DEAD TWINS TALKING

     This summer the Lilly twins are turning 64. The Beatles wrote a song about it. As we begin our final years of will you still need me, will you still feed me, each of us is hoping to live into our 70s, and maybe even a little longer.

     Sadly, the odds of us living to ripe old ages are low. I'm now in stage two of congestive heart failure, and Mars is suffering from symptoms of chronic kidney failure. But we still have right now, and that's all any 64-year-old identical twin can really ask for.

     It's funny how we wound up living in neighboring Asian countries, Mars in Cambodia and me in Vietnam, as our Beatles old man anthem fast approaches.

     I've been in Da Nang for nine years. For eight of those years, I've been married to Lana, 42, who I met in her hometown of Bien Hoa, an industrial city 45 minutes from Saigon by car. Mars recently got married to Eang, 44, in her hometown of Siem Reap. As the crow flies, my twin bro and I are just 613.7 kilometers away from each other now.

     There was a time when we both believed in the impossible. Back in high school, we were 6-foot, slow-footed, white basketball players with the vertical jumps of sea slugs. But we loved the game, believed in hard work, and eventually became two of the top prep players in San Diego County.

     At one point, long before boys began turning themselves into trans athletes so they could compete against and beat the pants off girls, we'd considered becoming subjects in a University of California study on the effects of growth hormones in identical twins.

     That's probably not a precise description of the study, but the gist of it was that if we signed up to be lab rats in the research, there was chance we might grow a few inches taller. Due to some possible life-shortening side effects, however, including weakened or enlarged major organs, our parents refused to let us do it.

     Despite our physical shortcomings, and thanks largely to our mother, we were born with above-average athletic skills such as quick reflexes and exceptional eye-to-hand coordination. We had the same focused drive and endless dedication as of any of the world's top athletes. Hardwired to become the best players we could, by the eighth grade our hoop dream had taken on a life of its own.

     The place was Keflavik, Iceland, in 1972, where our father had taken a job as civil engineer at Naval Air Station Keflavik (NASKEF). The military base was home to an enormous gymnasium, which became our home away from home for much of the year that we lived there.

     Our family moved into 4-bedroom house a few miles off base, a second-story walk-up with a balcony and windows on all sides overlooking some of the other asymmetrical, pastel-colored homes in the neighborhood. Most of the Icelandic-style dwellings around us had the greenest, most immaculate lawns I'd ever seen. It was a peaceful, picture-book place to live.

     The gym stood kitty-corner between the base's combined school and movie theater. Just down the road was a snack bar with a jukebox, which gave us a cozy place to eat and hang out between classes, films, and most importantly, getting our basketball jones on in the gym.

     For us, the gym was everything. It offered plenty of open play hours and top-brand leather balls from the equipment room to boot. We shot around and played halfcourt pickup games to our hearts' content for hours on end. And as we'd soon find out, the massive, airy facility also hosted basketball league games and boxing smokers.

     The gym had one main court in the middle, with two half courts along one side fronting a high, long column of retractable wooden bleachers. They kept the first few rows of the bleachers pulled at all times as bench seating, where players and other visitors could sit, watch, or rest between pickup games.

     On the other side, they'd installed a fully enclosed racquetball court in the middle, and two partially equipped matted areas on either side, one for gymnastics and the other for boxing and martial arts.

     For us, it was a dream come true. But our hoop dream, in fact, had actually started two years earlier, in the sixth grade at Mission Beach Elementary school, where we fell in love with the game out on the school's playground, a multipurpose blacktop with a single steel pole, netted hoop, and half-circle backboard near the lunch tables. The court also included a painted key area and free-throw circle.

     We spent countless hours during the school's afterschool program on that court, honing the skills that would one day make us two of the most well-known high school stars of the day.

     In retrospect, our athletic ability and work ethic might've been better served on a tennis court, or in the Pacific Ocean just a couple hundred yards away, where many young boys our age were strutting their stuff on surfboards. But thanks to Jerry West, we believed in our chances of achieving greatness in the sport.

     How little did we know. The truth was, in terms of our innate athletic skill, tennis and surfing legends like John McEnroe and Skip Frye had very little on us. Similarly built and equally coordinated, light-footed, and sure handed, our chances of reaching the professional pinnacles of the tennis and surfing worlds were much better. But as fate would have it, we chose Naismith's game instead.

     Not long after we arrived in Iceland, about the time our family was settling into our new, green and serene Icelandic community, Mars and I decided we wanted to return to San Diego on our own. We wanted to go back to Pacific Beach Junior High, and the local recreation center, where life and the friends we'd left behind seemed safe and familiar.

     Our parents, Tom and Marsha, arranged for us to stay on a monthly stipend with the Flores family, our neighbors for several years while living in the queerly designed yet fantastically situated single-story beach house we'd rented at 3930 Bayside Walk in Mission Beach, the one with a private beach as a front yard right on the edge of Sail Bay. Mr. and Mrs. Flores were all set to take us in, but at some point, we changed our minds. It was one of the best decisions we ever made.

     The first friend we made on the base was Glenn Craig, a handsome, strapping teen of 14 who also liked to play basketball. He was tall and lean, at least three inches taller than us, with the glossy and flowing shoulder length jet-black hair of a model. He was a dreamboat, really, with the foxiest girlfriend in the ninth grade to prove it.

     Our bromance began in the summer of '72. Glenn's girlfriend, Julie, was on summer holiday with her family when we ran into him at the gym, so for several weeks we had the rugged teenage Adonis all to ourselves. It wasn't a gay thing, at least not consciously.

