Petroleum Man Read online

  You don’t need to look forward to anything, Chippo. I’m doing this for my grandchildren, who happen to be your children.

  He shot a steely look at your mother and asked: And you approve?

  At which moment your grandmother Deirdre came downstairs from having read you two your bedtime stories and called out to me in her melodious voice as she entered the dining room, Oh Fabian and Rowena just love those little cars you gave them, Leon.

  Whereupon I stood up and said my plane would be ready in forty minutes. Taipei again, I added and excused myself quickly enough to cross the room before wiping a tear from my eye at Deirdre’s rare words of encouragement.

  3. 1:24 SCALE 1949 FORD TUDOR SIX

  IT WAS OF COURSE A BAD IDEA, I FREELY ADMIT, TO TRY to present you both 1:24 scale models of the 1949 Ford Tudor Six on the occasion, Fabian, of your fourth birthday, while you were both riding in the back seat. I thought I had activated the switch that blocks the operation of the rear windows. It was probably your grandmother Deirdre who had switched it off. She has the unfortunate habit of climbing in the car and starting it and then randomly, for all I can make out, pressing every button she can find on the door and dashboard as she drives away, windows half down, power mirrors askew, lights on, radio blaring, wipers waving, security system causing waterfowl to lift off from the lake. Of course it’s always worse when she uses one of my cars.

  In any event, Fabian, you are very, very lucky. Lucky that the driver of the car slowly passing ours was looking the other way when you hurled your Ford Tudor pot-metal model out the window into full rush-hour traffic. As far as I could see out the corner of my eye, it bounced off the windshield of the car next to us and then ricocheted across the concrete divider curb on to the hood of an exceedingly shiny lowrider which, as a singularly egregious form of automotive bastardization, deserved every inch of the long scratch your 1949 Ford Tudor probably inscribed on its hood. It is likely that the two drivers exchanged looks and hand gestures, which led to an illegal U-turn by the lowrider and then, at least from what I could make out, a high speed chase. You missed the exciting details of this episode, Fabian, because you were trying to wrest the other 1949 Ford Tudor from your little sister Rowena, forcing your grandmother Deirdre to unfasten her seatbelt with such violence that the buckle went flying and actually cracked—I realized only later—the windshield just below the upper-right-hand corner. The expense of this repair, considerable because the new glass has to be flown in from Germany, will be deducted from your share of my estate, Fabian. But belt unfastened, Deirdre was able to turn around and retrieve at least one of the offending presents, now safely installed atop Rowena’s bookcase.

  In your old age you will come to lament the lacuna in your collection, Fabian, although I have had the foresight to maintain privately within a secret recess of my study duplicate collections which you and your sister will have the good fortune to come across in your maturity, thus finding, miracle of miracle, the early lacks—and there will be more, I am sure—restored, as in some fairy tale. Nor did I tell you that the next day I returned to the four-lane boulevard in question, not a part of town we normally drive through but we knew no other way to put a stop to your tantrums, set off by your father’s malign suggestion that your grandmother and I take you to a circus—and overcoming scruples about being in a less than savory part of town without bodyguards. Though, true, I must now and then slip away to live a little, incognito. At any rate, I returned to the boulevard and parked the car on the off chance that I might find the remains of the 1949 Ford Tudor (the name of the color is sea-mist green, by the way). To my astonishment, I was lucky. There, in the north-bound fast lane exactly where the lowrider had made its illegal U-turn, lay the flattened, shiny, paintless, and wheeless form of the 1949 Ford Tudor embedded in the asphalt. Awaiting a gap in the traffic occasioned by signal changes, I extracted my Swiss Army knife and selected a wide screwdriver blade and then ran across to the fast lane and with a swooping gesture pried up the flattened pot-metal shape and darted back to the curb in the nick of time, no small feat for a man of my advanced age with an unsteady left knee. I will never confide to anyone how close I came to being run over by a beer truck whose driver apparently seized upon my courageous act as an opportunity for sport. Although I could allow myself a brief chuckle upon regaining the curb, squashed model in hand, at the thought of the beer truck driver’s reaction when he was told just who he had run down. Leon Tuggs, no less. The Leon Tuggs. The squashed model you will eventually discover in the shadow collection I maintain in my study.

