BURGER SCOOT

This story was originally posted as a Six-Sentence Story hosted by GirlieOnTheEdge. Not being tall, dark, and handsome, my mating techniques featured humor and self-deprecation. So when my wife reminded me of this story, I told her when we were dating years ago, I wanted to flesh it out a little longer than six sentences. Here are the results. I hope you enjoy it.

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I was about one hundred feet underwater when I ran out of oxygen.

It was 1977, and I was 18 or 19 years old. I was vacationing in Cabo San Lucas with my family. We had first spent time in Acapulco, where we saw taxi drivers honking and yelling at cops for the first time without getting pulled over (or shot). There were other memorable moments during the Acapulco leg of the vacation. One night, we stayed awake in our beds while the band on stage ten floors below practiced all night, trying to stick the current Latin hit in Mexico that made its way on American airwaves, “Eres Tu” (If you must know what “Eres Tu” sounds like click here.) Anyway, who has band practice on the same stage they will be performing later in the week?

Acapulco was fun but messy. Cabo San Lucas, our second and last leg of the trip, was a sleepy place with only a couple of hotels, but we could see the construction of more prominent Acapulco-size resorts. While it didn’t have all the amenities of Acapulco, it did have a relatively empty beach, and the staff was more accommodating than the busier resorts down south.

On one of the first days on the beach at our hotel, I noticed a stand renting out snorkeling equipment. By now, my brother, sister, and I knew the drill: everything at these hotels was free. All you had to do was give the guy at the stand (or restaurant, or bar, etc.) your hotel room number (never thinking that our parents would get the itemized bill at checkout). I went snorkeling, and it was fun, but what really got me excited was when I found out the hotel would take its guests out scuba diving!

I have wanted to scuba dive ever since I watched The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau on TV, which ran from the late 60s to the mid-70s, but I could never focus enough on the whole scuba thing to ask my parents for lessons. Anyway, what would I do with a scuba diving certificate? We lived in Sacramento and didn’t go on many boat rides in the ocean. I could have scuba-dived in freshwater, but the only body of water I could access without a car ride was the fast-running American River. On top of that, there were fishing lines with nasty hooks to deal with. I only passively wished about it to myself and my parents when we watched the Frenchmen on the Calypso.

One day, I boarded the hotel boat with about five others, and we took off with a bunch of scuba gear onboard. I had never dived before, not even touched a tank or a regulator, but this kid who talked my ear off while the boat took us to a shipwreck where we would dive said he was a certified diver and to stay near him. I felt embarrassed since he was about four years younger than me.

Normally, I would have shined him on and done my own thing, but as the hotel crew strapped the tanks on my back, adjusted the mask for my exceptionally fat head, slipped my fins on, and gently shoved the regulator in my mouth, this foreign stuff administered by men in a foreign tongue made me feel like I had better hang out with someone with experience that speaks my lingo.

We dropped backward, holding our masks and regulators to our faces, oriented ourselves, then followed the hotel guides down to the bottom of the shelf where there was indeed an old ship. I was enjoying what must have been a site thoroughly picked over the many tourists before me, but that wasn’t at all depressing. What was a concern was this feeling that I shouldn’t have to think about breathing, that it should be an involuntary action. A couple of minutes later, I felt like I was doing breathing calisthenics: I pushed out the bubbles through my regulator, and I sucked in air from the tanks as if I was sucking air through an ever-crimping straw.

Something was amiss. I never heard Jacques or his soon-to-be diseased son, Phillippe, talk about how challenging it is to breathe while underwater. If they weren’t talking in French (with Jacques interpreting for his American TV audiences) about sharks or sea turtles, they would talk about “the bends”–decompression sickness. Which reminded me how far I was below the surface. “Never outrace your exhaust bubbles from the regulator when swimming to the surface,” Jacques said on more than one episode, but I didn’t think I had much time. I wasn’t going to try to suck in however much O2 into my lungs and perform the most protracted, slowest exhale while following my bubbles to the surface.

Finally, I grabbed the kid who had never left my side and gave him the universal sign for killing someone (the cutthroat motion) since I did not know any sign for “I can’t breathe.” His eyes almost popped out of his sockets and rolled around the inside of his mask. After that, he quickly reached around me and twisted something, and I heard a hiss, followed by my lungs filling with sweet oxygen, life-giving O2 my body can’t process through seawater.

Now, the kid wouldn’t leave me alone for the balance of the dive, and the ungrateful wretch that I am, I couldn’t help but wonder what if I cut my ankle while trying to free myself from the rusty ship and the blood attracted a big blood-crazed Great White? Maybe I could use my sixteen-year-old savior as a human shield while I drag-raced my bubbles to the surface, the bends be damned.

The guides ultimately got our collective attention and pointed to the boat. I took my time watching my bubbles, but the kid held me back, making sure I beat my bubbles to the top. I was a little annoyed by this thoughtful but unnecessary caution: I’ve seen The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, you little twerp!