I was never content to glide a few feet like my flying fish peers. I had bigger dreams. I wanted to soar in the sky like a sea gull. I wanted to fly through the clouds and breath higher air than the sea-sprayed air barely above the ocean waves.
The farthest a flying fish ever flew was 2,000 feet. Sammy Finshaw established that record in 1964 off the coast of Barbados when he vibrated his tail like a maniac, caught a good wind, spread his fins like a Boeing 747, and broke the former record of 1,500 feet. Unfortunately, a week after his record-breaking flight, a dolphin snagged him for lunch and his illustrious flying career ended in the landing strip of the dolphin’s stomach. Which reminds me, everybody thinks dolphins are so intelligent and so sweet. Not if you’re a flying fish. To us they are freakin’ merciless serial killers that make Hannibal Lechter look like Mary Poppins. And not a day passes when they don’t murder our species in vast numbers. I hate those tooth-beaked twits!
But back to my story. I started training like an Olympian, went on a special ginseng fortified zooplankton diet designed to power me up. I worked out six hours a day and kept making impressive gains. When I began I could only fly a little over 1,000 feet. After a week, I was doing 1,500 and closing in on Sammy’s record. Mind you all the time I’m doing this I’m having to look over my fins at berserker dolphins trying to kill me from all sides. They didn’t care about my records or my goals. To them I was just freakin’ fish food. Goddamn twits!
Despite the constant and annoying dolphin interference, I discovered I had a gift for flying. I’m not talking the gliding that my species does; I’m talking bona fide flying like the Wright Brothers and aviation (What? Because I’m a fish you don’t think I could know about the Wright Brothers and aviation. Duh! Why do you think fish have schools?).
So as I got better and better and learned to flap my fins like wings, I made some serious distance. Three days after I started flapping my fins, I blew away Sammy’s record. I did 4,000 feet, actually double that because I turned around and flew back to where I started.
A month later I flew high as the seagulls and circled a cumulus cloud six times. I even buzzed ships as a joke, but my showboating, so to speak, became my undoing. When the media found out about my aerial acrobatics and eagle-like flights, they flooded the ocean looking for me. Freakin’ paparazzi, worse than the dolphins, stalked my every flight, their flashing cameras almost blinding me, their annoying questions and comments pissing me off. TV news and camera crews from all over the planet jammed their boats all around my haunts. I had hardly any room to breathe let along fly.
After six months of that crap, tired of living in the fish bowl with my every move under scrutiny, and freakin’ paparazzi never given me a moment’s peace, I said screw this and dove deeper into the ocean than the cameras and the paparazzi, or even frog persons, could ever go, and never flew again.
According to flying fish history, before that damn dolphin ended Sammy’s promising aviation career, Sammy said, “Success isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.” He was right.
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