Petroleum Man

by Stanley Crawford

  No thanks, I said with a florid gesture that brought my wristwatch within focus beneath my nose, I have a call scheduled with the Prime Minister of Japan, thank you.

  By the time I had finally turned in at 3:00 A.M. I was still trembling at how little of the mechanisms of industrial civilization Deirdre had understood, despite all I had tried to teach her during our many long decades of marriage.

  Use it up. Throw it out. Buy another one. That’s what makes the world go round. From which it follows that if you don’t use it up, don’t throw it out, and don’t buy another one, the whole damned system will fall apart.

  And then you, my little grandchildren, will be stripped of all your so-called unearned income and will be out in the cold in the dark, rubbing two sticks together.

  29. 1:12 SCALE 1996 BENTLEY TURBO RL 4–DOOR SALOON

  OVERCOMING THE SHABBY WAY I WAS TREATED BY THE manufacturer, I ordered a second Bentley Turbo with all the options (sunroof, rear picnic tables, deluxe veneer, leather headliner) but when they realized who they were selling the car to they delivered it along with a factory rep who had the gall to refuse to turn it over without a factory-installed speed governor set at 100 MPH max. Had I not been so taken by the deep metallic maroon, I would have refused delivery. As it was, the hulking beauty and exquisite finish of the car inspired me to enlarge the living room at Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Manor to nearly twice its original size and install a full-size automated garage door behind a seventeenth-century Japanese screen, enabling me to drive the Bentley inside and park it on a specially treated Persian carpet so that I could enjoy its presence during the long evening hours I occasionally spent at home—even sit in the comfortable back seat reading the paper. This was to be the first car to be so honored in the household. Eventually, as you know, the living room was expanded again to accommodate three others, of which more at the proper time. Your grandmother Deirdre was at first uneasy, as she is at any change.

  It makes me feel, she remarked after dinner one night, as if I’m having tea in a parking garage. What’s to prevent one of them from just starting up and coming after us?

  But the cars, softly glowing under the warm light of the living room, brought back sweet memories of my childhood days when I wandered the streets of the Indiana town I grew up in not far from South Bend, in the 1940s and early 1950s. On the way home from school I would stop and press my nose to the plate-glass windows of automobile showrooms to gaze on the sharklike forms within, their chrome and glass gleaming in the semi-darkness. There was the Oldsmobile-Buick dealer, with slanted plate-glass windows, slightly tinted. And two blocks down, the Studebaker showroom with its green bullet-nosed cars made in South Bend itself; and a block the other way, the corner showroom of the Hudson dealer and cars painted in dark metallic tones with deep, shadowy grills; and across the street, Fords chromed up and flashy after the war. These were my childhood shrines, the forbidden sanctuaries of my future life as an owner of many, many cars.

  And the Bentley—not the maroon Turbo RL, but its more recent replacement—is where tomorrow I will reluctantly consent to let you, Fabian, sit behind the inlaid walnut steering wheel, on your twelfth birthday, in the living room, and instruct you on which buttons to push and how to move the gear shift lever and the accelerator and brake pedals, with some theoretical pointers on steering and cornering. I know you think you already know how to drive, having successfully piloted your friend Christopher’s three-wheeler off the end of the dock down at the lake and into sixteen feet of water, but permit me to suggest that that brief experience should not be allowed to count. We may even turn on the exhaust fan set in the living room floor and start the car up and drive it a few feet between the sofa and the Steinway and then carefully back, particularly if your grandmother has decided to go up to bed. You need not make motor noises, as this car does not make motor noises. It is quite silent except for the whoosh of its fans and the thrum of the exhaust when you let up on the gas—but you have probably passed beyond the age of making motor noises anyway. I trust you will take this exercise seriously and that it will enable you to finally understand the gravity of your recent pranks involving your collection of models, and that it will lead to the end of those childish days of such things as making the power windows go up and down in order to see if they will decapitate your sister’s dolls. You have reached the age in life, Fabian, to begin imagining ahead to the time in three or four years you will actually begin to drive a car. Practice makes perfect, and practice starts early—just as if you were learning the piano or violin.

  You will be practicing, of course, not in order to become a mere driver of cars and other vehicles or a pilot of planes or even a captain of powerboats, but for something far more important. You will be practicing to become a man, a special kind of man far superior to all those that have come before, those throwers of spears and rocks, those wielders of clubs and swords and firearms, petty smashers and breakers—more of which below, by the way—and uprooters, defacers, and demolitionists. No, none of these will you become. They may be passing phases, of course, on the path to that far greater role of a fully-realized contemporary of the world, in its present magnificent configuration. You will become a Petroleum Man, and this is what you must now begin practicing for.

