by Paul Carter
PRAISE FOR DON’T TELL MUM I WORK ON THE RIGS
‘Carter writes as if he has ADD, careering through his life on oil rigs in exotic locations. He won’t win the Booker, but his yarns burn with anarchic energy . . . in a word, irrepressible.’
Herald Sun
‘This is one of the most split-my-sides-laughing memoirs I think I have ever read . . . that blows along like the North Sea.’
Northern Star
‘Not so much a thriller as a driller, Don’t Tell Mum is our tip for Bloke’s Book of the Year (BBOTY).’
Sunday Telegraph
‘What you have here . . . is that rare situation of somebody who not only has a story to tell but the ability to tell it. Carter’s anecdotes are told with great good humour and perfect timing.’
The Age
‘Ever wondered what happens to the boys from the movie Jackass when they grow up? They become oil rig workers. Shit happens, so some of the stuff that Paul Carter and his friends get hit with probably isn’t their fault – although sitting at the top of an oil rig derrick during a thunderstorm is probably inviting God to hit you with something. Otherwise most of the madness and mayhem, interspersed with the occasional car or motorcycle accident and totally over the top practical jokes, are clearly all down to Paul. As for the chain-smoking monkeys, pool-playing ferrets and bartending orangutans . . . if the humans are crazy the animals should be too.’
Tony Wheeler, founder of Lonely Planet
‘Great two fisted writing from the far side of hell.’
John Birmingham, author
‘This is a book for blokes . . . Carter is a kind of modern day Indiana Jones . . . a natural storyteller.’
Sunday Tasmanian
‘A unique look at a gritty game. Relentlessly funny and obsessively readable.’
Phillip Noyce, film director
Also by Paul Carter
Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse
This Is Not a Drill
First published in 2010
Copyright © Paul Carter 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
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ISBN 978 1 74175 702 6
Text design by Design By Committee
Typeset and eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Lola
Prologue
1. Derrick the Man
2. Cover your arse
3. What could possibly go wrong?
4. Panic fest
5. Bio what?
6. The bike the universe landed
7. Betty
8. Getting to know you
9. There is no plan B
10. PPPPPP
11. To Adelaide and beyond
12. Stage one: Green fuel, white knuckles
13. Stage two: Spiders
14. wallet
15. Stage three: Life cycle
16. Stage four: Follow the blood-splattered brick road
17. The long reach
18. It only hurts when I laugh
19. Stage five: Uneasy rider
20. Stage six: Numb
21. Stage seven: Harder than you think
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
My name is mud, or at least it should be. Today I’m taking my cat to the vet, to have him put down. Not, I hear you thinking, the cheeriest way to start a book. But my cat Oswald has reached the end of his days, because his bladder recently reached the end of its days as a functioning organ. There’s more cat pee than carpet in the house—it’s like the blood in the Alien movies, burning little acidic puddles everywhere.
Dead cat walking.
My only regret, I never took him to Vegas.
You will in the course of reading this book—that is, if I can keep you interested beyond this prologue—hear tales of Oswald my cat, and of my life over the last few years. But before that happens I need to explain how I got to be here in your hands, on this bus, in this toilet, or wherever you like to do your reading.
I’m an oil man, I come from oil parents, and I spent twenty years working on drilling rigs, in sixteen different countries on three different continents, drilling for oil. Dirty, black, stinking, polluting, penguin-clogging, globe-turning, war-inducing, non-renewable, blood-of-Mother-Earth oil. I love it, and it’s been very good to me. But now, at the age of 40, I take stock and look back.
From eighteen to 38 I had a ball. So much so I’m amazed I’m not dead. I worked with the same crew of men for fifteen years; they were my brothers. Some were amazing characters who showed me the way, some were sociopaths who should have been institutionalised, and some are now dead. After working and living with them, often in tough locations like jungles or deserts or offshore in the middle of a cyclone, I realise how lucky I am. In 1989 eight guys from my crew died, some in quite horrific circumstances, but I was lucky enough to walk away. Guys I know have had body parts lopped off, or had various things much bigger and heavier than them roll, pinch, crush or land on them while I was standing right there next to them. I have been shot at, held hostage, locked up in a Third World country and locked in the toilet by my own monkey. Many, many times I’ve found myself in situations that defy reality, but every time I managed to walk away. After twenty years I got spat out by the oilfield rotational life in one piece, my sanity, liver and fingers intact. Why, I have no fuckin idea.
My first book about living the life of an oilfield contractor, Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse, was published in 2005, my second book This Is Not a Drill in 2007, and quite by accident, my publisher tells me I’m an international bestseller. Like everything else in my life, I was in the right place at the right time. This phenomenon continues, as you’ll discover if you choose to read on.
Why, I have no fuckin idea.
‘What’s in Perth?’ Dave Sadler stood in my garage in Sydney leaning against my Kawasaki, scratching his crotch and looking confused.
‘Mate, we’re moving to WA in two weeks. I’ve taken a desk job.’
