Editor’s note, this was transcribed from the opposite side of the cassette tape from the previous interview, this one was apparently between Dr. Cassandra St. Clair and Consuela, as written on the cassette tape. Like the previous interview, the tape recorder could pick up only one voice, the other was muffled. Unfortunately, we are not familiar enough with the vocal patterns to know who is speaking here, either Cassandra or Consuela, they have a relatively similar voice, and we don’t know enough of their histories to know who is who here. We have denoted the nonaudible sections with ellipses. This interview was apparently taken about a year after the Stumpy Lefkowitz interview, or parhaps a bit longer, and apparently with the same cassette recorder, the Realistic MiniSette-20.
They make them sound like those drinks fell from heaven. I can tell you see, nobody on a frigate actually asks for an non-alcoholic drink. They drink them because they actually believe that the nutritional supplements are going to give them a more efficient torch hand. I was the only female welder in that whole crew. And I was there because Dogtown was banging the owner, he gave her the world that I was as good a welder as any of the men. I was, but the reality is that I was a female working conditions that were optimized for me. I have different respiration, different balance and body mass distribution, I have different perceptions because I’m a female … Yes, these young kids come in, they’ve been diving maybe five years, and their joints are fresh, they’re usually in good shape. It took me eight years of diving as a scientist before I could get a welding gig. … It was never science …. no, it was never science, I know that I’m supposed to be interested in science, and females in STEM and all that, they must have interviewed me twenty times for these teen magazines to show that girls can become marine biologists. … Yeah, but it wasn’t a cliche back then, it was this unstoppable reality, all these teenage girls went from wanting to be professional pony trainers to wanting to be marine biologists, and it happened overnight. I must have been at least partly responsible for that. … I didn’t lie to the interviews about my orientation. And my thing wasn’t some kind of secret. I was clear to every academic team I worked that I was just doing this until I could get my commercial diving career together … It was the machines and the welding for me. Sitting on some coral with a rebreather making notes about fish, I get it, I know it’s important, but it never meant anything to me, except that I wanted to hit 200 total dive hours on the rebreather. We used the rebreathers because we supposedly pulled more accurate data when we didn’t have the stream of bubbles rising from regular SCUBA gear. And when I got into United Crushing, I was the only commercial diver they had with more than five hours on the rebreathers. I had two hundred hours on them … But that was why I did academia for eight years, I needed lots of shallow water dive time. I don’t mind deeper water and rougher conditions, but it’s hard on your body to do those deeper dives. Some of these kids come in with a couple years experience, they use up their joint and their bodies doing a few seasons of deep water dives, and then they’re mostly done. They’re out the business, but my expertise was always the underwater heavy equipment. I rebuilt pumps underwater, I was their only diver could do that. Some of these boys looked at me with an air chisel, breaking off corroded nuts and bolts, they think I’m some kind of superhero. But that’s just what I did back then, I worked on machines. I had been doing that since I as maybe six years old, I went with Daddy, he bought me cream sodas and Whatchamacallits, and I got to stay with him while he worked. As long as I didn’t get any of my dresses greasy, he didn’t care, because momma never found out.
That was my life for those years though, just sitting on my ass underwater taking notes about fish and shit. I got it, it helped the environment and the bioversity and all that, but that wasn’t where my head was. I even pitched my own research to get data from fish interaction with artificial reefs made from sunken heavy equipment. I didn’t really care about the fish, I wanted to get down there and get an idea of how quickly equipment corrodes when it no longer gets anti-corrosion work. They actually liked the idea, but then some asshole puts some other female marine biologist diver on that one. He knew I was into the machinery, but he just wanted to drive me out of the university, because he knew the sunken heavy equipment thing was all me … he was just a skinny little guy, he never worked around heavy equipment, he barely knew how to dive. He drove an electric car, and they weren’t that common back then. So you can see why he probably thought of me as a thread. I’m a girl, I know more about that research than he does … Oh, sorry, are we starting this thing. Has it been recording all this time? … I can do it now.
Okay, the Rebender, that wasn’t the big deal they claim it was, it was jut a variation on their before-dive drinks and after-dive drinks … a third one? … There were probably ten of them. And the divers knew how to drink before a dive. Not all of them did it, maybe only two of them … The Rebender was non-alcoholic, it was a sanctioned drink, but it was created by necessity. Stumpy and Rick had this whole complex bullsh … Dogtown? … Dogtown was banging the owner’s ex-wife, I’m not even sure if he was the frigate. I can’t remember, but he definitely wasn’t part of that drink nonsense. It was Stumpy and Rick, those two assholes think their farts smell like apple blossoms … the Rebender was mine, did either of those dipshits claim that they invented it? … Ok good, no, it was mine … the second one, the economic necessity thing you said … But Rick and Stumpy were both drunk most of the time, I once saw Rick pushing Stumpy across the deck in some pretty high seas, they’re doing some kind of bobsled thing with a deck cart. They were both maniacs when sober, and they were a danger to themselves when they were drunk, which was most of the time … well I could handle Stumpy, at least he could be reasoned with. But Rick was just a mess. He was a happy drunk at least. What a miserable cuss when he was sober though, he sooked around, that long face like some homeless horse, he was a romantic, he was a mess. But Stumpy, he and I used to get high on the stern when the weather was good … it was mostly the smell, it used to mix enough with the smell of the bunker that they didn’t know we smoked weed back there … maybe they knew, but they didn’t say anything to us.
