Petroleum Man

by Stanley Crawford

  With that I felt compelled to put the Ford Fairmont back in its place on an upper bookshelf and bid you good-night.

  I left your room with troubling sparks shooting from my loins at the thought of somebody, anybody having not one but two.

  Is there nothing sacred left in this world, I wondered as I shut the door.

  18. 1:12 SCALE AERO COMMANDER

  THE ACCELERATING SUCCESS OF THE THINGIE®—winner of the “American Product of the Year Gold Medal” for an unprecedented three years running—enabled me to reveal a secret passion for flying. (Fittingly I am jotting down these words on a night flight back from Beijing.) I obtained my pilot’s license on my birthday, one of those big ones back then, and then took to flying from headquarters in Chicago to our various manufacturing plants and distribution centers, arriving minutes after a prop-driven transport plane had unloaded the 1980 Ford Fairmont Station Wagon above, so that I could then drive from the airport to my final destination. This was to become my routine through a succession of private planes and cars, all of which will be gradually added to your collections upon the usual special occasions, this one being Christmas.

  This of course is my favorite time of year because Thingie® use increases so dramatically in the last ten days before Christmas, when every American simply has to have special holiday Thingies® not only all over the tree but under the tree as well, on the mantlepiece, and all up and down stairs and front walks, and even on the front grills of cars and trucks. Christmas of course is a wonderful expression of the true spirit of Christianity embracing the productive miracle of American capitalism, which delivers heaven on earth to all the worthy and faithful with approved credit ratings. The old saying, “A camel can pass through the eye of a needle sooner than a rich man can enter the kingdom of heaven,” no longer applies in a world in which it is perfectly clear that American capitalism has brought the kingdom of heaven down to earth to benefit everyone who can afford the overhead, leaving all those camels and needles out there in the desert where they belong.

  I should alert you, however, to another prize the Thingie® won, if only because you should be prepared should some classmate schooled in subversive liberal democrat thinking decide to become a young muckraker in order to curry favor with one of your closet liberal democrat teachers, despite my attempts through various endowments to keep the school curriculum within acceptable Conservative Republican parameters. The so-called “Rotten Egg Awards” are bestowed on or rather thrown at those “American industrial products contributing to the destruction of the health of the nation, the weakening of the social fabric, and the despoliation of the environment.” I quote, reluctantly, from memory, leaving out more such claptrap refuted by the fact that the major victims of this award add up to a corporate product Who’s Who of the nation’s major export earners, to whose ranks I was proud to be added for many years running. But as I say, my little ones, you should know about this “award” now, coming from a friendly source within the family, so that the news will not be dumped on you by surprise by some envious fourth or fifth grader scheming to get an “A” at your expense. As a condition of my various contributions to the school’s endowment, I have had the library meticulously cleansed of such material, and Internet access appropriately filtered, but these days you never know.

  It is no secret that your father has prohibited you both from flying with me in any of my planes, large or small, but I trust he will not be so narrow-minded as to forbid you to sit in them when I finally finish the creation—only recently undertaken—of the Leon Tuggs Museum of His Personal Transportation with exact full-size real—not model—versions of the cars and other powered conveyances I have owned and driven and piloted over the course of my life. In a few cases we have been able to track down the original vehicles all the way across the country in California, such as the 1939 Ford Fordor, turned into a hot rod which we are dechopping and dechannelling and generally decustomizing. In a few other cases we have found suitable replacement vehicles needing few modifications to bring them back to their original condition. I have reason to believe that the Museum, which will be a life-sized mirror of the little collections that will eventually fill one wall of each of your rooms, will be the first of its kind. I would hope that both of you will see the Leon Tuggs Museum of His Personal Transportation as potentially the ultimate repository of your own collections.

