Petroleum Man

by Stanley Crawford

  Now women have their own form of internal combustion, which I don’t pretend to understand. In fact I see the internal combustion engine as being far more male than female. This is regarded as a fault, no doubt, in these times, but there it is. As a consequence, I find it easier to imagine the female parts as being represented by the path, the driveway, the road, the interstate highway, down which the male drives his internal-combustion-powered projectile or vehicle.

  The glandular basis of my General Theory also explains why the private automobile has won out over other forms of transportation and why it will continue to dominate the world, assuredly forever—traffic itself being the frenzied commingling of our collective testosterone and estrogen, in a non-stop orgasm of our never-stop age.

  But perhaps I go too far for minds still somewhat tender and unopened to the infinite ramifications of my General Theory, the truths of which life is bound to reveal to you in a far more disordered and painful way.

  34. 1:8 SCALE 2000 BENTLEY AZURE CONVERTIBLE

  THIS WAS TO HAVE BEEN THE LAST SCALE MODEL CAR IN your collection, Fabian and Rowena, bringing us up to date, with the possibility of an addendum collection to be added incrementally as I acquire the last ten or twenty cars of my life—or more, if I decide to become a serious collector of classic cars. I am discussing this possibility with my architects. The l:8 scale model of the 2000 metallic blue Bentley Azure—with passable 1:8 scale models of you, Fabian, dressed in T-shirt and shorts behind the wheel, me in sport coat and driving hat and gloves sitting next to you and pointing at something ahead in the road as I give you the driving lesson which in fact will never take place, and you, Rowena, in tennis whites in the back seat—took almost as long as the actual car to manufacture. The Azure itself is a special order-car which needs eight months to construct, plus two months to incorporate my custom features. I ordered the scale models for your collections at the same time, well before I realized you had chosen in fact to liquidate them. These models will go to the duplicate collections to be housed in the future Leon Tuggs Museum of Personal Transportation, with one to be held back and placed with the rest of the set in the trunk of my favorite car in which I will be installed or mounted behind the wheel following my death and relevant preservation measures, including twenty-four-hour video surveillance to discourage the sort of looting that so plagued the Egyptians. At this point, early I hope, I still agonize over which is or was or might eventually be my favorite car, but I trust I will be able to make the decision in time.

  I have tried on various occasions to bring up this delicate matter with your grandmother, offering her two choices, which are that she can either have herself preserved and mounted in the front seat next to me in my favorite car or else she can choose a car of her own to be parked next to mine in the “garage.” After several tries I was at last successful over dinner last Sunday night. At least in gaining her attention.

  I trust you have seen, I said, waving my hand in general direction past the Lamborghini, and perhaps even taken some passing interest in the new construction, to the west of my personal automobile museum site.

  What?

  You could not have failed to notice on the way down to the organic farm the radiant white stone walls. The stone comes from the same quarry as the Washington Monument.

  Oh that, she said with a sigh. It looks like a garage. A marble garage. Why would you want to build a garage out of white marble?

  In fact that’s exactly what it is, an exact replica of my parents’ detached two-car garage. The only place in my childhood where I was truly happy, gazing at the centerfolds above my father’s narrow masonite-covered workbench and now and then pushing aside the old playing cards he had tacked in front of their erogenous zones.

  It’s a special kind of garage, I attempted to explain, a sort of permanent garage. A garage for all time. A final parking place of a garage.

  I will not be buried in a garage, she muttered.

  This is no ordinary garage, I said, firing up some enthusiasm even though I knew she had probably already made up her mind in advance. This is a reinforced concrete garage with special structural features that will guarantee that when the concrete door finally closes, it will close for all time. Instead of pivoting down from the ceiling, you see, it rises up from the ground on hydraulic cylinders which then swivel and lock into place. It’s my own patented design. My eighth patent, as a matter of fact.

  With us inside. Or you, rather.

  With our remains inside.

  She looked up at me at last with a startled expression. Like mummies?

  What else do you want to be? I for one have always admired the way the Egyptians dragged as much of the stuff of their daily lives as they could into their tombs. The thought of sitting behind the wheel of my favorite car for all eternity was far from an unpleasant thought. In fact, I rather look forward to the experience, as it were.

