I thought Yeah, their goddamn shrimp. Their damn shrimpy minds. Why do you want to put yourself in the employ of people like that? Who have no interest in you other than what you can do for them? I was really getting sleepy and I yawned several times. It didn’t look like my friend was going to show up and I knew somebody had to go down to the dock the next morning and try to find that boat. And not just any boat. That boat, where they were selling them for $1.35 a pound medium jumbo, cutting out the middleman and passing the savings on to the consumer. I decided I’d be best off booking for the local hotel, so that’s what I did, like a fat man’s ass.

It was hot as hell in the parking lot the next morning. Some firemen were having a convention in the Holiday Inn, and they had ladder trucks set up in the parking lot, and they were giving rides to the general public. Since I was general public, I got on one. I had the fear of maybe getting up there and puking down on somebody a hundred feet below. But it was really impressive up there above the roof of the Holiday Inn. For one thing, you could see all those shrimp boats out there in the water running their nets. The sun was shining, but the sky looked smoky. It looked like they were just dredging ton after ton of little shrimps up. It made me feel a whole lot better, looking out over all that industry. I sort of got the big picture sitting up there and realized how small and unimportant my quest was, in light of the tons of available seafood already destined for restaurants all over the South. I decided to just find a shrimp boat docked with a fresh load, jew them down as much as I could, load up and haul ass.