by Paul Carter
Men sit in think tanks for months, turning over all the scenarios, so we can maintain our suspension of disbelief that nothing’s going to happen again. I wonder what’s going to happen in fifty or eighty years when the oil starts to dry up . . .
My time in the Middle East was short. I was in and out, because the walls echoed of war and upcoming turmoil. I opted to get out and go back to Asia, working for myself on a day-rate basis. Freelancing was more lucrative but the work was sporadic and often spontaneous. The phone would ring at ten o’clock at night, and the flight would depart at six the following morning; most jobs started in just that way. As fate would have it, after a few months my old employer phoned and asked if I would ‘day-rate’ on the Philippines project. I agreed and found myself back with my old crew again.
MANILA IS A MOSH pit with an airport. The city is in perpetual gridlock, and travelling just a few miles can take hours, unless you have a skilled local driver. The trick is to treat the traffic like a bad dog—don’t show any fear, because like bees and dogs Manila traffic can smell fear. Drive fast, don’t look both ways, is a popular technique in Asia; along with, if I don’t see you, you’re not there.
Five of us were in the car getting thrown around all over the place. I’d been up all day in Sydney then got the late-night call, did the high-speed pack, rushed to the airport, flew shitty economy for eight hours, arrived in Singapore, went straight to the job briefing, back to the airport, flew really shitty economy for five hours to Manila, and was finally sitting in an overcrowded jeep on a congested downtown freeway. The air is around a million parts per million carbon monoxide and we’re all smoking. Needless to say I was exhausted, my trick neck had popped out of its socket, but that pain was a welcome distraction from my back pain. I felt like a bag of broken china. I was so tired that potholes, fumes and noise aside, I slept regardless, my head rag-dolling from side to side.
At one point during my deep slumber, our driver hit a bottomless pothole sending my face into the dashboard.
‘Aw fuck!’ I sat back, holding my nose, blood running from both nostrils. I angled the rearview mirror to face me and poked at my front teeth. ‘Fuck . . . my tooth is chipped . . . fuck.’
As I nursed my smashed face, we progressed up Roxas Boulevard at the rate of your average tectonic plate. The static traffic encourages local kids to wander up and down the lanes selling just about anything to motorists. A boy appeared next to me with a wooden box suspended by a rope around his neck. I looked into the box and there, lined up neatly, were a dozen black three-foot long rubber double-ended dildoes.
‘Back-massager,’ the boy said, flipping one around his back and pulling it to and fro as if he was drying his back with a towel.
‘No thank you,’ I said and smiled.
Peter, who was in the back, grabbed one and tied it around his head so the two bell-ends jutted out above each eye. ‘We mean no harm to your planet,’ he proclaimed with a straight face to the people in cars around us, who looked on in mute fascination.
Ambu thought that was great and also tied one around his head. Then they proceeded to bash each other over the heads with them all the way to the hotel, finally stuffing them into their offshore bags as we pulled up in the hotel entrance.
The job was high profile and despite the logistics of travel we were well looked after. The hotel was five star, with gold taps, butler service, the works—which made a nice change from the whorehouses we usually ended up in. After checking in, I watched a porter cart off Ambu’s bag, across the expansive marble lobby with one foot of black-rubber penis wobbling in time to his efficient walk.
Peter and I were in the elevator on our way up to our rooms when a Japanese family got in. Peter is truly an animal. He takes tremendous pleasure in embarrassing me, and we had just departed the second floor when he rocked over on one leg and let go with the biggest fart I have ever experienced. And it was an experience because not only was there the expected olfactory-audible result but the looks on the faces of that poor family is something I’ll never forget. Mum and Dad went bright red, exchanging inner screams, as Peter finished off. My ears popped. One of the two children screamed and buried his head in his mother’s skirt, the other child started crying. I was as red as the parents, and mouthed the words best fitting Peter’s abilities:‘You bastard.’