  While the matter is still fresh in my memory, Fabian, I should add that I truly reveled in your third grade performance of the King in that delightful play, “The King and Queen of Ice Cream,” about a kingdom in which deserving children spend their dreaming hours eating ice cream. Charming—your painted-on curly black mustache and dramatic black eyebrows, though they didn’t quite go with your very blond hair and blue eyes. I was particularly impressed by the way you broke your wooden sword over the head of the “Diet Spy” dressed in black—apparently preceded by some backstage altercation—which I gather was not in the script. You certainly took care of that unpleasant character, and relieved us of having to listen to more of his liberal democrat claptrap throughout the rest of the play. I was, however, somewhat confused by the end, in which you were all eating vegetables, while singing. Unfortunately my plane was waiting, and I couldn’t stay for the closing-night party, at which these questions would have been answered.

  A final note: The Aero Commander was also associated with my acquisition of the last large tract of land in eastern Connecticut on the edge of Fairlawn-Fairview Village, complete with a small lake, on the north side of which I had Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Manor built. Opposite, several smaller tracts were sold as sites for 10,000 square foot minimum houses, including your parents’, the only other house with good frontage on the lake, and a three-minute drive from the Manor—enabling me to visit easily my lovely grandchildren whenever I am at home. There were of course the usual complaints at the zoning hearings about the “big box” look of the Manor but my attorneys successfully defended the design by pointing out my need for a sizeable climate-controlled space in which to house complete copies of English-language magazines, newspapers, court records, and books which either featured me or referred to me personally or to the development and evolution of the Thingie®. There you will find articles and advertisements and even footnotes, from scholarly works to supermarket tabloids dating from my very first mention in the press—the “Jalopy Hubcap Thief” article—to the present day. Also included are countless film and video clips and audio tapes of interviews and Congressional hearings at which I testified. At present, eight million separate pieces have been logged into the archives, which take up the entire north wing of the Manor, a complete tour of which you will be given at the appropriate time. I anticipate that this material about me will provide a lifetime—or two—of delightful reading and viewing for all of my heirs, including first of all you two.

  Just as I was getting ready to wrap everything up, the captain called to tell me we have been re-routed to Frankfurt, owing to a strike threatened by, guess who, the French air traffic controllers union. I might as well take this opportunity, Fabian, to say how pleased I was that you came out to my new garage at the Manor all bright eyed to fetch me for dinner the night before last and actually evinced some curiosity about my budding collection of cars, one of which I had asked my mechanics to leave up on the hydraulic lift for the night so I could inspect its undercarriage.

  As an engineer, being familiar with the underside of a car is often far more important than what you can see while standing and looking down into the hood compartment and other upper areas of a vehicle. Some of the happiest moments of my childhood were when I was able to lie in the dirt in the cool of the morning underneath the family Fords, identifying the components from schematic line drawings I found in a school library encyclopedia: axle, shock absorber, spring, frame, bushing, king pin, idle arm, oil pan, radiator drain cock, brake drum, and so on—words which I carried around in my memory like precious trinkets, rolling them between my thoughts until they became
familiar with wear.

  Unfortunately you quickly lost interest when I turned on the shop light and illuminated the various components in order to give you a lesson. You seemed to be only excited at the thought that the 5,000-pound Bentley Turbo—a model of which will be added to your collection at the appropriate time—might somehow come crashing down on our heads.

  Can I make it go up and down, Grandpa? you finally asked.

  I told you to press the red button to bring it down but failed to notice that one of my mechanics’ rolling tool chests was just under the far rear bumper, which, as it lowered, came down on the corner and, before we could push the stop button, tipped it up on edge with a horrible screeching noise and then spun it across into the next bay into the side of the Mercedes 450 SL with a sickening thud and then a crash as the chest tipped over, spilling out hundreds of sockets and wrenches all over the concrete.

  None of this was exactly your fault, Fabian, so this time your trust fund will not be billed for the $17,000 estimated to repair or replace the rear quarter panels of both the Bentley and the Mercedes and the tool cabinet and to realign the bent hydraulic lift.

