Petroleum Man Read online

  Yes. I was trying to point out the obvious. You may not yet be able to imagine the thought so I will imagine it for you. You and your grandchildren and their children (this never stops, you see) will be richly endowed for centuries and centuries given the recent changes in the tax code and even better ones yet to come, as long as you practice sensible and legal birth control methods. You may have noticed, or very soon will, that often when there are many people sitting around the dining room table dessert portions become quite small, particularly when Flora doesn’t understand that she was to have prepared dessert for seventy not seventeen, so let that be a lesson. For those doped-up people staggering around outside on the overheated streets shouting that the world is coming to an end and that global warming and other such bugaboos are slowly bringing us to a boil, you will be taught at an early age now to turn up the air-conditioning, which you can easily afford to do.

  I haven’t explained this as well as I might but there will be other opportunities. This flight is getting bumpy, coming in for a landing at Rotterdam. Right on time at 3:28 A.M.

  7. 1:24 SCALE 1957 FIAT 1100 TV CONVERTIBLE

  THERE ARE THOSE IDIOTS WHO PROPOSE THAT WE MUST soon give up our cars and take to moving around the earth on roller skates or our hands and knees or worse. Whenever you encounter one of these haranguing and hectoring types, who will also be carrying on about non-renewable resources and global warming, I would suggest you reply by pointing out that talk is so cheap as to be perpetually renewable and so could be quite reliably used to fill mass-transit hot-air balloons.

  Did I subscribe to such nonsense I should not of course have embarked on this project to bestow on you, Fabian and Rowena, scale models of all the cars I have driven and owned over the past many decades and by so doing creating false hopes that you too, in your time, will eventually know an experience equally rich and varied—if not more so, given your father’s propensity to trade in cars the first time the gas gauge reads empty. Better cars than women, I admit to muttering within his hearing, and of course I should not report that I am certain I heard him mutter back, not quite under his breath, But why not both? I fear this is steamy stuff for your still tender, unformed ears, those soft pink little flowers, at this particular moment, though of course you will not be reading these words until, one, you can actually read, and two, the universe willing, I have determined that you are of the emotional age to comprehend, with mature compassion and understanding, the details of my life that I will here and there divulge in the course of these descriptions. Naturally this will be much after that scornful age—your grandmother and I went through this with Deedums—when you say such things as Yuck, I don’t want to hear about some old person’s personal life, horrible, old, musty, food stains dribbled down their front. Which happily does not apply to either your grandmother or me, though I can’t tell you how many times your father, thirty years younger, has greeted me in your bowling-alley size living room with a flash of his perfectly straight if small teeth and a glad hand shooting out and the other ready with a crippling blow to the back, all with his fly unzipped. His is a typical Hoch smile. If moray eels could smile, they would look like Hochs.

  So given the eventual date of your reading of these words, many years from now as fully responsible adults, there is probably little danger in my divulging details of a personal life for my intended audience, who will have accumulated quite a little crop of their own by then. And given the press’s outrageous invention of details of my life and spending habits. But time rushes along. In only a few years you will be enduring your first “sex education” course in third or fourth grade, if my experience is any guide to your own, although I hope with much better results. Owing to the unfortunate graphics of the film strip, a wretched form of technology, I became convinced for many years that little girls were equipped with little hoses that hung down in the same way little boys’ nozzles hung down, and that making love (or whatever it was called at the time) was a matter of hooking them up like two garden hoses, admittedly not a very appealing prospect. May you be spared.

