Everyone loves dolphins! They’re so joyful and carefree, out leaping and splashing giddily in the ocean like they just can’t contain the utter delight they feel at being alive. If a poor, helpless human is being menaced by a shark, you’d better believe a pod of dolphins will swoop in like a gang of squeaking superheroes and save the day, because fuck sharks, that’s why. Dolphins are smart, heroic, and cute, with those bright shiny eyes so full of innocence and happiness. What person could look into such a sweetly smiling face and feel anything less than pure and utter love?
Hi there, I don’t trust dolphins. I can’t help but feel that with their creepy perpetual smiles and squeaky chattering that make them sound like they’re always giggling, they are definitely up to something. They are capable of premeditating and implementing acts of utmost mischief, including but not limited to making sexual advances upon unsuspecting humans, which seems kind of funny and not all that alarming until you find out that male bottlenose dolphins ejaculate with the force of a shotgun blast. Many of the species enjoy a habit of murdering small porpoises and even their own young and gleefully flinging their mangled corpses around like Nerf balls. Sure, some dolphin apologists will claim that these individuals represent the exception rather than the rule, and that there have been no reports of the creatures ever attacking a human being. But if you are a shrewd, educated, and physically gorgeous person like me, you will easily see through this shameless propagating of the radical dolphin agenda. Of course there have been no reports of dolphins attacking humans, because there have been no survivors and no evidence. If a dolphin is smart enough to shoot a plastic ball through a toy basketball hoop with a slap of its tail, he can clean up a crime scene.
With their physical power, high intelligence, masterful teamwork, and (cunningly disguised but nonetheless evident) insatiable bloodlust, dolphins are essentially the Velociraptors of the sea. If they start evolving thumbs, we’re all boned.
Knowing the reasoning behind my mistrust of dolphins, maybe you can understand why, when relatives were visiting my family in Florida some time back in my teens and it was suggested that we all go swimming with dolphins, I was somewhat less than enthusiastic. Since giving the excuse that I was worried that the dolphins would blast out my kneecaps with their deadly bullet sperm would only cause my poor beleaguered parents undue stress and confirm their fears that they had raised a weird’un, I kept my gob shut and went along.
I wish I could remember the name of the place, if only to warn you to never ever go there, but the humans in charge must have wiped my memory of any identifying feature so that their villainy could go on unchecked. I can tell you that it was somewhere in the Florida Keys, and that it was where my last vestiges of childish innocence died a cold, slimy death.
Our little group was herded out back into a picnic pavilion where one of the trainers went over the rules with us, including the vehement instruction not to poke the dolphins in the eyes. Um, what? For a moment my trepidation was overshadowed by bemusement. That’s a rule? Eye-poking has become such a problem that they actually have to instate a rule against it? If that’s the kind of thing you have to tell people not to do, maybe the whole idea’s a wash anyway. I’m just saying, if you give your kid a puppy and you have to tell them “Okay, now here’s your puppy but don’t set him on fire. Don’t set the puppy on fire, okay? Don’t do it. I’m serious,” maybe little Janine just shouldn’t have a puppy.
I began to wonder if, either by accident or purposely to save money, my dad had made the reservation with one of those facilities where the mentally disturbed interact with dolphins as therapy. My eyes darted around, taking stock of the other people in our group. Could we be surrounded by psychologically unbalanced eye-poking fiends? That fellow with the fanny pack didn’t look quite right, now that I thought of it. And who did that fortysomething woman think she was kidding with those girlish pigtails? Beneath those bouncing piggies lay the mind of Hannibal Lector, I was sure of it.
Despite my strictly anti-dolphin sentiments I really am an animal lover. Writing that joke about setting a puppy on fire made me cry on the inside. Then and there, squinting suspiciously around at the dangerous lunatics so cleverly disguised as carefree tourists, I decided that if it came to it, I would side with the dolphins. Whatever you can say about dolphins, they don’t poke people in the eye. They probably would if they could, though, because they’re like that. If they only had prehensile digits, oh what a reckoning there would be…
As I sat there trying to decide where my allegiance lay in Velociraptors of the Sea v. Eye-Poking Crazies, the initiation was concluded and life jackets were handed out. I grimly did up the plastic buckles and Velcro straps, positive that it would do nothing to save me if the dolphins decided to make an example of me to the rest of the eye-pokers.
In advertisements for dolphin encounters they typically show the animals joyfully barreling around the clear blue waters of a sunlit cove, with brightly-colored coral reefs, schools of fish, and swaying palm trees in the distance. The ‘habitat’ I saw was little more than a concrete pit ringed with chain-link and filled with murky water. It looked as if someone had flooded a prison yard with a garden hose, and now we had all paid big money to frolic with the inmates. I wondered if I’d be able to tell the difference between the hate crime dolphins and the child molester dolphins.
The dolphins were invisible until they came to the surface, and then I could only see an arching back or the tip of a flipper. My mother leaned in to me and giddily whispered, “Ooh, they look just like sharks!”
