtenstein print). On the table, the waitress places a crab meat fork (which poetically resembles the creatures it will disembowel) beside a shell cracker that appropriately resembles some kind of testicular BDSM torture device.

I am nervously chugging Beer One; Beer Two will be on its way. I’ve made it to my mid-thirties without eating these aliens, but at this point my fear has morphed into something different. This is Bataille. I am descending into Julia Kristeva’s realm of abjection.

The waitress returns with an assistant and two giant plastic bags full of insect viscera. The creatures’ bodies have suffered unimaginably in a watery, brazen bull execution. Potatoes and corn bump around between their pincers, antenna, and locked-in exoskeleton legs. The two bags are soaked in butter. Only now do I realize how my terror is also erotic. Maybe I can do this.

I start explaining my change of heart to Maxine.

“These bags are a carnival of death. This is Dionysian, Cthonian.”

Maxine cracks off a crab leg and shoves it in my face. “Stop being meta and suck it.”

This is as much for philosophy for me as for sex. I suck the lymph out of the shell, noting the bemusement in Maxine’s glassy blue eyes. I think to myself: this is like shark diving, this is like bungee jumping. She doesn’t know how to ride a bike or drive a car. The steamer trunk full of unmentionables is back home. I’ll turn the tables back on her in due time, but for now this crab meat tastes…delectable. This is closest I’ve ever been to being submissive to this woman. She cracks open the lobster, the crawfish, the crab, as white arthropod gristle splashes in every direction. I drink more beer and invoke more Philosophy Chungus cope with each bite she feeds me from plastic gloved hands. As she cracks open a lobster claw, her glove tears at her index finger. A part of me shudders knowing the butter and oils will make contact with her skin. My eyes are darting across her blazer and my Moschino shirt, scanning for splashes of food, afraid we’ll smell like Innsmouth shoggoths when we leave.

“Fire Burning” by Sean Kingston rattles over the speakers. Now, I couldn’t be afraid of these critters if I tried. I don’t have to rationalize this philosophically. Eating the monster is sex.

Maxine and I empty the bags. “Do you dare me?” I gape as she slurps up a glob of garlic infused crustacean butter gristle.

I order one last beer. Maxine washes her hands. Our clothes are immaculate, give or take one or two dots of butter - small lymphatic scarlet letters to our necrophilia in the back of a Washington Square seafood joint. She’s well aware of what she’s doing. I can put on airs about control in every arena but this one. She found a hole in my shell. She cracked it. We both enjoyed it.

Around us are couples obviously celebrating anniversaries and exclusive nights out, as we are. We pay the bill and thank our waitress for her exceptional patience. As we walk out, a pair of charming Black women in party frocks stop us to comment on our outfits. I show them the rear of my button-down as Maxine idly chats with them about designers.

“You two are Blair Waldorf and Chuck Bass!”

I know nothing of “Gossip Girl”, but Maxine and the women laugh. We drive home blasting Nine Inch Nails.

At her neighbor’s birthday party that night, I share my stories of my fear of shellfish, the nightmare of kosher, the beauties of butter. As I and my seafood Domina take our leave, a friend shouts after us knowingly.

“Go upstairs, you two, and have fabulous sex.”