The Buildings Are Melting

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Jul 25, 2010

How hot was it? It was so hot, entire buildings were melting.

I had a hard time enticing Deborah to come outside with me. She wanted to stay inside our air-conditioned apartment and study Portuguese. "I've been slacking off," she said, which may or may not be true.

"You can study later," I said. "Let's go for a bicycle ride."

"Ugh, it's so hot."

"We don't have to go far. We can ride to DUMBO and get a couple of those Lobster Rolls I was telling you about."

"No."

The lobster rolls are sold in the Brooklyn Bridge park at a little stand that serves as an outpost for a place called "The Lobster Pound" in Red Hook, with a website that claims their lobsters taste more lobstery. I saw the little stand on a bicycle ride last weekend, and although I didn't stop to try one, or even to see what they looked like, the idea of eating lobster rolls in the park sounded like a nice way to spend a couple of hours.

"Where is this place again?" said Deborah.

"It's right in the Brooklyn Bridge Park. A ten-minute ride. C'mon, let's go."

A few minutes waiting for Deborah to get dressed, and we were on our way. But when we got there, the lobster stand wasn't open.

"They'll be here around one o'clock," the guy at the ice cream booth told us.

In case you haven't heard, the Brooklyn waterfront is undergoing a major transformation. Most of it is still under construction, but areas have begun to open up. We wanted to sit in one of the new parts, but, unfortunately, the trees there are new, too, and too young to offer much shade, so we backtracked to the area under the Brooklyn Bridge and found a nice shady tree near the water to sit and wait for the lobster shack to open.

We watched a few parents take their kids into a nearby playground when Deborah spied the playground's sprinkler. "Whoa, a sprinkler! I'll be right back."

Technically, you're not supposed to use the playground unless you're with a kid, but it was too hot for Deborah to resist. I waited under the tree with our bikes while Deborah frolicked in the sprinkler for a few minutes.

"Ah, so nice," she said when she returned, refreshed. "Don't they realize adults like sprinklers, too? Why don't they set up sprinklers around town for the grown-ups? Why should kids have all the fun?"

Probably because adult sprinklers would turn into homeless showers, although that might not be such a bad thing.

Soon enough, it was one o'clock, and we headed back to the lobster shack for a shocker:

"$16.50? They have got to be fucking kidding!"

I had stupidly assumed that the prices would only be slightly ridiculous, not utterly absurd. "That's a lot of money."

"It's a fucking tourist trap," said Deborah. "There's no way. Let's go."

I bicycle along Manhattan's West Side bike path from time to time, and recently, on a similarly hot day, I ran out of water. I stopped at a hot dog cart near the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum to buy a bottle of Poland Spring, the bottled water of choice among hot dog vendors. "Three dollars," the vendor said. My first thought was to topple his cart and spill his rancid hot dog water all over the pavement, leaving his hot dogs to dry in the sun like worms after a rainstorm, but I resisted and instead dropped my jaw and then dropped the cash, forking over the three bucks and riding away a sucker. Albeit a re-hydrated and refreshed one. But you've got to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em, and $16.50 for a lobster roll was out of the question. "Let's blow this clam bake," I said. "Er, I mean lobster shack."

We decided to continue on our merry way, but unfortunately, we had lobster rolls on the brain and couldn't stop thinking about them, so, after riding around just a little longer, we began to scheme alternatives.

There's a quasi-gourmet market on the first floor of our apartment building that, lucky for us, has a fresh fish counter. "Do they carry lobster meat?" I wondered

"No," said Deborah. "I'm pretty sure they don't."

"How about crabmeat?"

"Hmm.. They might. It's not quite the same thing, though."

"No, I guess not, but it's close.

"Yeah. Close enough."

We biked homeward, stopped at the market, and bought all our supplies for making a half dozen crab rolls -- crabmeat, celery, chives, tomato, lettuce, mayonnaise, buns, as well as a full bag of potato chips and two freshly made frozen mocha drinks — for a lot less than the $33 two lobster rolls would have cost.

"Fuck that place," said Deborah. "If I'm going to pay tourist-trap prices, I'm going to wait until I'm a fucking tourist."