  Lest you think you are the only hell-raiser in the family I will reassure you by reporting that at your age or slightly older I was given a large red pot-metal toy car by my mother. In a fit of pique—I wanted a fancier model with a working spring-suspension system—I took it out to the back yard one afternoon and pounded it flat with a brick and buried it under an apple tree. I tell you this so you will know that I was not perfect in my youth, even though I have conveyed the impression ever since.

  4. 1:24 SCALE 1952 FORD F–100 PICKUP

  OWING TO THE UNFORTUNATE EPISODE WITH THE LAST model three months ago, I surreptitiously placed the fourth model of your collection on top of your bookcases without announcing the fact, on a certain holiday, though of course I then waited breathlessly for a day and then a week and then two months for either of you to notice the new addition to your collections, during which time I had flown to Europe three times, Los Angeles six times, and twice to Asia. I write these words as usual on a night flight back from a frankly disastrous business meeting in Kuala Lumpur. The captain tells me the forest fires below are on Borneo. At any rate, for your eventual alertness, Rowena, you have earned points toward a bonus model. And I confess to being surprised. Between your grandmother’s and your mother’s efforts, your room has been filled with drifts of stuffed animals some four and five deep, some three hundred in number.

  Now of course I entirely realize that you two are being raised not in an era of dearth and want as I was, in an era following on a previous era of even greater dearth and want, but instead you are living in a household of gluttonous consumption, as fueled by the huge bonuses of your lawyer parents plus your mother’s share of my exponentially successful efforts. The labor of incorporating all these new toys and possessions into your still undeveloped psyches must be at times overwhelming. I have particularly talked to Deedums, which is what we call your mother but you are not to, and tried to explain to her that by giving you two everything you want within nanoseconds of your expressing interest, she may be corrupting one of the great principles of civilization itself. I can see nothing good, Fabian, coming of how your father has managed to fill your room with hard and soft dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes picked up on his travels—and you should know that two years ago I questioned, Rowena, the wisdom of building for you, at age three, a little suburb of dollhouses, seven at last count, on the Astroturf beyond the south deck. Deferred gratification, my little ones, is when you postpone doing something as long as you possibly can in order to give the weight of your postponing to the final possession of the object, to make the getting worth the wanting, owing to the poverty of just getting without any wanting at all.

  Perhaps we deferred a little too much when we were your mother’s young parents, being obliged by circumstances to maintain at least the appearances of a Spartan lifestyle. Be that as it may, the point of all this, especially for you, Fabian, is that destroying things is a way to replace the missing wanting, because you didn’t have time to do any wanting beforehand. Upon destruction of the object in question, there then follows a period of lacking and finally wanting, regretfully, the thing destroyed, which, since it is destroyed—thrown out the window of a moving car, pounded flat out in the back yard—will thereafter forever be wanted and longed for and pined after.

  In the future I shall make a point of displaying beforehand photographs of future models so that you can begin practicing wanting them well in advance.
Deferred gratification builds character. The more gratification you can defer, the stronger your character. Which your mother understands but does not practice. Which your father neither understands nor practices.

  But Rowena, lest you think you have got off scot-free, it took no great mental exertion to connect the 1:24 scale model of the fire-engine red 1952 Ford F-100 pickup missing from the top of your bookshelf—though I am puzzled here, as you are too young and too short to stand on a chair yet or haul a ladder up from the basement—with the corroded, paintless shape I trod on in the shallow end of the swimming pool, badly bruising my instep. There goes your bonus, Rowena. And now you too, like your brother, have a lacuna in your collection.

