One of the younger adults in my life just happened to drop by unexpectedly on Friday night last and managed to cross the moat, slip through the bars, sneak past assorted guards and turn a big brass key in a squeaky lock without me being aware he was within seven klicks of my Bastion on the Sound.
I complimented him on his stealth and after he locked the door behind him and hung up the big brass key, he walked over and sat down in the chair he bought and which is reserved for him. It’s an ergonomic wonder, I’ll give it that. It reminds me of a dentist’s chair but that’s not something you say to a friend about a chair he really likes. Also, it doesn’t take up much room and it blends in real good. I know this for a fact because I can’t recall at the moment what color it is. It’s also silent and that, I think, is its most endearing quality. Were its owner nearly half so reticent.
Especially when I’m watching a movie. I don’t go to theatres to experience films I really want to see because I find the audience reaction too distracting and, in many cases, waaaay too much rain on my parade. Also, the popcorn’s not that good and ridiculously expensive. And it doesn’t do any good to try to smuggle some in. The air’s too clean in Seattle and hot buttered popcorn with salt and a little garlic is harder to hide than the fragrance of a fifty year old bottle of English Leather aftershave or cologne.
So in order to totally experience a film, I need a private screening. I’m also 6’3" and I can’t do anything about that either, except slouch, which is not good for the spine. One grandfather sat tall in the saddle, the other at the wheel of a fishing boat, and it’s not good karma to break with that kind of family tradition. At least not in my experience. And yep, I’ve tried.
My friends know this about me and it’s a peculiarity among several they’ve come to tolerate, if not accept. Especially on a Friday night without a date and no one else to hang out with. Max is 24. I am almost old enough to be his grandfather. Tonight, however, was a little different because of the movie I was watching. And also because I had six pints of Irish ale and a big tub of popcorn on the coffee table, upon which I also had my stockinged feet.
I was watching Jaws and that baffled Max for a bit. Max does know that I was on destroyers in the West Pacific during the Vietnam War; that I have fished for trout in high mountain streams and lakes, for striped bass in the Sacramento River and for salmon off the coasts of Northern California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. I don’t talk about this stuff a lot but when it seems appropriate, I share an episode.
The reason Max was taken aback a bit was that he also knows something else about me. When I was stationed in San Diego, I enjoyed snorkeling into a grotto not far from the Scripps Institute in La Jolla. It was an era of intense activity at the Naval Training Center and elements of the First Fleet as well. But on that relatively remote stretch of beach, it was as though none of that existed
Especially in that grotto. The tunnel leading into it was about twelve feet down, some six feet in diameter and maybe fifty feet long. It opened into a benched dome I could stand up in and into which light filtered from a distant crevice or several. It was like a mini-cathedral to me and those Sunday afternoons in the summer of 1969, as good a place as any to think about helping kill people and maybe dying in the process. In some ways, in was an incredibly spiritual experience. In which a speargun had absolutely no place.
I wasn’t there to take from the ocean. I was a pilgrim passing through, as it were. I was not, until the speargun, a threat to any of those who dwelled on the lands I was crossing. I was this vaguely familiar pale-skinned lifeform in a bathing suit, swim fins, mask and snorkel. I stayed on the surface until I was ready to submerge. Then I took a deep breath, dove, entered, swam, surfaced and climbed out to sit down Indian style on smooth rock cushion and let the air that came in dry me out while I lost myself to my own thoughts and prayers.
One of the guys in my barracks back on the navy base was also into diving, as it were, but he was a SCUBA diver who loved to hunt fish for food. He had a deal going with a local restaurant, which paid him in either cash or in a meal for him and his friends. So he was always going out with a speargun and when he’d made enough from his business venture, he upgraded and offered to sell me his old one.
We were at the base EM Club having a pitcher with a bunch of his friends and the shark and barracuda and manta ray stories were hanging almost as thick as the smoke from 500 cigarettes. I wasn’t much for talking and there was no way I could steer the conversation, especially when it got around to me and my aquamarine lifestyle. They acted, Gerhardt and all his buddies, like I had a death wish submerging in those waters without protection.
They were pretty convincing so I put out about a third my pay for this speargun with surgical tubing and some real sharp spears. Once Gerhardt got his money, they started talking about women and since, at that time, I had a girl back home, I got ready to leave. But as I was getting up, Gerhardt grabbed my arm.
"Tomorrow’s Sunday. You going out?"
"Yeah," I replied, jerking free of his grasp.
"I got a bet going with these guys you won’t dive with that speargun. Life could get real interesting for you around here if lost money and got laughed at."
They went with me and made sure the speargun was loaded. I dove with it and everything went fine, or so it seemed. But when I got up into my personal cathedral, the breezes felt different. Instead of warming me, they chilled me. I started getting scared, something I’d never been before in this place. Something told me to get out as fast as I could and never, ever come back.
I dove, with the speargun, and as I was looking down that tunnel, something came in that filled at least half of it and I lost half my air with a short scream. I knew there was no way out except straight ahead so I just closed my eyes and started kicking as hard as I could. Speargun in tow.
I brushed past it in the darkness and it did not have scales. I cleared the tunnel, shot to the surface and started swimming back to the beach. My erstwhile companions were laughing at me and pointing at something beyond me. I was in no mood to look over my shoulder until I was wading to the relative safety of dry land. When I got there, I turned around, looked out over the stretch of Pacific Oceans I’d just covered and there was a young adult dolphin treading water and laughing his cetacean butt off at me.
So were Gerhardt, his friends and maybe a couple three dozen others gathered to enjoy a true communion with a sun which can cause melanoma and an ocean world which, if disrespected, can kill in more creative ways than any humans since Cro Magnon decided not to share his turf with Neanderthal.
So, Max knowing all this, waited until the second commercial and asked me why I was watching a movie which reminded me of something that frightening. In return, I asked him if he’d ever noticed that when people took a drink in that movie, their lips were never wet when they took their cup, mug or glass away, even in the cabin of Robert Shaw’sboat when old Jaws was closing in.
Max looked at me and asked me who I thought was going to win the national election for president.
I told him probably the speargun. And people who can drink out of a cup, mug or glass without getting their lips wet.
