By his sophomore year, his family had moved to the neighboring city of Waltham, whose complexion turned quickly from gritty industry and tired triple-deckers to sleek high-tech offices and green suburbia. When he attended his first teen house party, he found himself being stared down by one of the toughest kids in school, a beefy pot dealer. DJ was tall but at that point very thin, so everyone expected him to get pummeled. Yet all those years moving around and constantly having to defend himself had turned him into an agile fighter. He ended up throwing the pot dealer through a window. After that, no one made fun of DJ’s accent anymore.
Before long he was getting into so many fistfights that his guidance counselor called him into his office and asked, “Is everything all right at home?” He figured DJ’s string of black eyes and busted lips were signs of abuse, not the emblems of his new identity as someone who was both cool and fearless.
The next year he transferred to the city’s vocational high school, where he discovered a talent for welding. Before long, he picked up a part-time job with a local welder. After graduating from high school, his mother helped him buy a brand-new black Firebird Formula 350. He treasured that car, keeping it immaculate. He cruised the downtown strip with pride, as though his Firebird were announcing to the world the arrival of the kid who had always been ashamed of how little he had.
A life of the party who seemed just dangerous enough to be attractive, DJ had become a guy that girls wanted a piece of and other guys wanted to be around. He cemented his appeal by adding muscle to his build through weight lifting. After a lonely and turbulent childhood, he savored the newfound attention. He moved quickly and partied vigorously, making up for lost time.
Still, for all the fun he was having, DJ realized that on some level he was lost. He had struggled just to get through high school, so college didn’t seem viable. He worked several blue-collar jobs but couldn’t glimpse much of a future. When a relative offered him the chance to work with him doing commercial construction in Syracuse, New York, DJ said yes.
Cut off from their normal social circles, they filled some of their downtime taking scuba-diving lessons at a local pool. As a kid, DJ had always loved swimming, refusing to get out of the water until he had reached that blue-lipped, body-shivering state that only children and shipwreck victims seem able to tolerate. Before one class, as he flipped through a scuba magazine, he came across an article describing commercial diving as a career. It explained how these divers did underwater welding and construction and traveled the world, finding adventure and making good money. It dawned on DJ: This is something I could be good at.
In February 1991, twenty-one-year-old DJ moved to Houston to enroll at the Ocean Corporation dive school. After a month in school, around the time when many wannabe divers realize how punishing the job is and quit, DJ called home to Lorraine.
“Mom,” he said, “this is exactly what I want to be doing.”
DJ grabbed his yellow fiberglass diving helmet out of his truck and headed over to the job site. The SuperLite 17 was his prized possession. He’d bought it used, when he was just getting started in the Gulf, and even then it had set him back nearly three grand. Despite its name, the helmet still weighed about thirty pounds out of the water. This job in the fall of 19938 had brought DJ to a hydroelectric plant in southeastern Vermont. Given his experience as a deep-sea diver in the Gulf, where he’d done underwater welding at depths of 250 feet, he figured working in the waters of a New England river one-tenth as deep would be like a dip in the pool.
When he was working offshore, he’d had no choice but to own his own helmet—which divers call their “hat.” Without it, you weren’t considered a diver. But as DJ looked around at the rest of the Vermont crew, he noticed that very few of them had their own hats. He’d heard that the standard practice for these “inland” divers, who plied their trade in rivers and harbors, was to take turns using a helmet owned by the employer.
When one of the inland guys told him he was about to learn how real diving was done, DJ let out a big laugh. “I know you guys work your asses off,” he cracked, “but I don’t know if you’re really divers.” He invoked another term the offshore guys had for their shallow-diving counterparts—mud bugs—and then said, “If anything goes wrong in the water, all you gotta do is take your hat off and stand up.”
The inland guy made some quip about DJ being yet another offshore prima donna, then said, “You’ll learn.”
DJ knew full well that he had chosen to come back east and do this kind of inland work. But he’d done that more for reasons of family. He doubted the assignments in New England would ever be able to give him the adrenaline rush he’d regularly gotten from his deep dives off the coast of Louisiana and Texas.
Yet it wouldn’t take long for him to see that the inland guys had a point. Back in the Gulf, after he’d done a dive, he’d be required to sit in a chamber for a long period to avoid decompression sickness. Known as the bends, this potentially deadly affliction involves the formation of gas bubbles inside the body when divers make their ascent to the surface too rapidly from the high-pressure environment of the deep sea. DJ would then be forbidden from going back into the water for up to eighteen hours. Once he had been promoted from his job as a tender—the rookie who feeds hoses and checks equipment for full-fledged divers—he essentially never did that lowly work again. But on this Vermont job, he quickly learned that after he finished his dive, he was expected to keep working from the surface, serving as a tender for another diver. Because they were diving in depths of less than forty feet for no more than a few hours at a time, there was no need to decompress. That allowed for much longer workdays.
After suiting up, DJ splashed into the murky gray-green waters of the upper Connecticut River. He quickly realized the conditions were worse than he expected. Not only was there much less visibility than in the Gulf, but it was so much colder. In the relatively temperate waters down south, DJ had kept warm simply by feeding a hot-water hose into his dive suit and letting the liquid circulate. But that solution wasn’t adequate for the frigid waters of Vermont in autumn.
One diver who had experience both offshore and inland showed DJ the work-around. Called a spider, it involved taking a thick, nearly foot-long hose—which the guys naturally called a donkey dick—and sliding the hot-water hose into one end of it. At the other end, there were half a dozen quarter-inch-diameter silicone tubes, which resembled the water hoses used by dental hygienists during cleanings. After DJ snaked one of these tubes down to each of his feet and hands, and others to his groin and back, the hot water would instantly circulate throughout his body. That was enough to make the bitter cold bearable.
There were two main strains of rivalry among commercial divers: inland versus offshore, and East Coast versus West Coast. Basically, the divisions boiled down to bragging rights about who did better work under tougher conditions. Regardless, there was one current that was always potent enough to get them to close ranks. Whenever some scuba-diving hobbyist tried to invite himself into the diving fraternity, he’d be swiftly reminded that people who made their living as divers, no matter what type or on which coast, never got to spend their workdays frolicking around with starfish in the azure bathwater of the Caribbean. That kind of diversion might have made for a fun vacation, but it was not real diving.
8 (Chapter 1, note 1)
This job in the fall of 1993: DJ Gillis’s employment history from Local 56 union records.