Great Men of Meat: Installment One

Let us all raise our goblets to the carnivorous culinary world's most indulgent duo, Turfinton Pedalbottom and Sherman Surfanual. 

Both Turfinton and Sherman lived sad and lonely lives full of mockery and discontent. Turfinton Pedalbottom's parents were assholes. They abandoned Turfinton at age 9, leaving him with nothing but a name that damned him to social ridicule, and cruel jokes from elementary school children. Sherman Sally Surfanual's parents were adult alliteration addicts. As children both Turfinton and Sherman shied away from human interaction, finding company and solace in animals. By the age of 11 Turfinton's best friend and only companion was a heifer named Carl. Three years later, Turfinton was forced to eat Carl in order to avoid starvation during a particularly harsh winter. The taste was indescribable, the emotions were inexpressible and the outcome was unpredictable. Sherman on the other hand was always a lobster boy. Due to his horrifically pale skin, he burned harshly and frequently. A fear of daylights harmful beams lead Sherman to a nocturnal life, a trait which, along with a skin pigment that often mirrored the fire-engines paint, drew him to love and identify with lobsters. Sherman ate lobster for the first time at the age of 17. As both men grew their affinity for their respective meat of preference grew with them. Both men had been instantly hook, their first savory bites of meat had done them in and by their mid-twenties each was accumulating massive debt supporting crackhead sized meat dependency. The pair finally met in 1897 after Sherman, a 28-year-old vagabond at the time, relocated to Salem, Massachusetts in order to be closer the Atlantic Oceans greatest gift, Lobster. Turfinton, who had lived in Salem for quite some time, kept spotting Sherman lurking about at the same butchers shops and high-class eateries that he frequented for his fix. On the night of July 23^rd, 1897, Turfinton Pedalbottom spoke to Sherman Surfanual for the first time; their friendship was instant. Their socially ostracized pasts and their current abnormal meat obsessions led them to be the perfect pair. After months of petty butcher robberies and countless midnight meat raids together, Sherman and Turfinton hatched a scheme to finally hit the jackpot. On the frigid night of November 7^th, 1897, Sherman Surfanual and Turfinton Pedalbottom reached their demise and fame all in one fell swoop. At 6pm Sherman and Turfinton burst in, guns a blazin’, to the First National Bank of Massachusetts. 46 customers, 7 tellers, 1 manager, and a security guard all hit the deck. They knew the deal; this was a stick-up. But this was a stick-up like nothing anyone had ever seem. When the police arrived Sherman made their demands clear: 150 pounds of frozen lobster, 150 pounds of frozen steaks, 30 freshly prepared lobsters with butter, 30 medium rare sixteen-ounce porterhouses, and two horses. The horses were the first demand to be met, an occurrence that sent the two meat addicts into a fit of rage. They beat the manager within an inch of his life in front of the main window of the building while screaming for lobster and steak. Fortunately, for the sake of the manager, 60 steamin’ hunks of meat arrived just in time. The highs and lows of a junkie are abrupt and extreme. Sherman had eaten 19 lobsters and Turfinton had polished off 22 steaks when the anxious police force decided it was time for action. The doors of the bank slammed open and the first officer through, an overzealous rookie, fired off a warning shot into the ceiling. The banks’ security guard let out a hair-raising howl; he was having a heart attack. But he wasn’t the only one. When the smoke cleared, Sherman and Turfinton both lay dead, smiling, slumped over a mountain of half eaten meat. The coroner’s report compared their blood to “a hearty, thick, gravy” and their arteries to a "traffic jam". Newspapers across the nation picked up on the story, dubbing the pair the “Surf-n-Turf Bandits” and with that, the restaurant industries most expensive and decadent entrée was born. The duo of Sherman “Surf” Surfanual and Turfinton “Turf” Pedalbottom live on, forever etched in the history books of decadence, and ever present on the tables of elite restaurants across the nation.

Here's to Sherman Sufanual and Turfinton Pedalbottom... hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray!