If you are to believe the title of this column, everybody hates me. This may indeed be true. But while everybody may hate me, I don't hate everybody. Or everything. Just most things. Some things I do not hate: pears, Bic pens, Jay Bilas, New York magazine, Senator Tom Harkin and the vocal stylings of Jenny Wilson. Another thing I don't hate is elephants. I mean, really, how can you not love elephants?

Part of my elephant fixation, I think, is that I spent an inordinate amount of time at the National Zoo back home in Washington, D.C., when I was a kid. See, Washington is not a town with a lot of things for little kids to do, unless you've got one of those rare children whom enjoy attending senate hearings or finding $1,200-a-night hookers. The zoo is basically the only option for parents who want their children to have fun but also have a somewhat productive and informative afternoon at the same time. Most of the time, I went with my dad and, while neither of us ever had a problem with being both unproductive and uninformed, the zoo was still a good choice for us on Saturday afternoons — especially when the weather was nice.

We would start off with primates (we're both suckers for a good chimp fight), admire the stately but ever-so-dull lions and then move on to the elephant house. My dad's allergies flare up whenever he's in confined spaces with animals, so he never went into the elephant house. Instead of sucking it up and going in, or simply not going, my dad, in his typical "ready, fire, aim" fashion, would just send me toddling off into the mammoth enclosure while he sat outside and read the paper. In retrospect, this sounds rather horrifying, but it all made sense to my father, a man who simply had no real grip on the idea that there are some things a six-year-old should not be doing, including roaming around a zoo where shootings are common and escaped monkeys are totally unremarkable. But that's my parents' child-rearing philosophy for you — when I was in high school, my friends' parents would lay down the law with thunderous pronouncements: "If you're not back home by one, you're not going out for a month." My parents were more along the lines of saying: "If you insist on stumbling into the house at 5 a.m. on Saturday mornings, would you at least lock the goddamn door behind you?" (They are big on locking doors, goddamn or otherwise.)

For me, the elephants were always incredibly enjoyable. They combined the grace and majesty of lions and tigers with the general unruliness and borderline psychotic behavior of monkeys. The star, for me at least, was Toni, a small female elephant that had been imported to the National Zoo in 1989. Toni had been injured in a bad fall at her last zoo and had to have an operation to set a bone in her back leg, which left her with a pink scar about the size of your foot. For some reason, this scar mesmerized me, probably for the same reasons I find myself enthralled by movies where the villain is an albino or has an eye-patch. Toni was smaller than the other elephants but made up for it by making it her goal in life to piss off her elders as much as possible by stealing their food, bumping them and generally acting like a pest. I admired her immensely for this and emulated it in my own life with mixed results.

As I grew older, I still would make the occasional visit to the zoo, although probably not as frequently as I should have. In my early high school years, I discovered cross country running, radical liberal politics and girls who listened to Joni Mitchell. By themselves, any of these three things can be dangerous, but when you put the three of them together, they can swallow your life. During this time, whenever I went to the zoo, it was a little bit strange. I didn't have the wonderment of a child and I saw the zoo for what it was: a prison for animals. Still, I continued to be impressed by Toni the elephant. She always seemed to be on when I visited. For an elephant, "on" is a relative term: it usually consists of eating food from an oil drum or wandering around the enclosure. She always put on a show for me.

In my last two years of high school, two important things happened to me: I learned to drive and I got a girlfriend — two accomplishments which absolutely flabbergasted anybody who had known me for any prolonged period of time. Not knowing what people are supposed to do on dates, I took her to the zoo, since it was close to where I lived and it was free (one of the major perks about living in Washington is that the museums not only represent a cultural center but also are a very cheap date that can make you seem like an intellectual when you're really just a cheap bastard).

It was around this time that I also discovered that any worries I had about the way the zoo treated its animals could be cured by drinking copiously before I went to the zoo. Suddenly, any worries about how the animals were treated evaporated in a cloud of fuzzy benevolence. Over winter break some friends and I went to the zoo after the Redskins won their first playoff game in recent memory. We saw the animals and, as we were leaving, we stopped in to see the elephants. No matter how happy we were, it was a sobering sight. Toni, the elephant that entertained me and countless other kids in D.C., the elephant that always made the zoo an enjoyable experience, did not look well. She was limping and looked sickly. How could this have happened, I wondered?

Last week, the zoo put Toni down. Her arthritis, a result of her fall 17 years ago, had made life unbearable. The new baby elephants in her enclosure kept getting tangled up in her feet. I called my dad and told him. He said it was a tragedy and then started talking about college basketball. He's not insensitive; he just never went into the elephant house.

So, what exactly is my point? What does the untimely death of an elephant in Washington D.C. have to do with the University of Wisconsin? Well, nothing, I suppose, if you just look at Toni as an animal. But to me, Toni was more than that: She was the rarest of entertainers who managed to enthrall me as much when I was six as she did when I was 19. How many entertainers can you say that about? How many movie stars can enthrall people of all ages, races and creeds? Maybe Brian Dennehy, but that's it.

I'm not sure what to think about Washington Post reports that Toni was mistreated at the zoo. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Personally, I think the National Zoo does an OK job, despite the problems they seem to have with keeping their animals alive. But that seems more of a result that certain animals for certain climates probably aren't supposed to be living in enclosures in the mid-Atlantic, no matter how nice they are. Still, I don't think Toni's death needs to degenerate into some argument about the morality of zoos (the editorial page of the Washington Post is having a field day with her death). It is better instead, I think, to look back and observe the life of a great entertainer, albeit one who weighed about two-and-a-half tons. And maybe, if you're feeling nostalgic, pour some cans of pineapple juice on the curb for her. I know I will.

Ray Gustini is a freshman and rues the day his beloved Toni went away. To make a donation to his "Elephant Fund" or reach him for questions or comments, e-mail him at [email protected].