I’m convinced that the world is in the grips of some sort of weird social meltdown. The news coming off the wires sounds like the dying shriek of a wino that finally got to close to the edge of the highway and was mowed down by a tweaking long haul trucker. Justice no longer hangs in the balance it hangs from the rafters with a noose around its neck and on its back are the long purple scars from its stay at Guantanamo Bay. The religious freaks are sharpening their crosses and walling off the west with stacks of shellacked Bibles. The bully named government, fat on hypocrisy, is on the other side of the seesaw and we’re stranded up in the air wondering whether we should jump or if we’re fast enough to run down the plank and kick him in the balls before he jumps off and we going flying through the air like suicidal lemmings. And there’s more…
The Mall down the road from my home has gone the way of Las Vegas with glittering acid trip billboards that spew forth bites of gibberish and in between these bites undetectable subliminal catch phrases are flashed and suddenly you have a craving for Social Security reform and Lite Beer. The center of this monstrosity is the football stadium sized Outdoor World and Bass Pro Shop, where outdoor fish and game Pimps, wearing brown polyester suit pants and belt buckles as big as satellite dishes, whore out fifty foot long pontoon boats and camouflage sweat pants to a redneck population that trolls the premises looking for the next best way to kill Bambi. It is this portion of the population that believes Jesus will rise again and will probably be driving the Budweiser car in the Daytona Five Hundred and will most certainly be a Republican.
Yes, the rednecks have been breeding, birth control be damned and they’re moving their junked cars and broken down appliances into the yard next to yours. So be warned. It’s a weird world and it just keeps getting weirder…
And the weirdest is yet to come. Trust me folks. I’m on your side…
According to a story from the AP by Mike Crissey (http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050302084709990002) it appears that a 22 pound lobster named Bubba hitchhiked its way from the waters of Nantucket to a Pittsburgh fish market where he was caught roughing up the help and demanding female lobsters be sent to his tank. I’ve heard of these types of crustaceans before and know they are a reckless bunch that frequent all night sand bars and swim recklessly in and out of lobster pots, daring the man to catch them.
Where this story took a weird turn for me personally was when I received a 3 AM call from an anonymous tipster who worked at the Pittsburgh fish market where Bubba was staying and who claimed to have found something very interesting at the bottom of his murky tank. No, it wasn’t lobster shit, although there were rumored to be several Baby Ruth size lobster logs floating about, what this tipster found hidden amongst the plaster castles and colored stones was used syringes, and no Bubba wasn’t diabetic.
I immediately had the syringes sent to a lab and the contents tested and it was of little surprise that the syringes held trace amounts of DMT, the once undetectable steroid sold by Victor Conte of now infamous Balco fame, who also gave athletes steroids code named, the "clear" and the "cream." YES! BUBBA WAS ON THE JUICE! I was staring right into the googly eyes of a new trend in shellfish training and I knew then that I had to have an exclusive interview with Bubba. I just hopped that I beat that bastard Brian Williams of NBC to the punch. Williams believes the heart of America lies beneath the faux waterfall in Cabela’s (the ugly twin sister of the Bass Pro Shop setup). Beneath his suit coat and slacks he wears a camouflage jump suit and always hides his hands on air so no one sees the grease on his palms. I know who you are Brian Williams.
I needed to act quickly and so set out in my Cherokee for Pittsburgh for an exclusive interview with this lobster named Bubba.
During the ride to the Steel City my source phoned me on my cell phone. He said that Bubba claimed the steroids were in the tank when he got there, that a King crab had occupied the tank before him and he was sure the stuff was his. I didn’t buy it for a minute. No lobster gets to be 15 times the size of his peers by clean living and good eating alone. What really bothered me though was why Bubba hadn’t been indicted by the grand jury with the rest of the Balco clientele and then it all became painfully clear, Bubba had turned states evidence.
