Petroleum Man Read online

  If there’s any—

  I silenced her with a seigniorial sweep of the hand and slowly shut your heavy paneled front door and made my way through your house to restore the 1954 Volkswagen Sunroof to its rightful place on the next to the top bookshelf in your bedroom.

  Enjoy the marbles, little Fabian. I doubt Ricky Wong will ask for them back. If he does, tell him to call the Chicago office and ask my secretary to pass on the message.

  So that’s your little lesson for the day on how to turn a bad trade into a good one.

  I believe I was explaining, my little Rowena, how your grandmother and I suffered horrendously by having to drive old well-used cars, such as the Volvo, when our tastes were so much better, and for that matter our real financial situation, which we had to conceal from the courts. Just so you won’t think we always had it easy. Pretending to be poor is probably much worse than actually being poor because you are constantly surrounded by goods and opportunities which you know perfectly well you could just reach for and possess and enjoy without the slightest hesitation—if only circumstances would allow you to shed the disguises of poverty. For all I know the truly poor may have these very same thoughts but the difference is that while they know they will never be able to afford the tastes they have unfortunately acquired, we know that we can. Indeed, we will be able to afford any tastes we might end up acquiring. Yet given the KlampTite-MagicMastic spies, we had no choice.

  This was the point at which your father barged into your room and swept you up out of your bed to congratulate you on your excellent grades at the end of first grade and report that as a very special present he had ordered a new French chateau-style dollhouse with real plumbing that actually worked for your backyard miniature subdivision. Had there been another adult present, he or she would have confirmed my suspicions that your father had forgotten that this was the big day of your first-grade graduation and had been reminded of it by Deedums while rushing through the house on those short legs of his, late home from work, to say goodnight to you. Be that as it may, he gave you a good-night kiss, or several kisses, while turning his bright hypocritical smile in my direction and speaking with deliberate rapidity, I hope you’re pointing out to her that these models you love to wax sentimental about are all made in sweatshops by teenage girls while the actual thing, the real cars, were made by union labor.

  Like every other object in the house? I suggested, standing up and slipping from the room. I refrained from pointing out that I could walk from room to room in your parents’ seventy-two-room house and with a margin of error of perhaps three percent identify the countries of origin and manufacturing processes and associated labor costs of every single object within them and that by the end of the tour, on the basis of a few notes scribbled onto my own palm, I could give you a number (that later could be scientifically demonstrated to be accurate within the above margin of error) for any one of the five major fiscal indices, which include raw materials, transportation, fuel, taxes, and labor. Most likely the average labor cost in current dollars for every object in the house would be about twelve cents an hour. Which, my dear Chip, I easily could have said, is why you with all your liberal democrat flimflam ideas is why you are rich and the rest of the world is poor. Do the math, as they say. But I chose not to display my expertise on that particular occasion as I have on so many others, notably on national TV.

  We had already said goodnight and even had I stayed longer I would have deferred to an older age our inevitable discussion about unions, my little Rowena, to a time when you will be more able to comprehend such matters. You are still too young to notice that your father, who loves to bask in his own sentimental liberal democrat fantasies, is not urging the housekeeper, the cook, your nanny, the two grounds-keepers, and his resident mechanic, to rush out and join the appropriate labor unions—which would probably cause him to be run out of Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Estates on a rail, tarred and feathered, which would be the first such incident in the neighborhood in three hundred years.

  And I will eventually point out that it’s a matter of pride to me that not one Thingie® in the world is or has ever been touched by a union hand or for that matter ever will be. Thingie® Corporation International takes such good care of its employees that there is simply no need to add yet another layer of bureaucracy between the worker and his or her paycheck—and indeed Thingie® Corporation International has proven to be one of the favorite investments of union pension funds because of its predictable and spectacular rise in value. Someday you may be called on to defend the minimum wage. What I suggest you do on that occasion is to contemplate the purpose of your own allowance, which by then you will also understand. The real purpose of the minimum wage is to provide an allowance to the young and the poor during whatever period of time is required for them to attain that degree of financial maturity for which they will deserve something better. The minimum wage, more importantly, allows the faster accumulation of capital for the well-off, an invaluable incentive to the poor to struggle in an upwardly mobile direction and without which they would remain in an unambitious and lethargic state. It is the old stick and carrot arrangement, in short.

  I know your little antennae are very sensitive—but you would be wrong to misread the regular altercations that your father and I experience as a sign that I do not like the man, am not fond or him, or feel less protective of him as a son-in-law than I do toward your mother, who is my daughter and only child. Of course I like the fellow—he is your father, after all—though of course I would like him far more if he would agree with my ideas, which are the reasoned and seasoned products of my long experience. Or if he could at least now and then pretend to agree with them rather than trying to bait me on every chance encounter or at every dinner party or special event or social occasion at which we both have the misfortune of being present. Before such encounters it is a common point of discussion between your grandmother and me exactly which door Chip will enter with knife raised ready to strike—a figure of speech here, nothing more—and whether this time he will perhaps go too far, forgetting that in doing so he may injure the precious little hostage, you my pet, that we hold in common. Or hostages, if we include your brother and your mother Deedums. Who, I would never say publicly, was the one who got us into this mess in the first place by marrying into a family of prominent liberal democrats.