What did they say about the Rebender? … Okay … Okay … Right, they probably didn’t even know it existed … probably, maybe, two to one … I think the taste just worked better with rum and whisky and that was most the divers liked … wait, no that was before a dive. After the dive you mean? … Every diver except for maybe two, one was a recovering alcoholic, he did his AA meetings over the shortwave, poor guy. And Danny, I’m not sure, he was a good diver, never drank. We used to say he was an Kuwaiti spy, I think that’s why he didn’t drink, it was the Muslim thing … I don’t know when you saw him, but he didn’t drink on the frigate, I would have remembered that. You remember the guys you decompress with … So yeah, after the dive then … he got that part right, they had a big box of those Raspberry Lemonade Natural Calm envelopes, they couldn’t use them for the Dirty Dishwaters, because the taste screwed up the coconut water they used … yeah, Coco Frio, I forgot about that … right, they couldn’t use them for the Unbenders, because that drink was the Emergen-C packets. I had this box full of the Raspberry Lemonade Natural Calms, I just started fucking around to see what I could do with them. I wasn’t really a believeer in the supplements. But they did help stabilize my moods, it was a tough time for me, my period always seemed to come right when I was scheduled for a dive, and then I was depressed about breaking up with my partner, she moved on when I was deployed, but there was nothing I could do, we couldn’t do that work in hurricane season … she wanted me to give up ocean work and just do inland work … that’s things like fixing broken docks, flood control valves, things like that. It’s not really the cakewalk people think it is. I had one of the closest calls with death that I’ve ever had as a professional diver and it was two thousand miles away from the Atlantic. We got a call for some valve work on a flood control reservoir, and of course, I’m right on top of that, that’s my bread and butter. But inland diving, it’s murky and it’s dark. I had to step through these access gates, about thirty feet down or so, but it’s dark, the spec made it sound like I could just step through, but I get down there, it’s actually really tight. And I figured “okay, they sent me down here because I’m the thinnest, even with my gear, I just need to get this thing done.” So I worm my way through, I took care of the gate, and then I go to squeeze back through the corrosion had kind of made a barb, going in the direction of the water flow. It’s cold, it’s dark, I’m running out of air, and I can’t get through this grate. I started swinging my light, my spotter was supposed to have eyes on me, I get nothing back. Just dark. It turns out he was thirty yards East and he didn’t even see me. I look at this mess, and I could feel death, it was right there, slow motion, running out of air, stuck behind a grate, But it was only about thirty feet. I burned through maybe ten minutes just trying to figure out why it was so easy to get in and so hard to get out. I took off my gear, down to the wetsuit, and even that is catching on the corrosion spikes. I pull a couple big breaths, and I just dived through that gate, I heard the wetsuit pulling on the growths, but at that point I realized that I’m not getting out unless I really push and I couldn’t do that tethered to whatever was left in my tank. So I drop that, and just muscle the fuck out of there, it was like having sex with a cactus. then I’m out, and I have to surface the thirty … no Pony bottle … I didn’t even bother to take it with me on that dive, it was supposed to be an in-and-out … I surface the thirty, my spotters still down there, I saw Jesse in a Bayliner maybe only twenty feet from where I surfaced, he’s freaking out because I didn’t have the marker rope, he figured I died down there. So then I yelled over to pull up the spotter, he was probably rummaging around down there looking for me. The spotter comes up, I barely inhale two words about getting stuck behind this grate, and Jesse starts screaming at me about the company SCUBA rig. I didn’t say another word, I had more than enough of his bullshit, I grabbed a tank and a regulator from the rack, I jumped down there, grabbed the gear from the other side of the grate, pulled it through, brought it up … it had to come up because we can’t leave gear inside of an active race. But then I pull the gear up, toss it on the deck and Jesse finally shuts the fuck up.
Where were we? … okay, yeah, I didn’t like inland diving. It’s working blind, it’s not for me. I still don’t like it. But I had this woman who wanted me to be with her for all her garden parties and her friends all adopting kids, it just wasn’t my scene. I ended up getting knocked up a few years ago, nice guy, I was ready to do the mommy thing, but it didn’t happen … about four months … it wasn’t easy, lots of hormonal issues with a miscarriage, but that’s life. I’m old for a commercial diver, but I’m not even thirty yet, I can still have kids … sorry, the Raspberry Lemonde ones, right? … I had this box of nothing but the Cherry ones and the Raspberry Lemonade ones. I’m not a professional bartender like Stumpy and Rick, but I can mix a drink, it’s not underwater walking hard, it’s just mix it, fix it. So I do their martini shaker method with crushed ice, and club soda, and one packet, then pour about two-thirds of the way and add Pepsi to the top … Yeah! I used Pepsi because that’s what they had on Crushing … bullshit, that was Stumpy who told you that right? … because he told that same load of bullshit to me. He didn’t try a hundred different mixers. He used Pepsi because that’s what we had in the bar, lots of Pepsi, we had to use what we had … it’s not an Unbender because it doesn’t have an Emergen-C, it has a Natural Calm instead.
That’s why it was the Rebender, these divers come back, they all had the shits from the magnesium, and they needed to get shiftfucked. Crushing didn’t care, as long as it was after the diver and not before. So I did a nonalcoholic with the Raspberry-Lemonade packets, and those worked with rum and whiskey. The guys all liked it. I drank a lot of them. I could get enough for about five drinks out of one packet. And we had hundreds of those packets. Maybe thousands of them … the Cherry ones were fine, we used those a lot, they went with the Pepsi. So that’s it, the tape is still turning, so it recorded all this … what’s tha … she supposedly left it for me in one of your interoffice envelope mailers … did you check Tucker’s desk?