  I go into much more detail on these matters in my General Theory of Industrial Sex, which posits, to skirt around the juicy bits, that civilization is based on the male piston and the female cylinder, the male bolt and the female nut, the male screw and the female wood or sheet metal or whatever is screwed, into, the nail and the nailee, the latch and the keeper, the keystone and the arch, the plug and the socket, the thread and the nipple, the drill and the bit, the shaft and the sleeve or bearing or bushing, and so on and so forth. In other words, if you care to look around anywhere at all, you are surrounded by mirrors of what your little parts are supposed to do: plug, unplug, insert, extract, drill, bounce up and down, and so on. At the appropriate time and place, of course, which is the tricky bit. As an engineer, I cannot help but notice what most people instinctively deny, which is that our lives take place amid the quite public copulatings of the parts of hundreds and even thousands of machines and devices which we use and which surround us on all sides. I first learned this lesson when I realized that the most exciting event of first grade was when I raised my hand and asked to be granted permission to go over to the end of the long bookshelf under the window and insert my yellow number two pencil into the mechanical pencil sharpener and crank away, secretly inhaling the fragrance of cedar shavings the machine was generating within its little chrome and plastic container. If such things still exist in schools anymore. Pencils, pencil sharpeners. Little worms of cedar shavings. But within a few weeks, Fabian, you will soon be able to report to me if first grade remains as exciting as it used to be.

  These last three cars were the ones in which I learned to apply the principles of internal combustion engines to the operation of my own body during college and graduate school. It is easier with the top down. In the Fiat convertible, though the car was a mechanical disaster. Hence the rented garage, the lift, the creeper with yellow padding. The rest is history. The Oldsmobile was implicated in an earlier pre-Deirdre adventure with, shall we say, a professional female engineer intimately familiar with the principles of Industrial Sex and who for a modest fee would perform private demonstrations, under the blinking red light of a radio tower, where the inadequacy of my fourth-grade sex education course led me to misunderstand the options available. I was still thinking in terms of connecting garden hoses—having not yet learned to observe the world at hand much more closely, as I was soon to do particularly in repairing the forever-breaking-down Fiat.

  This inept initiation took place in Calumet City, not far from Chicago, where my liberal democrat parents had shipped me off to a communist university, which shall deservedly remain nameless and which will see not one cent added to its endowment from the Tuggs fortune. My General Theory of Industrial Sex is intended to spare future generations from ever having to experience again the sorts of unfortunate episodes I had to endure as a young man. Though in deference to your grandmother, I am withholding publication until my “big one,” eight years hence.

  8. 1:12 SCALE 1956 CITROËN 2CV SEDAN

  FAMILY LORE, I AM CERTAIN, HAS ALREADY COLORFULLY distorted the turning point episode in my college studies in which I fled the communist university and its infamous liberal arts program at the end of my sophomore year for a much more down-to-earth university in southern Illinois. There I entered the engineering department and eventually became its most famous graduate of the latter part of the last century, if not all time. One of the great sadnesses of my career was that I made my fortune not from inventing a device based on what I call my principles of Industrial Sex but from one of those random brain waves that came during a warm bath, just as I was about to drowse off. In a flash of internal lightning the idea for the patent jolted me upright: one of those little things of paper which cost nothing to manufacture but which everyone is will to pay for. It warms the cockles of my heart every time someone activates its proprietary substance (which no one has yet succeeded in pirating) and a tenth of a cent is depos
ited in my account. This may not seem like much, my little ones, but multiply it by billions and billions on a good day and you will soon see where we can get with a mere tenth of a cent. And if you listen closely, you can hear the trees of the great forests crashing to the ground on the way to becoming all the little paper Thingies*, which eventually add up to your grandfather being able to buy you yet another model for your collection, such as this gray 1:12 scale 1956 Citroën 2CV four-door sedan whose full scale equivalent I drove for two years while getting my engineering degree. A particularly fine model with opening doors and sunroof and hood and trunk lid, with removable seats. The standard scale model of this car is a much tarted up later edition. It cost me a pretty penny to have them make up the earlier plain-Jane version, gray and chromeless, which was far more common.

  This car was something of a guilty hangover from my communist university liberal arts days. Cleverly engineered with only thirty-some moving parts, it was really a two-cylinder motorcycle enclosed in a tin-can of a body of anteater inspiration, with components easy to unbolt and unhitch. Top speed, about fifty miles per hour, tolerable in those years, at fifty miles a gallon. Much mocked by my fellow engineering students, who favored extravagant tanks from the early 1950s.

