After the Fall
Posted By Paul Kotik on 10 October 2005
October again. On the twelfth day of this month it will have been three years since our friend and colleague Audrey Mestre was lost to us in the abyss. I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget that day or fail to mark it when the season turns.
I’ve neither seen nor heard from Pipin Ferreras since January of 2003, about three months after Audrey’s world record attempt in the no-limits discipline ended catastrophically in the waters of Bayahibe, Dominican Republic. Pipin has moved into that realm inhabited by the other sort of person, for whom celebrity is as air and obscurity the Devil’s own fellow. There was his book, The Dive, which came and went, and the on-again-off-again intelligence concerning a feature film based on the book, or on Gary Smith’s Sports Illustrated article, to be produced and directed, or not, by James Cameron.
I’ve been in occasional contact with some of the other key figures in the drama of that awful day. I suppose everybody’s said about all there is to say on the matter. If there are still any secrets, they would, arguably, rise only to the level of denouement : the climax has already played out.
I don’t know what I would do, or how I would feel were I to be shocked out of my habitual indolence by a trailer for the Cameron film shrieking from my television screen in the middle of my Sunday morning cartoon shows. I don’t know that I’d be interested in seeing the film, after all is said and done. Movie distribution and marketing are, in the order of my knowledge of the great wide world, somewhere between Bantu gastronomy and housekeeping: I know little of either, and am interested in neither. I do know that nobody in my circle of friends and cronies has brought up the Audrey Mestre affair in a very long while, not since the sturm und drung of the aftermath petered out with no actual physical casualties. This being Miami, one never knows.
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