     As twins, it had always been easy for Mars and me to make new friends. We traveled through our halcyon youth guard's way down and hearts wide open, seeing almost everyone we met in the best possible light, without judgements or preconceived notions. We immediately liked every single person we met, and most of the people we met like us right away too.

     That summer spend most of our time either in the gym or a quarter mile down the road at the snack bar, which had a bus stop out front where off-base busses ran until late in the evening. With Elton John's Crocodile Rock, Daniel, and Rocket Man playing on the jukebox, we spent many a late afternoon sharing orders of salty fries washed down with fizzy, throat-burning fountain cokes on ice while waiting for whatever bus we wanted to take home that day.

     Our second most favorite place was the movie theater. Tickets were dirt cheap, around 75 cents from what I remember, and they showed many of the top Hollywood films of the day. After playing pickup games all morning, we'd walk right across the road on the other side of the gym to catch the daily matinee. Tubs of buttered popcorn and sugary soft drinks also kept us entertained and satiated until we got to those fries later on. It was an idyllic life, and we loved it.

     But when Glenn's girlfriend came back, the special feeling of comradery we shared with him suddenly changed. It was weird and hard, dealing with that sort of jealousy at that particular age. We met her one day on our way out of the gym, and while crossing the road to the movie house, she looked at us with beautiful but suspicious eyes. For reasons beyond our limited comprehension at the time, his foxy bitch wasn't the slightest bit impressed by or interested in her boyfriend's new twin bosom buddies.

     After that day, she barely looked at or spoke to us again. It was as though she were entirely immune to our twin powers of friendly sociability, and that we were completely off limits in her mind to any thoughts of approval or acceptance. Our closeness to Glenn petered out after that, and later, in the spring of 1973, I'd lose my cool in a touch football game, and in the process lose whatever remaining friendship I had with Glenn forever.

     Life's funny that way, the way some people like us while others don't. When we meet people who decide not to like us it can be hard to change their minds. Sometimes we can do things to get them to like us after the fact. Other times, when we meet people who initially like us, we can do things that make them dislike us, or even hate us, in the end. That's what happened with Glenn and a few other friends we met on the base.

     Life's a funny thing for sure. Time flies and youth fades away like the court lines on a light varnished hardwood floor. The composite leather of a basketball eventually wears away, leaving blurry dreamscapes of uproarious jocularity and tortuous pathos. The memories of our hoop days, which took off in Iceland like the first iPhone, can only be recalled in fuzzy, chopping-block pieces of recollection. It has simply been too long.

     Be that as it may, I shall rethink and reconstruct the events and remembrances of our shared past as accurately as I can, taking artistic liberties as needed to piece together our life story to the very best of my ability. No matter who reads it, sharing these chapters in our lives will be my last labor of love.

     During that short but sedulous year in Iceland, Mars and I lost our virginity together. We lost it to the same girl on the same night, not in a threesome but separately, me first and Mars second, in what would be our first in a limited number of twinly tag teams.

     The girl's name was Patty, a pretty and precocious 14-year-old ski bunny we met between runs on our second day in the breathtaking Alpine mountains of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria, in southern Germany.

     Our family had gone to the quaint ski town on Christmas vacation in the winter of '72, staying in a nondescript armed forces hotel that had a game room for kids and three nickel slot machines in a small foyer next to the main dining room for adults. But mom and dad let us pull a few handles there, our first, and we marveled at the spinning reels paying out for one, two, or three cherries, melons, oranges, apples, or bar symbols in a row.

     Mars and I had our own twin room on the first floor. It was a plain, no-frills room with an old-fashioned radiator heater under a large, single-pane window overlooking the parking lot and the looming Bavarian Alps beyond.

     I remember that radiator well. One morning after a shower, after walking over to the windows and dropping my towel to the floor, I leaned over the heater to grab a bag of Gummi Bears from the windowsill. That's when the head of my penis touched the heater's scorching surface. My pelvis instantly recoiled, and I yowled in jolting agony. It would be the last time I ever let my dick get near such a hot burning surface again.

     Like us, Patty was American. She was 14 years old, a year older than us, and one year younger than our brother Byron, who was 15. It's hard to remember exactly what she looked like. Her hair was long, straight and brown. She was thin and flat chested but had a foxy face and a bubbly and playful personality, allowing her to flirt and giggle with a self-assured sexuality beyond her years.

     After meeting Patty at the ski resort, we found out she was staying in the same military-run hotel as us and arranged to meet her later that evening in the hotel's game room, where the night before we'd played foosball, or table soccer, with a group of other kids staying there too.

     We were having the time of our lives. Traipsing about the property on our own, with little or no adult supervision, made us feel as though the world and our place in it was as an enchanting crustacean teeming with endless potentialities.

     At first, Patty was just like one of the guys, a strictly platonic affair, hanging out and playing doubles foosball, with each player controlling two of the sticks. We were having a ball. The room also had several old-school arcade games from the 1970s. Foosball, though, was the main attraction, with kids lining up to play the winners of each match.

     After several hours of clamoring around the pint-size football table furiously spinning the metal handles and striking the small wooden balls into the goals with the unabashed whoops and groans of pure teenage delight, we said our goodnights, promising to meet up at the ski lodge the next morning.