He grinned and looked at the crying child and said, ‘Hey . . . there’s a monster in here. I can smell him.’
We all held our breaths to the top floor but the damage had been done and those children would never be the same again.
The next morning the rig phoned, all choppers were cancelled because of bad weather.‘Hurry up and wait.’
I spent the day with Tommy, the driver. He’s a speed addict and made no attempts to be discreet about it. He did, however, get me from A to B faster than any bus or taxi could.
‘I drive car like the wind yes,’ he said through clenched teeth.
Tommy also talked almost as fast as he drove the car. I heard all about his battered past and underprivileged siblings doing the hard yards in the provinces. He explained in high-speed pidgin English how he had been too high to sleep the night before so decided to clean his flat at two in the morning but got caught up in finding out just exactly how much toilet paper you can suck off the roll with a new vacuum cleaner.
Tommy was good at his job, but he was also armed. I was more than a little conscious of him being on drugs with a gun in his pants. Then again, almost everyone in Manila is armed, and some bars even have a little booth like a cloak room where you have to ‘Check your weapon’ before entering.
I asked him to show me the real Manila, he did. At one point we drove into a ghetto backstreet lined with garages. It was like stumbling onto the set of Night of the Living Dead. All the junkies staggered out of the dark ness with bloody bandages on their arms and legs. Tommy explained that heroin is cheaper and easier to get than a needle, so in desperation they slash into an open vein and rub the dope into the wound.
He also took me to his local cockfight arena. Cockfighting, like not getting run over, is a national pastime. The birds are bred to fight, so imagine a vicious chicken. The pit is lined with clear plastic that is splattered with blood, because the birds fight to the death. Small curved blades, each about 3 inches long, are tied to the bird’s legs so the fights are short. There was lots and lots of betting going on. It took some time to get my bet down as everyone was yelling at everyone in Tagalog (the Filipino language) and I had to point a lot and do a pantomime of ‘Rocky’. But I ended up winning 500 pesos on a particularly violent chicken who, with his huge puffed-out plumage, looked a bit like Tina Turner.
Tommy dropped me off at the hotel and said he expected us to be standing-by for a few more days as the weather forecast was really bad. Filipinos tend to be a little blasé about bad weather. Of the seven thousand islands that make up their beautiful archipelago, not one escapes the average thirty-three typhoons a year. On top of that, the Philippines has seventeen active volcanoes and regularly experiences earthquakes that would send your hardened Californian tremor veteran under the nearest door frame.
The next day was miserable. Monsoon rain streaked down through the smog turning Roxas Boulevard into a river; no adventures today. Peter came by all excited about a bar he had discovered the night before. He really wanted me to go with him that night, but I told him that I had seen it all, every weird sick gimmick that any Asian bar had to offer. Peter assured me I had never seen anything like this, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. Coming from a man who still does fart tricks at forty-five years of age, it didn’t capture my imagination.
We watched an in-house movie and ordered room service for lunch. When the room service guy arrived at the door, he looked a bit pale. I asked him if he was okay, and he said there was a hurricane going on outside then opened up the thick floor-to-ceiling drapes to reveal a horrific storm.
‘I’m worried about my family,’ the room service guy said.
‘Fuckin’ hell,’ said Peter and opened the balcony door, but the wind snatched it out of his hand and slammed it back against the wall.
Wind and rain blasted in almost knocking over the little room service guy. All three of us pulled the door shut, and just as I closed the latch we watched a palm tree sail past the balcony. Our hotel had double-glassed doors and thick walls, one of the few buildings in the area that wouldn’t fall down if you pissed against it. But half of Manila is a shanty town, and a lot of people would be left homeless.
I went back out on the balcony, the wind was so strong it was creating a dead air vacuum that wanted to suck me out into the vortex. I gripped the handrail and looked over. The storm sent bits of corrugated tin and debris in a procession past the hotel. The palm trees were bent over almost touching the ground, and the streets were now awash with stalled cars and blown-off rooftops.
