Petroleum Man Read online

  Look, she said, her blue eyes brightening, with that we could make our own yogurt for little Deedums.

  I tried to keep my replies noncommittal. Could we?

  Undaunted she licked her finger and continued leafing through the slick pages. Bees! Beehives! We could make our own honey!

  Had she forgotten, I wondered, that a single bee sting can send me into a state of potentially fatal shock?

  At any rate I managed to satisfy her urge to go back to the simple life through a series of uncomfortable camping trips to the upper reaches of Lake Michigan during seasons rich in insect life.

  Bugs are at the heart of the simple life, my dear, I suggested on more than one occasion. In fact the simple life is centered around those most simple of creatures, the bug. If there are no bugs, we are not living the simple life. Through their inconsiderate and even dangerous behavior, bugs may be trying to tell us that the simple life may not be what it is cracked up to be.

  What I feel you need to know, Fabian, is that I don’t really understand women or for that matter actually like them, except possibly your five-year-old sister. And children in general seem to be another species entirely. This is an identifying mark, some would say affliction, of the engineering profession and other professions and trades that design, fabricate, cast, forge, bend, anneal, extrude, roll, stamp, and crush things out of metal and other hard substances, and additionally submit them to drilling, welding, bending, radiating, punching, embossing, grinding, buffing, polishing, plating, sandblasting, sawing, reaming, painting, and so on. In my experience all women abhor such processes and are quick to flee the premises in which greasy or sooty men pound on sheet metal with hammers, to use a crude example, or tighten huge bolts with mammoth wrenches or direct gushing hoses of odiferous chemicals into tanks and tanker trucks and tanker ships. Only men, not women, delight in devising explosives, poisons, projectiles, traps, machines, and weapons in general. Name one weapon invented by a woman. All this you should know as a young man, Fabian, so that as soon as you begin to feel those strictly masculine urges within you, you can begin to guide them toward those areas of male endeavor that will return the highest degree of delight and excitement over the long run.

  What I don’t understand about women is why they fail to understand, in turn, these essential male characteristics, even though at an early phase of a courting relationship they may pretend to admire the size of your car or pretend to share in your excitement at developing some revolutionary toxic substance that promises to rid the world of cockroaches at last, or they will pretend to admire your ability to bring down an obsolete fifty-story building with the pressing of a button—and so on. First they will pretend, and then, having got what they want, which I will not detail until you are a little older, they will turn their backs and lose complete interest in what you are doing as a man and even go so far as to hint that what you are doing is cold or childish or irrelevant or destructive of the so-called environment.

  My advice here, young man, is that you should prepare yourself in advance for the double-bind the opposite sex will always trap you in. Whenever you find yourself deep in some manly activity in which you are testing your new strength and canny intelligence against metals, rocks, glass, wood, and other hard and/or toxic or dangerous materials, you should be aware of exactly why some young woman is egging you on to make that bigger and better bulldozer or that stronger and more potent poisonous gas or that bigger and better atom bomb. Go ahead and do it, is my advice, but with the firm knowledge that later you are sure to be accused of making a shambles of everything. The long and the short of it is that men invent the world while women only populate it.

  Be that as it may, now that the last of your baby teeth has finally fallen out, coincidentally on your seventh birthday, your mother has been kind enough to supply me with the complete set, minus the two you misplaced at school, from which I am commissioning the construction of gleaming white marble replicas, which will measure approximately eighteen inches on a side, to be eventually housed in one of the small galleries of the new wing of the Manor. Probably between the gallery of my collection of antique and foreign condom dispensing machines, which you will be admitted to at a more appropriate age, and the one for my collection of antique bolts and nuts, screws, nails, and corkscrews.