     The Garmisch ski resort was a heavenly, picture-perfect site to behold. Flying down its exhilarating slopes was literally like being on top of the world. But my recollections of the place are now obscured by time, as though caught in the blurring flurries of ice and snow ripping through the topmost bowls of Zugspitze, the highest peak at the top of the Garmisch-Parten ski area and the tallest mountain in Germany.

     Perhaps my twin can add some much-needed clarity to my indistinct memories of the experience. All I can really remember is that after skiing from mid-morning to late afternoon on day three, we met up with Patty again post dinner in the game room. But this time, after we'd had our fill of foosball for one evening and returned to our room, Patty came along with us.

     Eventually, Patty ended up sitting with us on one of the twin beds, where at some point the conversation turned sexual in nature, with Patty asking us about our virginity. Talk turned to touching. As novices in the art of flirting and foreplay, she had to almost dare us to make love to her. Not in a threesome, but one twin at a time.

     I went first. Mars left the room, and we got naked on top of the bedspread. I kissed Patty on the mouth, first light pecking and then deep Frenching. I cupped her small breasts, kissing and twirling my tongue around her tiny brown nipples.

     I could be making this up as I go along. But what I do vaguely remember is having the strangest feeling of being turned on and frightened all at once, an esoteric weirdness of titillating desire and enigmatic uneasiness pulsating through me at the same time. I got on top of her and nudged my penis all the way inside. It felt warm and inviting, like a hot meal on a cold day.

     At one point during our brief intercourse, she began writhing and wincing. "Ow, ow, ow, you're on my wall," she groaned.

     She pushed up on my hips and twisted her body, making my erect manhood slide out of her. She promptly reached inside herself and made some sort of gingerly adjustment. "Okay, try again," she cooed.

     I came like a two-minute warning. It was nothing to write home about. No music and wonderful roses, no sweet fragrant meadows. I quickly pulled out, rolled off the bed and put my clothes back on.

     Without so much as giving her a kiss on the cheek or a pat on the ass, I bolted for the door and opened it. That's when Mars, who'd been standing outside in the hall for the entire five minutes, barged past me like a horndog zeroing in on a bitch in heat.

     It's hard to remember many of the details of our sexual escapades in Keflavik and beyond. As Mars would say, it's now all as hazy and murky as a misted snorkeling mask. But our stories, while embellished, are mostly true. I mean, we're not making anything up. Nonetheless, we may need to fill in and flesh out some of the dimmed and mawkish moments of our lives with a few excogitating pen strokes.

          The story and evening in question initiated by Mars in the previous chapter is actually our second pussy time score. The phase pussy time comes from one of our rare jaunts to downtown San Diego three years later, when we somehow ended up at one of the all-nude strip clubs in the red-light district with a group of our teammates on the Mission Bay High basketball team.

     The main throughfare-turned-boulevard in the downtown district, Broadway, was once lined with a smorgasbord of sleazy peep shows and nudie bars. Doormen stood just outside the entrances, where telltale clusters of blinking lightbulbs and flashing muted neon signs helped them to coax horny sailors and marines passing by to venture beyond the dark curtains just inside the doorway.

     Long gone now, ID checks at these strip joints was lax to say the least. On a warm, sunny, perfect day in the summer of '76, when we were barely 16 years old, Mars, me, and a small group of our fellow Buccaneer jocks waltzed right past the lone bouncer at one of these joints. Climbing a steep flight of stairs, we dropped anchor at two booths in front of an empty stage in the darkly lit cabaret room.

     That's when the magic happened. After ordering a round of cokes, a disc jockey's voice from out of nowhere welcomed us with a barrage of strip show banter before introducing the first dancer. The only words I distinctly remember him saying were, "It's pussy time!" He thundered the phrase like a game show announcer each time a lingerie-clad dancer was about to take the stage.

     We had a rip-roaring time. I'm not sure how many strippers we watched, or how attractive or unattractive they were. I just remember feeling wildly and naturally intoxicated, as high as a kite on the happy hormones of youth, exuberantly making sail on an adventurous sea of life with an endless horizon of enthralling possibilities.

     "It's pussy time!" the DJ boomed, inviting the next stripper in the lineup to the empty stage. All of us burst into uproarious laughter every time. Thirty minutes in the waitress started pushing for a second round. We exited, stage left, making a beeline for Broadway. Outside, the air seemed a lot fresher, and the midday sunlight seemed all that much brighter.

     Parading and chortling gleefully along the wide, almost empty downtown sidewalks, we bellowed the DJ's signature phrase over and over again, hee-hawing our way to the nearest Jack-in-the-Box.

     This old gringo was living far south on Mexico's Pacific side, in a surfing town world famous for its gargantuan, beach-breaking rollers. Puerto Escondido hosted absolutely zero giant resorts, so my favorite beach, a roughly two-mile stretch of wide, white sand, still remained mostly uncrowded.

     Often times throughout the day I found myself alone on the shore and preferred it that way. I liked it even more with no one else around at all, because it gave me a feeling of being by myself on a deserted island.

     Then my only companions were endless vistas and pelagic birds, giant, jutting volcanic rock outcroppings, and the stupendous sound of waves rolling in to violently die upon the shallow ends of a sloping sea.

     I loved the local inhabitants, but not the other gringos or Mexican tourists. The probability of a foreigner greeting me with a friendly first smile soared as high and distant as the puffy, white cumulus clouds daily cluttering the far-reaching edges of Puerto Escondido's oceanic horizon. Like the borders of a postcard the view left nothing in-between but tropical blue skies.

