I once shared a cell with a guy named Brian while I was doing a two-year federal stretch in Leavenworth. Might be the same guy. He’d gotten five years for attempting to hijack the submarine Nautilus at the New London Navy base. He probably would have succeeded except for the fact that the reactor and engine had been removed from the boat 40 years ago and the guy he was holding at gunpoint turned out to be a tour guide. Poor dumb bastard.
Anyway, I’d been railroaded, as usual; just one more example of faulty American justice. I’d been working at the San Diego Zoo when one of the baby pelicans had taken sick. I was trying to get it to swallow some antibiotics stuffed inside a dead mullet when all hell broke loose in the hall that houses the dolphin tank. I couldn’t very well drop the little pelican, so he and I raced into the hall to see what was going on.
In case you didn’t know, marine mammals are an extremely horny lot, and they take it whenever they can get it with anybody they can find. It seems that the root of the ruckus was a couple of male bottlenosed dolphins who’d begun masturbating each other in full view of a Los Angeles Brownie troop that had come down on a field trip. Kids were screaming, chaperones were fainting - it was a scene of pure chaos.
In the meantime, the pandemonium had distracted a zoo employee who carelessly left open the gate to the lion enclosure, allowing a large male to escape into the adjacent dolphin area.
As luck would have it, the zoo’s emergency squad was already on the scene, and a well-placed tranquilizer dart sent the lion crashing to the floor of the training platform of the dolphin tank.
As long as I was there, I figured I’d sneak a peak at the underwater orgy, so I held the baby pelican tightly with both hands, jumped over the unconscious cat and peered down into the water, where the action was reaching its climax.
Two federal agents immediately emerged from the crowd, seized the pelican, and slapped me in cuffs. I was thrown into a holding cell for the night, and when morning came, I was hauled before a federal judge, and charged with .......... transporting a chick across a sedate lion for immoral porpoises.
