it’s only 8:15 in the morning and this crusty old fiend is already planning lunch. “Go back to your cubical and breathe your nasty coffee breath around someone else,” I thought to myself. I sat in front of my computer screen with drool seeping down the corners of my mouth. I was locked in a 9 to 5 rut like all the other drones in the bee hive. I stood up, stretched and looked over my wall at the rows and rows of horrible cubicles. That fearful sight made me sick and I needed to get the blood flowing in my legs. I decided to go downstairs and get a cup of coffee so I could smell like the rest of the robots.
I was working for a world wide engineering firm in Irvine California as a computer drafter in the mechanical engineering department. The office building was a huge complex. The outside was entirely walled with mirrored glass panels that watched your every move from the outside. It stood just off the 405 freeway waiting for me every morning like a giant vile creature, a beast of unspeakable cruelty.
Now don’t get me wrong. I didn’t hate what I was doing for a living, I really liked the work. Drawing and designing mechanical equipment that would be built and put into operation was very satisfying. What I couldn’t stomach was the rut, the rat race, the cliques and plastic material people. Was this what I was going to be doing for the next thirty, fourty years of my life? I wanted more. I wanted out of this prison I was in, where everyone else seemed happy and content. Not me, I wanted adventure, I wanted to live. I wasn’t satisfied being a slave to society.
While waiting in line at the coffee bar, I listened to this heavy set girl with a pretty face who was in front of me talking with this other girl who had a hard, athletic body and an ugly face.
“My back is so sore,” said the pretty fat one.
“Why, what happened? Did you throw it out doing yoga?” asked the ugly, hard bodied girl.
“No. It’s the chair in my office,” Fats said. “It’s just so uncomfortable. It kills my back just sitting in it for twenty minutes.”
“Did you call maintenance to get a new one?”
“I did, but the janitors said they wouldn’t have any new ones until the end of next week,” said the fat one. Then her voice became irritated. She went on. “Those idiots said I can have a used one until the new chairs came in.” The pretty fat one was now starting to fume and got animated with her hand gestures. “I told them, ‘what do you think I’m sitting in now? What good would another used one be? My back is killing me.’ I mean, duh, don’t you think they’d understand that?”
The hard bodied girl looked at her friend and slightly cocked her ugly face to one side and said, “Honestly, what do you expect. They’re just janitors with no education.”
OK, I heard enough. I was almost ready to puke on these two chicks. I mean, Christ, there are people out there in the world starving, children with no roofs over their heads, wives victimized by abusive low life husbands, civil war in Somalia with the bodies of US Army Rangers being defiled; dragged half naked through the streets of Mogadishu by skinny black warlords, and this ungrateful cow is complaining about a chair hurting her fat back while her train wrecked face of a friend stands there belittling people because of their job title.
I started to open my mouth to say something to these two girls, that I’d probably regret later on, when Linda came walking up to me in line and said, “Hi Pasley.”
“Hi Q,” I said. Linda never called me by my first name. She always called me by my last like most of my friends. So I called her by the first letter of her last name. Q was a petite blond with milky skin and blue eyes. She was very pretty with a kind soul. “Can I get you something from the coffee joint?”
“No thanks Pasley, I have my water,” she said with a smile.
“I see. That stuff is bad news Q, you should lay off of it for a while.”
Her smile widened. “What are you up to tonight?” she said.
“I’m finishing up my rescue diver class.”
“Oh that’s right. You’re going to be a big dive instructor in the islands.” Q said with a slight chuckle.
“You laugh Q, but you’ll see. You’ll be writing me letters from back here in this shit hole.” I said laughing. I don’t think the two trolls in front of us thought that me referring to their place of work as a “Shit Hole” was very amusing. They both kind of sneered over their shoulders at Q and I.
It’s not that Q didn’t believe I’d pull the cork on this giant glass tomb and head to the tropics, I just didn’t think she wanted to see me go. She knew I would. I had a drive, an itch, a burning desire to escape. Most of my other co-workers thought it was a pipe dream when the subject was brought up. They were all so trapped in their routines that they just couldn’t fathom doing something completely out of their comfort zone. My fine office friends would just shake their heads whenever I talked about some day teaching diving in the Caribbean. That’s the stuff that only happens in books and movies, right?
I knew I was hooked on diving the very first time my head went below the water and I took my first breath of SCUBA. It was just plain wild being able to breath underwater. A regular frogman. It felt as though I had finally escaped the hectic world around me. And the sensation of staying underwater and breathing felt familiar. It seemed like I was back in the womb and all was safe and secure. No worries, no hassles, just the sweet sound of my bubbles climbing up to the surface of the water. Was this the feeling and sound that we all had while waiting to be born? Our oldest memory of what it was like to be unborn, filed back in the furthest depths of our minds? Nevertheless, I was hooked.
During my rescue diver course, I came to the conclusion that I’d be an instructor. I remember being down on the beach at Divers Cove in Laguna Beach watching instructors lose control of their students in the surf zone. Their students would get hammered in the waves. I overheard the instructors give half ass dive briefings to their new divers that left a lot of puzzled faces and doubt and fear in them. I told myself I could teach better than that. So after my rescue course I told my dive instructor to sign me up for the divemaster class.
A divemaster is the first level of a dive professional, which means you can start making money by diving. The next step after divemaster is assistant instructor, then open water scuba instructor. The assistant instructor course is not a prerequisite for the instructor course and I didn’t want to take that class because as a divemaster you are basically an assistant instructor. After a diver completes the divemaster course they can jump right into the IDC (Istructor Development Course.) I didn’t want to do this. I stayed a divemaster for a year to rack up dives and gain as much dive knowledge within the scuba industry as I could. There are plenty of divers who go right into the instructor level after their divemaster course, and that’s okay. I, however, look at it this way; who would you rather have teach you scuba diving, a brand new instructor with sixty dives or a brand new instructor who worked on a dive boat and has two hundred twenty five dives under his or her belt?
I did all my dive training through this scuba shop called Liburdi’s Scuba Center, which at the time was located in a small strip mall close to that horrid office building where I worked. Although it was small, the joint was very clean and professional. There was always this static feeling of high energy in the air when I walked into the shop. The Liburdi’s made the whole sport of scuba a blast. It was good times there, working for those dudes, especially divemastering a dive boat out to the Channel Islands off Southern California. I realized this is what I wanted to do with my life, not sit around in an office cubical like an animal in a cage.
A Fat Divemaster and Vile Puke
I was checking in divers off my roaster as they were boarding the dive boat to Catalina Island when I saw the ape. This dude had thick, coke bottle glasses and man tits. He was a beast. On top of his head was a ball cap that read in big blue letters “Divemaster.” I was thinking, What the hell kind of divemaster is this? Is he for real? He came aboard and I asked him his name.
“Arvid,” he said with a smile that revealed huge horse teeth. His Yeti breath was visible in the cold early morning.