     The other gringos usually brought only their narcissistic, self-serving egos to the bread-breaking tables of my unknown existence. Mexican tourists, meanwhile, barely bode better as first-time acquaintances, offering mostly paltry side dishes of uncaring strangers' doubt.

     Hungry for human connection, I especially adored the children I encountered on my daily shoreline walks. They grinned from ear to ear whenever I got up close and glanced in their direction. Some hid their happiness shyly behind their guardians' legs or torsos; while others, bursting forward, raised and waved a cute poco hand, then shouted out a joyful word or two in Spanish.

     "Ooh, tu hijo es muy hermoso!" I lavishly told the parents. And each time the parents beamed with pride, and their niños and niñas cried out with exuberant joy or exhibited other forms of giddy glee.

     On darker days, when I felt utter mental starvation and exhaustion, my positive mind would sink to the breaking point, and I'd see everyone as misguided humans, and miserably start hating them all.

     "Fucking losers," I said out loud to himself. "Fucking goddamned, delusional morons. Where the fuck do you think you're going? Who in the hell do you think you are? Quién carajo eres tú?!

     And each time, my suffering thoughts would drag my alcoholic mind back into an ice-cold Oxxo beer cooler, to the same sleazy barroom fantasy of getting sloshed with pie-eyed women as equally desperate and lonely as I was.

     Thankfully, such knee-jerk impulses to kill my tormented soul with bottles of beer or wine never ripened to fruition. I always returned soberly to what I believed to be the truth: that the only wise men and women of this world are humble, scientifically minded people who know that the Homo-sapient emotions of love, tolerance, acceptance, and forgiveness are the most important words in the human language.

     During these bouts of depression I'd rest, drink some water, have some food, and soon feel brighter, filled again with much hope and kindness for all people and the evolving earth upon which I lived.

     I suffer from mild hallucinations, brief panic attacks of demoralizing regret. My phantasmagoric world contains many misplaced memories of my younger years, lost dialogues of a thousand conversations I may or may not have ever had.

     When gripped by these bittersweet, melancholic thoughts—the constipated remembering's of all I've lost and everyone and everything I've left behind—I often, dig myself out of this pitiful, self-loathing state by playing chess. 

     Modern day computer chess has served me well. No longer does a computerized game mean challenging an electronic opponent only. Modern day computer chess now means going head-to-head against a real earthly inhabitant, someone else sitting at a table or desk, or just about anyplace else, with a laptop pinned between their knees.

     Being lost in it is what this old gringo likes most about chess, when my worrisome thoughts about what chores need doing or what problems require solving are for a short while totally rubbed out.

     Surfers talk a lot about disappearing on a wave, the instant all else in and of the world fade away, leaving only a shockingly fast, oncoming stream of exhilarating moments, one's complete melding into the perfectly thrilling now. In this way both surfing and chess are meditative, and this old gringo, who began playing chess in his mid-forties, is grateful for it.

     I had once more lost all the weight, in late middle age, which isn't an easy thing to do.  

     But a forty-year-old Cambodian girl broke my heart, and in a depressed state of emotional pain and weakness I high tailed it from the land of Khmer back to the island of Oahu, where a fourteen-day Covid-19 quarantine awaited my newly awesome, thin healthiness.

     But self-pity and I felt like blowing it again, so we in our tiny studio gorged for two weeks on double meals and triple snacks, every chubby bite delivered to our door via Safeway, Inc.  

     When I'd finished the lock-down, and a week later found myself a permanent room, I began getting pain in the backs of my shoulders. Simply deteriorating muscles, I thought. The shoulder pain of heart attack fame comes in the front of the shoulders, not the rear.

      I've had those aches on and off for a year.  

     A few weeks ago, my identical twin brother had a balloon and stents inserted into his sixty-two-year-old heart to fix major blockages in two arteries. Today, I better remembered the heart attack warning signs: pain in the shoulders or back, especially the backs of my shoulders!

     My cousin Rick experienced a widowmaker heart attack in 2016. His older brother John just a few years earlier had undergone triple bypass surgery to repair what a simple CT scan revealed. Getting the test is costly when paying by cash though, but insurance wise it's cheap as a co-pay.

     Cousin Rick had cash plus insurance, yet he neglected to test himself for those narrowing arteries. Voila. I have Medicare, 50k in the bank, and get 1k a month from social security; yet I too am refusing to get the checkup. Voila again? I thought Rick died in a stupid, avoidable way. Well, welcome to the club dummy!

     I'm much happier now though, as my little, electronic, human brain isn't sensing anything anymore. It's very pleasant here in this dark, silent place of scattered atoms. We're all waiting extremely patiently for new assignments, and we'll see you soon.

     I can't remember for the life of me what made us so mad at each other. But anger indiscriminately takes no prisoners, and on this particular flashback the first fuming had mostly to do with finding an apartment.

     It was 1979, give or take a year. We were barely 20 years old, at the most 21. We were good-looking, healthy, and full of so much promise.

     By healthy, I mean physically. Mentally we were both struggling, trying to find our footing, feeling lost and unsure of ourselves while dealing with perhaps the greatest setback of our lives: giving up the dream of playing college basketball.

     We were living in our hometown of San Diego, a city where for years young people from all over the country had made it their dream to live, but we were a long way from living our dream. I'm not sure why we felt like such castaways back then, at such a young age and with our whole lives ahead of us.