I would have preferred sharks. At least with sharks, you know where you stand. With sharks, you know what the score is. No one ever tells you not to poke a shark in the eye, in fact that's the first place they tell you to attack if a shark should happen to get all up in your business.
My mother and I were eventually led to the dock and introduced to our respective dolphins, and then instructed to get into the water. I immediately had one of those moments where time slows down and I realized that this was
it. This could be the definitive moment of my entire life, the moment I look back on with either regret or fierce pride. Would I fearlessly enter the flooded concrete pit, place myself in the mercy of these squeaking predators, and stare my own dread right in its grinning, slippery face? Would I conquer my fear and frolic triumphantly with those creatures that had ere now haunted my darkest nightmares? Or would I recklessly squander my young life in a misguided adventure leading ultimately to a watery grave? Would I back away from the precipice, refusing to get in the water and setting aside my embarrassment for the sake of cautiously safeguarding my life? Or would I chicken out like a little pissypants crybaby and forever look back on this day in shame of my cowardice? I contemplated these weighty questions in this pocket of frozen time, what felt like minutes surely passing by in the space of a moment, and I heard nothing but my own pounding heartbeat and my distempered breath echoing in my ears.
I was suddenly aware of my mother shaking me and demanding to know why I was just standing there, panting heavily like some kind of spaced-out, mouth-breathing creeper. Time hadn't stopped after all.
I got in the water and grabbed onto my dolphin's dorsal fin as I had been instructed by the trainer, and held on as the animal swam off. It dragged my limp body out to the center of the pit, and then the trainer gave my mother and I the signal to let go. We let go. Our dolphins disappeared below the surface, and that's when panic hit me like a solid punch to the clavicle.
I was in water. I was in deep, murky water that I couldn't even see my own feet through. You know what else was in this deep, dark, scary water? Big, strong monsters that had every reason in the world to violently murder me and nothing to lose by doing so. I was helplessly floating in the middle of Dolphin Jail and my swift annihilation would mean that the prisoners would, in some small way, be revenged on the land-walking, eye-poking race that had condemned them to this concrete Hell. At any moment, they could attack from beneath, take my flailing limbs in their jaws, and drag me to my doom. I would never even see them coming.
And with that, I got so scared that I forgot how to swim.
One moment I was suspended in the water, head and shoulders above the surface, the sun on my face and the wind in my hair, and then,
bloop, down I went. I sank like a mob snitch in cement loafers and was soon surrounded by cold, airless darkness.
This was not an improvement.
My first reaction was one of confusion.
Wasn't I above the water a second ago? And now I'm below it, having done nothing to instigate this change? Whaa…?Then, skepticism.
I can not have just freaked myself out so badly that I forgot how to tread water and am now sinking as a result. It simply can't be.Then, open scorn.
I did it. I seriously did it. God, self, could you possibly be more pathetic? This is unacceptable. Really. Screw you, you useless load. I can't believe this.Then, righteous indignation.
I knew this fucking cardboard life jacket wouldn't do jack squat! The nerve of these people!Then, I circled right back around to sheer terror.
THE MONSTERS ARE GOING TO GET ME!I remember testing the visibility below the water by sticking my arm straight out in front of me. I couldn't see past my elbow. This realization opened up a whole new world of aquatic horror.
Anything could be in there with me, and I'd never know it. I'd never even see it until it was a millisecond from biting my skull in half. I forgot all about the dolphins as terrifying hoards of marine monsters, fishy fiends, and devils from the deep slithered from my imagination to prowl just beyond my field of vision.
Giant megalodon sharks? They were going to get me.
Jagged-toothed leopluradons? They were going to get me.
Vampire squids? They were going to get me.
Bloodthirsty leopard seals? They were going to get me.
That freaky, sewer-dwelling, cockroach-eating thing from
An American Tail? It was going to get me.
Some kind of horrific, mutant hybrid of all the creatures listed above and a wolf spider? It was absolutely going to get me, and then Cthulhu himself would rise from the midnight depths to devour my mangled remains and savagely rend my soul asunder.
Consumed by fear, I resigned myself to face my oncoming doom as bravely and with as much dignity as I could; I flailed like an electrocuted muppet. Luckily, my spastic wiggling was enough to propel me upward, and my head soon broke the surface of the water, at which point I shouted to my mother that I was fine and doggy-paddled at top speed for the dock. Upon scrambling onto dry land, coughing and snorting, I informed the concerned trainers clustering around me that, come to think of it, I had terrible cramps and would prefer to wait in the picnic pavilion for my family.
One of the trainers called 'my' dolphin over and had it do that thing where they float on one side and flap one of their flippers, saying that it was 'waving bye-bye'. Obviously, the guy was just trying to be nice, but at the time I was positive that he was taunting me.
Just wait, I thought furiously as I grasped the shredded remnants of my dignity and walked away,
Dolphins are not merciful creatures. If I were you I'd invest in a bulletproof vest tough enough to withstand shotgun sperm.
