I caught up with Frisco on the corner of Rutledge and Grove, in an abandoned gravel parking lot where a Vietnamese woman had a hand-painted sign: SHRIMP $2.

The sign was a bit of a ploy. That’s the loss-leader price, it only bought you the 60-count, head-on popcorners.

She wore a wide conical straw hat and had an old red pick-up with three or four big white coolers in the bed. She opened the lids for Frisco, scooped the various options out of the gray ice slurry with a plastic colander.

“This here is head-off jumbo, six dollars a pound. This here is head-off regular, five-dollars a pound, and this one…” she lifted a lid marked $PECIAL , “…is super-colossal. These boys are my mack-daddies. Sure, they may cost a bit more, five-dollars a pound for head-on, but when you steam them, you will know where that extra money went.”

Frisco peered in at the colander.

“Yeah, they’re pretty big, but I don’t know about colossal now. You got to remember I just got back from Apalachicola.”

“Frisco, please. Am I Cambodian? Are we in North Charleston? Black people who know their shrimp come to this corner. I’ll take the Pepsi challenge with that Panhandle stuff any day of the week.”

He scratched his chin. She didn’t let up.

“Listen pal, whiting is dead as Dick Nixon. Shrimp is back. It’s a seller’s market…”

“Excuse me,” I said. “But which is it? Is your stuff really better, or is it just a seller’s market, because those seem like two different arguments.”

“Both. Not that it concerns you. I’m trying to close here.” She turned to Frisco and gave him a little Saigon Sass. “You buy or no?!”

“Okay, okay,” Frisco said. “Give me a couple pounds of the mack-daddy, and if it’s as good as you say it is I’ll come back tomorrow for more.”

“Okay,” she said, skeptical, scooping a colander-full onto the scale and taking off shrimp. “I only hope I still have some when you do.”

The needle was on the heavy side of two. She took off one lousy shrimp and it bounced to the lighter side. Chintzy.