  14. COMMEMORATIVE COLLECTOR’S SPECIAL EDITION OF THE COMPREHENSIVE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ALL THE WORLD’S CARS

  IN SHORT, MY LITTLE FABIAN, TO CONTINUE OUR discussion, now that I have got back in the air, a rare daytime flight to Rio de Janeiro during which business will have to wait—in short, men and women have almost nothing in common and you may wonder—especially given your father’s behavior—why they bother to live together at all. In general, I now believe they shouldn’t, or that at the very most they should live in separate houses on the same property, within a minimum distance of a hundred yards of each other, perhaps with a connubial tent in between—the sort of detail your grandmother would appreciate. She is fanatical about tents. I can never remember the title of her never-completed master’s thesis in anthropology, something like “The Tent Determinant.” For lack of a degree she never went into the field but instead took up charity work with the usual lost causes in between bringing up your mother.

  But anyway, this domestic scheme, which I have elaborated in my General Theory, in the chapter entitled “The Adult Guide to the Practice of Industrial Sex,” will be disseminated throughout the world on the occasion of my “big one” about seven years hence, under the auspices of the Thingie® Foundation, which I have created for the promotion of my ideas. One-hundredth of a cent from the purchase price of every packet of Thingies® is now contributed to the Foundation. When the endowment reaches a critical mass within the upcoming five years, I will be able to count on my ideas being as widely promoted as money can buy. The main problem appears to be that my conservative colleagues to the right become upset at anything more explicit than the birds and the bees, and even that metaphor they suspect is a liberal democrat reference to some so-called environmental crisis.

  And true, I do not practice what I preach. Or more exactly, your grandmother and I do not practice what I preach, yet our modus vivendi is not without interest. It is summed up in the phrase and its variations, which you and Rowena have already heard more than once: I’m things, you’re people. In theory this should solve everything, but unfortunately your grandmother expands and contracts the definition of both things and people to fit her personal needs and agendas, to the point that what may appear to the naked unbiased eye as a thing on day one, a house or a car, becomes the next day a person enwrapped in a tangle of emotions and memories and bizarre desires; and frequently vice versa. This appears to be tied to her theory, or whatever, of blossoming. As in, if I quote correctly, Every person and even every object has a special moment of blossoming, when it glows and becomes radiant and almost explodes. I can feel it pressing against me, telling me to stay still, watch, listen.

  My response has always been, And then what, it wilts and dies and turns to compost? Whereupon she becomes evasive. Maybe. Who knows? And to my repeated question, Does it happen more than once?, she simply gives no answer.

  Be that as it may, the exceedingly fat two-volume Commemorative Collector’s Special Edition of the Comprehensive Encyclopedia of All the World’s Cars, which I have presented to you and which is now safely installed out of your reach at the top of the bookshelf, is a fine example of a list of things, not a few of which you now own in model form. Even though you are still a little young to make out some of the longer words, it is never too early to fill your vision and imagination with the things of the world, leaving your little sister the simpler task of figuring out mere people.

  15. 1:12 SCALE 1966 VOLVO P–122 SEDAN

  NEXT WEEK, ROWENA, I WOULD LIKE YOU TO BE especially quiet and patient during my Founder’s Report to the family on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the incorporation of Thingie® Corporation International and not squirm or wiggle or
suck your thumb, which you should have stopped doing about four years ago, or otherwise cause your father to jump up and start loudly cooing at you in the middle of the presentation. His disruptions have already caused me to lose considerable pleasure in this annual event, when I detail by means of flip charts and computerized slides the inexorable rise of Thingie® Corporation International into the financial stratosphere. My labors here as an entrepreneur have all been for the benefit of the immediate family, notably your grandmother Deirdre, your mother Deedums, your brother Fabian (whose expensive treatments for his public-event-hiccup-syndrome seem at last to be paying off), and by reluctant extension your father Chip. Your uncle Fabian and his wife Patricia have been invited as usual, but not, I have specifically requested, their ten-year-old twin sons. Nor several layers of progressively distant cousins on Deirdre’s side who have got word of the event and who have been clamoring for years to be included. This—to try to remind you to remain still and quiet—is why I am adding this 1:12 scale 1966 Volvo P-122 Sedan, two tone red and white, to your collection early. I will explain the importance of this car to my life as a young entrepreneur in due course.

