Gold Coast

“I don’t know why, but I have trouble with that,” Maguire would say.

Brad Allen was show director, star, working manager of:

SEASCAPE

PORPOISE SHOW

SHARKS * SEA LIONS

S.E. Seventeenth Street Causeway

At Port Everglades

TURN HERE!

He would say to Maguire, “Are you stupid or something? I don’t think it’s that hard, do you?”

“No, it isn’t,” Maguire would say.

“I believe you’re supposed to be experienced-”

“The thing is, down at Marathon we didn’t have the same kind of show,” Maguire would try to explain. “I mean it wasn’t quite as, you know, showy.”

“Down there, did you know the names of the dolphin?” Brad always got onto that. “Could you identify each one by name?”

“Yeah, I knew their names.”

“Then how come you don’t know them here?”

“I know them. There’s Pepper, Dixie, Pe

“Robyn says yesterday you were trying to get Pe

“I get those two mixed up.”

“The other day you thought Bo

“Right.”

“-and Yvo

Or, Brad Allen would say:

“The Flying Dolphin Show, you keep leaving out the Mopey Dick part.”

“I forget.”

“He lays up on the ledge on his side, doesn’t move a muscle. Wait for the laughs. Then you say, ‘And that’s’ pause ‘why we call him Mopey Dick.’ ”

“I’ll try to remember,” Maguire would say.

Five months of it, January through May.

Brad Allen waiting for him when he first walked in, pale, a Wayne-County-Jail pallor, carrying his lined raincoat and suitcase, right off the Delta flight. Brad Allen glancing at a letter the Seascape Management Company had sent him, holding the sheet of paper like it was stained or smelled bad.

“It says you’ve had experience.”

“A year at Marathon,” Maguire had said, adding on five months.

“What’ve you been doing since?”

“Well, traveling and working mostly,” Maguire had said. “Colorado, I worked for the Aspen Ski Corporation, also at the Paragon Ballroom. I worked at an airport, a zoo, a TV station. I was the weatherman. I tended bar different places. Let’s see, I was an antique dealer. Yeah, and I worked a job at a country club.”

“Well, this is no country club,” Brad Allen had said. The serious tone, making it sound hard because he had to hire the guy. “How old are you?”

“Thirty,” Maguire had said, subtracting six years-after walking in and seeing how young the help was. Like summer-camp counselors in their sneakers and white shorts, red T-shirts with a flying-porpoise decal and seascape lettered in white. (Brad Allen wore white shorts and a red-trimmed white T-shirt with the porpoise and seascape in red. He also wore a white jacket and red warmups and sometimes a red, white, and blue outfit.)

“How long you been thirty?”

What was Brad Allen? Maybe thirty-two, thirty-three. The guy staring at Maguire, suspicious, wanting to catch him in a lie. For what?

“What difference does it make?” Maguire had said. “I’m an out-going person, I like to be with people, I don’t mind working hard and”-laying on a little extra-“I’m always willing to learn if there’s something I don’t know.”

It took him a few days to get used to the white shorts and the red T-shirt-thinking about what Andre Patterson would say if he saw the outfit; like, man, you real cute. Within two months Maguire was as brown as the rest of them, and his sneakers were begi

The people he worked with-R.D. Hooker, Chuck, Robyn and Lesley-reminded him of high school.

Hooker, a strong, curly-haired Florida boy, twenty-three years old. A clean liver, dedicated. Hooker would go down into the eighteen-foot tank, Neptune’s Realm, with a face mask and air hose and play with the porpoise even when he didn’t have to, between shows. One time Hooker said to Chuck, the custodian-trainee, “I don’t know what’s wrong with Bo

Chuck listened to every word and said, “Yeah? How come she was doing that?”

Maguire said, “It sounds like she’s getting her period.”

Hooker said, “What’s it got to do with her acting nasty?”

Maguire would listen to them talk, amazed, nobody putting anybody on or down. Maguire said, “R.D., you ever talk to them? I mean understand them?”

“Sometimes,” Hooker said. “Like I’m getting so I can understand Pe

“No shit,” Maguire said. “What do you ask her?”

“Oh, feeding her I might say, ‘You like that, huh? Isn’t that good?’ ”

“And what does she say?”

“She goes like-” Hooker did something with the inside of his mouth and made a clickity-click, kitty-cat, Donald Duck sound.

“Oh,” Maguire said.

Hooker came on his day off and worked with the two young dolphins in the training tank, hunkered down on the boards for hours, talking to them gently and showing them his hands. Dedicated.

Chuck was on his way to becoming dedicated. He personally wrote two hundred post cards to Star-Kist Tuna, Bumble Bee, VanCamp, Ralston Purina, and H.J. Heinz, telling them to quit murdering dolphin or he would never eat their products again.

Robyn was dedicated, though didn’t appear to be. She was a serious girl and didn’t smile much or seem to be listening when you said something to her. Unless it was Brad Allen who said it. Brad Allen could tell Robyn to dive down to the bottom of the show pool with Dixie, shoot up over the twelve-foot bar and do a tailwalk across the pool, and Robyn would try it. When Brad Allen told her she was doing a good job, Robyn became squirmy and maybe wet her white shorts a little. Nice tight shorts-

Though not as tight or short as Lesley’s. Lesley’s showed a little cheek. She never pulled at them though, the way Robyn did when she got squirmy. What Lesley got was pouty. She’d put on her hurt look and say, “It’s not my turn to feed the sharks, it’s hers. If you think I’m going in there every day you’re out of your fucking mind.” Lesley was dedicated, but not to nurse sharks. She didn’t think it was fu

Lesley had a pile of wavy brown hair she combed several times an hour. One night, during Maguire’s fourth month, Lesley said to him, “I think I’m falling in love with you.” She looked so good lying there in the dim light with her hair and her white breasts exposed, Maguire almost said he loved her, too. But he didn’t.

Brad Allen was very dedicated. Brad Allen was also serious and tiresome. He made Maguire tired. Maguire wondered why Brad Allen didn’t get tired of being Brad Allen. Once, Maguire took a couple of puffs on a joint before a