  Although the concept of a Petroleum Man may at first seem frightening in terms of the awesome responsibilities implied in such a title, all you have to do is look up around you and you will see countless examples of exceedingly successful Petroleum People, namely myself and your grandmother (though she doesn’t know it) and your own mother and father (although he denies he is such a thing). What we Petroleum People are good at doing is arranging our lives and the lives of others so as to use as much petroleum and derivative products and related natural resources as is humanly possible, in order to create and use up more and more things of ever increasing complexity, and in order to replace the now clearly obsolete natural world with a model of vastly improved design—that is, a world faster, more convenient, more comfortable, and far more entertaining than the rather shoddy model clapped together in six days. Petroleum was hidden away in the bowels of the earth so that when humanity reached that degree of evolution where we finally deserved to use it, it would be there. Evolution being, please note, nothing more than nature’s far too sluggish version of planned obsolescence.

  Now about the incident last week, which I cannot pretend to ignore or condone. I am only hoping that putting you behind the wheel of the Bentley will wake you up to magnitude of your deed. I had thought that you had reached the age at which, in preparation for your initiation, I could allow you to handle as frequently as you wanted the nearly thirty items of your collection. As a result, over your father’s irrational objections, I had installed in your room a custom-made cherry wood case with glass doors. No doubt I did not sufficiently anticipate the malign influence of your new best friend, Christopher Something. Burr, I believe. No one bothered to tell me about the bee-bee-shot hole in the plate glass window of my upstairs studio until too late. His family is high-rise construction money, never to be trusted.

  From what I have pieced together of the events surrounding the near destruction of your collection down at the tennis courts, you and your little friend Christopher boxed up some twenty items in your collection and carried them down to the tennis courts one afternoon last week after school, before your parents had come home and while the servants were napping, shall we say, in the furnace room, where the heat had forced them to remove most of their clothing. There, on the clay of the court, you laid the precious car and truck and airplane models of your collection in what you called, whimpering, a Desert Storm Enemy Convoy and proceeded to fire on them with Christopher’s beebee gun and an amazingly large cache of illegal firecrackers, rockets, cherry bombs, and at such close range that your wise-ass little friend had to have a chip of plastic extracted from his eye, though his sight was spared, for better or worse. In the rush to the hospital, clothing hastily restored to the servan
ts, you abandoned the scene of destruction on the tennis court. When the call came through—I had just flown in from Geneva, and both your parents were on the West Coast—I was able to reach the scene minutes before the panicked servants would have cleaned it up. I shot at least a half hour of video before instructing them how to box up separately each of the shattered models and to load the boxes into the back of my car, handling with particular care the little cloth and plastic models of your grandmother and me and of course you and your sister, most of which had been singed and dismembered by the force of the various blasts. I have since had the boxes properly labeled and added to the duplicate collection I keep in the archives, Fabian, along with the video, of which you will come into possession at some future date. In the meantime you will have to live with your much diminished collection of only nine items and its haunting absences. I understand the smears of blackened clay on the tennis court have since been brushed away.

  It seems you have still not realized the difference between the models of your collection, which have been painstakingly researched and commissioned by your grandfather, and those other, ordinary models bought at a model shop, which as far as I’m concerned you can blow up or drop rocks on to your heart’s content, filling your household industrial-size dumpster to the brim, for all I care.

  However, I am not an insensitive ogre. Boys will be boys, as I know quite well from my own personal experience. It is clear you are passing through a somewhat late destructive phase in which you take interest and pleasure in breaking things open, blowing them up, seeing when and how they will crack apart and what’s inside them—usually nothing, sad to say.

  I am fully aware that in a world based on combustion, in a world that worships combustion in all its forms—from the muffled heart-throbbing explosions deep within the internal combustion engine to the televised flashes of smart bombs sent to their targets on the ground from tens of thousands of feet overhead—were we to arrange the world in such a way that boys could no longer be boys, were we to hide all the matches and fireworks, all the guns and bombs, we would soon find ourselves making an about-face and shuffling back toward the Stone Age.

  The point being, Fabian, that there is nothing wrong in principle with blowing things up, particularly other people’s things. What is wrong is to blow up your own things, or worse, to allow your clever friend Christopher to destroy gifts chosen by your grandfather with great thought and deliberation and no little expense.

  By way of a P.S., given that severe headwinds have extended this flight to Brussels by almost an hour. The captain confided to me that in fifteen years of flying he had never experienced headwinds of such force. Be that as it may, last week must have been a national week of vandalism. Only a day after you and your Christopher’s tennis court labors, our long-dormant graffiti artist struck down in the Village in the parking lot where I had left the Bentley Azure convertible parked for all of five minutes while I signed some urgent papers in the bank. I returned to find scratched in the metallic blue paint of its hood the following inscription: PrOPErTY IS THEFT. There were the usual police reports, which took an intolerable half an hour, before I was able to drive the car back to the Manor and order my mechanics to completely remove the hood and arrange to have it framed under glass to hang on the wall of the Manor dining room, work which I hope will be completed by the time I return the day after tomorrow.

  Future guests will enjoy and be amused by my “artwork.” Happily our graffiti artist has miscalculated, leaving his handiwork in a form that could be readily appropriated. PrOPErTY IS THEFT, indeed. Or, as we used to say in my youth, Finders keepers.

