by Roman McClay
Their dinner was strewn about and bottles of wine were overturned in the sink and the Stargazer Lilies had dropped red stamen and white & pink petals on his grey concrete slab of counter top. The curry powder paint on the walls seemed to breathe as he took another Vicodin and swallowed it with 2 oz of Leviathan , a fruit bomb, a ponderous Cab, a table wine from California. The 750ml bottle of Humana Carne red lay among the fallen flower detritus; he stared at its label and thought back to dinner and how they had all feasted in reverie as celebration to a $50,000 cash payday; which was large even for him , he mused.
The music played over the integrated speakers -he hated clutter- and Moby sang of the Violent Bearing it Away .
“Ok, fuck these dishes, let’s go to bed,” he said as they waited for his decision, and once they had it they screamed and giggled and ran about like feral cats. He shook his head and tried to cobble together each move in life that had brought him to this spot; but it was too variegated, and he had been going too fast to take notes , he thought. This is just where he was, and now he ought to, he thought, tell his girls a bedtime story for Christ-fucking-sake.
He was 20 years their senior and they were methamphetamine addicts and sexual deviants and yet they loved the power of story like anyone else; they jumped in their shared bed, hemmed in between merlot walls among the black and white paintings he had done of Blake and Burroughs and the Bard . They waited in silence now, as daddy was in charge , they thought, and anything said now would only ruin what was to come. He followed them into the bedroom.
“Ok, did I ever tell you about the oil field?” he asked, and they grinned, and he now saw that they had glitter -and a little bit of food- on their epicene faces. They loved the way he talked about work , it was like war to him; and they saw his war-stories as grand; saw it all as love, and poetry and ancient masculinity on display. He was twice not just their age but their size.
They passed the pipe and held their knees; they blew smoke into the air above them. The sheets were black and stained with amorous effluvium from weeks of him wearing our their most soft parts; and they tried to make space for him in the middle of the bed by moving pillows and clearing away his manifold books and papers covered with his long-hand writing in black ink and strange, apocryphal, runes embossed in the margins.
“Jesus,” he said as he spied the sex-stained sheets, “you can make out the face of the Virgin Mary on these things. How much fucking do we do; exactly?”
“A lot,” Sarah said and then complained that she was sore. He said, ok , ok , ok , and returned to the start of the story with some mention of some piece of drilling equipment that they didn’t quite understand and some reference to a little town on the western slope of the state. He then asked again if they had heard this one ?
“Tell us daddy!” Alina barked in her muscovite voice devoid of any bass at all. She sounded like a kitten taught to talk. He growled like the last of the grizzlies in settled Missouri , in response .
“Alright, move over,” he said all-at-once and clambered into bed between them. “Ok, once, in 2007, I was in the Piceance , out by Parachute, Colorado.”
“He was married to a Playboy model, oooh ooooh ooooooh,” Sarah said, and Alina smiled and coughed as the smoke plumed around her head.
“Angel, who’s telling this lie?” he said, and she pretended to be rebuked and afraid; ducking down and pursing lips and looking side to side as Alina laughed and Lyndon smirked and continued on. “So, anyway, I’m in the Piceance ; 45 drill pads, that’s the rig count, each with two, 5-man teams in 12-hour tours , rotations that is, and trillions of tons of blubber -of sweet gas and shale- beneath us, ok girls?”
“Ok, dada!” they said in unison.
“And it was dust and trucks and heavy things all around; and men coated in pipe dope and the earth herself; but the high-plains desert had no forgiveness in her at all. It was kill or be killed out there, and this made a man into a beast. And man must make a beast of himself to get rid of the pain of being a man . Savvy?”
“Savvy,” Sarah said and nodded as she handed the lighter to Alina; her soft pale breast undergirded by the matte black sheet; the girls had stripped off what little clothes they ever wore by now and their youth was on full, redolent, display. It was in stark relief, he thought, against the words he used to carve desert djinns and daemons into young girls; giving them nightmares on the other side of that un-fissured and denuded and feminine skin. He knew -he believed- the way he saw things, the way he spoke, he knew it made them change -somehow- inside. He behaved as if he believed in majick no matter what he said about his contempt for religion and God. The smoke rose in relief against all that color in the room; all that dark color as he spoke:
In, the Proud Highway , Hunter talks about how he made a choice to start writing -you know be an artist- right away. He mulled it over; he admitted that one could, instead, choose to live a life first, then become an artist later in life; burnished, turned to bronze in the melting iron of Corinth . But he chose first to write.
