From The Road Series
Field Notes: An Afternoon In Bimini
”They call me Peanut!” he said through stretched lips. Only he didn’t just say it like in sentence form. He sang it, mouthing the syllables slowly, assigning each one a different note, and drawing out the “Peeaaaa-” in “Peanut.”
”Peanut?” I said to confirm, ”I’m Doc.”
We didn’t extend hands since his were covered in conch slime, instead, we offered head nods to each other as he told me about his favorite niece, they call Conch, while swiftly slicing the googley eyeballs off a conch with the single pull of a knife.
As I stood on the dock, Peanut working his way through shell after shell after shell of Bahamian Queen Conch, I found myself mesmerized by the ease with which he worked. The swing of a rock hammer here, a few flicks of the wrist there. The conch flew out of one bucket, the meat was hurled into a separate bucket, and the occupant-evicted shells were tossed back into crystalline water. The gap between sea water and the dock below us was several feet wide and most of it was already filled. Not with air but with mounds of those emptied conch shells, thousands of them, likely tossed in by Peanut.
Fresh, salty conch meat, chopped roughly with a machete and tossed with cubes of finely diced green bell peppers, onions, and tomatoes. It’s a hit with a lot of lime juice and a little bit of orange juice, both squeezed fresh, and tossed again. There are some extras that can be added to the salad, or not, depending on the makers’ tastes: a sprinkle of garlic salt for seasoning, a little extra diced habanero for spice, or maybe a dollop of mayonnaise for fat to round it out.
But all of that aside, the secret to the best conch salad–according to Peanut –lies not in the extras. You see, when it comes down to it, conch salad in the Bahamas is like made-from-scatch pasta in Italy. You can box it up and you can freeze it; you can manipulate the ratios and some of the ingredients. But there’s nothing that can compare to the tender chew and delicate brine of conch salad made with mollosk pulled straight from the sea. Chop the conch meat, fresh from the water, and serve it just after it’s eye stalks have ceased to google.
That’s where Peanut–a hammer-swinging, Vitamix-slinging, top-100s-of-the-90s-singing expert of cleaning conch–comes in. Peanut pounded into a shell, blasting a hole about a quarter of the way down its side with a single swing of his rock hammer. He pulled the meat from the shell, as he sang some Whitney Houston, and then he pushed the conch’s long meandering eye stalks towards me and said, ”Here’s lookin’ at you kid,” then laughed at his own wit. I laughed too, as a flash of Casablanca raced through my mind.
Peanut went back to cracking and slicing and singing, this time Rhianna as he pulled a long, clear worm-like piece of anatomy from the grey-skinned conch meat. He held it out towards me and said two words that told me everything I needed to know.
”Bahamian Viagra.”
He shoved half of it into his mouth and left the other half dangling between the parallel gap in his upper and lower teeth, spilling out between his stretched wide lips. He flicked it up and down with his tongue, laughing even harder as the worm whipped his nose and his chin, and then swallowed it in a single gulp.
I was a mix of infatuated and disgusted and I also knew I wanted to eat a little clear conch worm myself. Peanut passed the next one to Me. ”Better than the Mezcal worm,” he said to me.
It was delicate and salty, like an oyster liquor-flavored gummy worm, and I halfway wondered if somehow I could use the transparent sea-birthed gummy worm in a fine dining kind of dish. ;)
When the sun started to sink, I passed Peanut a couple more VitaMalts as a thanks for sharing his time and songs and laughter and also my first true introduction to Bahamian Viagra.
Peanut waved and told me to enjoy the night, shouting down the dock through his own belly laughs, “
”Mate, you will be up all night long with that thing in your belly!”
As I walked away, chuckling with him at the thought, I heard the beginnings of another conch salad in hammer swings and empty shell tosses, along with the faint sound of Peanut singing...This time, though, it was Michael Jackson. ”Don’t stop, til you get enough…”
There will always be a memory of that afternoon with Peanut and the conch pistol, and a salad that tropical dreams are made of, and maybe also there’s a small hope that the Bahamians are onto something with the pistols that evades scientific reason.
From the road...see you soon...Doc
Journal Entry 10/15/17
