Lolita the Killer Whale To Be Freed
              A Love That Dare Not Spout Its NameÂ
Oh Lolita. Light of my life, behemoth of my loins. My sin, my soul.Â
Mangled through the loudspeaker system of Whaleworld, she was Lo-lee-da. She was Lola at the feeding trough, attended by burly Neds and Nicks who spooned kelp muscularly into her jaws.Â
But in my telephoto lens and later at night in my cerebellum, she was always Lolita.Â
Did she have a precursor? Yes indeed â may I introduce a certain Willy of Wallyworld for whom I had unrequited teenage âhotsâ for five anguished years. If not for Willy, I might not have been as susceptible to Lolitaâs shimmery flanks and louche blowhole. Willy set up the longing; Lolita swam into the trap.Â
How did we do it? How did we evade the aquarium patrols for so long? Well, I happened to have a device called a motorboat â I spent many an illusory hour zipping mindlessly around the marina even as the guards stared me down with their gargantuan, phallic binoculars. As if I cared one millicentime for the local brats â they could flash their brown limbs all they wanted, I was only interested in my 4,000-ton darling surging erotically in the depths.Â
And Lolita was there, to be had. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if I got close and shot tranquilizer into her with a borrowed dart gun (doctor, garage) I could sometimes access a segment of her tenebrous, black-glowing quiddity. And clinging awkwardly to her damply rubberish hide, Iâd enjoy myself (as His Honor put it later) for a few precious seconds until some primitive survival reflex kicked in and she dove, my unpredictable darling, at a violently sharp angle into black depths, dislodging me to fight my way back to the surface.Â
This got wearying, I donât deny. Iâd have to locate my boat and swim often a great distance to retrieve it, my mood not improved by Lolita surfacing with showy lunges and siphon spurts â activity designed to delight shallow Bobs and Bettys on the tour boats, which wounded my feelings after so recent an intimacy.Â
I leaf through these memories with both joy and misery, for Lolita gave me much of both. And I return to a question I often put to myself: Why could I only love whales? Was it the adolescent obsession with Willy, which glittered in memory though it took place exclusively in movie theaters, that set my compass eternally on 10-ton mammalian love objects? Iâve never quite figured it out and I refuse callow counseling about âappropriatenessâ â that signpost of mediocrity wherever it alights! Â
But Iâm tired of explaining myself, which Iâve done ad infinitum from both this jail cell and the hospital where Iâm featured in silly classes on interspecies perversity. What I want to convey today is my fond regret on learning Lolita is being âfreedâ â she will be taken to her original home in the Pacific Northwest, where I always sensed sheâd end up, being a very broad sort of creature in the end. I canât say Iâll exactly miss her. You see, alas, my passion for my ethereal cetacean ebbed since she reached 50 whale years. With age has come a dimming of her glorious, shimmery snout â itâs now merely functional â and even her tail only waves in desultory nods where once it swept about like the seraphimsâ sashes in Botticelliâs Venus. As for her hide, it barely gleams, except in my memory, of course.Â
I console myself with these lines, inscribed forever on my soul:
Oh Lolita, you are my girl â who cares about size or phylum?Â
Are you Beluga, Orca or Baleen? What matter, my sweet Leviathan?Â
