Bite me: One man's fascination with "Jaws'

The fact I'm writing about Jaws rather than observing great white sharks in Australia proves one thing I'm a fraud.

As a child, I wanted to study sharks all over the world. Jaws, my favorite movie, instilled that urge, but slowly began to chip away at it, too. I developed the Brody/Hooper/Quint syndrome, named after the police chief who fears the sea, the scientist who studies sharks and the crusty fisherman who wants to hook 'em and gut 'em. I'm a complex mix of all three now.

It wasn't just Jaws -- that was just a movie, after all. There was a plethora of blood-tainted information out there and I ate it up: the Discovery Channel, pictures of scruffy surfers sporting one less leg, the Internet and (God, how I hate to admit it) the media.

When television couples a shark devouring a dummy in a wetsuit with scary music, you get a reaction in the subconscious. Despite the narrator reminding me in the last minute of the show that humans are the real killers, the fear is difficult to unravel.

Just a few years ago, Dr. Erich Ritter claimed you could swim with dangerous sharks by lowering your heart rate and the Discovery Channel took him up on it. Boy, did that pay off. As he chatted with the narrator in waist-deep Bahamas water, a bull shark took a chunk out of his calf. Thanks, "Dr." Ritter. I learned a boatload from you.

Mention my name, snorkeling and the Florida Keys to my wife and she'll burst out in laughter. In case she forgets, there's the video she took of me donning my $75 snorkel kit and slipping into the Gulf of Mexico. Seconds later, amid garbled underwater screams, I scrambled into the small, glass-bottomed boat we had rented. I saw a shark, a small, harmless nurse shark which could have mistaken my fingers for squid strips.

The same irrational fear was with me as a kid while swimming in my Nan's pool. I vividly recall my Uncle Bill forming his hands into a shark fin and cruising toward me menacingly. His mouth was underwater, but I knew what tune he was humming. He always grabbed my skinny ankles just as I was reaching for the ladder, too. I would later use his masterful techniques to torture my younger cousins.

There's no doubt I'm conflicted about these toothy fish, but luckily I still can feel safe and cozy while I watch Jaws. I watch it often. In fact, if there were a marathon on, I would watch Jaws back to back, over and over, and then watch the deleted scenes on my DVD, the documentary and anything else they throw in.

I share a part of Chief Brody, but with his cigarette dangling from his lips, he always has reminded me more of my dad, a little irritable and overreactive.

My dad, like the chief, definitely would say we needed a bigger boat and he would have been mad that he had to chum fish guts. My dad would have called the shark an SOB just before he shot it.
But there's another side of my dad and Chief Brody. In my favorite scene in all of cinema, a stressed-out Chief Brody sits at the dinner table drinking a scotch. His young son mimics him and the two make monster faces at one another. The chief asks his son for a kiss . . . because he needs one.

It's the perfect expression of how much your children can recharge your batteries when you're down. My kids do it for me, and I think I may have done that for my parents, sometimes.

My son hasn't watched Jaws yet, at least not all of it, but something's rubbing off. He said he wants to go to college with me to study bears. And sharks.