As an irresponsible 17-year-old, Brian D. Bradley volunteers to spend two days living at the bottom of the ocean for a research study.

Brian Bradley started writing because he couldn’t draw. At first he wanted to be a poet, but he quickly discovered that poems are pretty difficult. Next, he tried dramatic stage plays, but the results were kind of embarrassing.  Finally, he gave up and started writing television for shows like MadTV, Scrubs and Happy Endings. He co-created for television Uncle Buck for ABC and is the writer/producer of a number of TV pilots he’s very proud to have been paid for, but that you will probably never see. He’s very pleased to have a chance to share a story for Story Collider and he still can’t draw.

This story originally aired on March 22, 2019 in an episode titled “Ocean Adventures.”

Story Transcript

Before I tell you my story about my one and only brush with actual real-life science and how I came to spend 48 hours with a very strange man in an underwater habitat, I need to let you know that I do not come off terrific in this story.  In fact, I’m a real turkey in it.  I make no excuses ahead of time but I thought I would give you a little context first so maybe you won’t think I’m such a turkey at the end. 

So what do you need to know?  Well, this story takes place in 1988.  Yeah.  Let me tell you about 1988, my friend. 

I was seventeen years old.  Ronald Reagan had been president since I was nine.  The Soviet Union was dead and, just like today, nobody could find Iraq on a map.  If you turned on the news you'd see a story of the Jamaican bobsled team and Kokomo was a legit radio hit.  What I’m trying to say to you is this was a very, very stupid and shallow era and I was a child of it.  Please bear that in mind. 

So I learned to scuba dive when I was fifteen years old.  The year before, my parents had moved us to Florida and my father had seen me go from a happy kid acting out, I kid you not, Kenny Rogers’ Gambler in my bedroom to a sullen kid listening to metal and just acting out.  He really was worried about me so he signed us up for scuba diving lessons. 

It almost worked.  I loved hanging out with my dad and I really love scuba diving but, unfortunately, by seventeen I had also become a very skilled drug user.  Mostly just like marijuana and mushrooms but I'd also really gotten into amphetamines in the form of prescription diet pills that I got from my brother who managed a Walgreens.  Yay, family! 

So that was the 1980s teenage stew I was swimming around in and it’s also the reason that when my friend Matt and I got the opportunity to spend 48 hours in an underwater habitat helping the Canadian Navy to recalibrate the dive tables, I didn’t say, “Adventure in science!”  I said, “Rad place to party, bro!” 

So we gathered up all of our diving equipment and all of the speed and we drove down to Key Largo, to a marine research center down there that operated one of these underwater aquatic habitats, this one a 1960-zero model, and it was going to be great.  We were going to spend 48 hours underwater and then we’d spend another 24 hours topside where a Canadian naval officer would use a Doppler machine to count the individual bubbles of dissolved gasses in our blood stream.  This was in order to help correct the dive tables which were the calculations that scuba divers use to tell them how long they can stay at depth without getting decompression sickness, a.k.a. the bends. 

It’s very, very important work.  Thank God they had two 17-year-old hashers high on speed racing down in my mom’s convertible Mustang to help them out. 

When we got there, we were very stoked and very stoned and things went pear-shaped almost immediately because we were told that we were not going to be alone in this habitat.  In our anxiousness to get kind of crunk under the waves, we had somehow missed the fact that this was like a three-person operation.  So we were going to have a roommate down there and that roommate was a 50-year-old man from Long Island named Joe. 

Let me tell you about Joe.  Joe had answered an ad in the Key West newspaper to put himself into this study.  He's not what you would call an adventurous man.  He was short and squat and very, very nervous.  During a simple scuba proficiency test at about three feet of water, he tripped on a mangrove root, fell face forward into the lagoon sending all of his unsecured gear floating off in all directions.  It sort of told us that should this habitat flood in the middle of the night, Joe was not going to be a lot of help.  But then again we were high on speed so que sera, sera. 

Anyway, we dove down to the habitat on scuba and it came into view.  This was about an 18-foot steel, pill-shaped structure floating in about 30 feet of water in this murky mangrove lagoon.  In the distance, you could just see the shapes of these mangrove snappers which are large, scary predator fish with lots of gnarly teeth.  They were super scary but they were also very metal.  I was pretty into it.  It was pretty cool. 

The way that you entered the habitat is through up underneath the habitat there's something called a moon pool.  When you come up into it, we got to see where we’d be sleeping.  It was basically a dorm room under the sea.  There were three little bunks.  There was a galley kitchen and a marine chemical toilet for your business and then there was a hatch that you could open up in the floor and climb down this little tube.  At the bottom if it, suspended underneath the habitat, was a plexi glass observation sphere that you could sit in.  It was really, really rad. 

We were super excited to go diving.  We had been told we could dive nonstop for the first day and night but they told us we needed to wait because they had to bring all of our stuff down to us. 

Now, because it’s underwater a bellboy doesn’t bring your luggage.  Instead, a diver brings your sundries down in something called a dry pod, which is a sealed container.  Since they only have one of these dry pods they had to bring them down one at a time and so we had some time to sit around with Joe and we learned about his life. 

Joe had worked for Pan Am Airlines until he had gotten into a dispute with the union.  Then he won a court case and then some very scary dudes came to his house and said, “You should leave New York permanently.” 

He did.  He took his windfall.  He moved to Florida, he bought a boat and was living on it.  So it was kind of weird but also pretty cool. 

