I’ve spent 37 years working on The Simpsons as a writer, showrunner and producer. I’ve written jokes for Johnny Carson, Joan Rivers and—no joke—Pope Francis. I’ve met two Beatles and one president (Biden). Despite all that, I’m most famous as “that guy who didn’t die on that sub.”
“That sub” was the Titan, which imploded almost three years ago, killing all on board. One year before that happened, I rode the Titan 2.5 miles down to see the wreck of the Titanic.
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Doomed to a life of adventure
Let me begin by saying that my wife, Denise, and I like danger. And by “my wife and I,” I mean just my wife—not me, not even a little. Our friends know this, so one called from Seattle to tell us, “A guy in my neighborhood is building submarines to go to the bottom of the ocean.”
I replied, “That sounds like a fun way to get killed.” I would be right, but that was still years away. This was the first we’d heard of Stockton Rush. They say a name is destiny. Martin Short really is short. Fats Domino was pretty fat. And Cedric the Entertainer … looks like a Cedric. So when your name is Stockton Rush, you can’t become a dog groomer; you are doomed to a life of adventure.
Mr. Rush was as handsome and suave as a soap opera doctor. He had a smooth voice and a bottomless supply of quips, like “You’re never too old to be an idiot” and “Clint Eastwood once told me, ‘Don’t drop names.’ ” He’d had every career an 8-year-old boy could dream of: inventor, airline pilot, aerospace engineer testing F-15 fighter jets, and now a submersible captain. We were hooked.
We took two trips with Capt. Rush. The first, in 2020, left from an exotic port off a mysterious island known as … Staten. A hundred miles off Staten Island is Hudson Canyon, an underwater chasm the size of the Grand Canyon. We were going to dive it in the Cyclops, a submersible made by Stockton’s private company, OceanGate. It was gleaming and streamlined, just like a Star Wars TIE fighter … or a high-end vape pen.
The viewport was a giant acrylic eyeball surrounded by spotlights and a laser. Since a submersible has to be towed to its dive spot, unlike a submarine, a tugboat pulled the Cyclops, bobbing and bouncing, as we headed out to sea.
And when we reached our dive spot, the Cyclops looked beat to hell, battered by waves and lashed by its own tow rope. The white outer shell had cracked—chunks had fallen off, revealing the steel hull below. I heard that some lights and a laser were gone. Capt. Rush surveyed the damage: “We’re good to go!”
The most dangerous part of riding the Cyclops was getting into the damn thing. Nobody put a lot of thought into this. They simply leaned a 6-foot kitchen ladder against the floating submersible. You had to scramble up the ladder as it bobbed with the waves, leap over to a tiny entry hatch on the top, then plunge blindly into the interior, dropping about 6 feet into darkness.
Once you were in, it was groovy: cool, dimly lit, quiet. The interior was about the same size as a minivan; it would seat five, if there were seats. Instead, the five of us spread out on the carpeted floor: pilot, co-pilot, my wife, myself and one other rich stupid tourist with a death wish.
We sank noiselessly, peacefully, through the ocean. The moment we touched bottom, a loud squawk came on the radio: “Everything is broken! Repeat, everything is broken!” The sonar, the computers and the lights all stopped working. We went back to the surface immediately. While they repaired the submersible, we spent three days on the tugboat, trapped with the ship’s cook, Psycho. This was more than a nickname—he had it embroidered on his overalls. I’m sure that’s how he signed his taxes: Psycho! He explained, “Folks call me Psycho ’cause I got yellow eyes like Anthony Perkins in that movie.”
Yeah, maybe. I once watched our Psycho chase a moth around the kitchen for an hour, muttering the whole time: “I’m gonna get you, moth. You ain’t gonna get the better of me. No moth gonna outsmart Psycho.” (Two notes: The moth did outsmart Psycho, and Anthony Perkins did not have yellow eyes.) When the submersible was fixed, we took another dive into Hudson Canyon.
A thousand feet down, the ocean floor looked like a landscape from a Road Runner cartoon: miles of sand, bizarre rocks and the occasional coral branching out like a saguaro cactus. It was amazing. Three hours raced by like three minutes. When Capt. Rush was preparing to surface, we begged him for another three hours.
All aboard!
In June 2022, Denise and I stood on a dock in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Out in the harbor was the ship that would carry us and another submersible called the Titan to the very spot where the Titanic sank. A rubber speedboat pulled up to take us to the ship. The skipper stopped short and said, “Oh, man, I forgot the life jackets!”
I muttered, “That’s the same thing they said on the Titanic.” This was my wife’s birthday week, and this trip was her present. It shows you a man would rather risk his life on a dangerous mission than go to Macy’s and buy a scarf she hates. Capt. Rush built this submersible specifically for the Titanic dive. It was white and bulbous like a Star Wars Imperial stormtrooper’s helmet. The Titan looked supercool—from the front. But in the back, it had a bunch of plastic foam blocks strapped on the outside to improve buoyancy. They said this was super high-tech plastic foam, but it looked like the crap every ’80s stereo came packed in. The Titan had one tiny porthole, the size and shape of a window on a washing machine. That’s where it may have come from.
There were also two flotation tanks that looked like bulging eyes, and a landing pad that resembled a gaping mouth. The submersible looked scared to death. So was I. The Titan had many setbacks before getting to this point: There was the pandemic. Then it got struck by lightning, frying the electronics. On a test dive, a system failure trapped everyone inside for 27 hours. And finally, the toilet broke. This seemed nearly impossible, since the toilet was basically a potty seat—two pieces, no moving parts.
