He drove to a local hospital and checked himself into a quickie detox program. After that, he had to find a dive hat. He had sold his helmet years earlier, and he certainly didn’t have six grand lying around to buy a new one. He hopped into his truck and drove north to New Hampshire.
“Tap,” DJ said, “do you have a hat I could buy or borrow?”
Nearly a decade earlier, DJ had loaned Tap his helmet, and now, standing in the same spot where they’d trained for the tunnel job, he was asking Tap to return the favor.
“Here, DJ,” Tap said, handing him one. “Take this, and just give it back when you’re done.”
He was 311 feet under water, using a large impact wrench to help install a caisson, and he was working strenuously. He began to hyperventilate, taking rapid, short breaths rather than the long breaths necessary to make his demand regulator work properly. Divers have a term for what DJ found himself doing. It’s called overbreathing your hat, and it could be fatal. It meant he was failing to fully breathe his oxygen and fully exhale his C02. He grew more anxious. His mind flashed back to the tunnel, to Billy and Tim, as anxiety turned into panic. He worried he wasn’t going to make it. “All stop!” he yelled into his comm wire.
He realized that, given his depth, if he let himself get to full-scale panic, he’d be a dead man. He leaned forward, put his head down, and cracked the free-flow valve on his hat wide open. A rush of air filled his helmet and began circulating. He took deep, steady breaths. He got himself together. He would be all right.
Once he finished that project, DJ was relieved to discover that even though he hadn’t worked as a diver in seven years, his skills came back to him easily. Before long he was finding peace in the water. Outside of it, he was feeling pretty good, too. Before leaving Boston, he’d bought some Suboxone pills on the street, semisynthetic opiates used in detox to wean addicts. When he’d arrived in Louisiana and prepared to head to the offshore rig, he’d brought the pills with him. He had some heroin left, which he knew he should get rid of, but chose instead to stash it in the glove compartment of his truck. He’d chopped up the Suboxone pills, taking one piece every day to help him stave off the sickness.
After working offshore for a week and a half, he called his brother. Just before he’d left the bitter cold of Boston, he’d been broke and dope-sick. Now he was in sunny Louisiana, back diving and back among the living, and he had ten grand in his pocket. He told his brother, “I think I got this thing beat.”
DJ found himself working with mostly younger guys, recent dive school grads on their first Gulf tour. But he bonded most closely with a Tennessee diver named Bryan Ernest, who, like DJ, was in his mid-thirties. Toward the end of the year working in the Gulf, DJ made a celebratory road trip to New Orleans with some of the younger guys. The night ended with police finding DJ339 lying unconscious in the French Quarter, with his pocket full of heroin. He had finally succumbed to that stash in his glove compartment. He was arrested, and although he received probation rather than jail time, it cost him his dive job.
A few months later, in February 2007, when he was on his way back home to Waltham, he got a call from Bryan. His diving buddy was about to make the first saturation dive of his career. He told DJ he was so nervous that on his drive to work that morning, he had pulled his truck over and thrown up. “Do you think I’m ready?” he asked.
“Bryan, I think you’re ready,” DJ replied. “Just take your time.”
A few days later, he got a call from his former employer. There had been an accident. Bryan had been killed340.
DJ flew to Tennessee for the funeral, where he met up with some of his former supervisors. They felt awful about what had happened, and knew how close DJ had been with Bryan. They offered DJ his job back.
All his instincts told him to decline. He had never vanquished the pain from having to bring Billy and Tim out of the tunnel eight years earlier. Now, not only did he have an addiction to contend with, but he also had a fresh source of grief in having lost another good friend. Seeing no other options, though, DJ accepted the offer. Four months after his return, outside Galveston, Texas, he was arrested for possession and sentenced to several months in jail.
When he got out in February 2008, he returned to Waltham, unemployed and depressed. He reconnected with Chris Politis, who had been his closest friend in town. Chris was now an unemployed ironworker who, like DJ, had a child and, also like DJ, a raging addiction to heroin.
They took care of each other. Back when he’d still had money, DJ had shared his dope with Chris. He often let Chris crash on his mother’s couch—one reason why Chris was so fond of Lorraine. Now that DJ was out of cash, Chris stepped in to fund their habit. DJ knew addicts often stole from their families to feed their addiction, but he refused to break the promise he’d made to himself never to take from his mother. For three months, he and Chris functioned in a haze of codependency. DJ knew Chris wasn’t working, and eventually he learned how his friend was coming up with the money. Another friend who worked as a bank teller had once explained to Chris that employees there were trained to try to get robbers out of the bank as quickly as possible. They were told not to try to play hero by stalling or even pressing the panic button. Insurance would cover the loss of a few grand from the teller’s drawer. What the bank most wanted to avoid was an escalation that could leave people dead. So tellers were drilled to hand over the bills calmly and quickly. Based on this insider knowledge, Chris had settled on bank robberies341 as a relatively easy way to get the cash he needed to function. He decided there was no reason to be threatening, no need to take on the added risk of using a gun, or even alluding to one in his holdup note. Across several months, he hit a string of branches, each time using nothing more than a scribbled message on the back of a deposit slip that read either “50’s and 100’s” or “big bills.”
DJ wanted no part of this criminal behavior, and Chris never asked for his help. Still, by the spring of 2008, the banks and the cops were getting warmer on Chris’s trail. Surveillance cameras had captured his image, partially concealed by a Boston Red Sox cap pulled down tight onto his head and a bulky winter coat draped over his burly body. Copies of that grainy screenshot had by now been flashed during local TV newscasts and posted in bank lobbies throughout the area. DJ feared it was only a matter of time before Chris got pinched.
His cell phone buzzed while he was lying in bed. It was early Saturday morning, May 10, and DJ’s withdrawal sickness had kept him up most of the night.
“You ready?” Chris asked.
“Yeah,” DJ said flatly, even if he didn’t mean it. “I guess so.”
“Okay, I’ll call you when I get to your street.”
DJ heard the hallway floor creak. His mother was approaching. Lorraine had seemed especially worried about her son lately, keeping a closer eye on him. As she popped her head into his doorway, DJ spoke casually into the phone, “Yeah, give me a call later.” Then he rolled back over in bed, as though trying to get back to sleep.
Lorraine continued on into the bathroom. As soon as he heard her turn on the shower, DJ bounded out of bed and headed downstairs. Chris called again as he was pulling up in his Honda Accord in front of the duplex, and DJ hopped in.
Obligation and addiction had brought DJ to this pathetic point, poised to do something that, even in his dope-sick fog, he knew was immoral. Like any addict, he had let all the rationalizations play out in his mind. He wouldn’t be armed, so no one would get hurt. He needed to assume some of the risk, since Chris had been shouldering it all for months in order to feed both their habits. DJ saw the emptiness of those justifications, but he also knew that without them, he wouldn’t be able to go through with it. And then where would he be? He needed to stop being dope sick. To do that, he needed more dope.
339 (Chapter 15, note 11)
The night ended with police finding DJ:
340 (Chapter 15, note 12)
Bryan had been killed: “Deaths: Selmer—Bryan Lee Ernest,”
341 (Chapter 15, note 13)
Chris had settled on bank robberies: Geoffrey Kelly (FBI special agent), affidavit, June 4, 2008. Based on a tip, authorities began watching Chris, attaching a GPS device to his car.