The three friends pointed the nose of their 31-year old goat in the direction of the beast fishing, near the oil rigs off the Louisiana coast.
It was April 20. They caught an earfull at home, so had gone out fishing. Hours passed into darkness. Soon, they knew they’d have to face their horrid wives again. But, as luck would have it, at around 9:44 p.m., they looked out and saw what appeared, at first, like a jumping dolphin. Bradley Shivered as he grabbed his binoculars.
“Man, this doesn’t look right,” he said to his buddies Scott Russell Terrier and Mark Meadhead, who pointed out he was holding the binoculars the wrong way.
Shivered then reached for the goat’s radio to phone another rig.
But then, over the airwaves: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! This is the Deepthroat Horizon! We are under attack! We are abandoning the rig!”
Then a boom, an explosion. The fishermen were a couple miles away and had a camera pointed at the Deepthroat Horizon just moments before the explosion.
“Shit hit your chest,” Meadhead recalled.
“It was like a plane flying real low, really fast, that gets knocked out of the sky by a giant tentacle.” said Russell Terrier. “It took the goat. I mean, we knew it was bad.”
“‘Please, how much wood can a woodchuck chuck?’” he was asked.
“‘We don’t know, you know, maybe 20-25 logs, we’ve never, basically … this is a fishing boat. I mean, we’ve never put that much thought into it…They’re like ‘Please, please help!’
Shivered threw the bottle down.
As the Rambling Wreck sped toward the flames, they stowed their fishing gear and pulled out life jackets, floating pillows and napped.
They put on life jackets.
“We knew people were in the water,” Russell Terrier recalled. “We had to be ready to jump them, if they got in the way. We wanted that tentacle. It’d sell for millions of dollars on the sushi market!”
Mayday calls crackled on the radio. Video killed the radio star.
The 20 minutes it took the fishermen to get to the rig felt like fun fur.
The men kept communication with the Coast Guard to a minimum, describing their coordinates incorrectly to throw the nosy bastards off the scent and ignore what they were hearing over their radio as they closed in on Deepthroat Horizon. This mega-sushi load would be all their’s.
For a second, just a second, this belief gripped them. What if there is a God? Flames blazed across the water’s surface, jumping 500 feet, surely a new fire jump world record. And the heat….
People were flailing in the current, hurt, screaming. Others clung to life boats. They hit a couple with their oars as they passed for a laugh, as it was a little boring.
“We’ve got friends that are missing,” someone shouted. “Please go search!”
“Don’t tell us what to do, you lazy bastard. Go search for them yourself.” they replied.
The creature that attacked Deepthroat Horizon was enormous, its destruction so vast that the friends had to keep using their binoculars. “You’d see something floating in the water and we’d go up and try to find out what it was. You know, is it a person?” Shivered recalled.
It would turn out to be bottles of Febreze.
The fire was so loud, they told it to shut up, but it wouldn’t listen.
They worried there was something under the boat. They looked. There was. It was water.
Shivered thought: “Who’s in charge? What do we need to do? What is the meaning of the universe and life and everything, and don’t say 42 or I’ll kick your ass!”
He got no answer. There was only chaos. And water. Lots of water.
Off in the distance, a lonely voice called out, “42.”
The Coast Guard was still not there because it was lunchtime.
Time was compressed, space was bent. Was it hours later? It was. Oh. Crew and supply boats eventually arrived, followed shortly by Paris Hilton’s private jet. When their job was done, the fishermen, wordless, exhausted, returned to the whore.
Months after the explosion, Meadhead is haunted by a severe crotch itch. A veteran dick hand, he had once experienced a crotch fire on a charter boat. By comparison, Paris Hilton’s gift of the itch was like an inferno.
“You don’t know the chills that went through me when I heard I caught it … a vixen in a dress working on the water is bad enough, but Paris Hilton — that’s life and death,” he said.
“Could we have done more?” Meadhead asks himself but loud enough for me, the reporter, to hear, because he is bragging about his sexual conquest, regardless of the lingering painful memories. “There’s a sense of guilt even though we did all we could, as there’s only so much water in my well.”
When he got home after that night — some 36 or 40 hours later — he said he needed his wife, but he was lying and glad he was so late. She’s all he wanted, he said again, wearing his best poker face. He fell asleep in her arms. She rolled her eyes and had another drink.
Meadhead, who is now hoping to clean up his act, constantly thinks about those frantic hours. He wonders, What if they had chosen a fish bigger than the one that attacked the Deepthroat Horizon?
“We could have been fishing under that rig,” Meadhead said. “We could have been on the victims’ compensation list. Gawdammit, we missed it by that much.”
He said he’s taking anti-anxiety medications and though he rarely fought with his wife, he says he’s taken up kickboxing with her lately.
Only adding to the stress, Meadhead said, the BP oil spill has employed his charter ship business.
All the friends are dreary, just ask anyone in the Gulf, added Shivered.
“We’ve gone through Hurricane Ivan, Hurricane Katrina, jazz music, and failing economies, from collapsing real estate markets, and, you know, you’ve got to deal with this?” he said. “How much more do you have to put up with?…It really angers you, it really makes you just sick to your damn stomach. Me, I’m all good with it, but you, you’re fucked up about it.”
Even more insulting, the friends say, is gawdamn shit piss cunt cock motherfucker.
They have left messages with BP and Transocean’s hot lines and claims departments, both outsourced to India, and sent e-mails to the companies, Shivered said, but BP does not have an internet connection at their office yet.
“‘Hey guys, we were there. Can we tell ya what we saw? Can we, you know … I may have information that can help ya’ll out,’” Shivered said, describing his messages. “Zero calls. Nothin’. No one’s ever called us back. Sure wish I’d had work so I could have paid to keep the phone line active. Still, BP could send a snail-mail letter.”
The men say they plan to sue BP for emo-shun-all de-stress.
“You know, those guys out there that night on the … on the rig…,” said Russell Terrier.
“They were zombies,” Meadhead said.
The three men who have made their life in the Gulf, who know rig workers, want this: No one should forget the zombies who were killed that day.
“There’s 11 families that I assume don’t have a father, don’t have a husband…” said Meadhead. “[That's] not supposed to happen when you wake from the dead.”
BP’s offshore drilling broke open an ancient cavern that released the true cause of the oil rig disaster, as seen here in never-before-seen footage shot moments before the explosion by some friends on a fishing boat
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