  I hope you both know I am very close to rescinding the whole idea of the collection, through your failure to appreciate and respect the importance of my life, through models of the cars that were part of it. Your parents, by bestowing on you truckloads of toys in order to make up for their always being away amassing their own fortunes, may also be trying to undermine or bury my own efforts on your behalf. Is it of no interest at all that the 1949 sea-mist green Ford Tudor was the car I learned to drive on or that the 1952 Ford F-100 pickup was the one in which I slid across the slippery brown leatherette seat to bestow my first kiss upon the heavily rouged cheek of my first girlfriend, who in panic accidentally unlatched the door and almost fell out on the her parents’ driveway? They were poorly designed, those doors. You always had to open them and slam them hard whenever you went over a dip. She later became a lesbian.

  Of course you’re too young. You may always be too young.

  5. 1:18 SCALE 1954 VOLKSWAGEN SUNROOF

  I AM FULLY AWARE THAT IT IS IMPROPER FOR A GRANDfather to expose his barely conscious grandchildren to tales of his youthful sexual peccadilloes even though someone, certainly not me, should eventually inform you of the fact that your mother Deedums was already three months pregnant with you, Fabian, when she unfortunately convinced your father, who is assuredly but regrettably your father, Craddock “Chip” Hoch, to marry her—or rather put me in the excruciating position of offering to pay for the last year remaining in the most expensive law school in the nation if he would do the decent thing and preserve the honor of your mother’s family however little he seemed to value that of his own, citing in the heat of the argument the case of his half-sister—you see, it goes back quite a ways with those liberal democrats—that she was quite happy raising two toddlers without the benefit of wedlock. The Pittsburgh branch of the Hoch family has lamentably fallen into liberal democrat tendencies. True, I was being excessive when I shouted, slamming books down on each other in my study, that Not getting married is not an option in the Tuggs family. Divorce is not an option for any Tuggs. The only option in this family is wedlock. Do you hear? Wedlock, young man, wedlock and going so far as to suggest that we had special ways, within the family, of making errant spouses disappear. People drown all the time, operations fail, planes crash—well, I was going too far, no doubt. But he agreed. I understood later that he threw the phone book in the general direction of your mother and stalked out of our guest suite saying, Invite them all for all I care or something like that. Five hundred and nineteen people showed up, plus bride, groom, and you, Fabian, in utero, making five hundred and twenty-one, at a cost of $203.95 per guest. Two thirds of the guests, being utterly unknown to me, appeared crazed with thirst and hunger and wearing clothes hastily pulled from the racks of thrift shops on the way from the airport. You, Fabian, probably had the best time, inside Deedum’s tum-tum. Our accountants worked like slaves to get it classified as a charitable donation to the homeless. And the cost of the spa where your grandmother secretly underwent psychiatric treatment for three weeks, as a health expense. And the Tahitian honeymoon which your father extracted as a last-minute down-to-the-wire concession, as a business expense. Which added another fourteen percent to the cost, even so. You didn’t come cheap, little ones.

  Such has been the rush of events, Fabian, that I have only now, two days later, after a quick trip to Rome, come to understand what I glimpsed out the right rear window of the car just before your grandmother and I began to drive away from your parents’ house. At first I made no connection between your shifty-eyed behavior and truncated odd little gestures toward your little sister standing next to you beside the car and the blood-curdling screams that emerged a few seconds later from her mouth. I halted the car immediately and jumped out and rushed around to the other side with your mother Deedums moaning and your father shouting at me for some reason, Stop the car you fool! We came upon the puzzling scene. He then changed his tune to Move the car, move the car, happily omitting the you fool bit. Oh my god your grandmother was screaming, do something! You were standing next to your sister with your hands in your pockets and rocking back and forth as if you had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the bunny head of her left bunny-rabbit slipper was under the right rear tire of the Mercedes. I was about to rush around to get back in the car to move it off the slipper and therefore off Rowena’s toes, we all supposed, when she simply removed her bare foot from the slipper, though still screaming and crying.

  Are you hurt? Where does it hurt? Deedums said, crouching down and cradling her.