  I want to be composted.

  Well, I said, trying to think that one through as fast as I could. Then you go get yourself composted, at the appropriate time, of course, and then have yourself put in a box, which can rest on the front seat beside me.

  You have missed the point as usual. I want to re-enter the cycle of living and dying to see if I can’t do much better next time.

  So once again we reached the point of the irreconcilable, she wanting to become worms and voles, and me wanting to realize that ultimate ambition of mankind, to become a thing, to become locked or frozen or dried into thingdom, for all time.

  Your grandmother, it is fair to say, has never learned to appreciate the value of ego, surely one of the great inventions of the human spirit. At an early age I learned that if a large ego was a useful tool then an even larger ego was even more effective—and that having once made the discovery that a tack hammer is just fine for tacks but will not do if you want to hammer together a whole house, for which you need a framing hammer. At any rate, I have never looked back. Before a good ripe and fully developed ego, all obstacles fall. I am never wrong about anything, of course. But when the perception of others is that I am wrong or very wrong, it is my ego that comes to my rescue and assures me that deep down I am both right and know I am right. More often than not an apparently wrong decision is a feint on the road to success, in order to flush my enemies out into the open and put my friends to the test. The large ego wastes nothing. Even fine and imprisonment can be excellent ego-building exercises as long as you have salted enough resources away in safe places. Only poverty can be said to bring the bull-moose ego finally down to its knees. An ego that has no things with which to trumpet its taste or its boldness or its limitless cravings is nothing but an empty mask.

  With my many things and properties and investments and corporations and cars my monumental ego will face death without fear or loneliness. It will stride up to the moment in cocky disbelief, because it knows itself to be always the one exception, often the one and only exception, the one who will get away with something, since it has always managed to get away with virtually everything. And even if this is all an illusion, which of course I also know it to be, my ego will barge on through the one-way swinging doors quite as if this is some minor bureaucratic or medical misunderstanding that will be as usual settled by threats of litigation or transfer or termination or bribes of promotion. I will advance into the void clutching the hand of my ego, secure in the belief that this cannot happen, is not happening, will never happen, up to the very last instant, because these are the words with which my ego, my wonderfully strong and confident and defiant ego, have always whispered to me, especially in the darkest of moments.

  But some last advice, my Fabian and Rowena, since the subject seems to be impinging on everyone, with the approach of my next big one, the day after tomorrow, after months of preparation. With the passing of a little more time, I plan to pull my ego aside and have a long heart-to-heart talk with it during which I will strongly advocate the lifting of my impulsive disinheriting of the both of you. I can guara
ntee no success here, and even if it does go through with its unfortunate egotistical little plans, you will still through your parents and grandmother be able to count yourself among the top five percentile, even after those criminal death taxes. What you need to remember is that when you come into your inheritance, whether large or mammoth, you will be giving purpose to thousands and even millions of lives, and that you will have succeeded in subverting the squalid liberal democrat urges of the age—and of your father—and have become secretly a king and a queen in an era which likes to think itself above such things. The mass of humankind, my pets, will always need its kings and queens, call them what they will. If we have chosen to disguise ourselves, it is because we now wisely fear the people’s guillotines, its show trials, its media frenzies, its taste for stripping us naked and herding us through the streets like cattle and sheep—as they have been known to do in certain benighted countries of the world. We have successfully turned money into a finely penetrating solvent that can escape through the tiniest orifices and cracks to seek deeper, quieter, and safer chambers, gated communities within gated communities within gated communities.

  What they don’t know, yet crave to know, is how very ordinary we might be, which is why we must conceal ourselves behind our treasured things, behind the walls of our vast mansions, the tinted glass of our opulent cars, the rare materials of our clothing, until we can believe, through our things, led by our egos, that we too are indeed rare and precious beings, unlike any others that have ever walked—or driven across—the face of the earth.

  Yet when all is said and done, little King Fabian, little Queen Rowena, the soul is forever restless, even so—and especially when you think that you possess at last everything you have ever dreamed of.

  Therefore prepare, my young ones. Prepare for the worst.

