My shame is great.

All I wanted to do was turn my attention to the ear of corn on my plate. Butter it, salt it, chew it up from one end to another like a dog biting at fleas.

Is that so wrong?

I mulled the chunk of pinkish flesh floating in its little bowl of congealing butter. No interest at all.

“Does anybody want the rest of my tail?” I asked.

The gasps came from all directions — gasps of shame, of confusion, of outright disgust.

A waiter dropped a tray of silverware and ran off, weeping. A woman at a nearby table screamed, swooned and fell to the floor like a discarded napkin. A cook had to be restrained as he stormed out of the kitchen, enraged.

My dinner companions, too, were beside themselves. Their jaws dropped. Their faces went as red as one of the boiled crustaceans I had so offended.

“That’s LOBSTER,” somebody hissed. “You can’t give away LOBSTER.”

“And it’s the tail,” somebody else declared, in the tsk-tsk tone of unmasked contempt. “The very best part of a lobster!”

“String ‘im up!” shouted a man in a gore-streaked bib. “He’s not one of us!”

“Boil and butter the cad!” shrieked a furious woman. In retrospect, that might have been my mother.

I always suspected that a mob would get me someday. I just had no idea that it would be an oversized crawfish that riled them to action.

It’s not that I don’t like lobster, you should understand before you commence flaying me with a steamed clam. I just don’t love them. If presented with the choice between a couple of Roy’s hot dogs and a 2-pound, soft-shell lobster caught just an hour ago by a peg-legged fisherman named Hahns, I would have to think on it. On most days — you may begin clutching at your pearls here — I’d go with the hot dogs — nobody knows what hot dogs are made of, which is scientific proof that they’re delicious!

When I eat a hot dog, there are no surprises. A hot dog generally won’t fight back when you try to put it in your mouth, whereas a lobster, quite dead, will continue to defend itself during every step of the eating process. It’s really quite a marvel of nature.

Here’s how it tends to go for me: I start with one of the claws because the claws look like they’re pointing at me and it freaks me out. Might as well eat the sucker and be done with the annoyance.

But handling a lobster claw is like arm-wrestling with a hacksaw. Every inch of that sucker is serrated in some way to the point where you begin to suspect it was designed by the people who make Swiss Army knives. The Swiss, I suppose.

Once you’ve overcome the lobster’s hacksaw hands, you’ve still got to get at the meat inside, which is generally done with a nutcracker and a sharp little gadget they call a pick, although I’ve never been able to strum a guitar with one.

I always stab myself at least twice with the little pick while trying to pry allegedly succulent meat from its shell armor. I tend to scream when it happens, too, because for a few dread seconds, I’ll be convinced that the lobster has returned from the dead and is now biting me back.

It would be one thing if a lobster only had one claw, but most of them have two, which means double the work and double the risk of spearing a major artery with that hateful pick. By the time I’ve done battle with two lobster claws, I’m spent, and usually bleeding severely.

Sadly, there’s no quitting allowed — lobster aficionados are everywhere this time of year and they won’t give you a moment’s peace.

“Are you sure you got all the meat out of the claws?” they will demand, thrusting their entire heads into your plate so they can examine the carnage. “Look! You haven’t even picked the chela clean!”

These are the same horrid people who will watch over you like prison wardens to make sure you suck meat from each and every one of the lobster’s legs. And there are like a thousand of them!

“Bite down and suck the meat out!” they’ll scream at you, like cruel college punks at a fraternity hazing. “You need to get all the meat. ALL THE MEAT!”

I sometimes dream, after dining on lobster legs, that the wretched thing is going to reassemble itself inside my stomach. It happened to a guy I know.

By the time I get to the coveted tail end, I’m usually weeping steadily. To get to the slab o’ meat locked inside a lobster’s hindquarters, you have to perform feats of strength and skill so precise, you typically only see them in movies where Chuck Norris takes out a Bolivian drug czar.

You’ve got to bend the entire back end of the creature upward, snapping, tugging and twisting as you go. The dead lobster will retaliate by both hacking up your already-wounded hands and squirting its special juices directly into your eye, which not only renders you temporarily blind, it will make your entire face stink for days.

Once you have the back end of the crustacean separated from the rest of its body, there’s still the matter of wresting free the meat through a process that, to me, seems like it should only be performed by trained proctologists and then only with the lights off.

It is at about this stage of the operation where your friendly neighborhood lobster enthusiast will swoop in to extol the succulence and beauty of the green horror that is tamale.

I’m sorry, my friends. I’ve got to tap out.

I got to a point years ago where I could disassemble a lobster in a matter of minutes, and with only minimal face stinkage. It was around that time that I discovered that — whaddaya know? — I don’t really like the taste of lobster that much. I like the first few bites, sure. The butter is still hot at that point and my plate doesn’t yet look like an extraterrestrial exploded on it.

By the time I get to the second carpus (what I always called “the arm”) I’m suddenly aware — and vividly — that I’m feasting on something that spent its life crawling along the ocean floor and eating whatever it happened to find there. At that point in the journey, eating becomes an ordeal and I start giving away pieces of my lobster. Or, you know. Selling them, if the guy next to me is really, really hungry.

I know a lot of you think of lobster meat as utterly sublime and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone that summertime extravagance. For me, though, I’ll stick to a couple of hot dogs and maybe a large fries with vinegar if it’s really a special occasion.

Classless? Low brow? Vulgar? That may be true, my Epicurean friend.

But at least my face doesn’t stink.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Lobster-lovers can flog him with indignation at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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