Anyway, I chose the other way; I got to work and let the art wait until I was something new, something beyond a mere clever wit and sharp mind; a new man, a new beast of some kind.
So, we’re on a feral pad outside of De Beque, Colorado, way out in the middle of nowhere; with the Colorado river snaking around us; coiled around the pad like each of us, like we’re one of her eggs. At any rate, we’ve been working on this hole; setting surface, just going five or 6,000 feet down, but nothing is working, man. The mudtank’s tri-pump is fucked; bent connecting rods and the shaker screens are inert due to a bad motor. Shit, it’s non-stop shovel work, 24-hours of shoveling wet mud and cuttings, man. Ok? It’s brutal, and it’s one of 10 things we gotta do and we gotta do it for 56 hours straight. Me and Jason normally hand off 12-hour tours to each other; I work 12; then him.
But we can’t do that because everything that can go wrong with a machine is going wrong and so me and him work in tandem 24-hours a day. And this went on for -like I said- 56 hours. We slept an hour here or there in the truck, and we’d shit in a can here and there and we’d eat here and there. But, dude, it was barbaric.
So, you gotta realize this nine-to-five shit is a luxury of the modern age. And it don’t apply to most jobs that rough men do. And most modern men and women are insulated from this fact, they are relieved of any demand on them to handle this working-class shit. But just like that guy with an 18-bravo MOS is killing bad guys for you so you ain’t got to, well, there is some derrick man racking back drill-pipe so you don’t have to either.
The jobs men do -and only men can do- are pushed to the periphery both geologically, you know, geographically, but also, mimetically, or psychologically. Nobody even knows we exists out there in the wilderness sinking our harpoons into leviathan to bring back the oil for your lamps. You just flip a switch and your whole world is illuminated as if it’s magick .
And we didn’t work 5-day weeks; we worked until the hole was done. Just like in nature; you stalk and hunt the boar or the bear until he’s dead, skinned and quartered. You don’t call time-out on the hunt.
In the oil field we worked, we ran those rigs 24/7 until the hole was drilled, cased and cemented; period. And that demanded 12/12 crews and thus night crews and it required living on location in shipping containers outfitted with make-shift facilities and we didn’t leave the pad for weeks, months at a time.
We would be roused from our sleep to help if need be; our 12-hour shifts turned into 16 and 18 and more; and that happened more than once. There was no other life, on location, and yet I never felt more alive.
My partner -and he was my partner, because we relieved one another at 0600 and 1800hrs each day- my partner and I had to count on each other, and we could not jam each other up by fucking things up. Whatever I did impacted him and mutatis mutandis .
So out in De Beque, we are shoveling shit, fixing worn out tri-pump pistons every four hours and re-fueling and racking back drill-pipe as we i
nvigilate the earth. We are doing this for going into three days straight -with no break- and we just need a few hundred feet more to TD; and our bodies are mangled and sunburnt and stretched to the brink. And I personally felt like I was hallucinating on mushrooms or DMT or something, and when we finally -around noon on that third day- cemented the hole, me and Jason took our first real fucking break in three goddamn -continuous- days.
I remember leaning up against my murdered-out Dodge Cummins diesel; lifted on 37-inch tires; redneck as fuck. And the Company Man, this guy has been off site for 2-weeks, shows up at noon and within 10 minutes, this tiny, crusty, middle-manager asshole saunters up -and he knows nothing of what Hell we just went through- and he tells us to clean some shit up; as if we’re goofing off, ya know?
I mean, it was straight out of the Town-Ho story man. This Radney fuck is telling this Steelkilt -this Charlemagne son’s- this man before you, he’s telling me to swab the decks on a ship I’ve just single-handedly saved from foundering off the Cape of Good-fucking-Hope.
