Libido Torpedo
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.
