Petroleum Man

by Stanley Crawford

  It is at times like this I quite forget who I am, which is fine, and others do too, which is not. Having neglected to repeat Deirdre’s morning litany, I had left behind my wallet and a remote signaler for the gate house, and so I was flagged to a halt by the security guard, where my getup caused dozens of journalists and cameramen to look up from their morning coffee. As I lifted my veil and shouted through clenched teeth, It’s me, idiot, I could hear car and van doors slamming and the slap of shoes hitting the asphalt. The guard, a new one, froze in utter panic, forcing me to skid to a halt just in front of the still-closed gate and to back-walk the machine a few paces, whereupon I dropped it into low and gunned it through a privet hedge to the right. My personal motorcycle restorer will not like this, I thought, as I heard the branches scratch past, just before everything went blank.

  The rest, like billions of others, I was able to watch from the comfort of my hospital bed. Broken collarbone, cracked ribs, sprained ankle. As, plunging through the hedge, Deirdre’s green coat became entangled in the chain and was ripped from my back, causing me to lose my balance and come down with a thud on my left side while the machine proceeded on without me for some distance until it crashed into the NBC van. The doctor said that Deirdre’s hat saved me from concussion or worse.

  Headlines, headlines. They are tediously familiar by now, from the cruel TUGGS: DRAG QUEEN OF HIGH FINANCE to the more compassionate BEREFT TUGGS DOFFS DISGUISE TO ABDUCT SPOUSE, FOUNDER OF RADICAL FEMINIST MOVEMENT.

  Of course they could have put a HEROIC in there somewhere.

  26. 1:100 SCALE 1993 BOEING 737

  THESE ARE ACTUALLY THE SECOND 1:100 SCALE MODELS of the first personal Boeing 737 I purchased. I sent back the first set when I discovered the manufacturer was employing union labor in some of its operations, the point of which will become evident shortly, my dear little ones. When you pull the tail in a backward direction, the roof of the plane pops open and reveals from aft to fore the galley, the dining area, living room, the bath, and my sleeping quarters, with a tiny model of me sitting at the dining room table with a phone to my ear. I know you enjoy visiting me in the hospital but I frankly did not find the experience profitable—of being in the hospital. I particularly missed my habitual hours in the air. Other than your two visits, which allowed me to appreciate how you have both become all elbows and knees and arms and legs of startlingly smooth skin and with your mother’s large even white teeth, having been, both of you, spared your father’s moray-eel-like mouth and small teeth.

  These latest additions to your collections are to celebrate my release from medical confinement and my return to Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Manor, where, from my second floor study, I will resume direction of Thingie® Corporation International and its multitude of subsidiaries until I am able to more easily return to my weekly commute to our Chicago headquarters and less regular but frequent visits to our twenty-eight regional and nineteen global nodes. My mission on my 1953 Indian to rescue your grandmother and to disband the illegal gathering having failed, I am once again presented with the mournful spectacle of the encampment several hundred yards down the south field out the bay windows of my study. You are probably dying of curiosity—or will at the appropriate age—to know the nature of the conversation between your mother and me in my hospital suite, during those few moments we sent you off to be taken care of by my bodyguards; so for the sake of posterity, more of which below, I have recorded the gist of our remarks.

  I finally saw her, Deedums said softly, settling herself in a chair beside my bed, after having nudged closed the door. There have already been three attempts to penetrate hospital security by media.

  What does she want?

  She wouldn’t say. She just referred me to her “spokeswomen.”

  She’s being held captive against her will, I’m certain of it. The long and the short of it is that they’ve kidnapped her and are holding her captive against her will. She’s a hostage, in short.

  Yes, Father. Deedums was silent for a moment. Then she looked up. But you have to remember that Mother also used those words with a little laugh and a shrug when—well, when I was little. All the time.

  So what? I shot back. She could come and go whenever she liked. I regularly said to her, go shop in New York, London, Paris, Milan. Did she ever go? No, of course not. And why? Because she was pathologically addicted to thrift stores, which was fine during the early days of all that litigation, but later—I never knew why she kept going to them. What did her so-called spokeswomen have to say for themselves?

  She ignored my question. Mother once told me that was the only way she could know how ordinary people lived. She could touch their lives in the racks of old clothes and all those shelves of old crockery and kitchen appliances and—

  I interrupted: I wouldn’t know about any of that. And it’s all nonsense anyway. All she had to do was open the phone book and pick a name at random and call them and say, “Hello, I’m calling to talk to an ordinary person to see how you live.” Simple. We’ve had this conversation a dozen times before, down to the very word. What does she want? What besides old clothes and old pots and pans? She must want something. What is it? They should ban thrift stores for undercutting the real economy. I’ll buy her as many thrift stores as she wants. I’ll put a thrift store at the end of the drive, if that’s what she wants.

