World in My Eyes: The Autobiography

by Richard Blade

  “How does the Caribbean sound?”

  CARIBBEAN BLUE

  I had chosen the Caribbean over Hawaii because of the fact it had less restrictions for bringing in animals. We had Angel and now the sweetest kitty, Soxy, and there was no way on earth that Krista and I would put them through six months of quarantine. So Hawaii, as perfect a paradise as it might be for us humans, was out.

  Plus I knew the Caribbean well. I had travelled there extensively, not only while shooting the PADI videos but also for vacations. I loved its kick-back vibe, its beautiful weather and its warm, inviting ocean. But being there for a week or so is a very different thing to living there.

  Krista and I sat down that night and started with a list of places that wouldn’t work for us. Jamaica was the first we eliminated. It’s a gorgeous island with an amazing history but outside of the major resorts it’s dangerous. I’d seen the armed guards protecting the entrances to the massive hotel complexes and knew that if it took an Uzi to keep tourists safe then that was not a place for us.

  Honduras, Belize and the outer islands of the Bahamas were crossed from our list due to lack of infrastructure, and Grand Cayman, the Virgin Isles and Turks & Caicos were struck off as potentials as tit was too expensive to buy a home and live there.

  We also needed an island which had a major airport so friends and family could fly in and visit us, and we could leave to fly back to see Krista’s parents in LA and my mum in England. I had visited one island that had all of that and more.

  In 1989 Karen and I took a cruise of the Caribbean and visited six islands. One of them was St. Maarten. From the moment we disembarked at Great Bay in Philipsburg I felt relaxed. We rented a car and drove from the Dutch side up to Orient Bay in the French territory. There we played in the breaking waves and snorkeled the clear water. We grabbed a baguette in a small bakery and I was happy to have the opportunity to practice my very rusty schoolboy French.

  Krista listened as I talked about the island and I could feel her excitement growing. Before we went to sleep we had our plans in place. I would put in for a vacation request and take a week off in February and we’d fly to St. Maarten and check it out together. If we both liked it, then just maybe that might be the place for us.

  It had been a cold, overcast morning when we departed LAX but we found California’s missing sun waiting for us when we touched down at Princess Juliana Airport in St. Maarten. It was picture-perfect weather, everything that you would hope for from a tropical paradise; a warm breeze, whispering palm trees, unending blue skies broken up by a few puffy white clouds that only served to highlight the incredible azure color and a sun that beamed down erasing any chill from your body.

  We were staying on the French side at a boutique hotel on Orient Beach and within two days had decided that we were going to move to the island. We made up our minds that quickly; Krista was always up for a new adventure, for a fresh horizon and I could hear my father’s voice inside of me telling me “Life is short, my boy, make sure you live it.”

  With Krista in the Caribbean

  A little research took us to a realtor on the Dutch side. There it was much easier to buy and sell property and obtain residency than in the French territories. They took us to see a dozen homes but one that hit us instantly was a villa high on a hill overlooking Simpson Bay. It had a million dollar view for a price that was barely one third of that. It was currently rented out and had a long-term tenant living in it which was perfect for us as we had a lot of planning to do before our move.

  The house did need some work so we took photos, put an offer in and flew back to the States as we waited to hear the news. Two days later we received the phone call we had been waiting for; the villa was ours. Now we had to get down to serious business, make our plans for the house and work out exactly when to leave.

  One date that kept jumping out to me was the year 2000. It was a new century, a new beginning, a chance to welcome in the second millennium by embracing a new challenge. I love the thrill of the unknown, the prospect of seeing what is around the next bend and discovering new horizons. I have only one fear and that is “Why didn’t I?” I was terrified that my life would fly by and that I would wake up one day in a hospital bed, my body turned into a human pincushion of protruding tubes and wires, staring up at a white, tiled ceiling and be lying there thinking “Why didn’t I have the courage to pursue my dreams.” That idea filled me with dread.

