Petroleum Man Read online

  Yet from your bedside graphs, Fabian and Rowena, all may not be quite as simple and rosy as it seems, for somewhere else in the world there will be children whose bedside graphs feature a blossoming red line of indebtedness and no asset lines at all. Probably, come to think of it, 29,000 feet directly below me in the dark, as I believe we are now passing over some part of Indonesia on the way to Bangkok. At any rate, from this you would need to gather—I will help here—that the chief difference between the rich and the poor is that the poor must borrow in order to survive, and the rich to lend in order to thrive. What we call stocks and bonds and mortgages and investments in general are those instruments by which the rich lend their money to those less rich, middling, or simply poor. For those people who wish to believe that a world is possible without extremes of grinding poverty—lamentable as they are—and without extremes of great wealth—admirable as they are too—I can only say that this would be a world in which there was only one sex, or only day and no night, only summer without winter, with people of all the same height, weight, and of the same intelligence. And so on. You can see what a boring place the world would become.

  Things move and flow and reciprocate because tolerances permit them to do so. For tolerances read differences. Without tolerances, or differences, things jam, seize up, and freeze. Which will become perfectly clear when eventually you consult my various volumes on the subject.

  A last word of reassurance, however. Poverty will be around as long as the need for wealth persists. And while the poor have proven quite well their ability to get by on nothing, we rich people would be quite lost without our wealth.

  As you probably have guessed by now, your grandmother and I don’t entirely agree on this. She has a fatal weakness for the lost cause, for which I believe she mistook me back in our student days of defective Chevys and Fiats.

  But I for one am beginning to feel a little cramped in the Manor’s seventy-eight rooms, which is why I’m looking forward to the day when the construction of the extension of the new north wing, which will double the size of the house, is finally complete. Deirdre has become so busy with her so-called good works, however, I doubt she will hardly notice—at least not until she gets lost.

  My train of thought was interrupted by the captain reporting an emergency on the main runway at Delhi, forcing us into a holding pattern for a tedious hour and a half, but I have failed to recover a point I was going to make. Be that as it may, I must say that I certainly enjoyed our afternoon yesterday out on the Cape, particularly after your father had to excuse himself to fly back to the city to deal with an unexpected court ruling. The weather even seemed to improve after he left, the breeze dropped, and the afternoon turned warm and hazy, with you two digging holes and building castles in the sand while the Atlantic rolled ponderously beyond, your nimble bodies unmarked by time, and your grandmother carrying on about her latest lost cause to Deedums under the umbrella while I half dozed, having finished combing through the financial pages.

  There came a moment just before we were to leave when I could hardly restrain myself from thrusting myself up out of the beach chair and approaching you, Fabian, and squatting down and speaking the words over the sound of the surf—casually, as if I was only admiring your oddly unadventurous sand castle, which was more like a defensive bunker—softly speaking the words of the message I am at times so desperate to impart to you, that nugget of wisdom that could spare you so much grief and disappointment. But I knew, had I done so—had I actually stood up from my chair and crossed the warm sand to find myself at your side, your brown arms and back covered with a frosting of drying sand, I would have been rendered speechless in the sudden realization that I could never fit it all into so few words, in what surely would have been the briefest of moments.

  11. 1:12 SCALE 1953 CHEVROLET BEL AIR CONVERTIBLE

  THIS WAS THE CAR—A STOMACH-TURNING SHADE OF peanut-butter orange, with white top and trim—with which I courted and won your grandmother Deirdre, who to her credit did not conceal the fact that she would eventually be two-thirds of the Dayton, Ohio, KlampTite-MagicMastic fortune, on our third date. I bought the Chevy from a fellow engineer who desperately needed the $175 I had to borrow from yet another friend to buy it, for our first date, not expecting Deirdre (who I first thought was a mere student in anthropology) to be impressed by the wretched Rover’s walnut and leather appointments while I was attempting to start it with a hand crank. Or to stop, once I got it running, with vigorous pumpings of the brake pedal while controlling its tendency to swerve sharply into incoming traffic whenever the brakes finally did engage. The Chevy started and stopped and ran sluggishly in between, with a soft almost opulent wallowing caused by inoperative shock absorbers, and if you kept the windows half open or the top down the smell of exhaust was not overpowering. There were spots on the front bench seat where you could sit without the cracked plastic upholstery working holes into your clothing. Happily Deirdre was into downward mobility.

