text: While I realize many people may disagree with me, especially those unlucky few who have had both their arms and legs eaten, I don’t think anyone would deny that I have a certain amount of authority--an expertise, if you will--on the topic at hand, and therefore feel absolutely confident in my conviction that the worst thing about getting attacked by a shark is that everyone starts to see you as That Guy Who Got Attacked By A Shark. May, 2011. I’m getting a beer at my old neighborhood bar with some friends from high school. Phil. Karen. Faye. Pee Pants. I think we’re going to reminisce about the good old times, like when Pee Pants nearly got hypothermia because he peed his pants on the chairlift and tried to ski down a double black diamond and knocked himself unconscious after a failed backflip off a mogul, but no, they want me to lift up my flannel shirt so they can all ogle at the waning moon shape of negative space where the shark bit off a chunk of my torso. I let them ooh and aah for a couple minutes, but when they start to run their fingers down the jagged bite mark in my skin, I pull down my shirt and try to change the subject by asking Phil about the Instagram post I saw of him riding an elephant in Thailand. No one seems to hear me. Karen, who thinks she’s some sort of animal behavior expert because she watched a lot of Discovery Channel after drinking her way out of a job as a ferris wheel operator, starts giving me advice about how, like, I should have punched the shark or something. And before I can tell her that I’ll keep that in mind for my next shark attack, I hear Faye ask me this really pointed question like, “Well, were you provoking the shark?” And while I am tempted to remind this self-proclaimed animal rights activist of the times she, not once, not twice, but on three separate occasions dumped a bag of cat food on the floor when she couldn’t find a sitter for Mango before she left for Burning Man, I hold my tongue. I take a deep breath. And I tell her no, I was just snorkeling, and she goes, “Hmmm,” like that. “Hmmm.” And then, as she lifts her beer to her lips, she mutters, “Well, imagine if someone tried to snorkel into your home.” So I point out that she didn’t have anything critical to say about Phil riding elephants in Thailand, but Faye just gives me this wide-eyed look of horror, not about the brutality of taming elephants, but rather because she thinks I’m suggesting Phil might have hurt one of the elephant’s backs by sitting on it. Granted, Phil did just lose a bunch of weight, and he’s a little sensitive about it. “Are you okay?” Faye asks me. “Of course he’s okay,” Pee Pants says. “You can’t keep Shark Attack down for long.” “Ha!” Phil says. “Ha! Yes!” And he points at me.“Shark Attack!” “Shark Attack!” Karen says. “Shark Attack!” Faye says. And I smile and drink my beer and act like I’m totally cool with being the new Pee Pants, but the whole time, I’m thinking, My name is not Shark Attack. My name is Jerry. ... A few days later, I’m opening a Tinder account, and I write a bio that goes something like: My name is Jerry. I’m a grammy-award-winning saxophonist. I like hiking, saxophone, and brunch. You can catch me at the top of a mountain, playing saxophone and eating a poached egg and a waffle. The first couple messages aren’t promising. “Hypothetically, if we were to get married, and I wanted to take a cruise, would you feel comfortable getting on and off the ship, like, if we made sure to blindfold you as you walked down the gangway?” Or, “Let’s say we get married and buy a home where the master bathroom is in the exact opposite corner of the house and three stories removed from the TV room. Would you be okay with me taking a bath while you watch TV--granted that we take all the necessary precautions you won’t get triggered by the sound of sloshing water--or do you think the mere thought of a human submerged in liquid would send you into a flashback?” Finally, I meet a girl who says, “I love saxophone!” And I say, “Great. Your bio says you don’t pay attention to the news.” “Nope.” “And you don’t have social media?” “Nope.” “Ever read a tweet?” “I don’t know what that is.” “And you love saxophone?” “Love it.” Her name is Wendy. So I invite Wendy to a Dodgers game and we get garlic fries and do the wave and drink margaritas and yell at Cardinals fans and don’t talk at all about how I got six of my ribs pulled out of my flesh by a twenty-five-foot-long great white shark in Hanalei Bay. It is easily the best date I have had since the shark attack. Then, in the seventh inning, it all goes south. We sit down after singing Take Me Out To The Ball Game, and I put my arm around her and she snuggles up next to me, and just as I’m leaning in to ask if she wants to go with me to this falafel festival in Venice Beach on Thursday, this guy comes on the loudspeaker and asks everyone to stand if they are a veteran. And some