  17. 1:8 SCALE 1980 FORD FAIRMONT STATION WAGON

  WHEN THE KLAMPTITE-MAGICMASTIC LEGAL TEAM abruptly withdrew its patent infringement suit and proposed an out-of-court settlement that would release all claims against my three key Thingie® patents, I settled for the sake of your grandmother and the benighted rustbelt Delahunts. Just before that felicitous event, I bought the bottle green 1980 Ford Fairmont Station Wagon for very little money, another back-of-the-lot special but one which, you now know, was to become my signature vehicle for the decade during which my net worth rocketed up through the six and seven and eight digits on the strength of the runaway success of the Thingie®. But rather than do what any fool would do in my newly flush position, which would be to buy the most expensive car I could afford, I decided to hang on to the old Ford as a symbol of the frugality and thrift with which I managed the whole of Thingie® Corporation International. I cannot now count the number of media pieces with titles like, “Worth Hundreds of Millions, Leon Tuggs Still Drives His Old Ford.” His Old Ford of course modified with a supercharged V-8 instead of the original underpowered straight six, tires two sizes larger and suspension and brakes bolstered accordingly, bullet-proof windows and armored panels eventually added, plus two types of satellite communication systems. I used this humble car for official appearances and occasional ceremonial drives between the Chicago townhouse and headquarters or between the Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Manor and my private airport. It was always left deliberately out in front of the house in the weather, to help weather it, and to enable the paparazzi to take telephoto shots of it through the bars of the gatehouse gate a half mile away.

  Y
ou will note, Fabian and Rowena, that this is your first 1:8 scale model, meaning that that one foot of the model equals eight feet of the reality; hence its large size of almost two feet long. I trust you will also note that they finally got right the scale model of your very own grandfather, in his forties, behind the wheel, dressed in his work shirt and Levis—what I call my signature media uniform, used except for formal meeting with heads of state. I won’t go into the cost of this.

  People like their billionaires to make occasional displays of frugality—I make a point of picking up trash or ordering my underlings to do so on my tours of facilities, even though I know full well by now that the wadded up paper towel or empty juice bottle has been placed along my route for the photo opportunity the gesture provides. Usually I wave these objects at the press with jocular comments on what a trashy lot they are. Such details help bond the poor to the rich and ease the reluctance which even the poorest may occasionally feel as they contribute a penny here, a tenth of a cent there, to my vast personal wealth, even in the most obscure corners of the earth. There the passion for Thingies® rages unabated, particularly among those many primitive societies in which the Thingie® is considered an essential part of any wedding or funeral or shrine or grave marker and where even the poorest beggar child is expected to contribute at least one Thingie® to the communal display. Even my greatest detractors—yes, I have those too—have admitted that this is a triumph of marketing without historical precedent.

  Much fuss is being made about all those billions of people who live on less than a dollar a day, but look at three hundred dollars a year not in terms of dollars but in terms of cents. Three hundred dollars equals 30,000 cents. Or even better, three hundred dollars equals 300,000 tenths of a cent. Given the crumbling of Third World economies, we have begun to consider reconfiguring our returns in terms of hundredths of a cent. Then three hundred dollars equals a staggering 3,000,000 hundredths of a cent. Now we’re talking real money. If they only knew how rich they were in hundredths of a cent, I’m sure the poor would stop whining forthwith. As I have repeatedly explained to you, Fabian and Rowena, the fraction of a cent is where the real action lies in global capitalism.

  So this 1:8 scale model, another pricey custom job, represents the subtle touch I have always had with the little people of the earth, a source of considerable pride. Treat the model accordingly, my pets.

  * * *

  You were eavesdropping yet again, I am certain, when I called the current President of the United States the Big Penis in a heated argument during our after-dinner brandy with your liberal democrat father, for which I have no need to apologize, having not said such a thing to either of you, directly to your innocent faces. If you persist in stealing out of your rooms and coming downstairs every time you hear voices rising in that echo chamber of a dining room your parents “designed especially”—to encourage acrimonious dinner-time debates, it would seem—then I fear you’ll be getting exactly what you deserve.

  However, I would do well to explain. Of course I did not mean that he has a penis larger than anyone else’s. In any case, as you have probably already learned in your swimming lessons, Fabian, the comparative dimensions here are all trivial and are usually hidden anyway as a matter of custom and law, as should be the case.

  And it wasn’t exactly what I had intended to say, which your father immediately picked up on, feigning high incredulity. You’re calling your own President that? Who happens to be a friend? I recall that he tipped back his chair and tossed back his head and let out a stage laugh that easily could have filled ten acres of your property and awakened neighbors across the lake to boot.

  Then he brought his chair back to position with a mad gleam in his eye. Deedums was leaning across the table with an outstretched arm and a supplicating look but didn’t have the time to say as she usually did during such crises, Chip, don’t, please.