  Nearly forty years ago, huddled in his room during a stormy evening in Torquay, a little boy had made a list as the rain pounded against the windows. He wrote:

  1.I want to live somewhere sunny

  2.I want to swim with the fish in warm water like Jacques Cousteau

  3.I want to travel the world

  4.I want to be famous

  5.I want to be on television like Blue Peter

  6.I want to meet my favourite singers

  7.I want a beautiful girlfriend

  8.I want to be in a movie

  9.I want to write a book

  10.I want to be brave

  I owed that little boy everything and wanted to make his list come true.

  How could I let him down? I knew I would be walking away from everything but that gave me an exhilarating feeling of freedom, to throw off what you know and to begin again. It would be too easy to stay.

  Orson Welles had said that Los Angeles was like a comfortable chair; that once he sat down in it, it took him twenty-five years to get up. If I left in 2000 then I would have beaten Orson Welles by one year.

  And the big news was that Y2K would be the end of the world as we know it due to a calendar glitch within everyone’s computers. Trains would stop running, planes would fall from the skies, and satellites would tumble from orbit. I knew that was nonsense but I thought it would be appropriate that Y2K would mark the end of one world for me and the beginning of another for the two of us.

  Krista and I flew to St. Maarten several times in the next three years. We measured the house and bought new fixtures, cabinets, countertops, TVs; virtually everything for it would be new and we had it ordered and ready to be shipped out with us.

  My dream was to teach SCUBA and make it a very special “white gloves” service. It would be small and cater to a clientele that didn’t want to be shuttled onto big boats with lots of divers but instead could have a boat all to themselves and be whisked off to pristine reefs and uncrowded dive sites.

  We researched boats and decided on a twenty-eight foot WorldCat. We took her out for a test run in San Diego Bay and she was perfect. We arranged to have her put in storage and shipped to the island when we were ready, and thought of the perfect name for her, Living the Dream.

  We needed to make one final visit to the island to be sure everything would be ready for us the next year, so in July 1999 we flew out to meet with the government authorities and finish up the filing of our business license and residency papers. The realtor who sold us the villa heard we were on island and contacted us and asked if we wanted to go out on his cigarette boat. I had only seen power boats like that on the opening titles of Miami Vice so we jumped at the opportunity to experience a genuine open water racer. I wish we had turned it down.

  The afternoon started brilliantly. We sped across St. Maarten’s huge lagoon and out through the bridge at Marigot into the calm channel separating St. Maarten and Anguilla. The realtor gunned the boat’s 600 horsepower engine and in the smooth waters of the lee of the island we hit almost seventy knots. We felt like we were flying fish as the boat grabbed air and shot over the small waves.

  We anchored off of a tiny island called Pinel and waded ashore to eat lobster and freshly baked loaves of French bread from a tiny restaurant that looked like it had been put together by Gilligan’s band of castaways. Krista had a glass of wine and I stuck with water. Unseen by us our captain was downing the local rum in quantities that would keep a distillery in business for a year.

  As the sun began its descent towards the ocean we sw
am back out to the boat, climbed aboard and raced back around the island. Within minutes we were approaching Marigot and the captain cut the engines as we prepared to glide under the low bridge that marked one of the two entrances to the lagoon. As we passed under the concrete bridge he dropped the gears into neutral and opened up the engines to full throttle. The roar from the massive twin inboard motors was amplified by the base of the low bridge above us and the reverberations shook the air.

  “I love that sound!” he yelled, his speech slurred.

  Once through the French-side bridge he gunned the engines again and now we were hitting speeds of fifty to sixty knots as we flew across the lagoon’s still waters.

  We could see the dock ahead of us as we raced by Maho and towards Simpson Bay and on our right the concrete and steel bridge that was raised twice a day to allow the billionaires’ mega-yachts to sail into the shelter of the lagoon. Then it happened.

