This is Not A Drill

by This Is Not a Drill- Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield (retail) (epub)

  Needless to say, I never again forgot about the disk lock.

  My first motorcycle experience was at my mate Andy’s house. All the other neighbourhood kids hated Andy because after we had all banded together to build the best billycart in history the year before, Andy crashed it into a parked car at the end of the steepest street in town. He sustained head injuries and lacerations to most of his body, he smashed his sister’s horse-riding helmet and, of course, we all kicked the shit out of him for crashing the cart, so Andy was shunned from all things.

  But Andy had a postie bike. The great Australian 110cc postie bike, a fine machine, delivered the nation’s mail for decades. Built by Honda, it is in fact one of the bestselling motorcycles in the country; it’s bulletproof. And Andy also had a big shed with a huge old couch in it, a fridge and, best of all, a ping-pong table. That was enough; I was fifteen and I would have been friends with Pol Pot if he had a ping-pong table.

  Andy and I would pour his mum’s olive oil over the bike’s back wheel and ‘smoke it up’ in his driveway. Eventually, I talked my parents into letting me have one, and after months of chores and odd jobs I had enough for a bike. Andy and I would ride around the streets, blowing up people’s letterboxes with firecrackers, ride around the local golf course at night and generally make bastards of ourselves. At that age it was the most fun I was going to have with my pants on.

  Then I met Debbie, and that changed everything; there was no more time for Andy, I was far too concerned with the intricacies of one-handed bra release. One weekend my parents went away and left me in charge. So the first thing I did was talk Debbie into coming over. After a lot of fooling around I finally had her naked and bent over on our new couch, her head unceremoniously buried under the armrest. I had successfully negotiated a condom over my penis after several failed attempts that included actually looking at the instruction booklet. This was going to be fun. My mother walked through the front door on the first stroke. Our eyes met, my jaw dropped and I fell forward in slow motion, my hands slipping off the armrest and sending my spotty teenage face into the scalding hot iron pipe protruding from the top of the pot-belly stove. My mother was not happy, Debbie was not happy, and I had a huge round blister in the centre of my forehead and no chance of getting any girls naked on the couch in the near future, so I was not happy. The only person who thought it was great was John; he just winked at me and pissed himself laughing.

  Ten years later, after getting off a rig, I was taking a break in Perth and decided to look up Andy. He had gone into his family’s construction business and had done very well. Andy had stayed in touch with all the boys who grew up in the neighbourhood and we planned a big reunion. So I found myself standing in the pub where we had all had our first legal drink ten years earlier; it had changed hands a few times over the years, and its current guise was kind of upmarket and boring. We gathered in the middle of happy hour near the garden bar at the rear of the building. There was Andy, myself, Bob, Dave and Michael. Bob had turned into a degenerate gambling junky and had gained two hundred pounds; Dave was making surfboards for a living and looked happy; Mike was married, had two kids and ran a pharmacy in a shopping mall, he’d aged twenty years.

  The pub was crowded. Dave fought his way to the front and started passing drinks back to us, but it was taking forever. I didn’t mind as my alcohol tolerance was shot after a month on the rig, and my nephew could have drunk me under the table. But Andy was pissed off. ‘I’ll be back in ten,’ he said and walked off.

  ‘What’s he up to?’ I asked Mike.

  ‘Oh, he’s going to one of the other bars in here—there’s five, but they’re probably all as crowded as this.’ He nodded towards the garden bar then added, ‘Or he’s going to shit somewhere public.’ Mike finished off his beer and shook his head.

  ‘He what?!’

  Mike leaned in, fiddled with his shirt tails and gave me a strained look as if it hurt to tell me. ‘Andy has a shit fetish.’

  ‘Oh fuck off, I’ve known him since we were kids,’ I protested.

  ‘Mate, you haven’t spent any time around Andy since you were in your teens. He’s got a problem. He’s a great bloke, he’s done really well for himself, he’s just into poo,’ Bob said, backing Mike up.

  Dave walked up with five beers. ‘Good to see you, Pauli. Cheers, mate.’

  We all had a drink, then Mike said to Dave, who was holding a spare beer, ‘Andy just walked off five minutes ago.’