  He shot out, Then what do you call his predecessor?

  The Little Prick, I snapped back. Of course. In my position you would have said exactly the same thing, I’m sure. It was at precisely this instant, Rowena, that your sneeze was heard just inside the hallway. It took me some weeks to reconstruct the rest of the evening, after your grandmother Deirdre had returned from New York and had begun making the rounds to restore peace in the family. Apparently your father, after another brandy or two or three, but despite the urgings of your mother—who eventually left the house at approximately two A.M. to spend the balance of the night in the guest room of an old friend—your father, I say, chose to call the Secret Service and report my words, or some variation on them, to some young official on duty. Within a day or two, this led to a visit to Fairlawn-Fairview Manor one fine spring morning by a discreetly armed young government agent in a dark suit with a sallow complexion. He had the gall to ask me in my own living room whether my intent was hostile in calling my friend the President whatever I called him. And how many firearms did I possess? I explained that I owned three hundred and twelve antique and contemporary hunting rifles, shotguns, and handguns, all registered, inspected, insured, and recently appraised at $3.8 million. In a special new gallery just finished next to the one housing my world-class collection of vintage and contemporary water pistols. Would he like to have a tour?

  I beg your pardon, Mr. Tuggs?

  Eventually he apologized. Which led me to explain, in a merry moment, that I was attempting to explore the ramifications of an admittedly excessive metaphor, to use one of the few terms that has survived from my days as a communist university liberal arts student.

  Sir? he inquired, puzzled.

  Forget it, I suggested and then moved on to point out that your grandmother and I have contributed to the Republican Party to the fullest extent allowable by law and then some. I alluded to my brief service in the cabinet of one of the BC administrations.

  Sir?

  I tried to clarify. A little joke. BC means Before Christ.

  He held his pen in mid air. He really needed help.

  Meaning “a long time ago.” Very briefly, I did not explain. It turned out I was particularly unsuited for public service.

  He looked down at his notebook. Oh. By then he was blushing and his temples were glazed with perspiration. I’m sorry, Mr. Tuggs. We’re being run ragged at the moment.

  I said I understood perfectly. I escorted him to the door with my tongue clamped firmly between my teeth so as not to suggest that the member of the family who should really be investigated was your liberal democrat father, whose diatribes on the character of the President are the closest things to sedition I have ever heard. For your sakes, my little ones, I held my tongue and gave the agent’s perspiring hand a firm patriotic shake, even as I wondered who to bill for the time wasted, which was causing a cascade of meeting cancellations and postponements all across the country, through time zones from east to west.

  From one of the chaise longues on the front veranda, while I was dialing the office I watched the official black Ford Crown Victoria circle the chestnuts and head back down the winding drive through the mile of dense hardwoods that buffer us from the outside world in the form of the Fairlawn-Fairview gated communities I have developed around the lake. I cannot believe, I thought while my secretary transferred my call, that riding at high speed in a huge bulletproof Cadillac—however unfashionable the actual car—and escorted by motorcycle police and Secret Service agents in large Ford Excursions is not one of the great incentives to aspiring to be President of the most powerful nation in history. And that having your hand rest lightly on the buttons of the machine that can launch supersonic missiles all over the world cannot be one of the most exciting experiences in an entire life. At the very thought I could feel sparks shooting from my loins. Of course it could possibly cause one’s penis to grow a little. Likewise, I cannot imagine that some liberal democrat fool who in a fluke of massive voter incompetence happened to find himself in that ultimate office and who happened to wake up one morning and say to his staff, Oh, I thi
nk I’ll pop over to the Old Executive Office Building on a solar-powered electric scooter, thank you, I cannot imagine that he would not soon be picked off by some special services rooftop sharpshooter, knowing he was protecting the nation and its global assets from someone who would just as soon give it all away.

  * * *

  Fabian, I don’t know that I responded in an entirely satisfactory way the other night to the remark you made while I was sitting on the edge of your bed pointing out some features of the custom-made Ford Fairmont Station Wagon. From out of nowhere you interrupted me.

  There’s a boy at school who has two.

  I was momentarily confused. Two what? Custom made models of Ford Fairmont Station Wagons? Two…?

  You pulled your lips down over your increasingly fine Delahunt teeth and rolled your eyes in confusion.

  Two what? I repeated.

  You know, you said, then blurted out, two things.

  I thought long and hard before suggesting what I thought you might be hinting: Penises?

  You nodded vigorously before throwing your head beneath your pillow, leaving me with a troubling thought, which has haunted me ever since, I must confess. That there will soon be a young man out there, eventually a fully grown man, equipped with two, able to enjoy everything twice as much as everyone else, including especially me—now that is an extremely disturbing vision. At the very least, I might have to revise certain passages in my General Theory. At the very most—but I nipped such thoughts in the bud.

  From under the pillow I heard a noise, then giggles.

  Speak clearly, Fabian, I commanded.

  He charges, you said between giggles, twenty dollars a look.

  Well, I thought, at least he’s learning how to capitalize on his unusual feature. I’m sure he will go far.