people stand, and we start clapping, and eventually they sit down, and the clapping ends, and I lean toward Wendy to ask her about the falafel festival when the guy comes back on the loudspeaker and says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, if you have been attacked by a shark, please stand so we can honor you.” So I sit back and sip my beer and act like everyone else, looking around to see if anyone is standing. And no one is standing up, so the guy on the loudspeaker goes, “Hmm, are we sure no one here has been attacked by a shark?” And I’m shoveling garlic fries in my mouth at this point, shaking my head, not trying to make a big scene or anything, but internally feeling a little frustrated by this guy’s persistence, and silently hoping he’ll shut his mouth and get back on the organ. But he doesn’t. He goes, “Really? No one has suffered any injuries at the mouth of an aquatic animal? No one has had any bones crunched in the jaws of a macropredatory beast? No one at this baseball game has ever been mauled by a prehistoric killing machine?” “Nope,” I say out loud. I’m looking over the railing, waiting for the game to get going again, but all the players are looking up into the stands from the dugout, waiting for someone to stand up so we can all honor them. And Wendy crosses her arms and purses her lips and says, “I just don’t understand why anyone would swim in the ocean. We have so many bodies of water reserved just for humans: pools, public pools, man-made lakes.” She turns to me. “Did you know that Scandinavians don’t swim in the ocean in Scandinavia? Why can’t Americans be more like the Scandinavians? Hmmm?” And I stand up and start shuffling down the aisle while everyone in Dodger stadium cheers and applauds for me. Wendy chases after me, but I’m quite fast on account of being ten pounds lighter after having six of my ribs, a kidney, an eighth of my liver, and some indeterminable portion of my heart (as well as a small section of my ankle, which actually slows me down a little, but I digress) torn out of my chest and oblique area with eighteen thousand Newtons of bite force, and I manage to drive out of the parking lot before she can catch up with me. Over the next week, I do a lot of musician-grade heroin. I don’t pick up my phone. When I finally check my voicemail, I listen to messages like: “Shark Attack, it’s Faye. Pee Pants is dead. Call me back.” Or “Jerry, it’s your agent. I know you’ve never been a fan of getting attacked by sharks, but I think you owe it to all the shark attack victims out there to start making music about getting attacked by sharks. All right? Listen to me, Jer. Imagine a child: young, innocent, impressionable, recovering in the hospital after a savage hammerhead shark attack, watching music videos on YouTube, and he doesn’t see a single saxophonist that has been attacked by a shark. All his favorite artists like Lil Xan and--I don’t know who the youths are listening to these days--but the point is that all the musicians have intact limbs and heads and torsos and not a single bite mark. Don’t you think you owe it to that kid to get back up on stage? Yes? No? Call me.” Or, “Shark Attack, it’s Faye again. Where the hell are you? Pee Pants’ funeral is tomorrow. Call me back.” Or, “Hey, Jerry, it’s Wendy. Give me a call when you get a chance.” Or, “Are you kidding me, Shark Attack? We buried Pee Pants without you.” So I pack my bags--figuratively speaking. I don’t actually have to pack any bags, because I’m flying to Hawaii, and when you’re planning on committing suicide by shark attack, you don’t have to pack anything; you can just wear your swim trunks on the plane. But it’s kind of cold in LA on the day I’m supposed to leave, so I wear my swim trunks under my jeans, kind of like when I forget to do laundry, and run out of boxers, and have to wear swim trunks, but that’s all beside the point. The point is that I’m going back to Hawaii, and this time, I’m not coming back. On the way to the airport, I decide to stop by Pee Pants’ grave. It turns out he’s buried in this kind of dumpy cemetery with brown grass and dead leaves everywhere, but I tough it out, and hike over to his plot, and kneel down next to it and set down a bouquet of flowers, and read his headstone, which says something like, “Steve ‘Pee Pants’ something. Nineteen-eighty-something to last week.” And just as I get up to leave, I hear this voice behind me say, “Doesn’t really matter what they put on your headstone, does it?” And I turn around and realize it’s Pee Pants’ mom. “I’m so sorry about Pee Pants,” I say. And she grits her teeth and balls her hands into fists and says, “His name is Steve.” And then we hug and get coffee and catch up, and I tell her all about the hellhole I’ve been in ever since I got attacked by a shark, and she lowers her head and looks kind of sad and I think she’s going to tell me how sorry she feels for me, but instead