I was raised in a beach town in California in the 1960’s and 70’s. Like many kids of my generation, I avidly watched Jacques Cousteau and the voyages of the research vessel Calypso on TV. Not surprisingly, I grew up wanting to be a glamorous marine biologist. I had visions of cruising around the tropics on a research ship and going SCUBA diving every day to look at weird critters. Plus, those bearded French guys in wetsuits, seemed like total babe magnets. Marine field biology was appealing to this nerdy white boy on several levels.
In my first two years of college at UC Berkeley, I kept the idea of marine field biology alive, but I also grew more and more interested in brain research in the lab. The deadline to declare a major was drawing near and I couldn’t decide. So, in 1981, I dropped out of college and went to work for a marine biology lab in Los Angeles, partly to figure out what to do. This lab, which was a private company, mostly served to provide living marine organisms to researchers around the world. In most cases we would collect them ourselves by diving or using our trawling boat, but on occasion, we would get specimens from local commercial fishermen.
One hot summer day, during my first week on the job, my boss said, “Linden, drive the truck up to Santa Barbara. One of our fishermen has ten live electric rays and fifty frozen shark heads. Get some ice for the shark heads, fill the aquarium in the truck bed for the rays and then drive it all back here.” So, I drove the oversized pickup truck up the coast to Santa Barbara, found the harbor, and then walked down the gangplank to the dock, where the fisherman had the rays kept in a submerged wire mesh pen, lashed to the underside of the dock.
The rays we’re talking about here are the Pacific Electric Ray, Torpedo californica. Despite their name they don’t look like torpedos at all (the name comes from the Latin “torpidus” which refers to the numbness produced by their electric shock). They have a muscular, grayish blue pancake-shaped body with recessed eyes on top, a dorsal fin and a short tail. Mature females can be four feet in diameter and can weigh up to 90 pounds. Their kidney-shaped electric organs, which use many receptors for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, wired in series to create a giant battery, are located in front. So, the way to pick up a Torpedo is to grab it by the tail where it can’t shock you.
I had ferried nine of the rays up to the truck-mounted aquarium. This process had attracted a small crowd of harbor folk and curious tourists. I had saved the largest one for last, a monster female that I could barely lift. I hauled it out of the pen, held arms-length so it wouldn’t brush up against my body and staggered slowly up the gangplank. What ensued was something out of a Three Stooges film. Somehow, my feet went flying out from under me and I went bumpity-bumpity-bump on my ass down the gangplank, coming to rest on the dock, with the Torpedo on top of me. I could hear the laughter of the assembled crowd who got an amusing free show, but was soon distracted by the ray on my chest which began to shock me violently. My limbs were flailing about, my chest was constricting uncontrollably and (I’m told) my face was contorted in a horrible rictus. I don’t really know how long it went on. It felt like forever, but eventually, the ray flopped itself off of me onto the dock and then into the sea. It escaped and, after a few minutes, I recovered from my electrocution.
Muttering curses, I loaded a pile of crushed ice into the bed of the truck, tossed in the frozen shark heads (which were on their way to researchers at a dental school studying proteins involved in tooth regeneration) and threw a tarp over the whole mess. I climbed slowly and painfully into the truck and started driving back to L.A. when I realized that I was very hungry. I decided to head into Santa Barbara for some food.
I was driving up the main drag, State Street, craning my head around looking for a place to get a quick lunch, when I heard a siren and saw a police car with lights flashing in my rearview mirror. I didn’t think I had committed a traffic violation, but I quickly pulled over and started fishing in my wallet for my license. Two cops got out and they looked really, really upset. They had their pistols out. They were screaming. This seemed a bit much for a traffic stop.
“Out of the car, motherfucker, hands on your head! Spread ‘em! Do it NOW!”
I was scared shitless and quickly complied. They frisked me thoroughly and yelled, “What’s under the tarp?”
“Uh, shark heads, officer.”
“Don’t fuck with me, boy.”
“Look for yourself.”
While one cop trained his gun on me, the other threw back the tarp to reveal 50 severed heads of the Bonito Shark, Isurus oxyrinchus. The cops just stared. Their mouths hung open, and after a while, they blew big sighs of relief, and the gun was slowly lowered.
“Can I take my hands off of my head now?”
“Yeah, OK.”
I explained what I was doing and they showed me how some blood and gore were dripping out the back of the tailgate.
“Then, when we caught sight of your Charles-Manson hairstyle, we got really nervous. Don’t drive shark heads around our city again, dammit.”
“Yes, officer.”
That night, eating dinner with my girlfriend, I said, “You know, Jacques Cousteau is cool and all that, but working in a lab is starting to look better and better.”