  Sooner or later one of my guests is bound to offer to pay far more for it than the cost of crating and shipping the replacement by express air freight from England, plus the not inconsiderable cost of the brand new hood itself …

  And Rowena, lest you think that you can get away with your own little pranks by hiding behind your brother’s shame, you will notice that I have locked the glass doors of the cabinet that houses your collection of model cars. I know your distaste for olives, raisins, and anchovies in particular, which your mother fears might be the sign of an eating disorder, which distaste you have prominently displayed by lining the offending objects up in a very straight row on the edge of your dinner plate—until recently, when we all breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that you had changed at last, and that at ten years of age you had finally decided to become a proper young woman. As the only one of the family who periodically inspects your collection, which I have spent so much effort amassing, I happened to open the cabinet door one evening before dinner at your house and was struck by a very peculiar odor emanating from the 1:24 scale Lincoln Town Car Stretch, whose front passenger door you had left open, presumably the last time you crammed the offending morsels inside. I sent the model back to the manufacturers for a proper cleaning, explaining that the household had been invaded by pack rats. The cloth models of your grandmother and me in the back seat were so moldy they had to be replaced.

  But this was not entirely why I have not given you driving lessons in the Bentley in our living room, though you may think so. It is true that I cannot feel as keenly about your developing womanhood as I can about Fabian’s imminent transformation into a young man, because I know little about girlhood or young womanhood or even fully mature womanhood, except in your case as the future mother of the grandchildren I am unlikely ever to see, except in the form of the trust funds that I have already established for them.

  Be that as it may, I have told you repeatedly that you could watch from the back seat, but twice now you have run pouting to your grandmother, which only goes to demonstrate my point. Although I have been meticulous in bestowing exactly identical models on you and your brother for your collections in order to subvert impulses of sibling rivalry, the fact of the matter is that there are great bands of divergence between the sexes, which are bound to become greater and greater with the passage of time—all part of that elaborate training for you and your brother to assume possession of the world of things. Girls, if I understand correctly, are trained to assume possession of all that is soft and plump, while boys will be directed toward what is hard and sharp. Not, of course, to exclude either of you from the opposite tastes as an occasional exercise, so much as to suggest that while Fabian learns to “drive” a hard, heavy object of countless kinds of metal and filled with reservoirs of toxic, sticky, greasy, and combustible substances, any one of which, if served up as soup could kill off the lot of us—and I mean here of course gasoline, motor oil, anti-freeze, battery acid, grease, transmission fluid, mineral oil, rear-end oil—what is in short tucked inside a Bentley as well as inside any other automobile—that while Fabian learns to “drive” you should learn how to “ride” in the back seat. There you may enjoy the look and feel of split cowhide, woolen carpet, lambskin carpet overlays, and the finest English veneers. And there you may reflect, if you wish, on the four cattle and four lambs that have been humanely slaughtered for your comfort, on the walnut trees felled, and on the sheep sheared. Most of this work was undoubtedly done by men with sharp implements such as shears, knives, saws, axes, and the like, in their restless endeavors to create a soft plump environment for the women of the world. So by refusing to ride as a passenger in the back seat, Rowena, you may be endangering your future role first as a young woman and second as a fully mature one. I can only hope that your grandmother Deirdre is explaining these facts of industrial life to you as you sit whispering to each other on the sofa while I teach Fabian how to drive, though the cold looks in our direction suggest that she may be propagandizing you with other kinds of thoughts.

  The recent abuse of your valuable collections by both of you, Fabian and Rowena, has made me thankful that I have already embarked on assembling that other collection of actual real cars, or their contemporary replacements if we cannot track down and restore the cars I once actually owned. On this flight to Milan, I have been going over the conceptual drawing
s which illustrate how the cars will be housed in a large showroom in the ninety-acre field immediately to the west of your grandmother’s agricultural folly, Martha Washington’s Nap Organic Acres. The hundred-car complex of period automobile dealership showrooms and garages—the size will allow future expansion of my collection—will be designed by a world-class architect and will feature complete repair, restoration, and maintenance facilities staffed by dozens of mechanics and restorers. Upon my demise, the collection will be named after me and bestowed on the National Park Service to maintain in perpetuity as a memorial to the wonderfully inventive and generous man I was.

  Well, still am.

  30. 1:8 SCALE 1997 MERCEDES–BENZ 500SL COUPE

  THIS SOMEWHAT SMALLER CAR, WHOSE SILVER PAINT reflected nicely the Barbed Wire Robber Baron’s sterling silver tea service, we were able to fit into the dining room by making some simple modifications to the French doors which now look out, unfortunately, onto the organic farm. Their new function as garage doors is not visible even to the trained eye—your grandmother being the one exception.

  They’re not the same, she claimed over dinner one evening when your father under some feeble pretext canceled your plans to join us. I can see the difference.

  Of course they’re the same. Nothing has been changed. They are identical, exactly the same, twins, you might say, quite unchanged.

  Then what about that crack?

  What crack?

  She seemed to be pointing over the roof of the Mercedes to a crack at the top of the wooden pillar that separated the two banks of French doors, where the pillar had been sawed off in order to allow both banks of French doors, now fastened together, to swing outward like barn doors to allow the car to be rolled or driven in and out of the dining room.