The scary part came when Joe’s dry pod arrived.  So inside of the dry pod was of course his toothbrush and change of clothes but also in there were about six or seven library books all of them chillingly about sharks.  Kind of a strange thing to bring to an underwater house. 

We asked him like, “Are you afraid of sharks?” 

And he said, “No, I’m not afraid of them.  I’m apprehensive of them certainly.  They're nature’s greatest predator.  They can kill you from below.” 

Okay.  Maybe it was a good thing we weren’t going to be able to sleep tonight.  You know what I mean? 

So we decided it was a good time to go diving and that’s exactly what we did.  One of the cool things about this habitat is that you didn’t need a tank to go diving.  It was complete with a Hookah System which is a long hose that you can use for unlimited air.  That’s exactly what we did.  For the next few hours, Matt and I would pop some speed, go out, go around the lagoon a little bit, come back, pop some more speed, go do the same thing. 

But that is not what Joe did.  Joe did not dive at all.  Instead, what he did was sit in his bunk in his comfy sweats and read his shark books. 

Let me just recap here very quickly.  We were stuck in a metal tube 30 feet underwater with a 50-year-old drifter who was afraid of sharks and was kind of running from the mob.  That was weird to us.  And because amphetamines make you chatty, we wanted to talk about it a lot.  But there's no way to talk about it there because there's no privacy so we went down into that observation sphere to talk. 

So we’re down in there and we’re chatting and, I mean, we are high on drugs.  I mean we are really going at it.  We’re talking shit about this real-life SNL character that’s up there.  We’re having a good time.  We’re laughing.  It was really awesome, or it would have been if that thing had been soundproof at all.  But of course it was not. 

And so when we came back up into the habitat we could see that Joe had heard every word we had said.  I felt really, really bad but we thought, “Well, this has gone from weird to weirder.  Maybe we should go for another dive.” 

So we started to get into our gear.  It was dead silent in there.  And I said to him, “Hey, man, do you want to come with us?” 

He's like, “No.  I think I'll just slow you fellas down.” 

Well, out we went into the lagoon and at night it was an amazing thing.  The whole thing came alive.  Every hard surface, the rock, the habitat, everything was covered in this bioluminescent tube worms that just glowed with the moonlight and when we’d shine our light on them.  Then if you ran your hand across them they'd retreat into their little holes and it would leave a dark space, so you could like write your name in tube worms. 

Or if you're a couple of 17-year-old metal heads from Boynton Beach, a pentagram and a dick and balls, which is what we did.  I told you I don't come off great. 

After about an hour of this, we started to get pretty cold and it’s time to go back in.  We come up to the moon pool but there is a problem because the opening, the entrance into the habitat is now crowded with about seven or eight of those mangrove snappers that I was telling you about before, the big and the scary and all that. 

Things had gone from metal to life threatening very quickly because we could not swim through that school of fish because if even one of them kind of struck at bait and accidentally hit us, that would be a disaster.  So we just floated there panicking, wondering why they were hanging out there. 

Until we finally figured out that if we took our regulator, which is the part that you breathe with, the piece of equipment that you breathe with, and you clear it, a column of bubbles will go up through the fish and would startle the fish away, just for a moment, so that we could swim through that fish-free window and get back into the habitat, which is what we did in a hurry. 

When we got inside, the mystery of the fish was solved because there was Joe, sitting on that chemical toilet and he was fishing with some kite string and a bread tie that he fashioned into a hook and baited with a Kraft American single.  He was trying to catch these very powerful predator fish with cheese and kite string, which is of course impossible and also insane. 

He didn’t mean it, of course.  He apologized profusely.  We know he didn’t mean to hurt us.  But I will tell you that as we were up all night unable to sleep because of these pills, he was over there just snoring and smiling.  I really felt, I think, the scales have been balanced here.  We were absolute jerks to him and he kind of tried to kill us, so that’s a wash right there. 

So this is the big insight moment, and I thought I knew what the insight would be at this because I'd been going out to dinner on this story for a long time.  I thought it was about the stupidity of youth and adventure and that Matt and I were the flawed heroes and Joe the rube, but now I really do not know if that’s true anymore, because now I’m 46 years old.  I wear my dancing shirt with a cardigan. 

I’m just about as old as Joe was in that story, you know what, and just like him I find myself full of fears these days.  Fear of everything, fear of that little pain in my neck.  What is that thing?  Fear of spiders and strangers on my street.  I’m afraid to drink the grapefruit LaCroix because I think it will fuck up my Lipitor or something like that.  I’m afraid of losing my relevance now as I get a little older, especially in the entertainment business. 

And I'll tell you what I’m really afraid of these days.  I’m really afraid of losing the people that I love.  If someone came to me right now and they said, “You want to spend 48 hours in an underwater habitat,” I do not know what I would say.  I cannot tell you what I would do. 

But Joe did.  Joe knew.  He put all his fears and all his doubts in that dry pod, he took them down there to that habitat and, no, he did not go diving one time while he was there, but he was there.  And he said yes to that.  He kept saying yes to that.  That’s why Joe is the hero of this story. 

My insight is this.  My insight is that the facts of our stories remain the same but, as we grow older, as we evolve, their meaning can really profoundly change. 

I just want to say this.  Joe, I’m really, really sorry that we were turkeys to you.  I want to let you know, Joe, wherever you are, that as I kind of swim through the murky waters of middle age, you are an inspiration to me, sir.  And these devil horns are for you.