  I was not. My descent into penury was galling. It was as if I was being pushed back into the world of my too-thrifty parents. I calculated that the Chevy ran on the average thirty-one miles before needing to be repaired. Which only fueled, the correcting of its defects, your grandmother’s ardor. Deirdre was the first and only young woman I knew for whom mechanical breakdown was an aphrodisiac. It was intense hormonal activation at first sight. Which I later came to think of as major misunderstanding at first sight.

  Once, while I was on my knees replacing one bald tire with another one, slightly less bald, she called out from the front seat: I love this. The simple life. I’ve never broken down in a car before.

  It was the first time I heard the phrase from her lips, the simple life.

  Sure, I said to myself, sure, we can find a bit of time for the simple life here and there in between bouts of conquering the world.

  Beware, my little pets, of those words that may be whispered as you lie arm in arm with your future partner on a rolling creeper with yellow plastic padding on a concrete floor in a dark garage underneath the greasy chassis of one of those cars that never seem to want to run. I even have thought of expunging this model from your collections, wiping a bit of history off the map, as it were, but my passion for historical accuracy has got the better of me.

  It keeps coming back, that urgent feeling I had a month ago on the beach. Only now as I watch you playing on the wine-red living room carpet, Fabian, on one of those happy evenings when your father has to work late at the office, and you push one of the models of your collection back and forth on the exquisitely soft carpeting, its wheels making dew-like marks in the nap of the wool, and you stare dreamily into its little plastic windows, and hum little engine noises, a rooster of blond hair sticking up from your still narrow, flat little boy’s head—no coiffeur has succeeded in taming it, a Tuggs family trait—I often wonder what I could say to you that would spare you all the grief with women that sooner or later you too are bound to endure. What would be the message I would whisper into your ear some quiet evening? What is the secret? You are my last chance to tell anyone the truth while I still have it within my grasp. Yet you are still too young, too receptively young.

  But fortunately, my little ones, at least you live in a world in which you have to fix nothing. There’s an army of people in the house and out there who will fix whatever needs fixing or will simply throw it out and buy another one. And fortunately long gone is the world in which heavy glass bottles once containing soda pop, the food of the poor, were laboriously lugged down a hot sidewalk to the corner store where the grocer suspiciously paid back their deposit in dimes and nickels and pennies. I tell you all this so that you will not be tempted by some kind of nostalgie de la boue when you come of age and seek to throw off the trappings of hard-earned wealth and privilege in a mistaken quest for a simple life of eating berries and nuts in the woods and sleeping on the ground under boughs of pine needles—and living off of deposit money from empty soda-pop bottles.

>   Your grandmother Deirdre is a perfect example of what happens when you try to escape your class through half-baked notions of the simple life. I was able to bring her back into the fold, or into her fold, which soon became mine. A deep misunderstanding was at the base of her delusions, I fear, and as result I have maintained a one-man war against the Internal Revenue Service, seeking the abolition of the term unearned income or, that failing, its revision into deserved income.

  All income, my pets, is deserved—in the sense that at the end of the day I, or even you, at your tender ages, can readily work up a list of reasons why we deserve what we receive and what we possess. Such lists include the simple basics of I am alive, and therefore I deserve, as well as more refined items, such as my exquisite sense of taste that deserves to be satisfied, my pride of ownership, to a listing of all the good thoughts I have had all day and even the good deeds I have performed and will definitely perform in the future or will order someone to carry out in my name.

