by Paul Carter
The rain was coming in hard, but Ambu was unfazed as he made his way up to the derrick. The derrickman whose shift was finishing, Jake, is as funny as Ambu and comes from the same part of Borneo. The two of them have been working together for twenty years. He also speaks English like Tonto.
Jake arrived on the drill floor looking pissed off.
‘What’s up?’ asked Erwin.
‘Aw fuck . . . I lose my teeth,’ Jake was pointing at his mouth. He chews tobacco constantly, which involves a fair amount of spitting, and while leaning out on the stabbing board he lost his false teeth down the pipe. That made three sets so far for the year, the last pair going down the toilet when Jake got seasick during a storm on our last offshore job. It looked like we were in for another set.
The wind picked up a few hours later, and horizontal rain lashed the drill floor. The difference between rain at home and rain in the jungle is the difference between shaking off your brollie and looking like you just got flushed down the toilet. But nothing short of a typhoon will stop the job. The sky flashed as if taking a giant photo, and we all blinked as the thunder cracked down on our heads.
We had a couple of hundred joints still to run in the hole, and all I could think about was the end of my shift and a warm bed to crash in. Another flash and bang . . . lightning hit the derrick. Everything shorted out, followed by a few seconds of darkness and then the emergency battery lights came on. The driller gathered everyone; we all looked okay. I ran over to the intercom, thumbing the talk button.
‘Ambu . . . Ambu . . .’
I ran into the middle of the drill floor and craned my neck back, scanning the inside of the derrick . . . but I saw nothing.
‘Get a man in a riding belt up there now and another up the ladder.’
Then we heard him coming down in the tiny emergency elevator. Everyone froze and watched its slow descent to the drill floor.
The door flew open and out stepped Ambu, his hair standing straight up. He had one hand in his mouth.
‘PPPPaul . . . My teeth are hot . . . My teeth are hot.’
I pulled off a glove and put the tip of my finger on one of his teeth. His fillings were hot, and so was the zipper on his coveralls. For once, he looked really frightened.
‘Okay . . . Go and have the medic check you out. Ambu, got your belt on mate?’
Ambu was not hurt because he had his power belt on, at least that’s the way he tells it.
After the jungle stint and we all got back to the base in one piece, I took a break, opting to go and visit my father. It had been a long time, and I was a little nervous about seeing him again.
The drive from our village to the capital of Brunei was a smooth journey for the most part. At the time, the Sultan was constructing a freeway that was to cut through the jungle, connecting all the small villages dotted from the southern-most point to the capital Bandar Seri Begawan in the north. Eventually there would be new sealed roads from every village, all flowing into the main artery like a concrete Amazon River. But for the moment I was driving on a potholed single lane road that was losing its battle against the jungle which threatened to swallow it.
The staff car was a clapped-out fifteen-year-old Mazda that struggled to sit on eighty, but I was in no hurry. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I saw an ancient Greyhound bus looming up on my tail. I moved over to the left so the driver could pass safely, and the bus began to overtake me, kicking up dust and diesel fumes into my open window.
I was about to start cranking up the window when I heard what sounded like the biggest belch ever. Looking directly at me from only a few feet away was a buffalo. He had been unceremoniously hog-tied, up-ended and slid on his side into the luggage bay of the bus between the front and rear wheels, with two of the sliding doors left up as his head was too big to fit in. We looked at one another for a moment, his big eyeball registering mine, and then he was gone.
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER I was on the London Underground going from the airport to the city where I was hooking up with Steve, an old friend, in Leicester Square to talk rigs and life, love and failed relationships—poor man’s therapy with too much beer and a hot bacon and eggs vindaloo by morning. The Tube is always crowded and noisy; Londoners, much like Parisians or New Yorkers, are tolerant of their personal space being invaded daily. On the other hand I was totally uncomfortable, having arrived from a lush wild land where just seeing more than a dozen Westerners in a week was extraordinary. In the middle of a typical smelly tunnel, the rattle of the overcrowded peak hour train stopped. The lights flickered and went out, a few mumbled complaints wafted around. How British, I thought. Anywhere else and someone would be lying stabbed on the floor. The train driver’s voice came over the speakers.‘British Rail would like to apologise . . . for everything.’
