Raw

When you first start eating raw oysters, you can't taste any difference between them. The Penn Cove Selects, Belons, Olys, Kumos, they all taste the same to newcomers and casual eaters. People say it's like learning to taste wine, in the fact that you need to learn the subtle nuances over years through hard, dedicated drinking. But I've been drinking wine since I was sixteen and I still can't tell the difference between a Cab from a cardboard box and a twenty-five-dollar glass of Malbec from The Golden Steer. Oysters though? They make sense to me. Some are briny, others are kind of crunchy, some are the color of pennies, and sometimes they're clean and crisp.

Ordering them is like a low-stakes Russian Roulette. Every so often, I'll get half a dozen, and it's like eating straight out of a chum bucket. Other times though, when I'm at the beach on a sunny afternoon, drinking a beer, and dressing one up with horseradish and cocktail sauce, before I slurp it out of the shell, I know it's worth the potential Hepatitis. That all changed though on New Year's Eve, 2018.

That year my wife and I had a lot to celebrate. We had moved to San Diego, a lifetime goal for both of us, my younger brother had just gotten married days before, and I had published my first novel. We were back in my hometown of Port Orange, Florida, and spending nights at the pool halls I grew up sneaking into and relaxing with family to wrap up an exciting year. That night we were going to my favorite restaurant, Our Deck. It's a stereotypical beach bar and grill that looks like a large shack underneath the Dunlawton Bridge. The draw for kids is you can throw your leftovers into the mouths of dozens of catfish in the intercoastal that splash over each other for scraps. As I got older, I found it morbid that we were feeding our uneaten fish sandwiches to living fish, but when I got even older than that, I realized that's all they really eat.

To celebrate, my wife and I decided to get a few necessities for the evening. The first item on our list was to get some good champagne. We're not fancy, so when I say, "good," I mean not Andre. That along with a bag of BBQ Fritos (a chip the Midwest and the West Coast don't get for some reason) and some sweet tea. But, the pièce de résistance, and what we really wanted, were my wife's new favorite delicacy: raw oysters. She had grown fond of them out in California where I had convinced her to try some months before. Ever since that day, whenever we saw a raw bar or we were at a nice seafood restaurant, Laura would ask if we could split a dozen. I usually ate most of them, but I didn't mind.

By late afternoon, we had picked up most of our supplies, but we were still missing the oysters. On the way home from the liquor store we stopped at Gaff's, the local butcher. I went in alone, knowing my wife wouldn't appreciate the smell. Gaff's is, what I would call, more of the blue-collar butcher in my small town. The meat is high quality and reasonably priced, but the stink of drained blood and the stench of dozens of kinds of meat can be overwhelming, especially to a city girl.

Truthfully, I felt intimidated grabbing a number and waiting there by the glass case of meats. Sure, I had bought steaks before and even some pork chops from Gaff's but I had never bought oysters from anywhere other than a restaurant. Doing something for the first time in front of a crowd makes me feel nervous. I'm worried I'll say the wrong thing or make an ass out of myself, even when that thing is as simple as buying oysters.

"Number seventy-six," the meat guy said.

I walked...