  As for your grandmother, you know the story. The scrapbooks are still too often passed around the family gatherings when we’re not there, I fear. How Deirdre and I eloped in the 1953 Chevy Bel Air convertible, how our disappearance sparked a nationwide woman-hunt, which lasted through the abrupt bankruptcy of KlampTite-MagicMastic—since become a classic textbook study of pioneering offshore outsourcing and diversification gone wrong. This historic event fortunately took over the front pages and caused the stories about Deirdre to sink into trivia with headlines such as Investigators Fail to Link KlampTite-MagicMastic Heiress Disappearance with Bankruptcy. And how we hid out for two weeks in the upper reaches of the Michigan woods on the grounds of a closed-up hunting lodge owned by one of her uncles, living on berries and trout, making vigorous love among the ferns and mosquitoes, developing abscesses and excessive flatulence—until finally she said to me in our damp molding connubial sleeping bag, I would give anything for a warm bath. … And I suggested, There are as many warm baths as you want to take back in Ohio.

  Contrary to family lore, which I know is muttered back and forth among your parents’ generation as they sniff and snort long after your grandmother and I have gone to bed, things about us being hippies and anti-war protestors—I will point out only that we were neither, we were simply an impecunious engineer and a somewhat diminished heiress who found a small-town minister to marry us on our way into the woods. Far more diminished than either of us could have imagined during our two-week attempt at the simple life. Had we waited until afterward, it would have been a far different story. But be that as it may, upon our emergence, there was only one warm bath, the night before the Delahunt mansion went on the block.

  But it was a bath to rival that of Archimedes and his ancient Eureka!—if not exceed it, for owing to modern patent laws and our legal system, I was eventually able to reap the full benefits of my discovery of the Thingie® while Archimedes, without a patent attorney in sight, was unable to patent gunpowder, or was it gravity? Or whatever it was he thought up in the bath. I will have that looked up as soon as we touch down at O’Hare, in about two hours.

  12. 1:24 SCALE 1960 MERCEDES–BENZ 1904–DOOR SEDAN

  IT IS FORTUNATE THAT YOU ARE STILL TOO YOUNG TO entirely understand the words spray painted last night on the walls of the main security gatehouse of Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Estates, the third such incident in the past two years—in fact you may not even recognize the graffiti as being offensive, having already practiced yourselves with magic markers on the expensive Florentine wallpaper that decorates both your rooms. The cost to efface these bold squiggles and scribbles—or rather whether to efface them at this time or leave them for family members and friends to appreciate—apparently set off one of those little disagreements between your father and my daughter that can go on for several days and reach far into the future, into what prep schools and universities you will attend and what kind of person you will marry and how, finally, you will deal with your own children when they take black markers to what is surely the most expensive wallpaper between here and Mars. In this one instance I would agree with your father. In just this one instance. Were I to be asked. Though I did take a few shots of the wallpaper with the little video camera I normally reserve to record those moments when I bestow the model cars on you.

  Your still tender youth means that as yet I have no need to explain the words EAT THE rICH splashed across the high antiqued brick wall next the gatehouse where the security guard was either criminally asleep or watching TV, other than to observe that such thinking is the work of deranged troublemakers suffering from chemical imbalances occasioned by dietary deficiencies brought on, in turn, by poor lifestyle choices. You will surely have noticed, however, that neither your grandmother or I, nor your parents—one of the rare things all four of us actually agree about—allow soda pop or so-called soft drinks into either of our houses, on the grounds that such beverages are primarily manufactured to quench the thirst of the poor. By choosing such beverages you, or rather they, in this case, the poor, are also choosing the negative health effects that such beverages bring upon the individual body, and are therefore suffering exactly what they deserve. This same flaw in human nature, which so conveniently distinguishes poor from rich, also makes investing in companies that produce such goods an excellent financial strategy. Because of such investments, and here is where my little ones need to prick up their ears, your parents are easily able to afford those far more nutritious beverages whose consumption will build strong bodies and good teeth. Even the very young can often benefit from good market advice—as I have been saying for much of my adult life.