  Father. … There was something different about your mother, something about the eyes and mouth, a sort of slackening from the fixed and focused and cool calculating courtroom look of a successful attorney in charge of corporate litigation against disgruntled consumers, a new resemblance to your grandmother, very slight, almost imperceptible, a sort of softening. An awful thought darted through my brain. Had your father finally infected her with the liberal democrat virus? Would she too soon turn against me? Or rather, I tried to reassure myself, was she allowing a measure of compassion to surface at the sight of me her father in lower leg cast and chest and head bandages and the thought of her mother being held hostage by radical feminist amazons at Camp Martha Washington’s Nap?

  My little Deedums, these are trying times, I ventured, hoping to turn the conversation to a more promising direction. Murphy’s Law has come home to roost. I have been reviled in the national press. Only this morning I was forced to read a review of a book in the Times called Thingie® Unbound, or some such. In it my old college roommate Ralphie Fitch purports to know the whole truth about my undergraduate days and the founding of Thingie® Corporation International. He alleges all kinds of predatory business practices which rocketed it to the position of being the third largest corporation in the world in only thirteen years, with gross sales larger than the economy of all of Austria, or is it Australia? I could have gone on and on but didn’t. The bandages were beginning to chafe.

  Deedums looked down and opened her purse and pulled out a piece of paper and unfolded it. These are their demands.

  Your mother’s?

  No. Theirs. The organization’s. I doubt she knows or even cares. I understand she’s said something like, Take my name and use it however you like.

  She looked down at the paper for a long moment and then slowly passed it over to me. My eyes stayed perfectly in focus as they bounced down the list, one item at a time. Uniform international minimum wage. Free global movement of labor. Uniform international environmental standards. Uniform international health care, child care, senior care. International uniform reproductive—and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, crackpot ideas all, which would spell the end of capitalism as we know it, the end of the profit motive, and the end of wealth in the hands of the wealthy. And meaning for you, my little ones, the ripping away of a comfortable protected life and reducing you to the status of near penniless shoppers shuffling up and down the aisles of giant megamall thrift stores. Because that’s all that would be left.

  I can’t begin to list the things that would be swept away in such a world. Your grandmother’s simple life indeed, come home with a vengean
ce. My error here was that after the episode in the woods I don’t know how many decades ago, perhaps we should have kept going camping more often when we were a still fit young couple and worked harder at surviving cold nights on the hard ground and perfecting the business of eating salads of grass and preparing grasshopper stir-fries.

  Had I had two functional hands I would have folded the paper into a useful glider and shot it under the door and down the hallway.

  Instead, I handed it back to Deedums and said, Nowadays I believe they recycle this sort of thing.

  Our talk was interrupted—and in effect concluded—by a call from my scheduling secretary wanting to start penciling in appointments following my planned release from the hospital the next morning.

  27. 1:12 SCALE 1994 CHEVROLET SUBURBAN ALL WHEEL DRIVE STRETCH

  FORTUNATELY THE PRAYED-FOR BLIZZARD ARRIVED TWO weeks into spring, concluding with a wonderful ice storm, which sent the encampment slipping and sliding and eventually packing, leaving nine dumpsters and thirty-eight Port-a-Potties I feared I would be billed for. But the FBI has assured me that they would take care of everything through WASTE/AMERICA Inc., which I understand is operated by the Bureau in order to ferret out suspicious activity by means of a thorough inspection of the nation’s trash. They were probably already inside the encampment before the end, in the guise of Bicuspid Caterers, who provisioned the renegades during their final three weeks, to judge from some hints dropped by the director during several of our phone chats. The Bureau has generously offered to returf the entire lower pasture in May.

  What Camp Martha Washington’s Nap failed to understand is that things and the comfort and convenience they thrust into everyday life will always carry over ideas. It is clear that the winner in history is things. Instead of trying to change the world, from now on the masses will be obsessed with cleaning out their closets, garages, attics, basements, and storage units. Thing management, thing inventories, thing lists, thing dreams. And in order to manage their things the world has turned to that incomparable tool, the Thingie®, in such numbers as to defy all predictions, sending torrent upon torrent of the 1/100ths of a cent into the family treasure house. Men rule the world because they love things, and enough women love or tolerate men who love things to perpetuate the race. So another failed movement has been chased from the field and now squats on the back steps of the houses of power, awaiting an occasional distribution of crumbs. End of lesson. Or so I thought.

  You two of course witnessed your grandmother’s return to the high-ceilinged halls of Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Manor just as I did, since we were all sitting around the dining room table waiting for Flora to serve when Deirdre breezed in from the kitchen and sat down at her place quite as if nothing unusual had happened these past two months. She began prattling brightly about the wonderful new thrift store and soup kitchen she had found down in Baltimore, where she had luncheoned with the homeless, no doubt on one of her hopeless-cause junkets.

  I must take you all there some day, she said.

  Of course you must, I replied, noting she had made no comment on my ankle and chest braces. Her face was quite wind-burned, as if she had just come in from a long day of sailing.

