#49 — The Shrimp Wheel of Destiny
Coping with the long term effects of entropy
“Did you tell him about the air conditioner?” Sheena asked.
“Oh my god!” Exclaimed her roommate Robyn, “For the past 9 months whenever we turned on the air conditioner at our house it smelled terrible.”
“Terrible? It smelled like something died from asphyxiating on burnt shit wrapped in hair.” Sheena added.
“You mean you haven’t used the air conditioner in 9 months?” I asked, “We live in the fucking desert. It was 115 degrees last week.”
“Right. We knew something was dead and whatever animal was rotting on top of the AC had to be big to stink that bad. Last week when it got hot I couldn’t take it anymore so I went outside to see what died on top of the air conditioner.”
“I was hoping it was just a bird but I was afraid to find a dead cat. It was neither. There was a black tray on top of the air conditioner that had this rancid smelling dead meat on it. I put on gloves and opened the trash can. I tried to hold my breath but gagged and threw up next to the trash.”
“I guess our neighbor didn’t like one of our parties. It wasn’t the first incident we had with that neighbor so I called the police to file a report...”
At that point Robyn noticed I was bright red rolling around on the floor.
“What’s so funny Hogan?” Asked Robyn.
I had been suffering from a shrimp wheel addiction at the time. It was the late 00’s and shrimp wheels were everywhere.
I quit drugs when I moved to Temecula. Not so much quit as deferred. My crystal meth addiction was substituted by artificially dyed shrimp, flash frozen in a circular pattern with tartar sauce dip in the middle.
It started with a 30 piece as most shrimp wheel addictions do.
A pound seemed like so much at first. On a Friday night I’d come home with the shrimp wheel and it’d last us all weekend.
Then the tails really started to pile up when we started going through a wheel a day. To keep up with my addiction the shrimp wheels kept getting larger in circumference.
I’d walk out of Costco every day carrying a kilogram of frozen shrimp and tartar sauce like it was a pizza. I’d have to tilt it sideways and bring it in our sliding back door.
9 months earlier had been the height of my shrimp wheel addiction. I was coming off a few bad wheels. They were frozen for too long or not long enough at some point. The end result was a fishy tasting wheel that I wasted 40 bucks on.
I had brought over the 5lb 3-ring Costco Bubba Gump memorial wheel to Robyn’s for a Halloween party. It was at that perfect defrost where the shrimp husks have ice on them but the meat is ice cold.
I wedged my first shrimp carcass out of it’s husk and ripped its tail off.
Rancid. Son of a bitch! They fucked me again.
The shrimp wheel was untouched by the other guests at the party. I didn’t want to take it home. But when I went to throw it away the trash was completely full. I figured by leaving it on top of the air conditioning unit next to the trash someone would throw it away and forgot all about it.
Never underestimate the laziness of women living together when it comes to taking out the garbage. The smell by the AC unit was so bad they started keeping their barrels on the other side of the the house.
I explained what I had done and we all had a good laugh, though the girls were understandably pissed. I had no idea of the discomfort caused my drunk ass depositing of 5lbs of rotting shrimp 6 inches away from the garbage can 9 months before.
It was too funny for anyone to be mad.