* * *
I met Bubba in a sleazy hotel lobby in Oakland. He was sitting in a filthy tank filled with brackish water and was flanked by a lady Fiddler crab and two hussy lobsters. His black beady eyes kept twitching this way and that and his claws trembled uncontrolablly.
I turned on my tape recorder and Bubba snapped at me.
“Easy big fellow,” I said, “I’m not here to boil you.”
This seemed to put him at ease and so I commenced with the interview.
SM: “So, Bubba, did you have a relationship with Victor Conte and Balco?”
Bubba: Nothing.
SM: Did you rub something called the “clear” under your pinchers which was given to you by Victor Conte?
Bubba: Nothing.
SM: You are quite a bit bigger than the average 1.5 pound lobster and you attribute this to good eating and vigorous training?
Bubba: Nothing.
SM: This isn’t a very good interview. It’s been rumored that you were seen in the bay outside San Fransisco’s Candlestick park with Barry Bonds. That’s an awful long way from home isn’t it? What is your relationship with the baseball player?
Bubba: Nothing.
SM: You’ve seen the before and after pictures of Barry Bonds. How do you explain the growth in the size of his head? Did he shoot steroids directly into his jowls? Barry’s head is now so big that although he gained fifty pounds of muscle his body still appears to be the same size.
Bubba: Antennas twitch but he says nothing.
SM: Did Jose Conseco ask you to inject steroids in his backside in the toilet stall at the A’s Stadium and did he in fact rub the “cream” on your tail?
Bubba: Nothing.
At this point Bubba tried to pinch me but I blocked him with my notepad. This was the end of our interview. I knew then that Bubba wasn’t going to talk and it wasn’t just because he couldn’t talk it was because he was loyal to Balco and Victor Conte for helping him become the biggest and baddest lobster around.
At my hotel that night I pondered the steroid problem and how a lobster could get caught up in it all. The allure of being the biggest lobster in the tank must have been too much of a temptation for old Bubba much as I imagined it had been too much of a temptation for those baseball players that had multi-million dollar contracts on the line. Fans wouldn’t be so understanding though.
These great conveyers of purity, the average slobbering fan that dry humps the fantasy that sports figures are immortal role models who are supposed to be a better example to their children than they are, and are outraged at the recent allegations of their lobsters and baseball players juicing up should be ashamed of themselves. You are the same bastards that cheered like rabid monkeys in a free banana line when Mark McGwire hit 71 home runs. Did you really believe that Androstenediene was what he was taking when he hit all those home runs? If you do just stick your head back in the sand like the ignorant ostriches you want to be. Androstenediene does not produce steroid like effects.
Are you telling me that you just noticed the drastic change in the way players look these days? Babe Ruth looked like he was harboring a mini-bar and two showgirl under his jersey. Hank Aaron was so thin you could barely see him if he turned sideways. On average lobster tails used to be the size of a Twinkie but now some are as big as one of Dick Cheney's thighs. Did you really not know what was going on or did you just not want to know?
Forty years ago NFL football teams would put salad bowls of steroids on their training tables and players were told to take their “vitamins” before they ate and took handfuls of the drugs. The drug use amongst lobsters and baseball players may not have been around quite as long but the gross change in physiques over that last fifteen years should have been a clue that all was not as it should have been.
So I leave you, the hypocritical fan, with the ball, so to speak, in your hands. You can pretend at being outraged or you can look reality in the eyes and realize that a ball player isn't a perfect guy and shouldn’t be a role model for your kids any more than a lobster should be. You should be the role model for your kids and stop screwing your secretary and smacking your wives then maybe your kids will want to be more like you instead of a juiced up sports star.
* * *
It is with much regret that I inform my readers that Bubba the 22 pound lobster went the way of Ken Camniti (baseball player and steroid user) and died at the Pittsburgh Zoo. He will be missed. In Lieu of flowers donations can be sent to your local Red Lobster to help free other lobsters.
(http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050303090409990008)
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