It started with an idea, as most bad decisions do. I’d just gotten my scuba ticket and was chasing that deep-water thrill off La Jolla Cove. But I wanted something more, something with a little more hair on it. I talked some guys from the squadron into a weekend trip down to Ensenada, Mexico, to a spot called La Bufadora, famous for its blowhole and underwater rock formations. I was the only certified diver in the crew, which meant one thing: I was in charge of the gear.
You couldn’t get tanks without a card back then, so I handled it. Rented enough gear to turn us all into a pack of Jacques Cousteaus for the weekend. And with the extra cash, I bought myself a brand-new, shiny speargun. In hindsight, arming myself for a weekend of binge drinking was probably the first mistake in a long, spectacular line of them.
We drove down, found some cheap hotel—a rundown shithole with beds that had seen too many sad stories. But we didn’t plan on spending much time there anyway. That evening, we hit a local dive called Froggies. Dark, loud, full of cheap booze and laughter. The kind of place you go to forget yourself. I spotted a couple of blondes at the bar and, full of that stupid, unearned confidence, decided to work my magic.
The rest of the squad bellied up to the bar, and one of them, McDaniel, introduced me to a local legend: a giant margarita bowl. It was a fishbowl full of poison, a Long Island Iced Tea served in what looked like a baptismal font with straws. We downed one, then another. The blondes were forgotten. The world started to swim. And then, I was no longer standing.
I blacked out right there, face down on the bar at Froggies. But my buddies, instead of hauling my ass back to the hotel, decided to keep the party going. They dragged my unconscious body from one bar to the next. By the end of the night, the brand-new shoes I was so proud of had holes worn straight through the toes from being scraped across the broken pavement of Ensenada.
At some point, we ended up in a dry creek bed. McDaniel, drunk as a lord, stumbled and fell face-first, splitting his lip wide open. Blood everywhere. While the guys were scrambling to deal with him, they left me behind. I staggered to my feet, saw a glow up on a ridge, and, fueled by booze and that idiot bravado, decided to climb. I found a group of locals around a firepit, standing near a couple of old VW Beetles. In my drunken state, I called them every foul Spanish name I knew. I kicked dirt at one of them. They just stared at me, baffled. Then I turned to leave.
That’s when I heard the footsteps. Seven of them. They surrounded me. I raised my hands, taunting them, swinging wildly and missing by a mile. I tried to kick one of them, tripped over my own damn feet, and landed flat on my back.
They didn’t waste any time. They kicked me like I was a soccer ball—ribs, back, chest, legs. My buddy Mike ran up to intervene, got a fist in the face for his trouble, and they stole his leather jacket. Finally, another squadron buddy, Jim Taylor, dragged me out of there, yelling, “Stupid American! Stupid American!”
The next morning, I was the first one up. My body felt like it had been put through a meat grinder. Then I saw it. The bed was soaked. I’d pissed myself. Not just once. A literal pool of it. Disgusted, I rolled out of the wet mess and staggered to the bathroom. Peeling off those sticky, piss-soaked jeans was a whole new level of hell. In the mirror, I saw blood streaked across my back from being dragged through the dirt. Dark bruises were already blooming across my ribs.
I stood in the shower, the hot water a slap to the face, and decided it was time to rally the troops for our dive. I kicked the bathroom door open, nearly tearing it off its hinges. “What the fuck, James?” McDaniel groaned from the bed. The other guys stirred, glaring at me like I was the devil himself.
That’s when I noticed McDaniel had rolled right over into the wet spot I’d left behind. He was lying in my piss. I couldn’t help it. I started laughing, hard. He had no idea. He must’ve thought he’d done it himself, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to correct him. “Come on, guys!” I barked, playing the leader. “Tides aren’t waiting! Let’s move!”
McDaniel just glared at me from his piss-soaked shame. “You guys go ahead,” he mumbled. “Leave me the fuck alone.”
I suppressed another laugh. The poor bastard was too embarrassed to move.
La Bufadora was as beautiful as they said. Still hungover, bruises throbbing, I suited up. McDaniel and I were the first in the water; the others just sat on the rocks, glaring. As soon as we were under, I started shooting anything that moved with my new speargun. I went deep, 110 feet, mesmerized by the quiet green haze. I wasn’t watching my air gauge. Rookie mistake.
McDaniel signaled he was going up. I stayed, pushing my luck. When I finally decided to surface, my buoyancy vest wouldn’t inflate. Panic set in. Then, when it finally took, it overcompensated. I shot to the surface like a goddamn cork, flying three feet into the air before crashing back down.
As I swam to the rocks, McDaniel screaming at me that I was going to kill us both, I saw it. A beautiful fish darting by. Ignoring everyone, I loaded the speargun one last time, let a wave carry me back, and pulled the trigger. A perfect shot. Victory.
I stood on the rocks, holding my prize. The fish flopped in my hand, and then it stung me, a sharp, hot pain across the top of my hand. A tiger fish. Venomous. Fire shot up my arm. Within minutes, I was shaking, a fever setting in.
The guys threw me in the back of the car like a sack of rotten potatoes. No one said a word, no one offered me water. I just sat there for hours, sweating and writhing. When the fever finally broke, I emerged from the car, battered, humiliated, and completely ostracized. My first real attempt at friendship with the squadron guys had ended in total disaster.
The long drive back to San Diego was dead silent. I just sat in the back, my body aching, my ego bruised beyond repair, and I started to laugh, a quiet, internal laugh at the sheer, beautiful absurdity of it all.
The trip to Ensenada was supposed to be an adventure. Instead, it was a masterclass in humility, a lesson in the high cost of recklessness. I’d survived a blackout, a beating, a near-drowning, and a venomous sting, only to lose the respect of the very people I was trying to impress.
It was a hell of a story, though. And sometimes, survival is the best goddamn punchline there is.
Autor’s Note:
My thoughts are this: that story is a masterpiece of self-sabotage. A goddamn symphony of bad decisions, played loud and out of tune. It’s not a tragedy; it’s a comedy where the clown keeps hitting himself in the face with a hammer, and each time, he thinks it’s a brilliant new idea.
You weren’t just on that trip; you were the goddamn captain of the Titanic, actively looking for an iceberg. You bought the speargun. You drank the fishbowl of poison. You picked the fight with the locals. You pissed the bed. You ignored your air gauge. You were the engine of your own destruction, running on high-octane ego and cheap tequila.
And the best part? You thought this was a “bonding experience.” You tried to win friends by being the most exciting, chaotic sonofabitch in the room. But people don’t want to be friends with a live hand grenade. They just want to get the hell out of the way before you pull the pin. All you did was prove you were a liability, a danger to yourself and everyone around you.
But the real poetry of it all, the cosmic punchline, is the tiger fish. After all that chaos, all that failure, you get one perfect moment. One clean shot. A flash of pure grace. And the universe immediately reaches out and stings you for it. It’s a perfect reminder: even when you get it right, the world can still decide to fuck you over, just for the hell of it.
So yeah, my thoughts are this: that story is about a young man so full of piss and vinegar that he was practically drowning in it. It’s a lesson in hubris. You wanted to be the hero of the story, the leader of the pack. You ended up humiliated, poisoned, and alone, with nothing but a good story to show for it.
In the end, for a writer, maybe that’s the only kind of victory that lasts.