That night Peter returned to my room pleading with me to go with him to the bar he was obsessed with. The weather had died down but still no choppers for at least the next twenty-four hours.
‘All the boys are coming except you. C’mon we’ll get loaded . . . have a good time.’
I gave in. Tommy arrived to drive us through the rain to Manila’s red light district, Makati. Peter told Tommy to drop us on the main strip, and then led us down a side street to an old timber and brick building. Its neon sign flickered in big pink broken letters ‘The Hobbit House’.
We went in through two saloon style doors that opened into a large room with a big bar at one end. It took me a moment to take it all in; we just stood there. The place was entirely staffed and run by dwarfs and midgets, it looked like every tiny person in Asia had a job there. Peter was right. I hadn’t seen anything like it.
‘Hey, where’s Ambu?’ I asked.
‘He’s still outside . . . Fuckin’ great place, huh?’ Peter was right at home.
Ambu was talking to Tommy who had parked the car, and they were still standing on the main street. I went to get them, as we walked up the side street Ambu froze. He peered at the entrance where two midgets were now standing.‘How far away are they?’ he asked.
At the bar stood a driller, Paul, who I hadn’t seen in a few years. He was a big man in his forties, and he roared when he saw me then picked me up and hugged me. Paul was drunk, and more than a little upset over his recent divorce, as I learnt over the next hour.
A midget prostitute in heels and a boob tube was walking on the bar. She sauntered up to Paul and me, stopped in front of us, leaned a hand on my shoulder and at eye level said,‘You buy me drink.’
‘Err . . . some other time.’ I didn’t know what to say.
Paul was laughing.‘You think that’s funny, check him out brother.’ Paul was pointing at Ambu, who, having recovered from his initial shock, was chasing a midget wearing black velcro coveralls, a neck brace and a kid’s crash helmet.
‘You pick him up ’n throw him against that wall,’ Ambu said with excitement as he ran past towards one corner of the bar which was padded and covered with velcro from floor to ceiling.
We did shots of Tequila and Paul was in the middle of another bitter divorce story when the little guy in the crash helmet ran past. Quick as a flash Paul grabbed him by the ankle and, a beer in one hand and the upside-down midget dangling in the other, continued his story.
‘Anyway, I said, “you take the kids bitch and I’m not givin’ you shit”.’
I interrupted him, ‘Mate,’ and nodded at the poor midget; all the blood had rushed to his face.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Paul and, in a kind of drunk hammer-throw manoeuvre, spun around and sent the midget flying end over end into the wrong wall.
Everyone booed and threw food and drinks at us.
The night degenerated further into full-blown drunkenness. I managed to escape with Tommy, who was as drunk as me, and woke up outside my hotel room door, a porter shaking my shoulder.
‘Sir . . . Sir.’
I looked at my watch, it was two in the morning.‘My card key won’t work.’
He bent down and took it from me. ‘You’re in the wrong hotel, Sir.’
They were very understanding and organised a taxi to take me to the right hotel where I promptly threw up.
It took two days for me to feel normal again, the weather had cleared up and our chopper was set for an early departure. Our flight to the rig was going to take two hours, with a refuelling stop on one of the bigger islands called Busuanga.
Sparsely populated, Busuanga is a lush green paradise, spectacular from the air. While the chopper refuelled we had just enough time to wander to a small shack where a woman made the best noodles I had ever tasted. Eating them was done by holding the bowl under your nose and pretending to use chopsticks while actually slurping down your food with lots of loud noises. It’s considered bad manners to eat Western style, i.e. with cutlery, but belching, farting, picking your nose/teeth/bum, smoking, spitting, shouting and kicking the pig that’s under the table are all perfectly fine.