  I soon bested them with my next car, as you will see in my addition to your collections to be made soon, in observance of the Fourth of July, which earned me induction into the secret Black Box Society, “Dedicated to screwing up the world with technology for fun and profit.” No women, of course, have ever been inducted. And of course I have sworn in blood never to reveal the Black Box Society secret handshake. I quickly rose within its ranks to become Omni-Potent Potentate and Grand Dragon. As required by the position I engineered a stunt in which two campus police cars were surreptitiously rewired to reverse their directional signals, causing much merriment around campus and the expulsion of my partner in crime, the Vice Omni-Potent Potentate, who was unable to hold his silence after twenty years. He claimed in a tabloid article that his expulsion had destroyed his future career and would have nipped mine in the bud too, had he confessed or had I been caught. He was always a poor sport, that one.

  9. 1:18 SCALE 1933 PACKARD STRAIGHT EIGHT

  YOU MAY HAVE STILL BEEN IN THE HALLWAY NEXT TO the dining room, I fear, my little ones, when I happened to suggest in a rather too loud voice to your father that there would very definitely be repercussions if he chose to go through with his plans to move out of Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Estates to an even larger house more than forty miles away in what he regards as a more fashionable part of Connecticut. All the more galling given the expense and trouble I went to in the first place in creating Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Estates on the edge of my own Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Manor, for the comfort and convenience of your parents and you, my grandchildren—and allowing them to buy the largest house on the largest tract to boot. What could possibly be lacking in the present arrangement—which includes nine bathrooms, seven hot tubs, five-bedroom guest house, servants’ quarters, tennis courts, sauna, pool, guard house at the end of the drive, and its own dock on the lake. I know your father considers it a hardship to have to keep his yacht on the Sound, a ten-minute drive away, but a bit of suffering is good for the character.

  Move more than ten miles away, old Chippo, and Deedums gets nothing, I advised loudly. As in zero, nada, nyet. Absolutely nothing. The fifteen thousand square feet you have here is more than adequate, let alone the thirty-five acres.

  Your father had the gall to suggest that I was rarely at home within this charmed circle ten miles in diameter, to use his words, so what the hell does it matter?

  It matters because I say it matters. And when I say it matters, it matters. It matters a thousand times more than anyone else saying it matters.

  So you value me at approximately one-one-thousandth of your own self worth?

  An excellent ratio, I bellowed, quaffing some more brandy, for the relationship of father-in-law to son-in-law, Chip. Excellent. Congratulations. I’m pleased that at last you fully understand the numbers here.

  Whereupon your mother Deedums, having probably shooed you two upstairs, strode into the living room and asked what the matter was. On this, at least, your father and I were agreed. Nothing, we said in unison. Though I was irked that our altercation short-circuited my intention to trot upstairs and make certain your mother and your nanny had tucked you in properly and to catch a glimpse of your long silken blond hair, Rowena, spread out on the white pillow, and to wish you a last happy birthday for the day. I also wanted to check on the progress of the healing of your nose, Fabian, which you had skinned while crashing into the bushes with your latest bicycle. Given the somewhat tense relations between me and your father, I have put off bringing up the question of why he thinks it important for you to have so many bicycles, fifteen at last count. At age six, I only had one.

  But I stray. The 1933 Packard Straight Eight, models of which I have given you both on the occasion of your fourth birthday, Rowena, was not quite yet an antique in 1961, just a tired, old, and inexpensive car. My fellow engineering students were impressed, however, by the car’s dual sidemounts and its long, high nose, which indicated power and potency, and it gained me entry into the Black Box Society, becoming the Society’s official if secret car during my one-year tenure as Omni-Potent Potentate and Grand Dragon. The car was bought new and owned by a steel-mill family who had successfully put down a union demonstration with no loss of life on the side of management. Its high hood, which shrouded the enormously long and deep straight-eight engine, was more than a third of the length of the long car. The copulating thrum of the long-stroke engine was a joy to hear and feel through the heavy steel of the body; it was, this sound, the inspiration, for one of the more brilliant theses of my General Theory of Industrial Sex, if I may say so myself.