  As I understand they have been teaching you reading in school for a year or so, I hope you will regard the occasion next week as an opportunity to improve your vocabulary, adding the terms capital, from which capitalization, dividend, profit, stock-split, option, proprietary, lawsuit, and bankruptcy, to suggest a good starter sampling. These words will help you understand the fascinating history of the founding of Thingie® Corporation International upon the ashes of KlampTite-MagicMastic. The only thing I really owed your grandmother Deirdre family’s old empire was the formula for the soluble agent for my Thingie® invention obtained by informal means from a retired KlampTite-MagicMastic chemist, who creditably wished to shore up his retirement plan badly damaged by the manipulations that eventually led to bankruptcy. Of course you would not know this through the thousands of pages of court testimony in which your grandmother’s Delahunt uncles attempted to revive the company, the very company they themselves had ruined, by wresting away from me the Thingie® patent, a case which was eventually dismissed. The attendant publicity introduced the Thingie® to the world without me having to spend a dime on advertising. By the end of the trial the worldwide recognition index for Thingies® exceeded Jesus Christ himself and was a close second to the prophet Mohammed.

  About the two-tone red and white Volvo P-122 four-door sedan. During the two years of the Thingie® litigation, I was advised by my personal publicity trainer to adopt a low-profile lifestyle intended to suggest that your grandmother Deirdre and I were living a life of frugality and economy and were bringing up our only child, your mother Deedums, without the benefit of private schools or dancing or violin lessons, suffering as we were under the burden of a lawsuit of historic proportions. Or soon lawsuits, when a new one was added, The United States of America vs. Thingie® Corporation International, charging us with restraint of trade and with monopolizing the market for our little Thingies®. But how, my dear little Rowena, could we possibly be accused of—add this one to your vocabulary, while you’re at it—monopolizing a market which simply didn’t exist until I invented the Thingie®? The events of this dark period of our lives had such a strong effect on little Deedums that she resolved at an early age to become an attorney in order to defend helpless corporations against the depredations of inherently anti-business Big Government.

  Needless to say we won that one too. But during those years we had to pretend that we were simple middle-class folks driving sagging used cars and living in a middle-class neighborhood on the edge of a slum in Dayton, in order to buff up the myth of the underdog of humble origins taking on the entire liberal democrat government and Deirdre’s evil uncles who had looted enough of KlampTite-MagicMastic to still put up a good fight.

  This is the story I retell during each of my anniversary reports so that the family will retain a clear memory of the amazing history of my success and wealth, in order to reduce, if not completely eliminate, the risk of apocryphal anecdotes eventually polluting the account and twisting its meaning around to serve the agendas of liberal democrats. Such as your father.

  You have my permission, wee Rowena, or somewhat less wee, now that you are six, you have my permission to carry into our grand living room, where the furniture will be re-arranged for the occasion, my latest addition to your collection, and to hold it quietly in your lap throughout. You are turning into quite the little lady now, and there are indications that you will soon have the good straight but small Tuggs nose and the full Delahunt lips. Though I’m not sure there’s much we will be able to do about your father’s large knees and short legs.

  If Fabian’s public-event-hiccup-syndrome erupts, please ignore it. Giggling, you may not have noticed, only makes it far worse.

  16. NICKEL–PLATED SCREW–ON CHRYSLER HUBCAP, C. 1929

  I HAVE DECIDED, FABIAN MY BOY, TO OCCASIONALLY diverge from my original plan by presenting to you and your little sister exact replicas of separate and unique items from my own collection of automobilia, despite the possibility of complications which may arise from the fact that your two collections will no longer be identical, as I originally intended, in order to minimize if not completely eliminate questions of sibling rivalry. But these, I now fear, are likely to arise no matter what I do—given the genetic material you have unfortunately inherited from your litigating father. And what greater pleasure (for me) than to pass on while still in good health and spirits replicas of my little treasures which you would receive sooner or later upon my death, but without my lucid explanations of their origins and histories to accompany them. This will take place tomorrow on my return from Sydney. As ever I have a few hours to scribble a few words, on this night flight when it’s too late on one continent and too early on another to conduct any useful business.