Steve has an odd way of looking at the world, but he’s also fun. I asked him how he copes with being thrust back into his inner-London ‘normal’ life after living on a rig for months, often in a rough country. He pondered it for a few seconds then replied in his cockney accent, ‘Well me old son, I get owme from Eathrow . . . Straight down the boozer . . . Get abowt ten pints-o-lager down me neck ’n go down Piccadilly at five in the mornin’ wiv a packet of bird seed ’n a cricket bat . . . I fackin’ ate pigeons . . . no wot I mean?’
The next day I was on a platform at Paddington station waiting for a train to my father’s place. I was hungover from my evening with Steve, and had the worst case of jitters since that chopper got lost in the jungle. I hadn’t seen my father for many years.
To my initial horror I saw him do a whole menagerie of things that I do. His mannerisms, his voice, the way he walks when he’s pissed. If you haven’t spent any time with your father and then suddenly spend a week with him as an adult, it’s confronting. But we had a fantastic time and at least I know what’s going to happen to me when I get older. If I make it to old age, I’ll check out the way I checked in . . . fat, bald and dressed badly, with a mild boob fixation.
During my Brunei stint I found myself back in London, enroute to Aberdeen and the North Sea. A job had come up out of the blue, and I would have been a fool to refuse.
The North Sea is an oilfield icon, the centre of the drilling industry where historic breakthroughs have occurred, as well as some of its worst disasters. It is one of the roughest seas on Earth, but is also capable of producing six million barrels a day. Since its initial boom with the ‘Forties Field’ in the 1970s, it has become a sea-borne exercise in maritime gridlock. It’s unbelievably crowded waters, sprouting platforms in all directions, ebb and flow on a mammoth scale and it has become a white-knuckle obstacle course of freighters, rigs, tankers and commercial fishing boats.
I was standing-by in a hotel in Aberdeen, but a two-day wait turned into a four-day wait and on the fifth day the job was cancelled; the North Sea was not to be for the moment. Hanging around had given me a chance to look up some old friends so it wasn’t a total disappointment, and I had a day in London on the way back to Brunei.
Steve was away, which was probably a good thing, so I decided to have a look at one of London’s lesser known evils. This city has produced some of the most amoral and unsavory characters ever recorded—even worse than Steve! As a boy I had read about Sweeney Todd, who was running around at about the same time as Burke and Hare and Jack the Ripper, and it scared the piss out of me. Eighteenth-century London was a black pit of evil and Todd, born in 1748, was its most damned offspring. He came from a typical gin-fuelled broken home, and was already in prison at fourteen where he learned, amongst other things, like how to survive, the barber’s trade. At nineteen he was released and eventually saved and stole enough to open his own shop. And so the Demon Barber of Fleet Street went to work.
Todd had one barber’s chair in the centre of his tiny shop, and another identical chair fitted to the ceiling of his tiny basement. He invented an ingenious pivoting system whereby he could switch chairs simply by pulling a lever. Todd would lock the shop door,
slit the throat of his customer, pull the lever, and in a few seconds the victim would be in the basement and the empty chair on the basement ceiling would be waiting on his shop floor for the next punter. Todd would then scarper down to the basement to finish off the victim in a killing frenzy that would put a Great White to shame. Then he robbed them, skinned them and dissected them.
To further the evil, Todd started a relationship with a woman called Lovett who ran a pie shop not far from his barber shop. And when his nefarious basement became full, he transported the remains of his victims via ancient underground tunnels to Lovett, who ground them up and sold them to hungry locals as veal and pork pies. If they were alive today, they would probably be in the real estate business.
I was curious to see Todd’s shop but more interested in the location. It was on Fleet Street near Temple Bar, where The Strand and Fleet Street meet, right next door to St Dunstan’s Church. Temple Bar was already a London landmark when Todd set up shop. It is the location of a huge Masonic edifice which was originally erected by the Knights Templar, who used St Dunstan’s Church. It was this which I had come to see.
Some years earlier I became a Freemason. A great deal of older guys in the oil world practise Freemasonry. Sweeney Todd’s shop was a vital connection to the Lodge that I was curious about and keen to discuss at a meeting.
