Personal Narrative: Male Adolescent Dolphins

“Who would say being unnatural is such a bad thing anyhow?” I ask, “Male adolescent bottlenose dolphins have been known to form groups that gang rape females, often drowning a female who’s ‘unreceptive’ to the group of males,” I light a cigarette and crack the window, “That’s natural.”

“Do you have any beer?” I ask then fish one from a soggy cardboard container crammed halfway behind the driver’s seat, “Never mind. Anyway, there was a documented case of a male duck engaging in an act of homosexual necrophilia with another male who died when it hit a house window,” I watch the smoke pulled in a thin stream through the small crack in the glass.

“That’s gross,” Remy says without taking his eyes off the truck ahead.

“Life,” I sigh, “is gross.”

I shrug,

Thirty minutes later, as we were finishing with the last of the boxes from the truck, Kristen’s car pulls into an empty space behind Remy’s car.

The bowling alley, once we walked through the door, resembled one at which I’d worked when I was thirteen. Golden paisley in cornelian frame on a cobalt blue field of worn carpet: the familiar dullness of suburban existence. I thought of flipping pizzas in another life as the muted rumble of bowling balls thundered down maple lanes.

Chris Lewis, forty-something, was on welfare and could only work two days a week or he’d lose his government-subsidized existence—My income’d be too high if I pick up your shift, he’d told me once when I’d asked if he could cover me. I’d had my eye on Sarah Gonzalez, a girl on my school track team, and it happened that the one night she was free that week was the one night I happened to be working.

Chris would always talk about his kinky girlfriend, how she liked to have candles or ice cubes inserted in her vagina, I’d listen in timid fascination as I pressed the floury dough for another pizza in the