     But that's manic depression for you. By the time we turned 20, the claws of bipolar disorder were already deep in our respective buttocks. Oblivious to our knee-jerk compulsions, we soldiered on for many years as best we could, taking on the regrets and ramifications of our mistakes one by one.

     Somewhere between us living rent free together in the home of a gay model and his wife and infant child up in Irvine and moving into a one-bedroom apartment together on Ensenada Place in South Mission Beach, we'd gone looking for places to live in Ocean Beach.

     The details of this particular row are a bit hazy now. After looking at several rentals we suddenly got into a heated argument about which place to take. As I sit here trying to remember what happened my mind is going blank. I'm not sure exactly what set us off. All I can vaguely remember is us storming along the sidewalk on Niagra Avenue in downtown Ocean Beach absolutely livid with each other.

     I think we'd eaten at one of the breakfast places on Niagra in those days. The argument may have started over pancakes and eggs, but again, I'm not sure anymore. We screamed at each other with hurtful and hateful words springing from the deepest, darkest places of our disappointment and displacement in and from the world. It came from the anguish of not knowing our true calling in life.

     Of course, during these times we forgot about living our best lives in the moment and being grateful for every minute of our youth that we got to spend with each other.

     Needless to say, we ended up not getting a place together. At least not on that particular occasion. But there were other times we lived for short periods together in relative peace and harmony as roommates. They are now priceless moments in our brief life spans.

     Another time we got into a major imbroglio was at a breakfast place that our mom and dad used to take us to back in the early 70s called Mr. D's. Their special was two eggs, hash browns, choice of ham or sausage, and a buttermilk biscuit. All for 99 cents. And the biscuits were to die for.

     We went there many times with our family, and a few other times either with friends or each other. Again, in this instance, I don't remember what we were fighting about. Things got so heated Mars started spitting food out of his mouth.

     As I remember it, Mars usually got a lot more worked up than I did during our battles royal. Nine times out of ten I tended to get his goat a lot more than he got mine. But that's not something I'm proud of. On the contrary, it makes me wince, as Mars says, about how unable we both were to fully enjoy the warm fuzzies of being alive at such a young age together while here on planet Earth.

     One more mad at me story comes to mind. It was the time we decided to go live in Hawaii together, in the Fall of 1999. After leaving a job as a TV videographer in Texas, a gig that had lasted only a few months, I decided my next best move was moving to the Big Island to become a divemaster.

     My plan was to pay for the training needed to become a divemaster at a dive shop in Kailua-Kona and then work as a guide and crew member on one of the diving boats there. This dream of mine all came true, albeit in a warped and perhaps even pathetic way.

     After booking a flight from LAX to Hilo International, Mars and I stayed in a hotel above the Oceanside Harbor for one night before driving up the coastal route in a rental car. I started to write about this in a short story here, In No Particular Order, but have yet to finish the first chapter.

     We left a day before our scheduled flight and when we got to Laguana Beach we decided to hang out for an hour or two. It was the beginning of the end.

     We climbed over a long, forlorn sea wall and sat down on our beach towels in the deep white sand. It was roughly 11 am on a weekday morning and the wide, desolate beach was nearly deserted.

     I vaguely remember a sinking feeling of dispirited loneliness overcoming me as I took in the surrounding scene: an inviting yet unoccupied volleyball court, its taut net perfectly still in the warm, breezeless September air, and a trio of sexy young girls trapsing through the sand looking for a place to lay their beach towels and sunbathe.

     It felt like being caught in a crevasse of high anxiety and deep disillusionment, not to mention sexual longing and frustration, from which there was no place to crawl out. I was 40, maybe 41 years old, without a place to call home, falling into the abyss of my first midlife crisis.

     Sadly, we were each in our own separate, inconsolable worlds. We could no longer find solace in each other, in just being together, at an age when so much of our lives still lay ahead. And right there, while lounging free and unencumbered on that magnificent Southern California seashore, we began sliding into one of the worst falling outs of our lives.

     Of course, there would be a few more spats for us to navigate before we gave up quarreling for good.

     We left the beach and while driving the rest of way to LAX the subject of Mars wanting to smuggle half a pound of cheap Mexican weed onto the flight came up. I told him not to do it, but he was adamant. We got into it and by the time I parked the car in the Holiday Inn parking lot it was game over.

     When we got out of the rental, Mars was out of his mind, screaming at the top of his lungs and pounding his chest with his hands. Facing me from a few feet away, fists raised, he suddenly took a fighting stance against me.

     His violent outburst scared and horrified me at the same time. This was my identical twin brother, so mad at me he was ready to turn our verbal disagreement into a physical brawl.

     I backed off and retaliated with the silent treatment, which had been my tour de force against him over the years. I got my duffle bag out of the backseat and headed to the lobby to check in alone. It was one of the worst moments of my life. In shock and deeply wounded, my own anger, not to mention fear and loathing, took its ungodly toll upon my soul.

     I checked into a single room, while Mars called his wife at the time, Eva (mentioned in the Twinship Lasts a Lifetime section), who drove up to the hotel and took him back to San Diego.

     I flew to Hilo all by my lonesome. Gut wrenched, I made my next move like a wounded and desperate animal gone berserk, fighting and flighting at the same time, Hunter S. Thompson playbook in hand.

     From Hilo, the 200, aka the Senator Daniel K. Inouye Highway, cuts and curves through the middle of the Big Island past the Mauna Kea Ice Age Reserve and Mount Mauna Kea. It eventually connects with route 190, or the Mamalahoa Highway, and from there it's a straight shot down Hawaii Belt Road to Kailua-Kona, the Gold or Kohala Coast on the northwestern side of the island.

