We had stopped the boat right there when the captain had spotted a dolphin. Luckily for Chocolate Chunk, instead of acting impulsively, I grabbed the dolphin net I'd brought from California and was able to secure it around Sylvan's head.

Paul handed Sylvan a Pellegrino and took a picture of him drinking it. "Sylvan, can you swim?" Paul screamed two inches from Sylvan's face. My friend Paul is obsessed with pictures and is constantly documenting anything that takes place, whether people are cooperating or not.

I elbowed Paul in the ribs and whispered for him to shut his trap. The truth was that it was a good question. But the answer was obviously no. If at some point Sylvan had known how to swim, he certainly wasn't able to connect the dots now. Why he would jump into the middle of the ocean and all of a sudden start swimming was a little questionable. It was possilble that Sylvan had spent so much time driving on land that maybe he forgot there was a different format for the ocean. In any case, he was clearly embarrassed, and I just wanted him safely back on deck, or in the shallow end of any pool.

This turn of events was a huge blow to me, as I saw this trip as the perfect opportunity to capture some uncommon sea life for our new aquarium. My original idea was to fill it with Maine lobsters and some Chilean sea bass; when we had people over for dinner, they could just spear what they wanted from the tank and everything would be fresh like at Red Lobster. Ted vetoed this idea for some Health Department code that I'm sure he made up, and that's when I came up with my airtight plan to house a single dolphin. The very mention of dolphin fostering sparked a huge debate between Ted and me about the difference between a fish and a water mammal. His argument was that there was no point in lodging a fish if it was something that could survive on land.

"No fish can survive on land," I informed him. "They're called fish because they live in the fucking sea. Unless a lobster hops out of the Long Island Sound and porks a chimpanzee at a zoo in Florida, there is never going to be a fish that survives on land. You got that, Captain Stubing?"

After many vigorous debates and much lengthy consideration, I emerged victorious when Ted finally agreed to a single dolphin on the condition that I do not get it from a vendor but have to capture it myself.

I knew that Ted thought he had put one over on me by making such a demand, but not one to ever under-estimate myself, I made contact with several employees at the Atlantis in Bahamas, as well as the VP of marketing at StarKist and was piece by piece putting together a dolphin-abduction strategy.

Once we got to the beach where we were having our lunch, the captain of the boat pulled up nice and close to the shore so Sylvan could walk out. Eva and Steph spent the next three hours giving Sylvan swimming lessons while Paul forked over the $150 he bet me that Sylvan was never coming to Turks and Caicos in the first place.

"Is this one of her jokes?" Paul asked Ted when we all got to the island. "Is Sylvan really coming?"

"I don't know, maybe. I think he's coming, but I don't even know what's real and what isn't anymore. Three weeks ago she convinced me that it was legal to have an alligator dwell with you as long as you create a swamplike environment in a spare bedroom."

"Well, Ted, that is a little ridiculous. Why would you believe that?"

"Because she had the story so perfectly ironed out and she had convinced me there were alligator animal shelters, which I still think might be true."

"I think that might actually be true," my brother Ray said.

"Neither is true, you idiots," I chimed in.

By this point Ted's reality had become so warped he didn't even know what was reality and what was fantasy. I felt good about my position in the world, and I felt even better that I had developed so much mistrust among my close friends that they were constantly confused and disoriented.

The truth of the matter was this: I wanted Sylvan to experience the kind of vacation that in recent years I had become lucky enough to afford. Of course penetration was at the forefront of my mind, but I've learned through previous experiences that while trying to get someone else penetrated is ultimately an altruistic endeavor, it can be exhausting and, more often than not, fruitless. By the end of the week, I had given up my sexual aspirations for him and focused on enjoying our time together and, more important, enjoying the splendor of watching his Chocolate Chunk mess of a body wade around like a rhinoceros in a one-piece.

"I love you, Sylvan," I'd tell him as I swam into his arms and held on to his tits.

"I love you, too, Chels."

On our very last day on the island, we were all sitting in the lounge area of the pool when Steph noticed two Mocha Mamas sipping on mai tais. They were a little drunk, and Stephanie was very drunk, seeing as she hadn't left the pool bar for seven hours and was now chain-smoking while simultaneously making arrangements to move in with the Filipino bartender, who had casually mentioned that he always wanted to visit Los Angeles, more specifically, the La Brea Tar Pits.

Steph and I swam over and said hello to her new friends Feliqua and Wendy.

"You look familiar," Feliqua told me, and Wendy nodded in agreement. "Are you that lady on the TV? Tracy Lately?"

"That's right," I said, and then took Stephanie's lit cigarette from her hand and put it out in her drink while she was focusing her attention on our new friends. "Steph, did you tell the ladies about the dolphin we saw snorkeling and how you were unable to submerge your head underwater because you refused to put out your American Spirit?"

Paul swam up right behind me. "Stephanie! I didn't know you smoked!"

Stephanie ignored Paul and started looking for her cigarette. Feliqua announced that it was her fortieth-birthday celebration. She then led us in a very special rendition of "Happy Birthday" to herself, and afterward, Steph and Brian interrogated both of the ladies about what kind of men they were into. By this time the women had nicknamed Brian "Delicious" because he's gay, from the South, and has two basketballs for an ass that sit about a half inch under his shoulders.

Brian is originally from Atlanta and enjoys nothing more than black people from the South, but his true passion lies in the old sitcom Designing Women. He's an author who's very handsome and athletic, and he once spent an afternoon trying to convince me to executive-produce an updated, modern-day version of Designing Women, but with four gay guys. When I reminded him that someone already did that show and it was called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, he guffawed. "What about with four black women?"

"That was 227."

If you closed your eyes when Delicious laughed, he sounded exactly like Mrs. Garrett. The ladies loved him. Their laughs were just as loud as Delicious's and turned into a booming din as they kept high-fiving each other and screeching with their mouths wide open. The girls worked together as hospital administrators in Nashville, and both were at least at a 1.5 blood-alcohol level.

"You got an ass like a sister," Feliqua kept telling Delicious. Then he'd snuggle up closer to them and squeal, "I found my two Cocoa Sisters! Ahahahahahahh!"

Feliqua looked a lot like Whoopi Goldberg and kept asking us if we saw the resemblance. It was clear that she was not happy about this comparison, so we all shook our heads in unison and said, "No fucking way," every time she asked.

"I've met Whoopi," I reassured her. "Unless you're wearing Crocs under that water, you have very little in common."

Their nachos and conch fritters were delivered to the swim-up bar, along with the food the rest of us had ordered. When I sat down next to Feliqua, she looked at my salad and then looked at me. "What's the matter, Tracy Lately? You one of those skinny bitches can't eat no french fries, can't eat no grits?"