  And I’m sure everyone at the dinner table except me was vastly entertained by your account of the mishap, which you retold twice, bouncing up and down in your chair, while your father struggled to be silent as a stone, fortunately, and your mother interrupted only to suggest you not talk and chew your food at the same time—until she had to lead you away to deal with an onset of those hiccups of yours.

  In researching various ways I might prepare you as my grandchildren for inheriting the enormous wealth your grandmother and I will leave behind for you first, and which your parents will leave behind second, assuming our mortalities will proceed in an orderly manner, I have yet to come up with a foolproof method for you to enjoy what will soon be yours unfettered by the ideas and schemes and judgments of all those others—most of the world, in fact—who will want to tell you what to do and above all what not to do with your money. Perhaps on this flight to Hong Kong, I can best begin by simply cataloguing all those types of people so that you will more readily recognize them and thus spare yourselves from being led down the same garden paths again and again.

  By way of a preface, some thoughts about what money is and why it was invented in the first place. Which is more easily stated than explained—why mere numbers, mere pieces of paper, mere magnetic impulses can dictate the course of lives all over the globe. For the most part invisible and unknowable, money is in effect the most successful and longest lasting and longest surviving god that humankind has ever created, as can be seen from the fact that those who fail to properly worship money, for whatever reason, easily fall into a graceless state known as poverty. However, the god of money is not pleased to be worshipped openly, preferring to hide behind steel doors, in piggybanks, in wallets and purses, and generally out of sight. It is, in short, one of those gods who prefer to manipulate the world out of the public eye—like most of us in fact.

  That explained, we can move on to how different types of people relate to the god of money—and particularly to the wealthy, who may be seen as the high priests of money.

  First, there are the rare, and perhaps even mythical, persons who claim that money is of no importance at all, which is usually a clever disguise consisting of various public gestures feigning indifference to the transactions going on around them at all times, and pretending that paying for a dinner, or a newspaper, or leaving a tip were things that only the birds and bees do. Beware of these people, the money atheists, who do their scheming at night, in private. Your Ricky Wong, dear Fabian, may be one of these. This is typical of people who come from commodities-trading money.

  Your new friend Christopher Burr may be among the class of hangers-on and sycophants and opportunists waiting with stone-like patience for crumbs to drop, as well as your little gimme-gimme friend Harmony Solotov, who has managed to walk away with some of your best dolls, Rowena, though happily nothing from your model car collection. These people—the Solotovs—are into commercial real estate. You always have to watch out for that type.

  Then there are the outright schemers and swindlers who regard you as a bank to hold up—I lump blackmailers, muckraking journalists, and paparazzi here. These are the temple ransackers and tomb robbers of old. All lawyers, especially of your father’s stripe, belong in this class—though not of course your mother. And all doctors. Excepting my personal lawyers and doctors. Though I sometimes wonder.

  Then there’s a whole class of people who will want to feed off of you through commissions and tips and fees for various services, and who have developed a fine sense of what the traffic can bear. They start out early, these ones, but at least they know where the line needs to be drawn and usually won’t overstep it for a while. They should pass a law requiring these people have their percentages tattooed on their foreheads.

  The most trustworthy people, up to a point, and providing they are not feigning innocence, of course—the most trustworthy are those odd innocents from another planet, who are also the most pleasant. You might call them the money agnostics. I used to encounter them rarely and almost exclusively on those occasional transcontinental flights when I decided it was necessary to mingle with the hoi polloi once again—in the old days before my own personal 737 when I flew only coach, and only in seat 18A. Now and then I would have the good luck to be next to a seat mate who remarkably had no idea who I was.

  But such innocents, when the scales finally fall from their eyes, are quickly all over you with the sort of importunate questions even the most hardened journalist will have reluctance in articulating, and will soon reveal themselves to be in one of the three categories above, if not all three at once.

