Dolphins Make Me Wet

I don't really know what to say. I fell in love with fish when I was a kid. Before I could really remember. Maybe like some girls fall in love with dogs or horses. Maybe there was a mobile above my crib with trout twirling in an imaginary stream, or some panoramic light casting great big and mesmeric shadows of black whales. Or maybe it was some commercial. Charlie Tuna. Or maybe it was that movie, The Incredible Mr. Limpett. 

I was the exact opposite of a pescatarian. Fish were the only meat I would not eat. Everything else was on the table. Or maybe when I was a little girl I got away from my mom at that hokey supermarket she took me to just long enough to follow my nose to the seafood section where they had a fish market that masqueraded as 1920's Seattle, and where dead unamused fish lied in half-barrels of ice or in glass containers and were wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine when you would pick them. Maybe one of those sliced-open salmons was my first love. Or perhaps, it was a cod that caught my eye.

Or maybe it was Jaws. I fell in love with that handsome brute like some girls fell in love with John Travolta when we went to the drive-in on Fair Avenue where, on the fleeting universe of a thirty-foot concrete wall, I watched him in all his glory eat people and, oh, the erotic horror that it elicited. That Great White beauty with death in his coal-black eyes and all that power in his jaws. Chomping on half-naked bikini girls and the Brody's. I watched all the sequels. I remember being aroused by the theme music. By the thought of my legs being eaten while dangling in the dark ocean depths. I imagined that must be what oral sex was like. I didn't know, though. I was just a dumb kid who had never experienced even the slightest nibble of arousal.

Everyone says they go to the beach, but I went to the ocean several times when I was a kid. I skipped right over the beach part. We lived in Indiana, so it was no small deal to get all the way to the ocean. It was the Atlantic, always. Virginia or Myrtle Beach. I was 14 and on my period the first time we went. I was a good swimmer and swam out way too far and pulled my plug and bled into the ocean. It was like wearing a miniskirt to a biker bar, I thought. I was hoping to attract a shark. I was hoping to be yanked under and gobbled up. Taken against what ought to have been my will.

I imagined that I would be part of the ocean then. Like the speckled bits of colorful fish food they feed the clueless aquarium fish at the pet shop. Where people tap on the glass though the sign says to not. I would become the fish that ate me. And what was left of me would be nibbled by smaller fish and what wasn't ate would float on in that magnificent and colossal watery universe. There is some kind of spiritual bliss about floating to me. In the thought of floating away and in drowning as well.

It didn't happen. For all the shark in the ocean and all the attacks they claim there are, no shark found me. I was really into sharks then, until I met a dolphin. He swam right by me. I'd never see him again, but I wouldn't lose my attraction to them. It was only augmented the more I read and watched nature documentaries which were like erotic hardcore porn to me. Jacques Cousteau and the like. I had shirts. I had folders. Pencils. Stuffed animals. Bedding. I had a trapper-keeper with dolphins on it. Sparkling dolphins swimming in purpled oceans. My parents unwittingly encouraged my paraphilia.

I got off watching old episodes of Flipper. Hard. Exploded on my fingers and pooled in the palm of my own hand. I can't explain it. Maybe it is the way they move in the water. Maybe it was that sound. That charming seductive call that seemed to vibrate me to my core the way one ought to be vibrated. Or that smirk on their handsome face. That nose. That dorsal fin. That shapely body. I read somewhere that dolphins are the only other species on Earth to have sex for pleasure. It is a fact, they say. Humans, of course, being the other. I wasn't sure about that when I was 14. I am since, a firm believer in both.

My dad dreaded sex with my mom. He was always trying to avoid it by avoiding going to bed with her. It was a kind of weird game they played for years. After a few cocktails, she would sometimes outright proclaim that she was "in the mood" and parade around in a night gown and a fog of cheap perfume and he would sneer or pretend he didn't hear what she said. They were the Ropers. He was Ronald Reagan and she was Iran Contra.

Or he would be busy watching TV. Some crucial game. Some meaningless show. A rerun he had never seen. Or he had work to do in the garage where his tools and nudey magazines were with the women with big natural boobs and hairy bushes and that same expression on their face. That same "I'd do anyone, even you" kind-of-look. It was a trademark. A mirage.

My mom would say things about sex as though in code. Things she thought I didn't understand her to mean. I wasn't sure then that humans had sex for pleasure. I thought babies came from storks or catalogs or begrudging necessity. All I knew was my parents and there was a Death Valley the size of the Sahara between their intimacy. There was miles of rusty barbed-wire fence in there. A perilous field of landmines. A force field. Dad put the shields up and mom would have to try to skillfully break his defenses like she was Gold Leader trying to blow up the Deathstar.

Sure, they had sex, as frequent as some comet orbited Earth and only after gross capitulation. I never heard them doing it. Not once. And they had a tell-tale water bed. One of those big ones with the black-padded rails along the side and the warmer underneath and the frosted etched-glass mirror in the solid wood headboard with the two glass lights on either side that looked something like tulips. I never heard the bed splashing like it splashed when I laid on it and thought of some marlin or sturgeon. Some 300-pound aggressive tuna that jumped out of the ocean and onto the boat and took advantage of me. I could hear its tail slapping the deck in my fantasy. I could hear the ocean in that water bed when it did. It was the sound of pure and utter ecstasy.

