1-900-LOBSTER

I got caught up in commenting on Elly's blog at Buggin Word today. It got gross, and then it got grosser and I brought up this urban myth that I was creepy-obsessed with ten years ago. So as I waxed nostalgic about lobster tails and sea monkeys I was transported back to a time and place where all but this most repulsive of urban myths paled in comparison to our daily lunch conversations. Heck. Even our work.

I was working at the local free weekly newspaper. You know the type: Some liberal editorial, restaurant reviews, bar ads, and the last fifteen pages of "classified ads" for 1-900 numbers, massage parlors and escorts.

On Tuesdays the escorts' (hookers) managers (pimps) would come in to pay cash for their ads and bring in head shots (full nude photos of coked up barely legals) for us to crop and put in their ads.

FYI, pimps really do wear long fur coats. And too much cologne.

We made the ads, well, my coworkers made them and I said where they went in the paper, so besides listing all the local bands with dirty, double entendre names playing at all the skeezey bars, we had an ongoing peep show of sad naked ladies. Let's just say, not a good working environment for a shrinking violet. I may have been one when I started, but I left there a seasoned, sailor-mouthed hussy.

And we used to pass the time in the office by trying to think up the grossest phrases that brought to mind the most disgusting images. I think it was Jess who came up with the VBF (vaginal blood fart).

The paper also ran Savage Love, back when it was still really raunchy and less politically correct. So every Wednesday when we got the article text, one of us would stand up and read it out loud to the room. We would do the same whenever someone got forwarded one of those email-circulated urban myths which of course provided excellent fodder for our Who Can Say the Most Disgusting Thing game. But this one, about a woman's too intimate relationship with a crustacean had at least one of us huddled in the corner shivering. The thing is, the version we got had been edited some - to not sound so lame and corny. It sounded more real. More nightmarish.

We were no strangers to prostitution, furry porn, and diaper fetishes. But after that fateful day all you had to say to make any one of us throw up in our mouths a little was "lobster."