Freemasonry has made the jump out of the Dark Ages, and removed the shackles of its shady misplaced reputation, one it acquired in the years preceding the Cold War. It is a noble and studious organisation, and I have learned a great deal in my time at meetings, not just history or Templar lore but about myself also. There are Masonic Lodges in almost every city in the world, and, should I find myself in a strange place with no contacts, I can call the Lodge and always meet the most interesting characters. Yes, it does have secrets and signs, handshakes and formalities; they are part of a history that goes back centuries and have been kept alive for tradition—something I respect in a world where moral values are traded for anything and everything every day.
On my way back to Brunei after visiting my father, I quickly lost my rose-coloured glasses. My flight stopped briefly in Singapore, where two-thirds of the passengers got off and were replaced by Indian and Pakistani workers. All the construction and hard labour in Brunei is carried out by imported workers. They arrive in droves to dig ditches and haul bricks for ten cents an hour.
One of the two Indian men next to me nudged me and pointed at his embarkation card. It’s the card that you have to fill out in flight for the immigration people at the other end: Where have you been? Where are you going? Where do you live? Got any drugs? etc. I was filling out my card when the Indian guy saw his opportunity to get his filled out for him. Going from the grunts and nudges, I guessed he could not read or write English.
I smiled and said,‘Please wait while I finish mine.’
So he slides his card over the top of mine while I’m writing, tapping with a manky (dirty) finger on the tabletop.
‘Okay mate give me your passport.’ I filled it out for him . . . Mr Barney Rubble of Number 1 Credibility Street, Toy Town. He was most impressed and babbled something at his mate sitting on my other side, who grinned and slid his card and passport under my nose. Seymore Butts took his papers back without saying thank you then disappeared towards the back of the plane, returning moments later with half a dozen passports in each hand, that he dumped on my table without looking at me. He settled back into his in-flight movie, blowing his nose on his sleeve for the umpteenth time: he had a bad head cold and blew his nose on everything except a tissue.
I picked them up and dumped them in his lap. ‘No way,’ I said, shaking my head.
They landed back on my table again.
‘Fuck off.’ I grabbed them and threw the lot towards the front.
When the passports flew off he screamed, blowing snot down the front of his shirt. Barney took off to retrieve them while Seymore pressed the call button, glaring at me through the snot. The flight attendant arrived, looking flustered, as most of the passengers at the front of her section had just been hit in the head with snotty passports and had pressed their call buttons. Eventually we all calmed down and tried hard to ignore each other.
The meal cart arrived. ‘Beef or fish?’ the flight attendant asked and faked a smile.
‘Beef please,’ I said.
‘There’s no more beef.’
‘Then why did you give me a choice?’ I asked.
She gave everyone else the fish. Barney and Seymore practically inhaled their mini-meals, both belching loudly afterwards. My meal arrived, but as I was peeling off the metal lid Seymore leaned over me to talk to Barney and sneezed into my food. I had had enough. I stood up on the seat, stepped on Seymore’s head on the way out and found a vacant seat at the back where I tried to relax for the landing.
But it occurred to me that the arrival would be a circus if I didn’t get out ahead of Barney and Seymore—they were going to be pointing at me in the queue and I was going to be in trouble. I was going to have to get out ahead of them and make a fast exit from the airport.
Luckily I didn’t have any check-in luggage, just my small grip bag and, as everyone made a civilised exit from the plane I broke out into a run. I was first through immigration and customs—nice one—and even had time to savour a backward glance at Barney and Seymore who were brandishing their papers.
There was a strange air in the office the next day. I asked what was going on and was told that one of our people had been diagnosed with testicular cancer following a standard work medical. (He beat it eventually, but endured more than a year of intensive treatment and trauma.) I was due for my medical that week so the news wasn’t comforting.
After my checkup the doctor handed me a pamphlet titled ‘Testicular Cancer and You’. He said, ‘Have a read of that Paul, and familiarise yourself with the self-examination methods.’
‘Why? Is there something wrong with my nuts doc?’
‘No, no, it’s just so you know.’