So, my entire soul rebelled, and I felt the Black Sun or Satan himself had insulted me, and I was ready to do great violence on behalf of not just me, but God himself. This little entropic, johnny-come-lately , demon -compressed into the shape of a man- had fucked with the Fates, and I felt my blood boil and my eyes turn into great comets headed for him from the blast of Zeus’s own muzzle-loader.
I told that little corporate fuck, that he was -in no uncertain terms- never to speak to me ever again. If he failed -I assured him- I would murder him and his whole sub-standard family and put their sawn-off heads onto pikes along the perimeter of the White House’s lawn.
The other roughnecks, the floor hands and my partner Jason had -at this point- seen me come unglued from the tailgate and march toward this fucker; my voice, my words had animated me, I was speaking righteousness into the world. They grabbed me -they knew me- and it took four or five men to impede my progress toward this demonic little imp. I must have looked like all arms and hands and malice; a Medusa of giant asps and murderous, incoherent threats to that Company-Man, as I’m sure he could only see the backs and hardhats and maybe some boots of the half-dozen men between himself and some writing black-clad mud-man, grasping and gasping and lunging and speaking in tongues.
I felt each swollen and taxed and adamantine muscle in my 214-pound body contract and rebel in an attempt to reach out and close around this officious, sawed-off little carpet-bagger from the Dakotas or whatever. He scurried away -of course- and once inside the Tool-Pusher’s shack -that’s oilfield argot for the office- anyway, once inside he calls Curtis to rat me out for conduct unbecoming , I guess.
I was told to ship out and never come back; even though I had just spent three days -and taken five years off my life- making sure that hole -that million dollar hole - got fucking drilled. But the working man is expendable, no different than the whale men of yore. In an economy -as opposed to a tribe- a man is nothing but calories and a fungible commodity. He ain’t no man at all. Homo-Economicus is all that he is.
And yet, men like my father -Republican faggots who think they are all tough- support America and capitalism as if it is anything other, anything but a soulless and demonic enterprise meant to reduce each of us to our constituent parts.
If Ben Shapiro ever told me to suck it up , you know, if he looked at me and said, well, go to college then if you don’t want to work hard jobs , I’d not even reply to him totally missing the point -the point that he misses is that even if it ain’t me, some man -some real man- has to do that crushing brutal job out in the wilderness so Ben’s narrow ass can talk too fast on TV for a living . But, I’d not even say that; I’d just punch his face into 666 pieces if that smug cocksucker ever even looked my way.
Anyway, like Caius Marcius , I was relieved of command only after Rome had been won and as the spoils of this hydrocarbon war were funneled to all the beautiful people. But, I never yet have found one man who gives a shit about my tale of woe. Nobody cares about the price paid for conquest, for Empire, for what the public demands and takes for granted as they mill about in their 5,000 square foot homes with the AC set at 67 degrees.
Isn’t this the Tao of the Bourgeoisie , the way of the middle-class? These fucks can be lazy, ineffective, disloyal, incompetent, but as long as they don’t say shit -even with a mouth shoved full of it- then they get to stay at the party indefinitely. Hard work, competent work, honor, manliness, is not valued, only the traits of getting-along are in vogue. Never raise your voice, never be too visceral as they say, eat shit, be mediocre, and obey! That’s the national motto; that’s the new American way.
Why the fuck would I want anything to do with that shit? I do not. And I will not. And if I have to pull each thread of this country apart to reveal the fraud at its heart, then -with all my guts- that is what I will do.
I’ll never submit to that kind of disgusting conceit; and I’ll go to my grave -earlier than most I suspect- standing up for myself and my fellow tribesmen, in fact I suggest they bury me upright.
I told that Company-Man as they barred me from the shack and the pad, that this little fiefdom was his, sure enough , but the rest of the world was mine, and that if I ever saw him again on the street he’d have problems no phone call or words would solve .