  This, my dear little ones, is the terrible world into which you must be prepared in advance to grow up, but thankfully not without having access to an endless fountain of good advice and sound experience, in the form of your devoted grandfather, more of which I will prepare in due course and distribute to you later at the appropriate moments of your coming of age.

  19. 1:12 SCALE 1985 MERCEDES–BENZ 500SEL 4–DOOR SEDAN

  I WAS ALMOST PREVENTED FROM BESTOWING ON YOU two this 1:12 scale model 1985 Mercedes-Benz 500SEL 4-door sedan, the first outward display of my growing success that I allowed myself to flaunt upon my annual income exceeding the one-billion dollar mark, on the occasion of your parents ninth wedding anniversary. One of those periodic eruptions of family discord with which we must now and then test ourselves almost made me postpone the presentation of this latest model, complete with scale models of your grandmother and me in the front seat and you two in the back seat—even though you two were not yet born in 1985. No matter that I have privately thought that your parents’ wedding anniversary should be marked by a chorus of wailing women dressed in black and by men in dark suits bravely suppressing sobs. But I have always been willing to enter into the spirit of an occasion, whatever my personal feelings and beliefs, as I was concerning this one, however odd is the grandly public manner with which they usually choose to celebrate it. Unfortunately my shoelace happened to come untied just down the hall from their bedroom door, while I was on the way to your bedroom, Fabian, and I was forced to stoop to retie it and could not help overhearing the following altercation. Somewhat unaware I had switched on the video camera sound—as usual, I had the machine along to record my presentation of the models to you two—and so accidentally obtained a muffled recording.

  You know perfectly well, your father was whining, that he simply hates parties organized by others for purposes not centered around him.

  Then give him a central role, Deedums courageously suggested. I am his daughter, after all. He is central. Without him—

  Why not just give him a hunting rifle and let him shoot me in the middle of the party. That would be very central—

  But one of them decided to slam shut the bedroom door and I was left to imagine the rest, which in fact I chose not to, a
ppalled as I was by your father’s violent imagination. Although on recollection the idea was not without merit.

  But I was also left to my own devices, because as the afternoon and evening gathered steam—three hundred invited guests, probably fifty uninvited, various lambs and pigs being basrbecued out back by the Panamanian Army, children splashing in the two swimming pools, liberal democrat teenage cousins and friends and criminal-element interlopers trying out drugs and sex in the upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms—it was clear that they, or Chip, your father, had “planned” the afternoon and evening without any kind of formal moment of observance during which they could be toasted as a successful, happily married couple—or toasted as the carefully groomed illusion of such—and I was threatened with being deprived of what I so excel at: the extended toast. Desperate at being outwitted, I paced through house and garden with my two bodyguards in tow, tearing myself away from countless attempts to ply me with investment advice, and probably downed too many scotch and sodas in my perambulations—until at last I found myself in front of the fireplace with a glass of champagne in my upraised hand just at that moment when my eye caught Deedums and Chip about to slip out of opposite French doors of the living room. I would like to propose a toast, I bellowed, handing my video camera to some young fellow standing next to me—who I mistook for one of my bodyguards owing to his dark suit. Film this, I said in a low voice.

  I could not help but notice an instant of nervous silence, a quick little pall that fell over the room, suggesting that their little bedroom conversation I had overheard had spread out to become a regional if not national controversy. I was faced with a split-second decision: either I could gush hypocritically sentimental for perhaps thirty seconds, not my wont, or I could wax passionate about the state of the world for half an hour. In an instant of inspiration, I chose to do both. Though I must admit that in that very same crowded moment of insight there flashed a vision of my swiveling around and reaching up and pulling down the buffalo gun that Deirdre’s great grandfather, the Delahunt who was the Barbed Wire Robber Baron, had once used to help make the West safe for cattle. I imagined raising it and pointing it across the room and discharging it into the chest of my daughter’s liberal democrat husband. But instead I inflated my lungs and spoke.