The doctor had given the pamphlet to everyone on the crew to read as a precaution, even the Iban guys who can’t read too well, and just pointed at the pictures and laughed. I stuffed it into my pocket and forgot about it.
A week later I was sitting in the tool pusher’s office on the rig, staring at the drill floor through the window. I found the pamphlet on testicular cancer in my pocket, lit a cigarette and started reading. There was a quick guide to checking yourself with cartoon images showing you exactly what to do. The cartoon showed a naked bloke, bent over and scrutinising his ball sac which he was stretching out with his left hand. His right hand was reaching around the back, shining a flashlight flush up against his nuts, the idea being that you illuminate your balls and look for any abnormalities. The pamphlet also had pictures of abnormalities, like those skin cancer booklets that have pictures of melanomas, so you know what to look for.
I looked up at the windowsill and there sat a two-foot long black metal ‘Maglite’. It’s the Rolls Royce of flashlights, the ones security guards bash you on the head with. It was two in the morning, everyone on night shift was on the drill floor . . . I thought, why not, so I dropped my coveralls, grabbed the Maglite, bent over and lit myself up. Everything looked okay, then I noticed my bits were making shadow puppets on the wall in front of me. Distracted by this, and I have to say mildly amused, I didn’t hear the tool pusher walk in.
‘Boy . . . what in the fuck are you doin’ wid my flashlight?’
I dropped it into my undies and in one superfast move pulled up my coveralls and spun around to face him. But my gear only went halfway up because the Maglite hit my crotch, something they don’t warn you about in the pamphlet. To his credit the tool pusher listened patiently as I tried to explain and wiped his Maglite on my sleeve. An hour later, the whole drill crew was lined up checking themselves.
Working in Brunei was a pleasure and three years went by too quickly. My time was up, a new project was forecast i
n the Philippines, and the ‘grapevine’ had me going. In the meantime I didn’t want any of the postings the company offered, as that involved going to areas I had already worked in or places that were too dangerous. So I settled on the best gig up for grabs, in the Middle East.
There was plenty of oil work for me, hopping up and down the Persian Gulf from Oman to the UAE (United Arab Emirates) and on to Saudi Arabia. At the time, the world was in flux; working in oil gives you a finely tuned sense of change, and it was clear that there was something going on. Guys would sit around and debate constantly, and not just the usual small stuff, a coup or tribal conflict, but something much bigger. The last time the walls whispered like that, the Gulf War kicked off within a year. The drilling just goes on regardless. I met a guy who was working on a land rig in Syria at the time. He was happy to work there because everyone got extra danger money. From the drill floor he could see the coalition forces light up the night sky. One day the crew saw an American F-16 fighter jet crash nearby, and a few hours later the downed pilot showed up asking to use the phone.
I spent most of my time in Saudi, and had no problems moving around the region, thanks to my excellent history and having lived in Brunei without any problems for years. Saudi Arabia is ruled by a tribal monarchy and governed by Sharia (Islamic law). It is definitely not just another traditional country going through a change. The stakes in Saudi are way higher. It controls one-fourth of the world’s oil reserves, therefore it can directly affect the supply of oil to the rest of the world. Saudi Arabia is the most prized ally of the United States, whose interest in Middle East politics goes well beneath the surface, and both countries protect their energy fiercely.
This relationship started in 1933 when the Saudi ruler Ibn Saud granted a massive oil exploration contract to the Standard Oil Company. This evolved into Saudi Aramco, the power brokers who have 260 million barrels of oil and 225 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in their back pockets. On top of that Saudi Arabia is the keeper of the Muslim holy cities, Mecca and Medina, and the spiritual home of 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide—that’s equal to the population of China. The Saudis have the best-trained, best-equipped military force in the Middle East, and, with the US as their best buddy, who’s going to fuck with them? Perhaps themselves; Saudi Arabia is in a cultural maelstrom, where enormous wealth and power meet uncertainty and fear, where tribalism and customs meet mobile phone consumerism. As the oil-rich Saudis wrestle with their small quiet land that we rarely hear about, the Westerners who know the inner politics, hold their breath. After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, they shit their pants. Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and fifteen of his hijacker pals.