Letter from Bonaire to Gaspé, Québec. Between two buddies. February 1990.
The following is a letter from my best friend, Eduardo Augusto Roussy. A legend. Back in younger days we both sought big adventure. This was before texts, email, GPS, social media, instant and constant communication. He was working as a scuba-diving instructor in the Dutch Virgin Islands. I was cutting my teeth as a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Gaspé, Québec. The week between Thanksgiving and right about now is kinda my own holy week, like Rosh Hashana, Ramadan and Easter all rolled into one glob of mythology. He was swept through the sluice of a dam in Crabtree, Quebec in October 1993. I have written extensively and obsessively about this friendship. But to truly appreciate this special genius, here is his voice resurrected, in his own words, from one of our many letters of correspondence, dug out of the old shoebox. The photo above is the hovel that was his home in Bonaire, 1990.
Hey Mike ‘The Grizz’ Foster,
It’s Feb. 14. Happy Valentine you goat man. You want to know what’s new?
I have turned in my resignation and guess what buddy, I’m coming home (home is where the good bed and good food is).
I had to stop writing there for a bit. I sat up and almost puked my guts out. I’m nursing a hell of a hangover. It’s one of those hangovers where you wake up with pains you have no idea how you got.
I also have two fucking ugly blisters from passing the manhood test of putting out cigarettes on yourself.
I don’t smoke and the guys I hang out with don’t either but we borrow from people at the bar.
I have one on the back of my hand and one on my fucking ear. Bored children will do crazy things. I ate a flower at a bar once.
One of my co-workers is an ex-Dutch marine (crazier than shit). He ate one and I decided it was a good idea to do the same.
I was burping up rose or carnation or whatever the hell it was for the rest of the next day.
One thing I didn’t do was punch a stack of roof shingles to try to break them. The other dude I hang out with is an ex-Dutch para commando and martial arts expert.
He did it. The marine did it. But I said fuck it. In Tortola I punched a telephone pole and it hurt like hell.
So anyways I received your latest Gaspésian letter yesterday. Oh yeah! Reasons for going back and when.
Boredom has taken its toll. I have very nicely crashed and burned. The booze, the sun (not so much the sun) and the ditzy broads have fried me. The para commando dude (the man is a real stud. His wife is a babe and the dames go for him like crazy) said, “Women are for a couple of days, pals are forever.”
Not particularly awe-inspiring but it does hold a certain degree of truth. Time to go back and take a rest.
#2. Jane*. Last week I was sitting in the dive shop. For about two weeks I was trying to make up my mind as to whether I’d stay or go. I was sitting there balancing on the edge thinking about Jane when RRRRIng!, the phone rang and it was her.
Talking to her put me over the edge like a runaway 18-wheeler. Remember on the tape I sent I said if things were the same when I returned to Canada as they are now then my next stop would be Britain. Well, they are and I’m going.
People have told me I’ll (sic. Bless ‘im) probably won’t be able to stand her when I see her again or that it was probably just a Caribbean fling. Maybe they are right. Who knows? But it would be shame not to find out.
I also want to go to Britain to take British Sub-Aqua Club courses. With the eventual goal of becoming an instructor. They do real hardcore diving. Deep and long. Decompression. Real Wreck Penetration Diving, etc. (You know diving was invented by men…deep, long, penetration).
Anyways, that’s what’s happening here. I’ve told them March 15th would be my last day. I’ll probably stick around for a day or two then go to Tortola. I’ll spend some time there and then off to the Great White North. By then it will be the end of March and 8 months out country.
Remember on that tape I also said with the way I’m living now I wouldn’t want to have it any other way?
It still applies.
It’s great acting on whims.
Remember The Double in Fiction?
And Oscar Wilde’s give in to your temptations?
It’s kind of nice.
It gives you a great feeling of freedom.
It’s a lot better than the dilly-dallying I did for two years. Should I go to the French Foreign Legion? Should I do this or that, maybe something else.