  ‘Oh fuck, he’s not that pissed already is he?’ Dave asked.

  ‘What?’ I looked at Dave blankly.

  ‘Mate, last time we went out, he gets blind and takes a dump in some guy’s car. Yeah, he reckons the bloke stiffed him on a business deal last year. We saw him park his car on Loftus Street, and Andy jumps on the roof, pulls his pants down and drops one through the sunroof.’

  I burst out laughing, but wondered if the boys were having a lend of me.

  ‘He’s sick, and he’s got issues with women,’ Mike chipped in.

  Andy came back and the boys went quiet. ‘I can’t tell which one of you four looks most like my dick,’ he said.

  I looked him in the eye. ‘So the boys have been telling me all about your shit fetish, Andy.’

  ‘Oh bullshit, it’s not a fetish. Here, hold this.’ He handed me a shot glass.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘One shot of Baileys,’ he answered.

  ‘You went over to another bar to get this?’ I put it down on the table.

  ‘No, I went to get one of these.’ Andy pulled a vending machine condom from his pocket, opened it up, took the glass of Baileys and poured it into the condom. All four of us just stood there looking at Andy, who looked back at us like we’d just asked him to kick a kitten into a woodchipper. ‘That fuckin’ idiot behind the bar is useless, so I’m going to fuck with her,’ he said, and marched over to the packed garden bar. We slowly followed, but no-one said anything.

  Andy, looking perfectly respectable in his designer suit and silk tie, quietly waited in the corner, then casually tossed the condom onto the back shelf behind the bar. The whole bar was black marble, and within seconds someone saw it and freaked. Soon after, the entire crowd at the bar had stopped yelling ‘two vodka Red Bulls’ and instead had become transfixed on the condom.

  The poor girl tending the bar didn’t know what to do. She was young, probably in college, and I noticed she was flustered with the demanding punters. You have to lip-read orders and mix multiple drinks fast to work in a place like this, and she wasn’t coping with bottom-shelf drinks. She called the manager, he turned up with the big set of keys hanging off his belt, took one look at the condom and said ‘Clean it up,’ before walking off. She went over to the corner and came back with one of those little pivoting dustbins on a pole that you sweep up cigarette butts with, and a small broom. After five minutes she had the condom grasped in the middle, using the dustbin and broom like giant chopsticks, then she dropped it, spilling some of the Baileys on the counter. ‘AAAAAH,’ the crowd jeered.

  That was when Andy launched himself across the bar and grabbed the condom. He grinned at the crowd, stretched it out, tipped it up and poured the contents into his mouth. One girl threw up on the spot. I turned and walked straight out, telling the guys where I was going in case they wanted to join me. I didn’t look back, the place went nuts, bouncers sprinted past me towards the soon-to-be-battered Andy as I walked out.

  An hour or so later we had all regrouped in a nightclub in a different part of town. I was standing at the bar with Dave, looking at an untouched Andy. He had apparently bought his way out of trouble, and was now sitting in a booth with four women around him, ordering drinks, the centre of attention and loving it.

  ‘He’s turned into a twat,’ I said to Dave.

  ‘Yeah, well, he can afford to, I s’pose.’ Dave was as easy-going as ever.

  We stayed there for a while, milling around and enjoying ourselves, then Andy was there next t
o me. ‘C’mon, we’re leaving,’ he looked stressed.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘No time to explain.’ He pulled on my jacket.

  ‘Hey, fuck that, Andy, I like this place,’ I said. ‘What happened to your ladies?’

  He didn’t answer, he just left.

  Dave and I stood there watching the girls in the booth. One of them opened her handbag and took out a packet of cigarettes, then paused and looked into her bag. Her girlfriend leaned in and peered into the bag as well. Then from somewhere inside she pulled out a neatly wrapped paper towel and out rolled a six-inch turd. It hit the glass-topped table in front of them and continued rolling all the way to the middle where it sat among their drinks. Four high-pitched almost perfect Hitchcock screams completely blanked out the music, and kicked off a stampede that emptied the dance floor and threw half the place into a panic. And all because Andy’s completely depraved, sick little mind had decided it was a good idea to hide a turd in a handbag.