‘Oh,’ he said. He knew about my promise to my wife, a promise I’d made years ago, that if we ever had kids, I’d stop working offshore on drilling rigs and stay in one place, stay at home and be a father. He knew Clare was six months pregnant, he knew I was worried about finding a stay-at-home job in a city like Sydney, and he knew I would probably move inters
tate, but he’d wanted to avoid the conversation as much as I did.
‘Shit, mate.’ He finished his beer. ‘I’m going to miss ya.’
Dave had just given me a hand with a new set of exhaust pipes. We’d changed out the baffles, altering the note on a Harley-Davidson XR from a modest rumble to something like King Kong gargling battery acid. Dave grinned as he killed the engine.
I knew I was about to begin a new stage in my life, but I didn’t want this one to end. I’d miss our regular motorcycle-maintenance and beer-drinking sessions and blats into the hills. Dave was a motorcycle journalist. We’d met years earlier. For a long time I’d thought motorcyclists in Sydney were a really friendly bunch; every time I was off the rig and belting around the eastern suburbs on my bike I’d get a wave during rush hour on the big lane split into Bondi. Turned out it was Dave every time, just on a different bike each month. When we finally stopped one day in the same place he explained he’d been waving to me for ages. ‘Mate, I always had on the same helmet.’ I hadn’t noticed.
Though I didn’t want it to, my time in Sydney was ending. Staying in our tiny flat and rotating out to a different rig every month just didn’t fit into our plan now that Clare was pregnant.
We needed a house, with a garden. I needed a normal job, home every night, no more adventures; I knew I could no longer just roll up after a job and jump on my bike and disappear for a few days. It was time to get serious about our future. I had to grow up.
Shortly after that conversation with Dave, Clare and I packed our life into cardboard boxes, I freighted my bikes to a mate’s place and had the obligatory fight with the real estate agent over repainting our flat, and a broken stove (it never worked properly anyway, all I ever did was light cigarettes off it). We had already found a great house to rent in Perth through the internet—compared to our tiny flat it was like Graceland. I had a desk job lined up with a drilling tool rental company in Perth. The move went like clockwork.
In Perth, Clare was blissfully happy. She’d wanted to be a wife and a mother since she was old enough to drape a pillow case over her head and pretend she was a bride. Now she was married and pregnant, and had me permanently at home. And when Clare is happy, she bakes. I came home every day from my new job to wonderful dinners and—I kid you not—cherry pie, unquestionably the sluttiest of the pie family. I couldn’t believe my luck. After years of offshore galley dining at ‘Chucks’ in the Third World and then crawling off to a bunk in a four-man room smaller than my broom cupboard and smellier than the toilets in a cheap cigar factory, I was instead wiping whipped cream off my face and curling up each night in a bed like a sprung tennis court, with my gorgeous, pregnant wife; I was looking like one rabid, but very happy—and fat—dog.
Between all the cooking and the eating, Clare was nesting, so we went shopping, collecting all kinds of shiny new baby stuff. Let me tell you about baby stuff: there are strollers, big, fully integrated, multi-function, dual-directional, go-faster-James-Bond ones with better brakes and suspension than my car. Cots that are stronger, more comfortable and bigger than the bunks offshore. In fact, there are whole superstores that supply every baby thing imaginable. We made endless consecutive trips, collecting carloads of stuff that all needed assembling. We got a pram, a cot, and a baby monitor to wiretap our child’s room. We even made the obligatory trip to the brand-new, brilliantly designed mega-Ikea store, joining up with hundreds of other shoppers at the bottom of the escalator like migrating salmon. Everyone had their Ikea face on, that 1000-yard stare into the wonders of modern Swedish pre-fabricated, flat-pack laminated furniture. Clare grabbed the brilliantly designed Ikea shopping trolley, the only item they produce that I actually like, and we entered the one-way river of Ikea zombies. Two hours later, the river emerged into a great feeding hangar—with your eyes shut it sounded like you were stepping into a lagoon full of flamingoes at dinner time. We waited in the brilliantly designed holding zone until a JCB deposited five metric tonnes of flat-packed brown cardboard boxes and an Allen key. All this for one very small baby.
With all the new things for the baby and the house we had to make room. Most of our existing furniture was pretty old, predominantly from the 1950s, but it was well made, so it seemed a shame to toss it. Having moved to Perth from Sydney I was used to just dumping unwanted items on the street. Bondi, where we lived, was for all intents and purposes a black hole where entire skiploads full of old junk evaporated overnight. Furniture moves so fast out there that all the homeless cats in Bondi have nothing left to piss on. (Seriously, you could dump a body on the sidewalk in Bondi and some backpacker would fuck off with it and turn it into a coffee table before you could say, ‘Whatever happened to Grandpa?’ I once left the most diabolical second-hand mattress on the street, just left it propped up against a lamppost. It looked like someone had shot a snuff movie on it. The next day—gone.)