she grabs my arm and gives it a little shake and says, “I’m just so glad you’re all right.” And I laugh and say, “Yeah, yep, uh huh.” And she goes, “No, really. Do you know how many times this week I’ve had to explain what heli-skiing is?” And she kind of studies my face and the way I’m slowly nodding at her and she says, “Really? You haven’t heard of it? It’s when you jump out of a helicopter and ski down the mountain. At least, you’re supposed to ski down the mountain.” And I say, “Right, right.” And she sighs and says, “Just be happy you aren’t remembered for something like that.” And I ask her if she was listening to anything I just told her. I’m That Guy Who Got Attacked By A Shark, remember? And she says, “You’re still kicking aren’t you? You’re still breathing air. Your heart is still beating. That shark hasn’t dragged you down to the bottom of the ocean yet, has it?” And I say, “No.” And she says, “That’s the spirit,” and takes out an urn and hands it to me. “What’s this?” I say as I take it. She shrugs. “Steve’s father wanted to bury Steve. I wanted to cremate him. So we split him.” So I drive to Wendy’s house and knock on her door, and when she opens it, I kiss her like I’ve never kissed anyone in my life. I tell her I want to swim in the ocean again. And she looks a little sad and says this isn’t going to work out. So I catch my flight to Hawaii, and this little old lady sitting next to me on the plane asks me what I’m going to do in Oahu, and I hold up an urn and tell her I’m spreading the ashes of the upper half of my friend Steve’s body in the ocean. And she asks me who Steve was, and I tell her he was this really great skier who loved remote backcountry terrain, old Mustangs, making crop circles, golden retrievers, and Phil’s sister. I also tell her he was chopped in half by a helicopter propeller. And she says, “That’s nice,” but it’s okay because I’m pretty sure she tuned out before I said that last part. And then she tells me she has a granddaughter who is about my age. “Has she ever heard of a grammy-award-winning saxophonist named Jerry Wiles?” I ask her. The old lady kind of squints at me and says, “Jerry who?” And I say, “What about swimming in the ocean? How does she feel about that?” And the little old lady says she isn’t too sure of her granddaughter’s opinion of ocean swimming. So I ask her if she’s aware of her granddaughter holding any strong prejudices against people who get attacked by sharks, and the little old lady says she isn’t aware of any such prejudices in her granddaughter. So I sit back and kind of smile, and the little old lady writes down her granddaughter’s number on a paper napkin and gives it to me. And I fold up the napkin and put it in my pocket even though I have absolutely no intention of texting some random old lady’s granddaughter. And then I hold the urn full of Steve’s ashes a little tighter to my chest, and look out the window at an ocean full of eight-hundred pound beasts that want to eat me alive, and I think to myself, “Not today. Not today.” ... The guy sitting next to me at the bar lifts his chin off his hand, revealing a knuckled imprint on his jawline. He blinks a couple times. “That was a story,” he says as he turns his attention to his beer, which is still full. I’m killing the last of mine when he squints at me and says, “So you’re telling me that Steve’s mom buried only his legs?” And I tell him, “No, Steve’s dad buried his legs. Steve’s mom burned Steve’s top half.” The guy nods and hunches back over his beer. I’m starting to think I might have wasted my story on this guy when he says, “You know, I’d already heard of you. Before you told me all this.” And I go, “Yeah?” And he says, “Yeah. I wasn’t a big saxophone guy until I heard Sidestroke to Shore.” He chuckles and shakes his head. “You lit up the world on that one, Jerry.” The compliment is bittersweet. “I wrote that after I got attacked by--” “By a shark. I know that now,” he says, and puts a hand on my shoulder. His wrist is covered in tattoos. “But I didn’t know that when I listened to it. All I knew was that you were in pain.” He slaps some folded up bills on the bar and stands up. While he puts on his jacket he says, “That whole record got me through prison.” Then he pats me on the shoulder and walks out of the bar. I sit in silence for a half hour before I pay my tab and leave. It takes me another half hour to swing by my house to pick up my saxophone on the way to the cemetery. The full moon makes it easy to find Steve’s grave. And even though it’s a chilly night, I don’t hesitate to rip my shirt off and toss it into the wind. I put my sax in my mouth and start playing Sidestroke to Shore with a passion I haven’t felt since I penned it, and right when I get to the chorus, I arch my back and belt the notes at the stars, letting the moonlight shine through the jagged emptiness in my side and land on the grave of Steve’s legs.