  The final straw for me came right at the end of the night. We were all very drunk and trying to get a taxi, a five-seater taxi, at four in the morning in the middle of town; we had about as much chance of finding one as catching a lift home in the Pope mobile. Then Bob had an idea. ‘Dave, you’re the smallest, hide behind that wall,’ he said and pointed at a tree, but we knew what he meant. ‘I’ll get the next taxi that comes round the corner, he will stop ’cos . . .’ Bob stopped to stare at the pavement, swallow and focus. ‘There’s only four people and not five and he’ll stop, you’ll see.’ He slapped his hands on his big belly and smiled the way you do after you’ve had so many beers you’ve lost count at twenty and you’ve completely forgotten what you’re talking about.

  There was a pause as we all grappled to understand Bob’s idea. ‘What? So everyone’s in the taxi except Dave, he’s hiding behind that wall,’ Mike said. ‘Not that I care, Bob, look I’ll hide behind the wall, I’m supposed to take the kids to the beach today after church. It’s Sunday morning now.’ He was leaning against a bus stop and realising he was very late.

  ‘No no no no, sorry, when the taxi pulls up, I’ll open the door and Dave’ll dive in and lay on the floor, then we all get in ’n the guy won’t see Dave, you see,’ Bob explained.

  ‘Aw fuck off, fat boy. You lay on the floor of a filthy taxi and we’ll all stand on your head,’ Dave protested. He had beer hidden in all his pockets and threw one at Bob. The can hit Bob square in the forehead. Nothing, no reaction, he just rubbed his head then took off after it.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Andy.

  ‘Fine, great idea, I’ll get the taxi.’ I stepped into the street looking for the light on the roof, and right on cue a taxi pulled up. Bob was honking about the beer, not the fact that it had been thrown at him, but because it exploded in his face when he opened it. The confused Bob distracted the driver, Andy slipped in and lay quietly in the foot-well and the rest of us piled in.

  Bob was in the front seat. ‘Fremantle, please,’ he said and grinned at the driver, beer dripping down his drunk face, and we drove off. All three of us who were sitting in the back exchanged the same look, then Andy farted. Mike kicked him in the ribs and that was it.

  The driver’s hand shot up to the mirror and angled it down to see Andy’s head rearing up to confront Mike. He slammed on the brakes, ripped on the handbrake and went bananas. In seconds he was out of the taxi, the door was open and Andy was getting dragged out by his hair. The taxi driver was big, Italian and obviously at the end of a bad shift. Andy came up swinging and missed, and Mike and I got in the middle of it and tried to calm the cabbie down. Bob was waving his arms in the air, and Dave can speak some Italian and joined in, but while we all collectively talked the driver down, Andy had gotten into the driver’s seat, closed all the doors and locked them. The driver was the only one facing the car, and he suddenly stopped gesticulating and his face went red. We all turned to look. Andy was unscrewing the black buttons at the tops of the doors, the ones you lock the doors with, and eating them. He swallowed all four, then clicked the column shift into gear and just drove off.

  The five of us stood there for a moment, then we scattered in four different directions, leaving the poor cabbie standing there; he didn’t know who to chase, and this was before mobile phones or any of that shit. I felt awful as I ran up a side street. Andy had issues, and I was hoping he didn’t shit in that taxi.

  That was more than ten years ago, and I haven’t seen Andy or any of the others since. Though I did hear through the grapevine that Bob had his stomach stapled, Mike is divorced, Dave is gay, and Andy is still Andy.

  12 THE LAST STAND

  ‘Do you realise what the human body goes through when you have sex? Your pupils dilate, arteries constrict, your core temperature rises, your heart rate and blood pressure skyrocket. Your respiration becomes rapid and shallow, your brain fires bursts of electric impulses from nowhere to nowhere and secretions from every gland. Muscles tense and spasm with enough force to move three times your bodyweight.

  ‘So why waste money by joining a gym?’ the doctor said, beaming back at me. ‘And the best part is, you can make a baby.’

  Good advice indeed.