But in Perth, in the refined environs of Nedlands, the items I left out—which I’ll have you know were by no means crap—just sat there for weeks. Which left our house marked as the one moved into by trailer trash. Joggers would scowl at me while I watered the front garden; drivers would slow down and point. I found it quite annoying, although eventually I amused myself by standing in our messy front yard in just a pair of tracky pants and a stained wife beater, scratching my back with a toilet brush and belching my name. In the end, though, I had to pay someone to haul the stuff off just to stop us from being run out of the neighbourhood.
There’s a strange kind of dynamic lethargy and indifference in Perth. People are almost snobby but not enough to piss you off. New luxury shops are springing up all over the place as the current mining and oil boom has injected billions of dollars into the local economy, lining the pockets of the real estate lucky and the people who work in the right industries. CUBs are popping up like mushrooms—albeit mushrooms with oversized status handbags and Armani sunglasses. CUBs: this was a new term for me—cashed up bogans. Blue-collar guys earning more than Somalia’s national debt, and looking to buy new toys.
The family across the road had clearly benefited from the boom years. The dad was in real estate and had recently had all his tats removed. Their house was impressive, two storeys of limestone and marble with a manicured front lawn big enough to host the next Olympics on. Their daughter was around nine, and had more toys scattered over the front yard than I had ever seen when I was her age.
One morning I went outside and a bouncy castle big- ger than the flat I grew up in was just sitting on their lawn. I couldn’t help comparing it to the toys I’d had at that age.
When I was a lad I had to make do with improvised bits of shit I found on the street or hand-me-downs from my older sister. She hated having to share her toys with me. But hell, whoever said necessity was the mother of invention was onto something. Barbie, with her hair cut off and a texta-applied beard, in clothes made by my mum, made one hell of an action hero. The other kids had the real deal of course, GI Joe, Action Man, Stretch Armstrong, Big Jim, and Steve Austin with his mechanical arm and bionic eyeball. Austin was the best. You could peek out the back of his head through his bionic eye, and that was about as cool as it gets when it’s 1979 and you’re ten. I did my best to make my sister’s former Barbie look manly: I took a bastard file to her boobs, and beefed up her arms with gaffa tape. I ran the edge of a hot knife down her cheek, distorting her right eye and leaving her looking like she’d been through the windscreen of a truck. I renamed her ‘Derrick the Man’, and convinced the other kids he was special and could breathe fire.
Still, I couldn’t compete; one boy had the Evil Knievel action figure—it came with the Harley-Davidson XR750 and a ramp. We would have wars in the backyard, and every time, without fail, Evil would shoot through the air on his bike and save the fuckin day. Steve Austin, Action Man, Big Jim and GI Joe would cheer, while Derrick the Man just stood there looking like a tranny.
Until I put a hot na
il through his pursed lips and filled his head up with lighter fluid. The resulting inferno nearly put the lot of us in hospital.
My reverie was broken by a bloodcurdling scream. The little kid from over the road was standing in the street screaming at her parents; listening in, turned out the bouncy castle wasn’t the one she wanted. The dad was trying to calm her down, then he spotted me sitting there watching and waved the way you do at a neighbour you don’t really know. He smiled, blindingly white teeth, bleached to perfection. My mind tripped and I found myself thinking about kids in West Africa expiring in the dust with perfect complexions and the whitest teeth you have ever seen . . .
I should have gone inside and forgotten about it, but I couldn’t. There was a pitch-dark rage building inside me. I wanted to watch that bouncy castle burn. Just as I was thinking I should get the fuck out of there before I said or did something Clare would later bollock me for, the dad wandered over and tried to strike up a conversation.
I was sitting on the weekend paper; our front step was wet from the rain earlier. He made me squint when he smiled. He was clearly just so happy with his stuff: the big house, nice car, his wife, his toys, his kid.
‘Are you reading that?’ he said, still smiling, pointing at my newspaper.
‘Yes,’ I replied flatly. ‘I have an eye in my anus.’
His smile faded and he asked me what my problem was. My anger deflated. He was right, I was being a jerk. I got up and handed him my paper.
‘What happened to your ink?’ I gestured towards his forearms.
‘Not so good for business, you know?’ He shrugged and smiled again, a bit uncertainly.
I smiled back. He once had a young man’s tattoos. What now? What images could cover the scars left behind that would accurately capture impending middle age? Precisely how does one illustrate an irritable bowel and mortgage repayments? But I didn’t say any of this. Just gave a non-committal wave and wandered inside. I knew I’d been a rude prick. I was missing the rigs, missing the old days, missing those giddy flat-out rides into the hills with Dave. For twenty years I’d been running all over the planet, rig-hopping from one job to the next, completely free, no ties to anyone or anything. Now my crew had moved on and I was in a suburban utopia more imposing and alien than any jungle I’d worked in. I told myself this was the new life that I so desperately wanted, but honestly? It was on the verge of blossoming into a real three-fingered prostate exam.