Capt. Rush was detailing all these setbacks to us with a PowerPoint presentation when the computer froze and died. Uh-oh. Then he brought out the waivers for us to sign. Here are some highlights: When diving below the ocean surface, this vessel will be subject to extreme pressure, and any failure of the vessel while I am aboard could cause me severe injury, disability, emotional trauma, other harm and/or death. … I will be exposed to risks associated with high-pressure gases, pure oxygen servicing, high-voltage electrical systems and other dangers that could lead to property damage, injury, disability, emotional harm or death. … If I am injured during the Expedition, I may not receive immediate medical attention. Welcome aboard!
Our ship sailed for two days, 300 miles into the North Atlantic. This was a working-class, blue-collar vessel—its usual job was laying transatlantic cables. And they served the manly man food I loved: meat loaf, burritos, pizza. The cooks were Newfoundlanders, a people so insular they still had the Irish accent of their distant ancestors.
The day finally arrived—we were anchored about 2 miles above the wreck of the Titanic. They outfitted Denise and me in matching navy blue flight suits. It was supposed to make me seem like a crew member, but I just felt like an idiot. It’s like when you put a fire chief’s helmet on a 5-year-old. He may look cute, but he ain’t putting out any fires. We were now ready to board the submersible. We just had to take a COVID-19 test. I passed mine. Denise failed hers.
Capt. Rush said, “Sorry, Denise. You can’t take the trip. But Mike, you can still go!” I said, “I don’t wanna go!” It’s as if Neil Armstrong were getting ready to go to the moon when he came down with the flu. So NASA tells his wife, “You can go to the moon instead.”
At Denise’s urging, I got on board and began the two-hour descent straight to the bottom of the sea. The number of mishaps preceding this trip was amazing when you see how simple a submersible is. It’s basically a car that you drunkenly drove into the ocean. It sinks like a stone until it hits bottom. When you want to come up, you drop some of your weights and pop to the surface like a cork.
That’s it: Sink like a stone; pop up like a cork. When they wanted to tilt our vessel down, the pilot yelled, “Everyone pile into the front. Hurry, hurry.” To tilt it up: “Get in the back, move it, move it!” To steer it, the pilot used an Xbox game controller. I don’t mean that it looked like one or was similar to one—it was an actual joystick from a gaming system.
The ocean’s depths
How can I describe my voyage to the bottom of the sea? It was … boring. The ocean is pretty empty here, so there was nothing to see out the porthole. I actually fell asleep. And if you want a shock, try waking up from a nap thinking you’re at home in bed and realizing you’re trapped in a steel tube 2 miles underwater and sinking. We touched bottom amid the usual assortment of catastrophes.
We were nowhere near the Titanic. There were underwater currents pushing us farther and farther in the wrong direction. The sonar wasn’t working, and the compass kept flopping from east to west, north to south. A compass has one job, and this one wasn’t doing it. There was also a time crunch. We had started late, and there was a hurricane rolling in on the surface. Just another day in the life of Capt. Stockton Rush.
A navigator on the surface sent us directions, but they didn’t conform to what we were seeing. Our Russian science officer kept radioing the surface: “We need better directions. Switch to the B map.” The reply? “What is the B map?” There were five of us in the submersible, and four of us were working on the navigation. I was just 180 pounds of ballast.
And finally, just before we had to resurface, we saw it: the bow of the Titanic. We had minutes to snap selfies with the famous parts: the railing, the prow, the anchor. It looked just like it did in the movies. It wasn’t overwhelming; it wasn’t underwhelming. It was just whelming.
The only real danger came in the last minute of the trip. As the Titan was being hoisted back onto the ship, the whole thing flipped vertical. Everything inside—computers, phones, five people and their sandwiches—crashed in a heap at the bottom. Our trip to the Titanic ended in chaos. Still, for me, the submersible was a technological marvel. It was so perfectly pressurized that I went from sea level to 2.5 miles deep and back again, and my ears never popped.
It was only when the voyage ended that I learned the import of what I’d been through. Capt. Rush told me, “More people have been in outer space than have done what you did yesterday.” A passenger from Guadalajara became the first Mexican ever to reach the Titanic. I became the first Simpsons writer to get there. Denise was already planning a return trip so we could visit the Titanic together. That trip I never wanted to take? I’d be taking it twice. Whatever it cost me, I’d be paying double.
A borderline psychopath
But it was not to be. A year later, the Titan imploded, killing all on board. After four days of searching for the Titan, they found its wreckage. The submersible had failed an hour and 33 minutes into the dive. This sparked a four-day worldwide media frenzy. The public wanted someone to blame, and Stockton Rush became their villain. They fed off news stories that depicted recklessness, cost cutting and deceit. And then there was a documentary that included a clip of a former OceanGate employee calling Stockton “a borderline psychopath.”
That didn’t sound anything like my experience. Stockton Rush was the most meticulous, detail-oriented man I ever met. He insisted I attend his morning briefings and evening recaps, and, man, they were boring. He would carefully run through endless checklists. In fact, he gave me a copy of his favorite book: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. If I live to be 10,000, I will never read this book.
As far as I could tell, everyone—the public, the media—was too focused on the waiver we had signed that listed 100 ways to die. But they missed the point: Rush had thought of everything; he made sure we knew the risks; we went anyhow. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the accident on an “inadequate engineering process.” But was it recklessness or the risks that come with pioneering? Apollo 1 caught fire on the launchpad, killing all on board. Still, we made it to the moon two years later.
Stockton Rush was what we used to admire: a visionary. A dreamer who made his dreams come true. He had many successful dives and brought dozens of people like me down to see the Titanic. He did the impossible—not once, but over and over. Then his luck ran out, as luck does.
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