Wet Goddess

A memoir about a man’s steamy love affair with a dolphin has been churning around the global media hype machine this week, with everyone from Gawker to the Hindustan Times squawking about how it received a five star rating on Amazon.

While I immediately dismissed the asinine journos who had based their stories on a measly SIX reviewers (most of whom also admit to harboring crushes on guinea pigs and giraffes), the bio for this cetacean suitor, which I found on his website, caught my attention for running the gamut on the freak checklist.

Not only was Malcolm Brenner molested as a child by an orgone doctor who was trying to harness the universe’s sexual energy, Brenner is also a neo-Pagan who lives in a trailer with his anole lizard friends. Oh yeah, and he toe-fucked a dolphin.

But that’s not the weirdest part. Delving into Wet Goddess, I realized that the lamestream media had missed the crux of the novel entirely. Of the last few social taboos remaining, inter-species screwing ranks low on the LOL potential (skull fucking is soo much cooler!), especially because the perpetrators are usually mega animal lovers who’ll wax poetic about their paramour’s attributes, saying shit like, “Darling, you do have the cutest way of twitching your sinuses when you say you love me. I love the shape of your vestibular sacs.”

But halfway into yawning my way through Wet Goddess, the thin plotline took a rapid turn. One minute, an adolescent Malcolm is happily snapping photos of the dolphins at a local marine park and batting his eyelashes at its feature star, a bottlenose named Ruby. The next, he’s toking a joint while listening to Johnny Cash, and suddenly realizes he can communicate telepathically with his crush. But only when he’s really, really blazed.

Two lovers sharing a high giggle

At first, her utterances are a bit confused, and the reader is treated to a full page of avant-garde dialogue consisting solely of symbols like “###%%%@@@!” But after a few more sativa hits, she and Malcolm are enthusiastically critiquing human sexuality, in English, through a parade of shared mental images: “All the painful and punishing puberty rites… paraded before our minds’ mutual eye in a spasm of agony and uncomprehending disgust. We heard the shrieking of boy babies and saw a mountain of bleeding, severed foreskins that reached to the sky.”

Then, Malcolm decides to learn echolocation, and animorphs into a fellow dolphin to join Ruby in the water, which “was thick with the taste of bodily fluids” due to a nearby dolphin orgy. Taking a moment to compare Ruby’s slippery sensuality to his girlfriend’s lackluster corporeality, Malcolm notes, “Ruby’s breasts are on either side of her genital slit, not as big and round as Elaine’s, but consider her arrangement: breasts and cunt, clitoris and anus, all packed together! What a sensual nexus!”

In the chapter where Ruby and he finally bone, Malcolm inexplicably switches to using the second person—putting the reader in the uncomfortable position of embodying a horny dolphin. “With your snout inches from my crotch, you echolocated. That was my turn to gasp! My erect cock resonated like a tuning fork, the harmonics shooting up my spine to my skull.” At least I give good blowjobs.

When it comes to making love, however, physical configurations prove a little tricky, due to my pseudocervix being too tight for penile penetration. So we float around with “just the tip” inside, clutching and thrusting towards orgasm, until simultaneously coming, “sharing the astonishing sensation of hot semen displacing cool sea-water in your cunt.” Like many of its romantic literature counterparts, the scene closes with a romantic picture of the two sobbing into each other’s arms/flippers and declaring their undying love.

Rating: Four dildos. Even though Malcolm eventually leaves for college and Ruby ends up committing suicide from a broken heart, every time Malcolm hits his bong or listens to that Stones song, the dead dolphin comes swimming back into his consciousness. I want whatever he’s smoking.

Previously – The Very Virile Viking, Part II