  For whatever reason, whether it was he wanted to hear the engine’s roar once again or just for the insane thrill of it, he suddenly wrenched the wheel hard to the starboard. The boat lurched to the right and went up on its side but being designed for racing it didn’t tip over as most other boats would have. It would have been better if it had, because now, as it straightened out, we were hurtling straight at the reinforced bridge.

  There were six of us onboard when he lost control and rammed into the massive concrete supporting pillar. I was sitting at the very back on the long padded engine covers that took up almost a third of the length of the boat. I grabbed a line and held on as the front of the boat disintegrated from the impact and a large piece of fiberglass came flying back and hit me square in the face. Antonio, who was sitting next to me was not as lucky. He was hurled from the boat and his arm was sliced open by the rocky embankment.

  With the entire bow gone the boat swung wildly in the water and came to a dead stop high on the rocks under the bridge.

  The smell of diesel fumes filled the air and I could hear Krista calling my name.

  I pushed forward through the haze and found her extracting herself from beneath two people.

  “Oh my God, are you okay?” she asked frantically as she saw the blood pouring from my nose.

  “It’s nothing. Just a little blood. How about you?”

  “Good. I’m fine too,” she said as her left arm hung limply at her side. She was almost in shock and wasn’t yet feeling the excruciating pain of her major fracture.

  Two of the other passengers started to cry out in agony. One had broken their leg, and the other, the driver’s girlfriend who had been next to him as he piloted the boat in a drunken haze to its sad end, had by far the worst injuries including a broken hip, broken ribs and a concussion where her head had hit the boat’s mahogany console.

  Only one person on the boat escaped without a scratch, the captain. All the alcohol in his system had made him go limp at the moment of impact and while the rest of us were flung around he collapsed back into his seat.

  Two ambulances rushed us to hospital. Krista was X-rayed, treated, given painkillers and medication and her arm was put in a cast. Thank goodness St. Maarten has a great healthcare system; our total bill was a little less than $250.

  The next day I was waiting at the so-called captain’s real estate office when he returned there after spending the night in jail. I handed him the bill. At that moment I wished it were more, a lot more.

  He looked at it and then at me. “You’re leaving today, right? I’ll mail it to you in the States.”

  I had warned Krista before I walked into his office that day that if he gave me any bullshit there would be trouble. I didn’t say anything; I just grabbed his throat and slammed him against the wall. Then I spoke.

  “You nearly killed my Krista. Give me the money now or I’ll do to you what you did to her and break your fucking arm.” I released my grip and watched as he scurried to his desk and pulled out the money.

  “Here’s three hundred,” he said.

  I took it silently and left. It if he was expecting change he was sorely disappointed.

  That afternoon, with a bright blue cast on her broken arm, Krista and I boarded the plane back to Los Angeles. The next time we would be at that Caribbean airport we would be arriving as residents.

  GOODBYE, GOODBYE

  The date was set. We would leave Los Angeles, our friends and Krista’s family on May 5, 2000. We would drive across the country to Miami and take a plane to St. Maarten from there. We didn’t want to fly all the way because we wanted to put the minimum strain on our ever-growing pack of fur babies. We now had three; in addition to Angel and Soxy, Krista had rescued a puppy mix - part Lab, part Collie, all adorable - and named her Zoey. They would be a lot happier with us, in the car, on a four-day drive than they would be taking their chances in the hold of a plane for five and a half hours.

  In anticipation of the drive and the kind of car we’d need on the island I traded in my Lexus and bought a Mitsubishi Montero SUV. It wasn’t glamorous but we weren’t moving to impress people; we were moving to leave behind the jackets and heels needed for dinners out in Los Angeles and instead live in shorts and flip-flops while we ate at beach bars.

  I contacted a realtor in LA and we quietly put our house on the market. We insisted that as part of the deal the buyer couldn’t take possession until May 6, 2000. To our shock it sold before even the first open house. They had staged a day when all the real estate agents caravan around together to see new properties before they appear on the MLS. During that closed showing one of the agents broke with protocol and put in a secretive call to his client, a soap star from Days of our Lives, who drove straight over and bought it on the spot.

