The Last Days of Maury the Lobster

A nine-martini night of blindness, casual sex, and crustacean love.

By Snowden Wright

On New Year's Eve of 2004, some old college friends and I celebrated in New York City. The reunion took place about six months after our graduation. Although I had lived in New York the previous summer, loving interning at a magazine, hating interning at a magazine, I'd since moved back to Mississippi, where I pathetically substitute-taught at my former high school, slept in my old bed, drove my old car, and painstakingly completed applications for grad school. I had told myself when I left the city I wasn't yet mature enough to handle it.

That first night, eve of the eve, our group of twelve reuinted friends attended a Dave Attell comedy show, got drunk at a midtown bar, and binged on hot dogs at Gray's Papaya in the Village. The scene was college all over again. We universally struck out with a group of girls supposedly in high school whom I suspect might have been prostitutes. We interrupted our single friends talking to older women by claiming they had calls from their girlfriends. In the morning, having rediscovered that fun is the very best thing to have, we awoke sometime around noon, our clothes tossed haphazardly about the apartment where we were staying, socks draped atop the television and t-shirts dangling from the fan. All of this was watched over by a signed headshot of Steven Seagal framed in walnut on the mantle. The place reeked of boy. Vomit spackled the rim of every toilet bowl and cigarette butts floated in dozens of beer bottles and urine colored a spot on the carpet. It would obviously take hours of hard work to get the apartment back in shape. What now then? We all went to eat lunch.

On our way home from a burger joint, we stopped at a grocery store and purchased a live lobster. We named him Maury. Some people might think it odd to buy a living crustacean simply because they feel like doing so, and some people might think it odd to treat said crustacean as though it were a household pet. We were not those people. Maury proved terrible at fetch, but excellent at playing dead. None of us had the Hooksexup to teach him how to shake hands. He made for a great companion until it was time for us to leave for the next party.

We had tickets for a "New Year's Eve Gala" at a bar downtown. Serena, a Moroccan lounge with black-velvet couches situated beneath Edison bulbs, was located beneath the Hotel Chelsea. In 1953, Dylan Thomas had died of alcohol poisoning while sleeping on one of its beds, and in 1978, Sid Vicious had (allegedly) stabbed his girlfriend to death in one of its rooms. We made ourselves right at home.

Given that so many of us were from out of town — not exactly fish out of water, but perhaps lobsters out of the tank — we all underwent a parallel sensory overload on entering the bar. Look at what the city had to offer! A brunette as blandly attractive as a catalog model walked out of the bathroom dabbing white crumbs from her nostrils. In front of top-shelf liquors, a bartender with a tattoo on the exposed side of her breast took well shots, each without a grimace. A faction of girls lit cigarettes in the corner despite the recent law prohibiting them. Mind, we were hardly ladies men. We definitely knew how to spell "ogle."

At the start of the evening, we kept mostly to ourselves, sipping cocktails, telling stories, but we soon ventured into the horde. Those days I still drank martinis. Three heaping ounces of vodka and a hint of vermouth were the perfect cure for my complete and utter dearth of charm. Almost. It took at least four martinis to imagine myself a lothario. Around my sixth martini of the night, I met a young woman, Cynthia, whose specific features I wish I could remember. I think she was blond. I hope she was pretty.

The two of us swapped turns screaming into each other's ear against the din of celebrating louts. I told her that I "aetifuek motoehtip" but also "qelithe theoin llqleaad" in my spare time. She told me that she "meklep weithto tlkepty" from long ago when "cxlkegh althermol" for extra cash. We got along swimmingly. Five minutes into our witty repartee, Cynthia excused herself to visit the ladies' room. Perfect opportunity for me to get my nth of the evening. At the bar, studying the side-boob tat on my server, I fell into a moment of imaginative revelry, combining memory of the past with consideration of the present. I thought of a television show.

In a particular episode of California Dreams, a sitcom from the producers of Saved By The Bell that NBC aired on Saturday mornings throughout my early teens, the lead singer of the titular band is set up on a "blind date" with a girl who turns out to be actually blind. (Hear the laugh track?) At first, pacing across the set in his signature plaid jacket with cut-off sleeves, the lead singer, Jake, contemplates the moral quandary of whether it's cool to date a girl who can't see, but soon, aided by the fact the blind girl has no trouble filling out her neon tube-top, Jake decides to follow his heart and learns a valuable lesson in the process: it's what's inside that matters.

At the bar on New Year's Eve, considering the girl in the bathroom, remembering the show from my teens, something else came to mind. Wouldn't it be funny, I thought, if I dated a blind girl?

"So is it 'Morrie,' as in Tuesdays With Morrie," Cynthia yelled on her return, "or is it 'Maury,' as in Maury Povich?"

"Povich."

"Good choice."

At that moment, looking at the girl next to me, I thought with absolute certainty she was blind. Here is why. Due to the amount of Stolichnaya flowing through my veins, I could only catalog a fragment of my thoughts into the dusty vaults of my memory, whether short-term or long-term. So, looking at Cynthia after her absence, I could remember thinking about her being blind but I could not remember thinking about it as a hypothetical scenario. Fancy became indistinguishable from fact.