I hope I never become that way again.
It’s better to do something and be wrong than to do nothing.
I’m looking forward to seeing the boys again. I can see myself becoming real cagey after about two weeks so I’ll try to go to Britain around mid-April. We’ll see though I have to talk to Jane.
Before then though, a trip to Gaspé could be arranged.
My blisters, the sons of bitches were getting on my nerves so I cut the fuckers open.
I used the sissors (I never could spell that word), my first aid kit and my dive knife as a mirror. Crocodile Dundee get the fuck out of my way.
Last night I think we managed to insult and piss off everyone in the bars we went to. Things just seem to go that way. In Papimientu (the local lingo) Masha Danki means Thank You.
Somehow we’ve conditioned ourselves to the point where it is quite automatic to say, “Masha your own fucking Danki” whenever we hear that word.
I was afraid when I returned to Canada everything would be the same.
From what I hear though some things have changed. You are no longer with Flo. You are now the Grizzler with his French-Canadian honey living away from the big city. I like it.
Me, I’ll go back a little salty having lived out a small part of my weird-assed life fantasy and you might know this already, N--- is getting married to L----. No second-hand info this time. That is the straight proof from the man himself.
I called my house to tell them I was coming back before May and they told me the news. I called N--- (collect, I’m really low on cash) and he confirmed it, August 14th I think is the date. So, things are changing! I guess it’s that age. But it’s good. We’ve stagnated in that city long enough.
Sometimes I feel like stopping everything I’m doing, sitting down and laughing my head off.
Maybe that’s what you were doing at that bar? Everything that happens seems to be part of a big play or movie designed specifically for me.
It’s even funnier when I think I actually have an impact on people. It’s actually fucking hilarious. Take Jane for example. If someone would have told me when I left Canada I would fall head over heels for a British girl, I would leave the BVI to go to Bonaire, and she would leave early because I was going away and then I would leave Bonaire to go see her in England, I would have said, “What?!”
But that’s what’s happening and it makes life a hell of a lot more fun.
Even the hurricane I thought was funny.
I mean, why the big deal? People don’t really die with these things (I’ve never seen a dead body, do they exist?). Getting some idea of what I mean. You probably do. If not, it’s probably all the excess nitrogen doing funny things to my noggin’.
Want more stories? Let’s see.
I found a scorpion in my room. They are fucking ugly and they can move fast, too.
I caught it and I was considering keeping it alive for a while but then I thought if it gets away, I’ll never be able to sleep and find it again.
So, I cut it in half with one swoop of my dive knife.
I also caught a lizard here. (It’s kind of a zoo in here) and was able to feed it a mosquito.
There have been some big ones (lizards) running around at my place.
I think I told you I have big nasty cucarachas.
I was taking a dump when I saw one in the shower. Without standing up I grabbed the plunger and started banging away until I connected. I didn’t kill the fucker. I left it with it’s fat cucaracha guts hanging out until it died a slow agonizing painful death.
Unlike mosquitos, cucarachas understand the concept of death.
When one of their buddies buys it, they scatter into the four winds.
Mosquitos, however, see their friends dying and continue on buzzing around without a care in the world.
Last week, I was refueling one of our boats. This we have to do by hand by pumping from a 55-gallon drum through a hose to the boat. Since it has to be done manually it always gets really messy. Fuel is spilt. Sometimes it overflows because there is no gas gauge on this particular boat. The fumes are pretty nasty even if no fuel is spilt.
The manager dude was in the boat poking at things, looking around. I’m on the dock, pumping away.
He picks up this revolver type object with a rectangular stem. He looks at it, points it at me and squeezes the trigger.
All I could do was let out a pathetic psychotic laugh and say, “Whoah, that’s a flare gun!”
Thank God, Allah, Buddha, Mohamed and Lord Neptune, the safety was still on.
The safety is a little switch that has to be moved about I centimetre to be armed. Being a crispy critter would not look good on my resumé.