I suppose people who have unusual paraphilias might choose a career in the field that gets them close to that which they desire for the opportunity it presents, wicked or prudent as it may be. For example, pedophiles, male or female, might become teachers. Sadists often become cops. Masochists often become criminals. Necrophiliacs often become undertakers. On and on. I suppose that is why I became a marine biologist. I suppose that is why I worked for Sea World for 7 years.

I've had my fair share of orcas. I've got drunk a time or two and did a sea turtle and a squid. I even tried to seduce a shark, but I can say with certainty that sharks are about as interested in sex as my dad was with my mom. But it was "Rhett Butler" who was the one. The love of my life. He was a dolphin and I suppose he knew my reputation when I became his personal trainer because he wasted no time. I suppose I fancied myself his Scarlett O'Hara and the aquarium where we had our rendezvous was Tera, or was it Tara? I don't suppose it matters. I suppose I felt that we could have something more than was possible, such was the hopeless romantic dreamer in me. Kids. A house in San Diego. A private indoor pool. Air conditioning. He got the nickname because he looked like Rhett Butler, or rather, Clark Gable portraying Rhett Butler. His eyes. The way he grinned. He was a handsome cad and I was hooked.

Our affair lasted two seasons. Best sex I've ever had, fins down. I suppose I wished it never would end, but I knew that it must like one of those romance novels they sell in supermarkets end. I knew it would be over before I was ready for it to be over. Such is the way it is with affairs of the heart. You can never be satisfied in the end and there is no way to end them yourself. There is no graceful exit. I don't think of it as inappropriate at all. The way a teacher sleeping with a student would be, or the way an undertaker humping a corpse would be. Dolphins are intelligent mammals. They are not limited in their cognitive abilities. They're much more advanced than us in a lot of ways and he was the aggressor so an argument over intelligible consent would be moot. They are much more intelligent than apes and elephants, so all those slutty zoologists out there in their short khaki shorts have no right to besmirch me as they gallivant about with their dirty hedonistic primates in their dingy dung-filled cages. Yes. I know what you do.

I was fired by Sea World when my affair with Rhett Butler was revealed. A security camera caught us in the act. I was told to pack my things and leave at once and I never got to say goodbye to him. I made the argument that the sex was consensual, that it was a Swedish training method, that it was love, impossible or otherwise, and love is love. Still, they let me go. I never dreamed I would tell my story to anyone, but this group helps. Therapy has lessened my desire some and healed my impossible heartache. The question I get the most is either what is it like being with a dolphin, or do I think I can live a happy life with a man? First, it is mind-blowing. Second, I suppose that I could. If we had a waterbed, he could speak like a dolphin, and if he could do that thing with his tongue for a few sardines.

Sometimes I have dreams about Rhett Butler. I can feel his slick skin between my thighs. I can feel that warm gush of saltwater jacuzzi inside me. He is a big muscle of fish. But in the dream he morphs into a man. Right in front of me. While making love to me. Then he gets out of the water and walks on two legs around the pool like he is suddenly Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. Rubbing his arms. Grinning like a charlatan. Like someone who just hit the Powerball.  

I am in love with him, regardless. Fish or man. But he looks at me and his dolphin voice gets lost in human English. No apparent accent at all. And when I say I love him and ask if he will love me forever, he says no. He doesn't. Dolphins are brutally honest, you must know. When I ask him why, obviously distraught by his cold response, he emotionlessly explains that he was only doing me because I was what was available to him. And because I gave him sardines.

Now that he is a man, he says, the whole world is available to him and there are plenty of fish in the sea, so to speak. I wouldn't begrudge him of an opportunity to live his life with the woman of his dreams, would I? He looks at me the way my dad looked at my mom when she was peacocking around the kitchen in negligee, reeking of her Woolworth perfume, before rubbing his new human face and combing his fingers through his thick head of brand-new chestnut-colored hair.

"But what will I do without you?" I implore from the warm pool, hoping he will jump back in and become a dolphin again.

He turns and looks at me, and before he walks out of my life for good, he says, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Then the dream ends. It is always the same. I don't know what it means. 

I moped around for a few years. Had a brief thing with a bass named Lawrence. He was in a pond at an apartment complex where I lived. There was no happy ending in sight until I met a man with a most unusual name. I met him in the pet shop where he was buying his young daughter, Elizabeth, a guinea pig. His name is Benjamin Andrew Fish. But the funny thing is, Ben can't even swim. 

God works in mysterious ways. Sometimes that water bed feels and sounds as though there is an ocean beneath me. Or like I am deep in it. Ben has a nasal condition of sorts that in the thralls of our sexual trespasses, at the door of our climax, makes him sound like a dolphin making love, or begging for a sardine. I close my eyes tight sometimes and fantasize about Rhett Butler in those moments and for a split second or two I fool myself to believe that Ben is Rhett. He lives perpetually in the sea of my heart. Memories and fantasies are all that I have left. Tara, I suppose, is a state of mind. How does one do it when the love of their life swims away? Day by day, I suppose. Day by day.