At the time, the Philippines wasn’t the safest place to be; there was an extremist group creating havoc in the southern islands. The group operating where we were was called the ‘Abu Sayyaf ’ and specialised in K&R (kidnap for ransom), usually of tourists who would finish up beheaded on TV.
Oil workers have to have very complex insurance policies that cover everything from acts of God to getting snatched by extremists. K&R happens a lot in the oilfields, especially in South America, Africa and parts of Asia. The extremists know they will get paid the insurance money and so prefer to grab oil people, whose insurance costs go up as more and more get kidnapped.
This cost eventually finds its way to the oil companies who countermeasure by hiring third-party security specialists. They are tasked with providing close protection and defend the rig and its personnel. Depending on who you’re working for and where, these people vary from thugs with guns, to mercenaries, to ultra-professional ex-elite forces personnel who tend to be of medium build and height, are quiet and organised, and for all intents and purposes look like my accountant. Except they can perform complex mental calculations while constructing a shape charge to breach a hotel fire door that’s been welded shut, and drop someone at 500 yards with open sights or a toothpick at three feet. And, of course, they can maintain control of half a dozen shit-scared rig pigs.
Despite all this, the rig was a pleasure to work on and it was great to be back with the crew.
One of the drillers was a Frenchman who thought it was great fun to try and aggravate me by attacking the monarchy.
He would bound up and yell across the drill floor in his thick French accent,‘Hey Paul . . . Fuck your queen . . . ha ha ha ha ha ha.’
Or he would page me, and the speakers located in every room on board would chime: ‘Bing . . . Bong . . . Paul, pick up . . . Line one please.’
And I would dutifully jump to the nearest phone, ‘Paul speaking, hello.’
‘Fuck your queen . . . ha ha ha ha ha ha.’
Then my new French friend, who I now called ‘Frog One’, progressed from verbal attacks to practical jokes, starting with the old styrofoam-cup-dipped-in-a-grease-bucket-and-carefully-stuck-on-your-hard-what-when-you’re-not-looking trick. I walked around with half a dozen cups on my hat, the boys grinning at me.‘What?’
So I retaliated with the Fork in the Redwing. This is a good one . . .
First you take a fork and place it inside a safety boot, on its back so the prongs are facing up. Redwing boots are preferred as they are big, heavy and fairly high with two looped leather straps that you hook your fingers through to pull them on. This requires some effort: you have to really push until your foot reaches a point of no return and finally it slips down into the heel. If there is a fork laying there, you end up with the fork’s prongs lodged behind your big toe. If you try to pull off the boot, your toe gets stabbed. The only way out is to cut through the steel toecap and pull out the fork through the sawn-off toe, wrecking the bo
ots. It takes ages to saw off the toe, especially because you have to hobble all over the place looking for the hacksaw that’s been hidden by the bastard who put the fork in your boot.
‘Fuck you,’ the French driller yelled down the phone.
‘Fuck your president,’ I replied calmly.
He got me back a week later. We had to go on standby in town and wait while the rig finished drilling out the next well section. So we all got in the personnel basket, which is a big metal basket for transferring people from the rig to a vessel such as a boat. The crane operator picked us up, swung the boom over the side and instead of setting us down on the deck of the crew boat dunked us into the sea, waist deep, for ten minutes. I looked up, dumbfounded, and then saw the Frenchman giving me the finger from the crane 200 feet above us.
I could just make out his mouth, ‘Fuck you’. He was ecstatic.
The crew, on the other hand, was really pissed off. We were soaked, as was all our gear, and the ride to town was going to take twelve hours.
A week later we arrived back on the rig and I was prepared for an awesome payback. While in town I picked up two big bottles of food dye. When Frog One finished his shift, I found his new boots and emptied the food dye into them. After a twelve-hour shift in the tropics, your feet are soaked, as is the leather inside your boots and they are often still wet when you start your next shift. He came out in the morning, checked his boots . . . he knew I had arrived the night before, but there was nothing unusual and so he began work.