The central hook of Deep Blue Saloon is forged from my own experiences diving Cozumel, Akumal, Belize, and Cuba in the late-eighties and all through the nineties. As a hobby I had become a scuba instructor in 1992 and was taking a lot of groups on dive trips, and my comfort level with diving had gotten pretty high. When I wasn't teaching, I was getting into some really deep dives, enjoying the narcosis and the incredible psychedelic scenery that you had, at that time, on the reefs in that part of the world. I was fascinated with the consciousness-shift that occurred for me when I got down to depths below 180 feet or so on regular air (in fact, the original title for the novel was Club 180). This kind of deep diving is not something I advocate doing - it's really dangerous. But as far as the high goes, it's quite soporific, and the hallucinations that my protagonist Branch Kilgore has in the novel are really not too much of an exaggeration.
 
        The deepest I ever went on one of these foolish dives - on regular air - was five-hundred and eight feet. Like most of the idiots that have done such a thing, I had no recall of seeing the digits 350+ on my dive computer upon ascending back up into the two-hundred foot or so range, where I had stage tanks waiting for a long decompression crawl back up to the surface. But when I did surface, I had some distinct memories of someone being down there with me, down below four-hundred, and it took my crew quite a while to convince me that there was no one there. But, I knew they were wrong. I'd spent time down there with a girl - a beautiful girl, and we'd had strange and aquatic drinks together (nitrogen martinis, I think they were). This girl had told me her name was Calypso, and she'd also told me that I had to write about the ocean. Specifically, she'd told me I had to write about how urgent it is for humans to respect and learn to protect the ocean. Now, many, many years later, I hope I've fulfilled her demands with Deep Blue Saloon.
 
        The character of Victor Mendez - the environmentalist in Deep Blue Saloon who believes he can save the reefs through peaceful protests, education, and social media, is based on a real guy I knew in Cozumel back in the eighties. For his own protection I won't mention his name, as he had to go into hiding at the time that the international pier there was being built, so I'll just refer to him as Herm.
 
        Herm was a marine biologist and a veterinarian, and he ran a dive shop there on the island. He was kind of a mentor to me, and because of his incredible knowledge of the marine environment, and because of his passion for diving, every dive with him was a learning experience, and very exciting, too. There was a small group of us diving with him. We were his apostles, and he was our guru. You had to have perfect buoyancy control to dive with this group, and each dive was like a kind of deep, floating meditation. We were always learning about the reef, and occasionally we'd rescue dolphins or turtles that got caught up in fishing nets. As one example of how knowledgeable Herm was, he was the guy the authorities would call when a crocodile would swim out of the lagoon and go lounging on the beach of some resort. Herm would capture the croc and release it back into the lagoon. I actually got to help him in that endeavor on one occasion.
 
        The great blessing of Cozumel was also its curse: deep, leeward water, where the reefs were, and it was the perfect spot for cruise ships to anchor. Cozumel should've been preserved as a divers' paradise, I think, but, instead, it became a port of call for stinking cruise ships. When the business types on the island started trying to build the international pier, right on top of Paradise Reef, Herm was the one who stood up and said, "no you won't." When the business types said "the reef's already dead, we're building it", Herm's the one who stood up and said "you're wrong...no way." Herm basically started the resistance to the destruction of the reef. This was in the days before the world wide web, Facebook, Twitter, all of that, but our little dive posse did its best, writing letters, toting signs around, trying to block access to the construction site, calling 60 Minutes, that sort of thing.
 
        When Herm really raised a stink, his life was threatened, and the lives of his family were threatened, too, because, of course, the pier was going to bring so much money to the island. So, Herm was forced to leave Cozumel, the reef was blown up, and the pier was built. At about the same time, mangroves all up and down the Yucatan coast - the site of the most pristine fresh water cave systems on the planet - were paved over for resorts, because there was money to be made, and because it was just unfashionable for most people to go against economic development. As Herm was packing up to go, I asked him where he was heading. He told me he would go to Africa to do a veterinary practice. I remember him saying "Africa's wildlife can never be destroyed." I won't tell you where Herm is now, but I've stayed in touch with him, and I can promise you that he is beyond disgusted about the current decimation of elephants, rhinos, and orangutans, etc. in Africa. I'm sure Herm is rooting for Branch to take Gusano's job offer in Namibia at the end of the novel.
 