  10. 1:24 SCALE 1957 ROVER 75 FOUR DOOR SEDAN

  BECAUSE IT WAS TO BE SOME YEARS BEFORE MY Thingie® patent, my seventh, I was obliged to settle for inexpensive back-of-the-lot used cars while I completed my graduate studies and slowly built up my engineering practice. And when the grand Packard—excellent off the shelf 1:18 scale model, I must say—turned out to require more time and patience than a young blade like me could spare, I sold it to a budding collector and for a song picked up a five-year-old Rover 75, whose 1:24 scale model I had to send to England for. A heavy car of restrained and somewhat blunt elegance known as the “poor man’s Rolls-Royce,” this one suffered from brakes that had to be pumped and an inoperative starter, which required me to hand crank it unless parked on a hill, and a noisy timing chain. Ah, but I think back fondly on this disreputable time of bad cars and heavy drinking with my fellow students and midnight equations and theories and raunchy conversations in the three-stall shower room in the dorm, which I have re-created in one of my galleries in the Manor using fixtures salvaged from a recent renovation of the actual dorm. It is one of those fully functional time capsules I can revisit whenever the whim strikes me, seeking to refresh my youthful soul—though I must be careful not to be overcome with nostalgia.

  These were the days when I first elaborated my theory of Industrial Sex in a finally coherent form. I also anonymously published The Steel Penis and the Iron Vagina, expanding on material I could clearly not include in my thesis, “The Place of Tolerances in 18th-Century Metallurgy,” which was the germ for my later survey, A History of Tolerances, still used as a pirated text at Bombay University, or so I am told. At the proper time in your lives, I will bestow signed copies of Tolerances on each of you, to give a certain weight and gravitas to your personal libraries.

  At this time—I was in my mid-late twenties—I also developed a personal financial graphing system which has served me in good stead ever since. My only regret is that I did not start it at your ages, my little ones—or that that I did not have a well-meaning adult set it up for me, as like you I would not yet have been able to comprehend its subtleties and long-term benefits. Essentially the system consis
ts of four line graphs recording the progress of my income, savings, and other liquid investments, real property, and debt load. At twenty-five, say, my debt load was rapidly rising under the burden of expenses exceeding income, my income appeared to be falling, my savings and investments (the cream 1957 Rover 75 four-door sedan worth $150, some pots and pans, some used furniture, a slide rule, etc.) were virtually nil, and I was without equity in real property whatsoever. Had there been any point at the time, a fifth line could have been added, projecting the potential value of future inheritances and the like, but as I say, there seemed to be no point, as my frugal liberal democrat parents were soon to have their modest assets stripped away from them by those inventive entrepreneurial strategies of the health care industry, which suggested, from another point of view, excellent investment opportunities.

  At your age and in your circumstances, Fabian and Rowena, your graphs would look quite attractive and would be exceedingly pleasing to contemplate—they could be hung on the walls above your beds. There would be the steady green line of your weekly allowance, probably twice the value of my graduate school stipend; there would be no red line of debt; there would be the rising blue line of your trust funds, or lines, because you have two each, one from your parents, the low one, and one from your grandparents, the high one, about five hundred times higher; and the faint yellow lines of the estimated value of your twin inheritances, the highest of all, quite up there at the ceiling. It is so handy to have this financial material at your fingertips—or posted near your bed so that you can go to sleep and wake up able to reflect upon these essential realities of human existence. As in fact I have, continuously since my late twenties. Though now of course I use a satellite-fed digital projection system on a screen that drops from the ceiling at the foot of my bed, at the push of a button, and a similar arrangement in my personal 737.