That is the only thing that’s happened so far that has made me almost shit my pants.
I did a dive with the para commando dude to 150’. I have two gauges. One read 150’. The other 141’.
The no decompression time at this depth is about five minutes. I actually went over the limit but as I ascended the computer credited me with more time. Still, I did an 8-minute safety decompression stop at 10’. We did the ascent in blue water, which means you can’t see the bottom or the surface. It’s just all blue around you. It’s a really wild feeling because aside from your gauges, you can’t tell if you’re going up or down. It’s a little like being in space, suspended in this blue medium.
I have logged 284 dives now. There’s about 10 I never wrote down. I left Montreal with 86. I’m surprised my gear has held out this long. I have 182 hours of bottom time (time under water). That’s about a week.
It’s funny how one can spend time with one person and still find out things about them that floor you.
(Here I have redacted several paragraphs of deeply personal information shared by third-party lovers. It is only fair as any chance of anyone out there, however remote, of adding 2 + 2 together, would be very bad karma).
Remember, you can kill me, you can skin me, you can eat me, but PLEASE, I said PLEASE now boy, you payin’ attenshun? Don’t you dare go a-borin’ me.
Speaking of death rush of imminent success, and machinery and technology, different people measure success in different ways. Back there, it seems to be measured by the size of your wallet. Well, I survived a killer hurricane. I call that pretty successful.
We took a guy gasping for air to the hospital and he recovered. Success again.
I drove our boat Sea Explorer into shore to about a foot of water (while towing another boat) and backed it out without hitting land, pier or the towed boat. Success.
I can’t wait to go back and tell those candy-assed pussies in their two-breasted outfits in what orifice and just how far they can stick their wallets. Oooh! Nasty! Angry words from paradise! Hee! Hee!
It’s the 15th. I just came back from a bar/food stand where I watched the cook cut up, with a meat cleaver, iguanas for soup.
Feb. 16th. After I wrote that sentence yesterday, I passed out and woke up at 11:30 p.m. Thought it was the next day and I was late for work. It even happens in the tropics.
It’s the 20th of Feb. I have 24 days of work here. Today I’m going to the travel agent to book my flight back. Remember H-----, the Dutch girl? I didn’t see her for about a week. I mean I didn’t see her at all, she was nowhere to be found. I thought she had gone to Curaçao like she was planning. Nope, she was at home with Dengue Fever. It’s kind of like malaria. You get it from mosquitos. It’s high fevers, dehydration, you become delirious. It’s like being at death’s door and not giving a fuck. Hooray for the tropics!
Anyways, the Dutch marine is gone. His girlfriend in Florida offered him $50,000 if he would go back and marry her, so he went. Nothing like true love.
The para commando dude leaves tomorrow. He’s going back to Holland and his wife. Two other Dutch people, a guy and a girl who were working with us and quit in December, are leaving, too. Rumours are the managers where I work are getting fired in June. Yep, this place takes them in and spits them out.
The BVI took you in and wouldn’t let you go. There are people who have been there 20 years without a clue as to why they have been there so long.
Jane sent me a cut-out from a travel guide with tropical islands and a big YES marked on places like the Maldives and Seychelles. (Maldives, Indian Ocean. Seychelles, east coast of Africa). They are incredible places and I would go there in a second but not by myself. We’ll see just how serious she is. When I see her again (after the preliminaries) we’ll do some heavy talking. Who knows what will come of it.
I think there is enough juicy news here to keep you busy for a bit, (continued on photo)
I don’t know if there will be time for this to get there and for you to answer. It takes about two weeks for your letters to get here. It might be best to wait until I’m back. (Jump every time you hear the phone ring at the end of March),
This (photo) was home for 3 months. I’m now living in a house that’s a fucking dungeon. Now you know why it’s called ‘The Papillon Special’. It won’t be too long before we are having Labatt Blues again.
Until then,
Bon dia, dushi
(Good day, sweetheart)
Ed
*Name changed.
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