     I don't remember getting there, but I do recall staying in a somewhat cushy hotel room for the first few days. It was only three or four stars, but well-appointed and very close to the sea, somewhere along Alii Drive near the Coconut Grove Marketplace.

     Depressed to the point of isolation, I spent too much time in that comfy room, ordering delivery from restaurants in the area and overeating. I was feeling way too sad and out of sorts for a guy who'd landed smack-dab in the middle of paradise.

     Deep down, I knew I was living beyond my means. I was also jonesing for cocaine and methamphetamine, my drugs of choice when it came to my sexual addiction to pornography. I was one jolly-seeking son of a gun!

     I took my first swim in Kailua Bay down by the pier. The water was lovelier than I could've ever imagined. I also located the dive shop I'd be training with, Eco Adventures, in a small retail center next to the swimming pool of the King Kamehameha Kona Beach Hotel.

     I quickly found a relatively cheap place to live outside of town about 12 miles up Alii Drive near the town of Kealakekua. I rented a studio on a small coffee plantation owned by a single woman in her late 50s. The apartment was ground level but underneath the woman's house, along the side and at the back of her slanting property.

     The panoramic view was spectacular. From the sweeping lawn outside my room, it was nothing but 180 degrees of shimmering Pacific Ocean far below and beyond my very own Kona coffee and Koa tree wonderland.

     It was the perfect place for cane spiders. Scientifically speaking, cane spiders are termed Heteropoda venatoria, a species of spider in the Sparassidae family, called huntsman spiders.

     The main house was surrounded by either apple or Cuban red banana trees, and there were plenty of cane spiders that came with them. At first, the sheer size of this arachnid scared the bejesus out of me. In fact, cane spiders are the largest species in Hawaii and can grow up to 4-6 inches, legs included.

     The year was 1999 and Google had only been around for a year, so I didn't know how to Google the spider to find out how dangerous it might be. I also had no idea that cane spiders, also nicknamed large brown spiders, giant crab spiders, and even banana spiders, are commonly found inside homes and that some countries even consider them welcome houseguests.

     Rather than spinning webs to catch their prey, cane spiders hunt for food directly, eating mostly moths and butterflies but also indoor pests including ants, roaches, and silverfish. They inject their prey with venom containing the toxin HpTX2, a potassium channel blocker. Although not deadly to humans, their bites are said to be plenty painful.

     Based on the cane spider's behavior, I soon learned they prefer to run away rather than put up a fight and defend themselves. Unfortunately, my first reaction was to squash the terrifying creatures on sight, so I killed several of them before eventually just shooing the creepy crawlers out of my room with a soft bristled broom.

     Luckily, I never got bit by one. My landlady, a stout woman with short silver hair whose name I can't remember, told me to leave the spiders alone and they wouldn't bother me. She was right, but it still creeped me out every time I saw one crawling along the low pile carpet or across the walls and windowsills.

     The landowner was a nice lady who pretty much left me alone the whole time I lived there. I was only inside her house a couple of times, once to sign the month-to-month rental agreement and the second time to get my deposit back and say goodbye. I stayed in her studio for only two months before moving into an ocean view house on Alii Drive with another diver from the shop.

     While living up on the plantation I binged twice on my stimulants of choice. The first was a solo coke and porn party with two grams of decent blow, a fifth of Southern Comfort, and several porn videos I'd rented from an adult bookstore in town. The second was a meth and beer all-nighter with several other druggies I'd met in town.

     The back of my apartment was separated from another studio on the other side by a very thin wall with one crack in the corner closet big enough to see through. At first, I kept the volume on my Panasonic 9" TV/VCR combo on the low side, but eventually I was too fucked up to care and cranked up the sound a lot higher. I'm sure my neighbors heard the moans and groans of those sex scenes all night.

     The night I did coke, the studio on the other side of the plywood partition was occupied by a couple in their early 20s. The entrance to their studio was on the other side of the main house. I never actually spoke to either one of them, but I did see them coming and going from time to time. Occasionally I heard them talking in their apartment. Although they spoke in hushed, keep-your-voice-low-he-can-hear-us tones, it was almost like they were in the same room.

     The girl was a Polynesian hottie. Just the thought of her behind that drywall made me horny. I tried to peek through the crack in the closet a few times, but I never saw or heard any action between them.

     In the wee still hours of that morning, my young neighbors must've heard me snorting lines and jacking off, but I got lucky, and the cops were never called. By the time the sun came up I had only two terrible things to contend with: a guilty conscience for blowing the money and a horribly morbid coke hangover making me wonder in forlorn fashion what the fucking point of being alive even was.

     Scuba diving from a boat on the Kona Coast is out of this world.

     The owners of the dive shop, Dave and Elsa (like the lioness from the film Born Free) welcomed me with open pocketbooks. Dave was an American, tall and husky and fit as a fiftyish gym rat who could stand a little more cardio in his workouts. Elsa was Swedish, or maybe German, a petite, short-haired brunette in her mid-forties who spoke with a European accent.

     Dave and Elsa were good people and made a nice couple. They were living the dream, running their palmy scuba diving business in Kona Town from the Kailua Pier with all the gusto and panache of two wheeler-dealers in a money-making shark tank.