  No but it’s all crushed, she sobbed, my bunny slipper. And then muttered something into her mother’s neck. Am I right, Fabian, in guessing that it was something like, Fabian made me do it …?

  Get the damned car off the slipper, will you, your father attempted to order.

  A few things have been made clear by this little prank, Fabian. One, your father was at last able to speak his mind freely, voicing his opinion of his father-in-law, though this is probably the last time in his life he will have occasion to do that—or so I am to gather from the shouting that broke out between your parents just before they closed the front door on their way inside. And while, on reflection, I could possibly be pleased with your explorations of the nature of gravity and related forces, you should try to invent better experiments than egging on your sister to place the head of her bunny slipper under a tire of a 5000-pound car to see what will happen.

  Though true, what has happened was very interesting. I will arrange a talk with your father at the earliest opportunity.

  6. 1:24 SCALE 1955 OLDSMOBILE ROCKET 88 HARDTOP

  WE’LL GET TO THAT ONE IN A MINUTE.

  I feel it important to point out that the previous model, the 1:18 scale 1954 Volkswagen Sunroof, was far from cheap, with its doors and hood and sunroof that actually open and close—and will do so again if you are careful as you enter the age of manual dexterity, or at least as you are now doing, Fabian. You will notice sizes and therefore the scales of these models vary, which is owing to the capriciousness of model car manufacturers, though whenever possible I will order the larger size. For the Volkswagen’s special metallic blue paint job, I had to call the factory—but that is a quaint, old-fashioned concept I must chase from my mind. Having chased quite a few factories abroad myself this past decade, with spectacular effects on the price of shares. At any rate, I had to call the customer service center, or whatever, which is probably located on Mars, and after being put on hold and forced to listen to music that sounded like elephants systematically breaking plate-glass windows—well, I turned it over to my secretary to deal with. To make a long story short, yes, for an exorbitant fee they could do a custom paint job and have the thing delivered in nine weeks, no doubt via several stops around the Indian subcontinent dodging labor unions.

  By the same token, I suppose, there is no sense concealing from you, my little ones, what you can see with your own eyes when you go visit less fortunate playmates whose houses have only three bathrooms, not seven, and only two or three cars, not eight (or is it nine?), and only one swimming pool, not two, and no tennis courts, no skateboard ramps, no one-quarter scale dollhouse suburbs, and a much smaller army of illegal immigrants—but I ask, and indeed I posed this question to the President only the other
night, how can a person be both “illegal” and an “immigrant”?—an army of such bruising your ears with bad English and probably worse Spanish. It is irrelevant whether I approve or disapprove of how your fiercely ambitious mother and dumb-luck father throw their children into the arms of this Central American Relief Society, which pumps a measurable portion of your inheritance south of the border each week—not to speak of the illicit portion—and charges it with the responsibility of feeding you and comforting you and playing with you except on those relatively rare occasions when your grandmother and I step in and restore a sense of normal non-ethnic family life.

  Though true, your grandmother is a one-person ethnic group all her own. She comes from outer space. I have often thought. We met under the guiding principles of Murphy’s Law, when her Renault wouldn’t start on a damp morning in front of the women’s dormitory, across from the campus green. Deirdre Delahunt. Nice dimples, good jaw, vague blue eyes, all of which you’re probably going to get, Rowena, the Dayton Delahunt look, and nice body work. As I checked out all the wires in the rear engine compartment on my knees, struck by lust at first sight, I suggested that we go out on a date if I managed to fix it. A bad solenoid jumped with a screwdriver, and I had my date. It turned out that she had already heard of my legendary ability to fix things. She was attracted by my large powerful thighs. I have ordered that car for your collection—not the Renault, but the one we went out on our first date in. Yet another custom paint job. Within three years the damage was done. In the form of Deedums, your mother. Conceived in a rented garage on a rolling creeper with padded yellow upholstery underneath another car that will eventually enter your collections. But Tuggses don’t divorce. We endure. Your grandmother and I have endured quite happily, considering, ever since. The garage? My agents were finally able to buy it last year.