  If there had been any doubts about our move they were gone now. The house that had been a warm, loving home for Krista and me for the last three years was no longer ours. The die was cast.

  The only people who knew about our pending move were my mum in England and Krista’s parents. The time was rapidly approaching to break the news that we were leaving. Krista and I talked it through and decided that I would give everyone two months’ notice. That would give them time to replace me.

  I had a lot of goodbyes to make. In addition to KROQ I was walking away from four TV shows. 7 Days had just been renewed for a third season by Paramount and the second season finale that I had written was currently shooting in Canada and wouldn’t even air until the middle of May. By the time it premiered we would be long gone and watching it in St. Maarten.

  I’d also taken over Casey Kasem’s TV show, America’s Top 10 Videos which aired in my old VideoBeat time slot on KTLA Channel 5 and around the country. In addition to that I was the host of two TV shows for Europe, Music, Games and Videos and Inside Hollywood. It was a lot of money to leave behind but I knew I had to break out of those golden handcuffs if I really wanted to live the next stage of the life I’d dreamed of.

  After I said my farewells to the world of TV it was time to face KROQ and bid adieu after eighteen great years.

  Krista and I had talked about what was certain to happen. I would give my two months’ notice and everyone would be sad but that would be the end of it right there. I wouldn’t be allowed back on the air to say goodbye to my beloved listeners; DJs never are. The reason is because if they are leaving then they could say anything or do anything without fear of retribution and a station can’t risk that. Give your notice and the response is inevitably, “Thanks, now unplug your headphones and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” I was 100% prepared for that reaction and with that mindset I walked into Trip Reeb’s office to tell KROQ’s GM I was done.

  I sat at his desk and slid a picture of our house in St. Maarten across to him. He looked at it and smiled.

  “Nice place,” he said. “Your next vacation?”

  “No, I’m moving there.”

  Trip looked puzzled. “Can you explain that to me?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “Krista and I bought it three y
ears ago with the plan to move there when it was time,” I sighed as I looked at Trip. “It’s time.”

  Trip took a moment before he spoke. “So you’re leaving KROQ?” he asked.

  “That’s why I’m here, to give you my notice.”

  Trip got to his feet. “Wait, let me get Kevin.” He rushed out and appeared seconds later with KW. Kevin looked stunned.

  “You’re leaving?” he said incredulously.

  “I am. You know how much I love diving. And I’ve done everything I’ve ever wanted to do here at K-Rock and in LA. It’s time for something new.”

  “So you’re not going to another station?” asked Kevin.

  “There is no other station. KROQ is it for me. And we might have our differences in music, Kevin, but as far as I’m concerned you and Rick Carroll are the two greatest programming talents in the history of American radio. And you Trip, as the big boss, have been amazing to work for, but I want to try something new while I’m still young enough to sling tanks and drive a boat.”

  Trip looked at Kevin and then back at me. “You know, I envy you. What do you think, Kevin?”

  “Have you said anything about this on the air?” Kevin wanted to know.

  I shook my head, “Nothing.”

  “And when are you planning to leave?”

  “Two months. The end of April. After eighteen years I wanted to give you time.”

  “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. Don’t tell anyone and on Monday I’ll have a meeting with Kevin and Bean and we’ll work out how to position this and when to break the news.”

  Kevin’s words were shocking me. “So you want me back on the air on Monday?”

  “Monday? Isn’t it your turn to work a Saturday shift tomorrow?”

  Kevin’s loyalty to his staff was legendary but this was staggering. I was lost for words as KW continued.

  “I’ll let Lisa and Gene know about this and have them start working on a going-away party for you, a huge farewell concert for you and your fans,” Kevin grinned. “It might end up even bigger than the Weenie Roast, who knows?”