“Sharks suffer from a bad reputation,” said Gabriella Hancock, an assistant professor of psychology at Cal State Long Beach. “Everybody remembers those one or two shark incidents that they see on the news, but they don’t take into consideration the tens of millions of people that go into the ocean every day and don’t even see a shark.”
The Boston Herald
I was walking along the beach in Hyannisport, enjoying the warmth of the late summer sun, when I spotted a basking shark, Cetorhinus maximus, lying propped up on one fin, staring out at the ocean. The Atlantic, because the Pacific was obscured by a continent that was in the way.
“How’s it going?” I asked. My wife says I need to be friendlier, so I try to work on being less curmudgeonly during the summer, when my hard-shell carapace of grouchiness isn’t needed for my day job.
“Okay,” he muttered. I could tell he wanted to be left alone, but the Cape has a fairly high suicide rate, and I wanted to make sure he wasn’t so depressed that he’d try and end it all. If he made it to the Sagamore Bridge, the most popular place around here to commit self-slaughter, to wax Shakespearean for a moment, he’d tie up traffic for hours and I wanted to drive home around 2.
“Just okay?” I asked, hoping to get him to snap out of his melancholy reverie.
He let out a sigh. “‘Okay’ is exaggerating,” he said finally. “Pour some water on my gills, would you?”
I picked up a styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts cup and filled it with water. “Yuk,” he said. “French vanilla.”
“So what’s the matter?” I asked.
“Did you see The Herald the other day?” he asked. We’re still a two-paper town; sharks read The Herald, dolphins read The Globe.
“It’s the first thing I read in the morning,” I said. “Was it something on the op-ed page?”
“No, a news item.”
“The news is depressing these days. What–exactly–has you so down in the dumps?”
“It was a quote by Gabriella Hancock, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Cal State Long Beach.”
“So . . . a one-off expert. What did she have to say?”
“That sharks aren’t as bad as people think.”
Like Cortez’s men in Keats’ poem “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” I gave him a stare of wild surmise. “That sounds like a compliment to me.”
“Don’t you get it?” he said, giving me a wicked side-eye.
“Get what? You’re not a man-eating great white, you’re a passive filter feeder whose diet consists exclusively of zooplankton, small fish and invertebrates–you don’t even eat chum. Why should you be tarnished by the stigma of sensationalistic accounts of sharks in the media?”
“Ooo-you make me so mad!”
He was silent for a moment, except for a hissing sound that put me on notice that an explosion was on its way.
“I catch it coming and going,” he shouted, slapping his fin on the wet sand. “On the one fin, people are scared of me who shouldn’t be. On the other, I don’t have a bodacious psychology professor from Cal State Long Beach to talk to about it.”
“If you want to talk to her, you have to take her class. And since you’re from Massachusetts, you’d have to pay out-of-state tuition.”
“So–no tele-psychoanalysis?” he asked.
“Nope. No 1-800-SHRINKS.”
I let him stew for a moment, then began as quietly as I could. “You know, having a reputation that’s worse than your actual character isn’t such a bad thing.”
He rolled over and gave me a look; receding hairline, big forehead, nerdy glasses. “I guess you would know.”
“Precisely. I don’t want to win friends and influence people, as Dale Carnegie advised. I want to repel people who want to influence me, so I actively cultivate an air of grumpiness to fend off all kinds of idiots I don’t want to talk to.”
Dale Carnegie
“Like who?”
He’s a shark, so I didn’t want to correct him by saying “Like whom?”–a substitution that, I believe Calvin Trillin said–makes you sound like a butler.
“Well, there’s people who want to talk politics, for example. I don’t want to waste my time on them.”
“Why don’t you just go along to get along, and become a Democrat?”
“You say you read the paper, but you must not read much history.”
“Spare me the Santayana.”
Santayana: “Can I please get out of this post at the next paragraph break?”
“If you did, you’d know that this state went for almost two decades during which every Speaker of the House of Representatives–Democrats all–were indicted.”
“So you have principles–big deal. Who else.”
“Well, people selling candy so their kids U-12 soccer team can go to Disney World.”
“But it’s ‘The Happiest Place on Earth’.”
“If that’s so, why do people keep attacking Mickey Mouse?”
“I don’t know–maybe his persistent smile triggers them. So–do you have a psychologist to help you maintain your mental health?”
“Nope. I’m not going to pay somebody to listen to my troubles unless–like a bartender–they serve me alcohol in the bargain.”
I started to fill the cup again, but he spoke up. “I’m fine, thanks.”
“You sure?”
“Nope–all set. I think I’m going to swim over to the fish pier, entertain the kids a bit. Give me a push, would you?”
“Okay,” I said.
Sly Stone
I got him back into the water and he turned to say goodbye. “This has been very helpful.”
“No problem.”
“Where’d you pick up the shallow, pseudo-psychology that reduces apparently complex problems to simple answers composed almost entirely of words of one syllable.”
“Sixties hit machine Sylvester ‘Sly’ Stone, that’s where,” I said, not missing a beat.
“Really?”
“Yeah–‘Different strokes for different folks.’”