  At this point or earlier, I would have expected you two, my little pets, to thrust your bony gawky necks forward in her direction and call out such things as Grandma, Grandma, tell us about what it was really like inside Camp Martha Washington’s Nap but in the sullen silence of the dinner table I detected a whiff of conspiracy. It rapidly became clear that Deirdre had conferred with you all separately or together, probably in the days of her re-emergence, and that possibly protracted negotiations had been conducted while I was away on business. Even my son-in-law Chip, never one to ignore an opportunity, stared at a distant object somewhere on the far side of the living room, perhaps a flying saucer, with too rigid indifference.

  Excellent split pea soup, she went on. I had Flora make it from organically grown peas.

  I see, I said.

  They live so simply, those people.

  Of course they live simply, the homeless, I said, warming to one of my favorite topics. They have no homes, they have no things to speak of. They have no homes to put their things in, such as they are. In its infinite wisdom, our society has given those who have no homes to put their things in—it has given them the condition of homelessness. What could be simpler?

  The farmers, I mean.

  Oh them. I wouldn’t know.

  We could sell the horses, she said. I could tell that the next big thing was ballooning up over her horizons. Of course we could sell the horses. A snap of the fingers and they’re sold. They’re plastic, life-sized horses. The groundsmen move them around before dawn each day, turning them this way and that, moving them into shade, or into sun, depending on the weather forecast. They help keep neighborhood real estate prices up in Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Village Estates for a fraction of the cost of live horses.

  We could turn all the pastures into organic farm land, she said, finally turning to me and looking into my eyes for the first time in two months. Martha Washington’s Nap could manage it all.

  The chorus that followed this remark confirmed my suspicious.

  What a wonderful idea, Deirdre, Chip observed a little too quickly. Right out your window, a living little farm. An idea whose time has come.

  Can we have chickens? You, Fabian, of all people. I always wanted chickens. And what is this we?

  And of course we must have rabbits. You, Rowena, knew not what you said.

  Not to be outdone, I pitched in. And what about pythons, lions. Alligators. We’ll need to keep these populations in check. Nature is red in tooth and claw for a very excellent reason.

  Your mother put down her fork and leveled her gaze at me. Father, it’s a condition.

  Of course I could see it coming. The problem with the principle, We do not divorce in this family, never have, never will lies in the conditions imposed at certain periods throughout a long and extended marriage. This was Condition Number Six, by my reckoning. Number One, something about no partisan political arguments at family dinners, which unfortunately deprived these occasions of the spice and the sauce that made me salivate in advance at the prospect of nailing old Chippo. Number Two, something to do with off-color jokes. Number Three, something to do with what your grandmother tastelessly referred to as “the bimbos,” details of which are best left unrecorded. Number Four required me to seek medical treatment for gas, so far unsuccessful. Number Five had to do with the establishment of separate bedrooms in the separate wings of the Manor and the protocols by which I was occasionally allowed to approach and enter hers, modeled, I suspect, on the Immigration and Naturalization Service regulations for undocumented workers attempting to enter the United States from Mexico. All this by way forewarning, young Fabian.

  And just where is this play farm going to be, if I may ask? I demanded.

  Deedums looked up and beckoned toward the high French doors. The seventy-five acres between the house and the lake. Where the encampment was.

  Very well, I said, getting up from the table with a theatrical grimace. I turned and limped away. Then I turned and shouted back, Call in the tractors, before hobbling around the corner and up the stairs as slowly and as noisily as I could, huffing and puffing, instead of using the elevator.

  As I say, young Fabian, be forewarned: no man ever expects his marriage to reach Condition Six. It happens even to the best of us—or for that matter especially to the best.

  * * *

  That was ten days ago. Happily I’m in the air again, comfortably curled up in my sofa at 30,000 feet, on the way to Taipei, trying to make up for lost time. That three weeks was the longest I’ve been uninterrupted on the ground in almost nine years, experience I hope to never have to repeat. Anything after two days, when I begin to itch to get back in the air, is almost unbearable hell.

  This 1:12 scale model 1994 Chevrolet Suburban All Wheel Drive Stretch I presented to you both
just before leaving was itself custom stretched the equivalent of the sixty-four inches the actual vehicle was extended. The occasion of the purchase of the actual vehicle, not the model, was the takeover of Gazillions Burgers by the Billions by Thingie® Corporation International and the creation of a new entity called Thingie®-Gazillions International. At no little cost, all this stretching, even the scale models. Though this was a personal car, I came to be known briefly as a stretch pioneer in the corporate world through commissioning other vehicles such as stretch crew-cab pickups, stretch Jeeps, stretch vans, and even stretch golf carts—to make it clear from a distance who was on the course. The 1994 Chevrolet Suburban All Wheel Drive Stretch was my preferred vehicle while visiting my collection of cattle ranches I had been quietly acquiring over the past several years in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and west Texas. Five virtually identical stretch Suburbans were commissioned for the ranches during 1994 and 1995. Because of the exorbitant cost of these custom-made scale models, Fabian and Rowena, I have only given you one each, not five, with me behind the wheel in a ten-gallon hat. At least they got the hat right.