  ADDENDUM A: 1934 DUESENBERG DUAL COWL PHAETON, BODY BY DIETRICH

  I WAS OF COURSE PLEASED TO SEE YOU, FABIAN AND Rowena, if only from a distance, at the gala celebration of my big one, for which I arrived behind the wheel of the 1934 Duesenberg Dietrich Dual Cowl Phaeton, with the top down, a little present to myself—at least before it moves into the new annex of the Leon Tuggs Museum of Personal Transportation which will house two hundred of the world’s best cars, once I acquire them. I don’t know that I would have wanted to examine your flaming orange hair, Fabian, up close. The Duesenberg is the first of the new collection. Despite some battery trouble, my arrival at the south portico via some specially laid down paving material to prevent the grass from being damaged—my arrival corresponded exactly, as planned, to the moment when thousands of miniature Gazillion Burgers were released from a transport circling overhead, for the delectation of nearly three thousand middle- and upper-management guests, plus spouses. The mini-burgers wafted down on little parachutes promoting our latest line of Lobster Lickers, whose 1.7 percent real lobster content we are allowed to list as the principal ingredient since a recent loosing up of restrictive labeling regulations brought about by a vigorous and inventive lobbying campaign. I’m sure when your mother Deedums wins her election to the Senate, as she obviously will, she’ll improve the legislation even more. They were all snapped up, out of the air, and even off the ground, as per my memo suggesting that anyone who did not join in the fun and games would be summarily fired. Except of course for several hundred mini-burgers which, owning to a change in the wind, came to land in the fields and on top of the greenhouses of Martha Washington’s Nap Organic Farm, which led to your grandmother taking me to court under the charge of being the source of a drift onto her organic fields of illegal pesticides or herbicides or other substances not approved for organic production, to quote the silly language of the suit. Apparently, Rowena, you have taken to working down there on weekends soaking up the beneficial aromas of manure—nostalgie de la boue is a hard one to stamp out—and I would appreciate it if you could somehow indicate to me the real extent of the damages to your grandmother’s precious lettuces and arugula. Minimal, I suspect. And mostly, I also suspect, from crazed inmates of the farm running across the beds trying to catch one of the Gazillion Burgers while still airborne and then flattening themselves on the ground to gobble it down, starving vegetarians as they are, before they could be caught by the farm’s diet police.

  Otherwise the event was an astounding success. I delivered my birthday address, a celebration of the wheel, from the south portico of the Manor to the collective management of all my corporations. Commemorative collector packets of Thingies® were handed out on silver platters, and the event ended with an evening fireworks display over the lake, which added to the litigation mentioned above.

  Your grandmother was not present, as I had expected. For some time I have reconciled myself to the existence of that desert that yawns in time between man and wife, a place littered with the skeletons of indiscretion and infidelity—mine mostly, I gather. An arid, silent place where the slightest word or belch or yawn is an announcement that there will be no relief from hostilities, on the rare evening she shows up at the Manor on the way out of town from seeing Deedums and you two and when she occasionally consents to sit down at the dinner table.

  I find I am spending more time in the air than ever—these words are being scribbled on my way to Warsaw—and landing is always a great sadness. Given recent events, I have decided it might be wiser to withhold these reflections until you are grandparents yourselves and when you both will be of an age to appreciate my seasoned and candid view of your errant youths, or at least those small slivers I happened to glimpse from time to time—having been spared the vast bulk of it all, I’m sure.

  Be that as it may, as the first of my new collection, the Duesenberg will be installed in the garage bays closest to the Manor which I have had remodeled into a bedroom, after my architects pointed out the structural problems of constructing a ramp up into my former second-floor bedroom and, given the length of the massive automobile, how crowded it would be. The space is easily of a size to accommodate the largest automobiles ever made, as I acquire them one at a time, and as they pass in and out of my bedroom on the way to their permanent home. I am already negotiating for a 1929 Bugatti Royale currently in Japan.

  I have ordered the usual number of 1:12 scale Duesenberg models in the hope that you have or soon will find some interest in reviving the happy thought of recovering your collections so impulsively cast off in careless moments of your youth. It wouldn’t take much, of course. The merest word spoken over the phone or scribbled on a scrap of paper or even e-mailed might well do it.

  Anything, in fact. Anything at all.

  *Thingie® is a registered trademark of Thingie®-Gazillion International. Used with permission.