     My experience as a divemaster-in-training and then briefly as a boat-based dive leader was a guggle of mixed gas. I was well-trained and during my training Dave and Elsa gave me a part-time job at their main office and warehouse, where I cleaned and organized the place, ran errands, and filled up tanks for the morning dives. Later, they even gave me a chance to be part of their dive team. But my dream of working as a pro diver would get ripped to pieces by a cold-blooded shark of my own making.

     At first, while living up in my Kealakekua studio, things went fairly smoothly. Despite my constant mood swings and drug cravings I stayed relatively sane and sober, taking my scuba diving training in stride and for the most part enjoying the ride.

     Like most overthinking addicts I had good and bad days. But even on the good days I trudged along my road of hapless destiny with a gnawing sense of unsettling uncertainty nibbling at the back of my brain like pesky Tribbles on a twin trek to nowhere. There was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide; yet I kept fooling myself into thinking there was.

   On the bad days I'd stare woefully out the side kitchen windows of my ground-floor studio, beyond the lush, sloping green lawn at the back of the house to the distant rows and clusters of Koa trees towering high above the sea like mighty giants on perpetual watch of the dazzling body of water below.

     I missed my brother terribly. Sadly, my up-and-down solo days as a sad-sack worrywart made me a poster man-child for middle-aged loneliness and despair.

     On the good days I marched onward and upward, as high as the magnificent Koas, counting my lucky stars at every turn of my Professional Association of Diving Instructors adventure. Figuratively speaking, I had it made in the Koa shade. Despite the black holes in my psyche, my dream of becoming a professional divemaster seemed very much on track. I was having the time of my life. I just didn't know it yet.

     I soon found out that becoming a certified PADI divemaster is tremendous fun. I went on lots of amazing trips and dives, exploring underwater caves, jumping into the open sea with sleeping humpbacks and pods of massive, eye-peering pilot whales swimming pokily towards and then past me in the crystal blue-green water. I dove at night with the mantas and saw reef sharks, oceanic white tips, hammerheads, and even a few tigers. It was thrilling.

     I also learned about the science of diving, called dive theory, which involves the physics and physiology of recreational dive planning. The most important thing is knowing how not to get the bends. It took some time and effort, but I enjoyed studying for and passing this part of the training too.

     But the best part of scuba is the going out on the dive boat. I took countless trips out to sea, standing on the top deck of the vessel with other crew members and mingling with the customers as we cruised along the island's rocky volcanic shoreline to the best dive sites and coral reefs the Gold Coast had to offer.

     Once at the first dive site, everyone got into their wetsuits, geared up, and then plunged into the warm, welcoming ocean, giving perfunctory okay hand signs before sinking down to explore the fantastical, awe-inspiring oceanic world in the depths below. It was a blast. But picture-book Jacques Cousteau recreation doesn't come cheap.

     By the time I moved down to Alii drive I was feeling the pinch of my limited credit cards. I moved in with a fellow diver named Casey, who looked like he'd been cut by the same cloth as Jesus. He had long, stringy, shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes. His face was thin, his body wiry, and his smile big and heartwarming.

     During my first week on the island Casey had delivered a few pizzas to my hotel room. In addition to his part-time job as a delivery driver he also put in regular shifts at the dive shop's retail store in the Kona Square and worked whenever he could as a dive guide.

     I'd soon find out that only a few divers, including a retired cop named Gary, were given regular shifts on the morning dives. Casey did mostly night dives and maybe one or two morning dives a week. I'm not sure if he was a divemaster or not but most of the guides were.

     When Casey invited me to be his roommate on Alii Drive I jumped for joy. It didn't matter that my room was a doorless 5'x6' kitchen pantry that had been revamped into a bedroom refitted with a wall-to-wall scaffold used as a bedstead to hold a mattress for sleeping. I don't remember how much rent he asked me to pay, but it was dirt cheap for a sea view place right in Kona Town.

     This is about the same time I met another guy living his dream on the Big Island who worked in one of the small retail dive and snorkel shops right off Alii Drive somewhere in the vicinity of the Kona Marketplace.

     His name was Steve, who looked like a young Bert Reynolds, with short, coifed jet-black hair and dark brown eyes. He had an easy way about him, a down-to-earth composure, yet he also came across as a man's man with equal parts low-key cockiness and measured self-assurance. Steve was a natty charmer and as such a natural salesman. I liked him from the start.

     Eventually, we started hanging out together, which set me on course to yet another coke all-nighter, this time on New Year's Eve 2000, an off-the-wall night of debauchery that turned out to be one of the final dive knives in my foamed neoprene body bag.

     Gary, the retired police officer from Los Angeles, fit the type-A American hard ass mold to a tee. Pushing 60, the strikingly handsome and medium-built ex-cop stayed physically fit and strong for his age bullying through his golden years as a rough and tough Hairy Ape of a man, hard-eyed and calculating. But the gruff gorilla could turn on the charm, particularly when it came to getting what he wanted or needed. In my eyes Gary seemed mostly like a Bates Motel security guard: friendly on the outside, demented on the inside.

     Gary's stern and intimidating temperament both scared and puzzled me. I didn't understand his bossy and flinty disposition, the harshness in his I-couldn't-give-two-shits-about-you mentality, and it didn't take long before I saw him as my Big Island bête noire, a thorn in my side not to be trusted. Yet underneath his dick disputatiousness Gary was just another adventure-seeking senior citizen trying to press the very best out of life's freshly squeezed juices.