  The Chrysler hubcap, circa 1929, is an exact replica (including scratches and dents) of the first of more than three hundred hubcaps I acquired throughout my childhood neighborhood, usually on the way home from friends’ houses on my bicycle just after dark, visiting the old cars and utility trailers made out of old cars’ front axles parked in back yards. My anonymous exploits even attracted the attention of the newspapers, but only after I had amassed a collection too large to hide under my bed. Also my room had become redolent of axle grease—which I claimed I was using for one of my chemistry-set experiments. Now for those so-called biographers who have charged that I honed my famed entrepreneurial skills by filching my neighbors’ hubcaps—or, even earlier, at age five, by managing to spirit little Arthur Byers’s enormous collection of burnt-out Christmas tree bulbs in its entirety out of his house during his birthday party—I can only say that the real point is that I was able to recognize an opportunity when I saw one. And obviously, a good half of any opportunity is another’s indifference or negligence. The editorials and letters to the editor about the “Jalopy Hubcap Thief” make for entertaining reading—especially given the extraordinary rise in value, from nothing, of my hubcap collection, for which we have just added on a special room to the Manor, next to the gallery housing my collection of antique light bulbs and neon light signs, including a corner dedicated to Arthur Byers’s former collection of burnt out Christmas tree light bulbs. Some day I’ll pull the clippings out of the vault and let you study them.

  As I also said to your little sister, you may take this or any other item from your collection to my annual Thingie® presentation to the family, as long as you promise to hold it carefully in your lap while I am speaking, in order to entertain yourself during those moments when my train of thought will undoubtedly outstrip your young understanding. I also expect it will help with your recent little hiccuping condition. There is hope, let me reassure you. After several false starts, your father again, with his unfortunate habit of applauding long after everyone else has stopped, with a sour and sarcastic expression on his face—after several false starts you have learned
when and how to clap and have also learned to not clap in the middle of intense dinner-table conversations just to draw attention to yourself. You are to be congratulated for your new restraint.

  I will be making several important announcements during my talk, to the effect that both profits and Thingie® share prices have reached dramatic new historic highs, adding two new billionaires to the family—namely you and your little sister, through various trust arrangements. Which makes you far wealthier than your father, but that’s his problem, not yours. You may of course applaud at this news, though I would caution you against boasting of your future wealth to your kindergarten in part because your fellows will probably not fully understand. Worse, your teachers are likely to become resentful and sullen, particularly should they attempt any number of mathematical calculations that might serve to plumb the enormous gap between you and them. I don’t know how to advise you to deal with your father, who has chosen not to participate in any of the family stock distributions, at least directly, even though of course he does via your mother, who does. In effect this has turned him into a relative pauper within the family. His own fault, of course.

  You will notice that I no longer present directly my net worth as graphed by the minute throughout the day on the video projection system in my Manor bedroom and by a similar system on my 737, as I consider it indecent to examine it in public, though I am always pleasantly surprised to find myself rising on all those annual lists published in financial magazines—followed inevitably by sycophantic articles with titles like “How Billionaire Leon Tuggs Does It—We Think” but which are really crude gropings about for what they imagine to be my feet of clay. They look everywhere, they look into all the lawsuits, which are a normal cost of doing business, they pry into family tiffs with Deirdre’s relations, and then, finding nothing, they purport to discover improper liaisons invented out of the whole cloth. Feet of clay? What they will discover, my little Fabian, when they rub off enough of the clay they themselves have splattered, what they will discover are toes of steel.