There’s a scene in the movie Boondock Saints when Willem Dafoe, who plays an FBI agent, is standing in the middle of a neighborhood where a gun fight happened. It’s a crime scene. There’s carnage everywhere. Dafoe, or Agent Paul Smecker, plays back to all the forensics guys and others what he thinks took place in an attempt to solve this case. All the bodies are resurrected and bloodless and shooting at each other again in this scene. There’s church choirs in the background. It’s kind of beautiful.
I don’t know why exactly, but I picture the day I nearly drowned in some similar dramatic way. Crawling around the bottom of a pool in a square in scuba gear. Instructors gliding down to rip my mask off. Ripping my mask off. Motioning with their blurry index and middle fingers that I keep on crawling in tandem with my classmates. The rest to be certain is on the way. How this is all accompanied with some soft violins is really a foregone conclusion.
The violins grow a little more lugubrious. These same instructors from earlier swoop down now instead of glide. Their purpose is to rip everything off of me starting with my air. They have however many seconds to try and take my gear from me. My weight belt. My harness. My tank. They flip me over like they’re breading me for the deep fryer and don’t want to miss a spot. I can’t do anything about it. Wrestle them. Grab ‘em by the balls. I want to. But I just have to take it. There’s nothing fair about this week. Don’t panic. It’s about that and only that. They want you to panic.
I don’t panic. Time’s up on my “hard hit,” hell yeah. Master Chief hits me again on the ascent (is later chewed out by the command for it) bails to the surface and I’m left to recover. I still have all my stuff with me. All I have to do is sit Indian style, plop my harness and tank between my legs, unfuck the air line from the manifold. In hard hits they wrap your line around the manifold, maybe throw a half hitch for good measure. Like that’s ever gonna happen. It’s to see if you panic.
I don’t panic all right. I don’t assume the position, either. I’m pretty relaxed. I’m very relaxed. Like Aqua-Man relaxed.
There’s a little dive physics under my weight belt at this early stage in the program, or a few weeks worth. These physics are trusty and reliable and a lot of bad shit had to happen to a lot of people for there to be tables and laws and everything else dive physics. I’m told Hitler is to thank for the tables. Yikes. It’s hard to remember all of the associated laws now except for the one that got me in trouble for not abiding by it. Skip breathing. Don’t do it.
It’s all too common, though, while you’re crawling around in a square in the deep end in scuba gear, waiting for an instructor to bullet down and rip the rest of your shit off, to skip breathe. Inhale. Hold longer than usual. Exhale. You do this little cheat in the hopes of getting hit with a full gulp of air versus the alternative. Because get hit on the exhale, which instructors were not allowed to do, and it feels like forever before you’re allowed to recover and put the air back in your mouth. You’re more liable to panic.
Skip breathe enough, though, and your body might actually trick itself into thinking it doesn’t need air. Instructors bullet down, rip the regulator out, flip you over a bunch of times like they’re breading you violently, who fucking cares; I’m Aqua Man, bitches.
Except I really wasn’t. I was in deep shit at twelve feet of water and I needed air.
When the instructor put the regulator back in my mouth a second time, I spat it out.
(Violins and church organs and choir)
There’s loud bells, too, like the ones at recess. Naval personnel bolting out of every classroom. Others knifing down now to where my limp ass is. Trying again to put the regulator in my mouth while they knife back up with me in tow. I’m blue. I can still hear one of my classmate-homies: “Dude, like ffffucking blue.”
I’m handed over to a corpsman. The organs and the violins heighten to a crescendo. It’s the era of gloves and barrier masks. The corpsman does neither though. He goes to work on me old school. I don’t know why to this day. I come to, though. I look at his heavy breathing mug. The music stops.
You don’t have AIDS, do you? he says.
The fuck?
I’d bitten my tongue hard in the commotion. Bad.
It was kind of beautiful.
Things Men Carry 