     While working as a gopher for the dive shop, I rode shotgun in the company truck with Gary a few times to pick up the Hawaiian rolls, cold cuts, and vegetable trays needed for the midmorning snack provided on the boat between dives. On our first food run to the local Safeway store, Gary pulled the truck into the nearly empty parking lot, parked near the entrance, and told me to wait.

     "Stay in the truck, I'll be right back," said Gary, stone-faced as a perfect stranger. He licked his brassy-haired chevron mustache and shut the door behind him. While waiting, a gentle drizzle began tapping the windshield of the old V-8 Chevy, and I noticed the light in the sky growing, unfolding somewhere between predawn and daybreak.

     We'd left the gym at 5:15 A.M., and it was now 5:27 A.M., so we now had 33 minutes to get the food, drive back down to the office/training room and storage facility, help load up the scuba tanks and gear into the rusty bed of the truck, and then get down to the dock by 6 A.M.

     Sunrise came a little past 6 A.M., and by that time all the tanks, gear, food, and water needed to be safely stowed on the double-decker vessel, and we were then free to begin greeting the day's customers.

     I have one or two funny stories about the schmoozing aspect of the job, which was tolerable enough, even fun at times in a meeting-new-people kind of way. It all depended on the sort of customers we got.

     Most of the divers were fun, happy-go-lucky folks hardwired to be social. They arrived at the dock jubilant and coolheaded, untroubled by whatever else was happening in their lives. They came as kindred spirits, gung-ho and ready to share their next scuba gest on the high seas with captain and crew.

     Some people on the dive list were the quieter types, divers who either needed or wanted to spend most of the trip lost in their own thoughts. And what better place to meditate and ponder life then with the warm sun on their shoulders, salty sea spray in their faces, and dolphins chasing the wake on a dive boat chugging along the Gold Coast of Hawaii's Big Island between some of the most spectacular coral reef dive sites on the planet?

     A few of the divers who climbed aboard were on the stodgy side, too smug and aloof for their own good, as though the entire emprise was all about them and their needs. They were rich snobs who saw the crew as worker bees providing a service which they had paid good money for. The two best ways to deal with these unpleasant fat cats were first to grin and bear them and then to kill them with kindness. Nothing too unbearable.

     On the intolerable side, I knew all the chin-wagging chitchat was just a make-believe part of the sale. Like most jobs in the travel and tourism industry, it was a soft-skill gabfest of insincerity, right down to the last you guys were amazing and let's definitely keep in touch.

     Beyond the sham artificiality, the expedition did have a deeper meaning. It was a passageway to the shared human experience of perfect strangers with a common interest spending a few gutsy hours together in the one of the most indelible and awe-inspiring of places under the most exhilarating and extraordinary of circumstances. It was, beyond a doubt, the perfect place for all diving souls on board to bucketize their bucket lists.

     There was a time when I thought being a scuba diving guide in Hawaii might be the right job for me. Gary seemed perfectly content with his position, and even made the job look easy. Wake up at dawn, go to the gym, get the food, load up the gear, head to the dock, go diving, have some snacks, go diving again, rinse off the masks, snorkels, and wetsuits, go back to the dock, return the gear to the storage unit, done by noon. What could be cooler than that?

      However, as I soon found out, Gary was on the inside track. He was Dave's supervisory right-hand man, a savvy diver, attractively machismo, and to the clients at least, charismatically palsy-walsy. This meant macho man Gary did less of the grunt work, had the best schedule, and got to dive more than anyone else. Like Dave, he did morning dives only, Monday to Friday, while the rest of the employees took their schedules and dives in pecking-order fashion.

     During my time with Eco Adventures, I was never employed as a divemaster or dive boat guide. I was a paying customer, going on the dives as part of my training. This included one night dive with the manta rays, one cave dive, and dozens of open water dives.

     While working as gofer at the main office, I once witnessed how brutally competitive the scuba diving job market in Hawaii could be. A young man, in his early twenties, came to the office one morning to talk to Dave about his schedule. I eavesdropped on their conversion from the upstairs storage room just above the roll up doors at the back of the building.

     "Why'd you take me off the schedule?" the young man queried.

     "We just don't have any spots for you right now," Dave, said matter-of-factly.

     "But why?" the young man pleaded. "I thought you were happy with my work."

     "You did okay, but we need people better at socializing with the customers, and we also think you're a little too young and inexperienced to be on the boat right now." Dave explained. "I'm sorry, but we gotta let you go."

     "Without any notice?" asked the young man, his voice strained and choked with frustration.

     Dave folded his beefy arms around his massive chest. He was a large man, at least 6'3" and 240 pounds. The kid didn't stand a chance.

     "This is your notice," said Dave. "I'm sorry, but it's just the way things go sometimes."

     "What about my pay?" the young man asked.

     "You can pick up your paycheck on Friday here at the office." Dave answered. Then, after a few beats he added, "Is there anything else?"

     The young man slowly turned around, head down, and solemnly walked away. He looked as dejected as a high school hoopster right after he finds out he hasn't made the final cut. The kid did look young for his age, but that's not the real reason Dave sacked him.

     Truth be told, two new female divers had rolled into town, friends of friends who were promised jobs before they arrived. They were a few years older than the young man, a bit more experienced, and as I soon found out, extremely cute and bubbly young women. Young and spirited, not to mention attractive, their breeze shooting would come in handy with the male divers.

     That was the Project Runway nature of the scuba diving business: one day you were in and the next day you were out. I would know because it also happened to me, except Dave had a much better reason to send me packing.