  As for the car, a 1:24 scale black 1960 Mercedes-Benz 190 4-Door Sedan, on the occasion of Thanksgiving, Fabian and Rowena, this was the well-used and somewhat clunky vehicle which transported your grandmother and me ultimately to the evening bathtub session that eventually led to the salvaging of the tattered remains of the KlampTite-MagicMastic family fortune and its merging with the exponentially burgeoning Thingie® Corporation International, in a nice admixture of dying old money and lively new cash. While I lay limp and spent and dozing off, I languidly explored some of the unsolved intricacies of my Theory of Industrial Sex, in the bathwater whose temperature was cooling owing to the evaporative heat loss of its surface, but also being raised by the slow dribble of hot water from the fixture. Deirdre was darting back and forth, in and out of the bathroom, trying to raise my drooping lids with questions such as Should I wear this? and Should I wear that?, holding up fancy dresses for the last dinner in the old Delahunt house, in the dining room downstairs. We were already fifteen minutes late, delayed by our little game with rubber ducks and wooden sailing ships in the bath, and so on and so forth. I was absently answering, Yes, this and No, that other one, not really paying attention because deep within my mind I was systematically inventing the famous Thingie® and thinking through the industrial processes by which it would be manufactured and assembled and even packaged and the multitude of uses to which it would be put—but minus the one single thing that would make everything else work, the special moistenable agent and several related polymer compounds that it would take me another three years and countless baths to stumble on. Fortunately my agents were able to salvage most of the fixtures and much of the black and white tile from the third-floor bathroom of the Delahunt mansion before it was demolished, eventually providing the basis for an excellent reconstruction in one of the galleries of the Manor’s north wing extension.

  I am composing these words on a flight back from Bangkok, where I was delighted to find a company which will custom build models in 1:12 to 1:8 scale in any trim level or color, for a fraction of the cost of my previous suppliers, through a U.S. Government supported program for rehabilitating felons through building such models. Based on family photographs and approximate measurements, they will also be able to create scale models in cloth and plastic or rubber of us all to place inside the car models. They showed me some examples, and I pointed out that white p
eople are white, not swarthy, and our noses are not that prominent—your father is an exception here, but he will not be modeled—and neither the Tuggs nor Delahunts are notable for dark bushy eyebrows. Apparently the program attracts felons of higher than average intelligence and education; such inmates, I was told, entertain fantasies about cars they will surely never be able to own, possibly never even see in real life, and this is the fuel that propels them in their exacting efforts, to your benefit, my pets, at one third the previous cost.

  13. 1:12 SCALE 1966 VOLKSWAGEN WESTFALIA CAMPER VAN

  LITTLE FABIAN, THE WORDS THAT FOLLOW ON THE occasion of your sixth birthday are for you only, as between man and man. Unfortunately because of bad weather over the North Atlantic the flight has been delayed six hours. I have decided to stay with the plane rather than try to get back to London for a couple of hours, in case the weather opens up earlier than planned. But at least this year I was actually able to attend your birthday party, for the first time in three years. Obviously what follows are things I could not have said to you face to face, video camera running, when I presented this model to you, an occasion which you rose to nicely with a sweet smile—thank god it looks like you will have good Delahunt teeth, not your father’s small nippers—and a fluttering of your long eyelashes. But as I was saying, in terms of the genes we share in common, the many decades that separate us are but a few grains of sand on the whole of your favorite winter beaches on the Côte d’Azur, Cabo San Lucas, Bali, or even Florida. Your birthday car, by the way, with its as-usual expensive paint job—it will be six months before my new supplier kicks in—a light blue 1966 Volkswagen Westfalia Camper Van with operating pop-top and front and side sliding doors, and four miniature sleeping bags, was bought at Deirdre’s insistence—the actual car, not the model, that is—when she began feeling the urge to head for the woods again and resume the simple life, though this time with a number of tools and simple appliances which she found in some catalogue and which she insisted on showing me on the sofa after dinner—well before you were born.