See, I’ve pointed guns at men, I’ve fought with my fists and I’ve beat people until they went limp. And shit, I’ve had my ass handed to me too; I’ve been hit with 2 by 4s and jumped by niggers and consequently I ain’t as pretty as I once was. I’ve made gang bangers scurry back to the car when they -at first- thought they were fighting a pussy white boy like in the movies, and then those wetbacks called the cops to save themselves from me.
That’s a true story.
I do not -and I will not- play by society’s rules. Because the game is fucking rigged. And that is that. You can claim American and the West is more fair than any other system or country in the history of man; shit, you can even believe that; shit, it can even be true , but for the worker, the working-class alpha male, who has to carry 10 times his own weight on his back and haul dynamite around in his endocrine system, and suffer insults and ignominy from lesser men in positions of arbitrary authority over him, men with no honor at all, well, your stats on wealth and freedom mean fuck-all when great men, real men, actual men, are chewed up and spit out by a society that hates them and uses them and breaks them and then throws them away. Fuck your statistics college boys, ok? I live in the real world, not on paper or on a fucking spreadsheet.
Jason and I drove off and a mile or so down the dirt road we saw a cut-out by the river, so we stopped and at the little make-shift pier used by water-trucks to fill up we jumped 15 or 20 feet down into the spring flow of the river.
It was cold and moving fast; so fast that it was a quarter mile or more before we could swim to the bank and get out. We laughed and yelled as the Colorado soaked our clothes all covered in pipe-dope -an intractable copper and black anti-seize compound used on the threads of each pipe- anyway, swaddled in 3-days of detritus, the heaviness of these clothes felt buoyed by the electricity and diamagnetism of the epinephrine and androgens still vibrating inside me from the rush of unconsummated violence. I felt the true joy of ablution in one of America’s great waterways, I felt washed in the aqua regia , the blue-blood of the true natural lord of this world.
See, beyond the immediate stimulus of my environs , something was happening inside of my body and brain in these arch conditions of man.
I was evolving into a barbarian, a man that felt and thought in a different way. And there is no way to skip ahead to it, no way to read it in a book, no way to test out of and move one-grade ahead. A man must live it; he must be broken, beaten, besmirched without his putative country having one feeling of regret for his mistreatment. A man must be attacked and left for dead by the Empire herself before he can rise to be a more complete beast .
Once that happens, and it had happened slowly, in punctuated e
volutionary moments, but once that happens, speciation occurs. I emerged, Homo-Barbarianus . And from that day forward I only got worse; and by worse, I mean better, more complete, more gestalt, more integrated.
I vowed to never let anyone who hadn’t worked a 1%er type job -oilfield, drilling and blasting, farm hand, fisherman, et.al.- never let some white-collar fucker, or waiter, or TV shithead, look down on me or tell me the difference between right & wrong ever again.
I remembered sitting up in the derrick as night fell, the winter sky coming early at 1630 hours; hemmed in on all sides by looming, lithic, beige and nearly lifeless mountains -home to black bear and stygian corvids and bête noires with exoskeletons around and malice within their hearts- we were all dug into mountains that rose sharply to 11,000 and 12,000 feet, many miles above and outside Parachute and Rifle, Colorado.
I’d sit in the derrick nest high above the pad, and stare at the other gas-wells, the far-off flares of the gas burn-offs in the winter night; evidence -these Eternal Flames- that there were Leviathan down there under our boats.
And after sleeping a few hours, again, the next tour , the fires appeared in the early tenebrous morning as I waited for the earth below me to yield to us too. These gas-flames were candles that never extinguished on wicks that never were trimmed; like giant torches outside some ancient walled city, some Persian Death-Cult city that’s two-days walk from your perch. It was Biblical, and not the nice-parts; it was Isaiah , First Kings , and Revelation , man.
Those fires burned all night and the wind blew the flames like comet-tails, in total darkness like evidence of slow-moving but incoming incendiaries from the trebuchet of one’s enemies.
I remembered fist-fights with floorhands, coon-asses -that is Louisiana boys, white boys who speak Cajun and throw down- fights with them, the pugilistic, the old-school drillers and mudhands. We fought over insults and work-stoppages and anyone who fucked up the wellbore.