  ‘You’re in good shape, Paul, just stop with the damn cigarettes.’ This guy is good, he’s been giving oilfield hands their work medicals for years, and his demeanour is a result of that. He’s seen it all, guys walking into his office with everything from missing digits and broken backs to galloping jungle crotch rot. He’s about fifty, Australian and looks a bit like a hippy crossed with a King Charles spaniel.

  I was there because I’d just come off a rig that served a turkey at lunch the previous day that was so undercooked a skilled veterinarian could have saved it. I had casually asked if the doctor thought it was a good idea if I joined a gym, and he was basically telling me to spend my time at home in bed with my wife—nice one.

  ‘Sorry, honey, doctor’s orders.’ I could see it now. Most guys after months offshore tend to leave their loving partners feeling like a seafront village after the Vikings have been through it.

  The crew and I would be back the next day for our work medicals, and I didn’t want to be throwing up while I was there. The doctor gave me some pills and I went back to my hotel to spend the rest of that day vomiting.

  The following morning I was sitting in his waiting room again, this time with the crew. I hate waiting rooms; after all, it says ‘Waiting Room’ on the door, and there’s no chance of not waiting, you have to just sit and wait. It’s like standing in a long queue at the post office, it’s infuriating and you end up thinking rotten things about the person standing in front of you. He’s got dandruff, the fuckin’ loser, or why hasn’t she moved up in the queue, there’s a huge gap, are you blind? The waiting room is even more annoying when you’re there for a work medical—you don’t feel sick so you really don’t want to be there. And these days, it’s not just touch your toes and read the board with one hand over your eye; it’s full body scans, X-rays, blood, pee and poo in cups, climb this, run on that. It takes days.

  I looked at the magazines on the coffee table in front of me. No matter how hard you resist, you will end up reading a three-month-old copy of Woman’s Day, but that only lasts so long. I looked at the boys. Ambu’s got gout, so I was hoping I would go in before him ’cos he’ll take ages. Don pulled out the pages from copies of National Geographic and sniffed them ‘because they smell like childhood’, apparently, then he folded them into Japanese origami animals that were actually very good. Jake drew penises on everyone in Newsweek with a texta pen. Erwin has infinite patience, he just goes to his happy place or something, but then a Harley went past. A Harley Davidson exhaust note is like a dog whistle to Erwin: his ears twitch, his head cocks to one side, and he’s up and over at the blinds to look.

  My new guy was there cracking his knuckles. I hate that. John’s a young American, hardworking, full of beans, keen to learn, and still copping endless shit for rubbing one
out during a training course while wearing a heart monitor. He went in first, but came back out after only ten minutes or so. He sat down quietly and started thumbing through a magazine. We all wondered why he came out so fast. ‘What’s up, mate?’ I asked.

  But before he could answer, the doctor stuck his head round the door and said, ‘Hey you, young guy, stop jacking off into your footy sox. You’ve got tinea on your bell end.’ There was a long pause, and with that he called in Ambu. As soon as the door clicked shut we started laughing.

  ‘Still thinking about that fuckin’ nurse, John?’ said Don looking up from his origami folding.

  ‘Yeah well, at least I don’t get shit stuck up my ass,’ yelled John before he stomped off to the coffee machine.

  Don furrowed his brow. ‘That’s an inherent contradiction,’ he said and went back to his folding.

  ‘You need to think about a plausible reason for your toes, Don.’ Erwin looked serious.

  ‘What, you mean just being a fuckin’ sociopath isn’t good enough?’ John was getting past it.

  ‘Screw the nut, mate,’ I said. I could see this turning into a brawl. Don closed the magazine, his face turned to stone. He got up and walked over to John, who puffed out his chest and changed his stance. His voice also goes up half a dozen octaves when he’s scared, whereas Don’s goes down. This makes Don sound like he should be doing voice-overs on beer commercials. Don’s jaw was set and he was wearing a smile, but behind it was John’s first real beating and the young guy knew it. You see, John’s a nice bloke, and that’s where his problems start. Nice blokes with nice wives and happy children don’t go toe to toe in a waiting room, but Don does.

  ‘Fuck off,’ said John in a high-pitched squeak, sounding about as frightening as David Beckham. John was backed into the corner, then Don held out his hand and gave him a beautiful origami bird.