        My disillusionment with what happened at Paradise Reef in Cozumel, along with my nitrogen narcosis experiences, led me to start daydreaming about some kind of narcked-out hero who might have been able to step in and save the day. That's where the Branch Kilgore character in Deep Blue Saloon comes from. Branch is based on a real guy named Willie who dived with me in the mid-nineties. Like Branch, his mom had died when he was a baby, and his dad, a commercial diver, was a really rough character who consorted with some south Texas mob types, and, like my character Branch Kilgore, Willie had been raised by a kind of high-class mafia don. He saw some serious shit when he was just a kid, had started his criminal career while he was very young, and he was also a real dive fiend and a nature lover, too. Along with all of that, he'd absorbed an incredible amount of culture.
 
        Willie had spent time in the navy, and had been kicked out of SEALs training for what he described as "being too enthusiastic." He was very bitter about his discharge and he used to go on and on about what a lot of "robotic punks" the navy wanted for their special teams, and how he had been more talented than any of his training mates. He used to say he should've gone to the marines instead, where his abandon and fearlessness would've been appreciated. That was just his personal opinion. Willie was a guy who had witnessed numerous murders, and had probably been involved in them, too, but who could also talk at length about the joy of attending ballet at the Bolshoi, opera at the Met, and who waxed poetically about the splendor of the reefs at Sipadan Island in Indonesia. He was outspoken about how he would gladly kill anyone who would harm the reef or the mangroves. I never knew if I should take that part of him seriously or not.
 
        Willie was also the first diver I knew who had a serious nitrogen narcosis addiction. He's the one who looked me in the eye before a deep cave dive we did together and uttered the phrase "You goin' on this deep one with me, or you gonna be a pussy and I'll have to tell ever'body?" I loved it, I never forgot that moment, and I use that line as a kind of dramatic hook in the novel. Nitrogen narcosis was apparently the only drug that could ease the pain of Willie's past traumas, and I think that his deep diving habit kept him from following through on his environmental ambitions. Like Branch, he definitely had a death wish, and, indeed, Willie died underwater, in a cave diving accident in 1999. His body was found very deep, of course, and very far from the entry. I was deeply saddened by his death, because he'd become a good friend to me, and, also, I guess, because I was counting on him to do something about all the bad things humans were doing to the world's water. I just knew that if Willie could have gotten past his trauma, and his anger over his dishonorable discharge, he could've done something really great with his life. He was fearless, he wasn't afraid of dying (obviously), and, like Branch Kilgore in Deep Blue Saloon, he'd learned to shrug off panic.
 
        The character of Pamela Lennon, too, is based on a real person, whom I'll call Margaret. In Deep Blue Saloon, Pamela, very wise, very old, and very English, runs an inn and is the protector of a 200-hectare mangrove lot coveted by the pier developer, Omar. In reality, Margaret, very wise, very old, and very English, ran a dive shop in Cozumel, not an inn, but, like the Pamela character, Margaret was articulate and outspoken about how corrupt the leaders there were. She used to talk to me about how the leaders in the world were violators of the "precautionary principle." At the core of that principle was the idea that a wise human would never damage their physical environment in order to make money. Margaret was ethical. Margaret was articulate, and she was attentive to the happenings in the world. She was quick with the quotations from Shakespeare, always very relevant, and, like Pamela in Deep Blue Saloon, she wasn't afraid to let you have it, sharply but lovingly, if you were partying too much and losing focus on the important matters at hand. She was a major participant in the battle against the destruction of the reef, and in the battle against the destruction of the dive culture there, too.
 
        Alas, in spite of the best intentions of Herm and Willie and Margaret, in that particular battle in Cozumel, greed won out, and the phenomenal underwater life there is suffering greatly. But today, as I write, I look back on what Herm and Willie and Margaret believed in so deeply, some twenty-five years ago... that if you destroy your environment, there can be no winners. I was so sure, in 1989, in 1992, even in 1999, that the world was going to come to its senses and recognize that preserving nature was the most important thing we could do, even if it meant we wouldn't get rich. My eventual disillusionment with all of that is what led me to write Deep Blue Saloon, where I've done my best to lay out Herm's passion, Willie's pain and relief, and Margaret's principles. Where do we go from here? Go radical like Gusano Verde? Be methodical and patient like Victor Mendez and Bali? Two things for sure: vote the environment ahead of your wallet, and stay off of stinking cruise ships!