The First Day
I was tired to the point of feeling like I was in some sort of distorted dream, awake but still major parts of my brain were not functional. I had been awake for better than 24 hours. I had a chance to get an hour of rest but real sleep just wasn’t possible. The oiled sofa would not cooperate.
I was nervous as I settled at one of the galley tables to have coffee with 3 of the workers that had already started talking about what was going to happen that morning. I looked through the window and saw only darkness outside. I introduced myself and slowly sprawled across my chair trying to look experienced. I listened.
One was a grizzled slightly built man with a forcefully quiet demeanor, cold steel eyes and tanned leather for skin. He kept his jaw under tension and didn't move it much whenever he spoke. It was obvious he was in charge and he knew it.
The other was a Cajun named Mick. He was loud, uneducated and looked like he had just spent the night wrapped around a truck engine. He was young but, the few years he had spent working on rigs showed through in the already deep creases in his stubbled face.
The last man, Ben was a driller. I knew that because that’s what the man in charge called him.
“Y’all men grab some 18’s an some shackles. We’ll meet on the drill floor in 15. The driller is on the floor with ya’ll. I’m runin the table.”
Ben nodded then Mick piped up.
“Fuckin 18’s? They aint no way we could break that fuckin’ bit with no fuckin’ 18’s! Muther fuckin’ 18’s. Shit!” he said indignantly.
“We aint gonna use the 18’s to break it.” the man in charge growled with and armor piercing glare back at Mick.
Mick obviously was an experienced rig hand and was used to respect from anyone within earshot but the man in charge had silenced him with almost no effort.
I now somehow knew that the man in charge was called a tool pusher. Also instinctively I knew to avoid him. He was not pleased I was there and I was very aware that he was watching me.
As the 3 of us walked out onto the deck and headed down into the bowels of the machine, Mick was talking to no one in particular in his usual loud Cajun accent.
“Fuckin pusher. Fuck that muddah fucker.”
“Fuck him“ the driller commented.
It was at about this point in my young oil rig tenure that I began to realize the word fuck is a universal term and it’s use is required at least once in any form in every spoken sentence. I also found if I didn’t know what someone was talking about the phrase “fuckin A” or in a real pinch just a palin, old fashioned “fuck” would get me by even though it was known I was a worm or, the new guy for those never exposed to oil hands.
Mick found what we needed and started passing the tools out.
I was disappointed really when I found out that the oil industry’s “18” was nothing more than an 18 inch pipe wrench. Fuck. I can buy one of these fuckers at the local hardware store I thought. What a gyp. I noticed however that I was picking up the lingo. I was pleased I was adapting so quickly.
It was sunrise when we made it up to the drill floor which was immediately under the derrick. On the way, I had started to notice that there are a lot of stairs on an offshore rig.
I would come to find out that everywhere I needed to go on the machine, climbing in some form was required to get there. The cardiovascular benefits of this activity were most often enhanced by carrying large heavy objects, usually metal. One hundred feet of coiled arc welding cable was especially effective at driving my heart rate to nearly explosive levels.
The drill floor was about a 30 foot by 30 foot square pad made of what appeared to be wood, but I had never seen wood quite like this. In appearance the planks looked like garden variety railroad ties but, they were unnaturally large, looking like Paul Bunyan himself had cut them long ago. The surface was a cold grey and felt like stone. The many scars and gashes left in the timbers served as record of it's long days at battle in the fields against obviously colossal metal opponents slammed against it.
As I looked around I realized not one piece of machinery I saw was familiar.
The tool pusher circled us up and reviewed the plan of action.
“Nah men, they want us to use the drill table to twist the bit off the collar.”
Mick immediately piped up.
“How da fuck is we sposed to hold the bit and turn da collar with a mudda fuckin bunch a 18's? Aint no fuckin way!”
The tool pusher shot him a glance but it was an understated version of the one I had seem in the galley. The tool pusher was as skeptical as Mick.
“Ahh raht nah what the engineers want us to do is turn the collar with the table and clamp the bit with the tongs” he explained.
I looked at Mick for some indication of what he thought about this plan we were about to execute. He had a puzzled look on his face and was making small circles in the air with his index finger. He was trying to visualize this unsrewing process.
Finally he fixed a gaze at something far away in the middle of his mind. A look of discovery flashed across his face –
“Aint no fuckin way! Cause, look, this fucker turns like that right? Den the fuckin bit comes off like this. Mudda fucker! Wait…………………….. Fuck. He’s fuckin right. It could work!”
The problem was that there was a drill bit screwed onto a drill collar that was stuck fast and no application of heavy tools so far had persuaded the thing to come off.
The plan was to lift the whole piece upside down with the air tuggers, put the collar into the table and clamp the bit with the pipe tongs. Once we had hold of it the drill would be turned hopefully breaking the bit free.
Dangerous? Of course. The drill table was capable of turning millions of pounds of mud filled drill pipe all day every day. We were about to try and turn only a few hundred pounds of bit with it. If the threads really were welded together somehow and didn’t give way the table could twist the collar to the point of shattering. It was also possible that the whole thing could slip out of the table and tumble over the floor in an unpredictable path. Then there was the danger of the tongs breaking. If any of these were to occur, large chunks of sharp, very mad metal would fly everywhere. The drill floor would be a war zone for an instant.
The pipe tongs were suspended horizontally over the floor on something akin to garage door springs. They were serious industrial strenght tools with clamping jaws that could have ripped large trees in two at the base in skilled hands. The handle on each was the size of a ball bat at the fat end and perhaps 7 feet long. This was a leverage tool intended to quickly grab large objects and hold them against great force.
I followed everyone else’s lead and we set to work making the preparations for the operation that was about to take place. The collar was clamped in the table, the bit was clamped with the tongs and the tongs were held in place with the wire rope from the air tuggers.
When we were ready, the tool pusher yelled out to us “Ah raht men! Get outta there!”
Ben and Mick ran and I followed. Clearly they were unsure of what was about to happen.
I was worried because the tool pusher had let a hint of fear escape his lips when he told us to leave the floor and I distictly remember seeing his jaw move. It was very apparent none of them had ever seen anything like this attempted before.
As we watched from behind a quarter inch thick steel wall that partially surrounded the back half of the derrick, the table slowly turned right. The tongs jerked slightly as the slack came out of their wire rope tethers. Even with the noises of the machine running, I could hear everything start to strain and popping sounds were coming from places that seemed to have nothing to do with what was happening on the floor.
I watched the tool pusher as he braced himself and gently cradled the drill controls in his hands. He slowly but continually increased the turn on the table. Nothing was moving as far as I could tell but I could hear the motor on the table continuing to work and twist.
There was suddenly a sharp and loud report not unlike a gunshot from the direction of the clamped bit. Everyone yelled “fuck!” in unison and jumped back a full step.
Something serious had just broken but it was unclear as to what. I looked at the tool pusher and he had let the controls snap back into the neutral position as he gazed at the bit trying to decide what had just happened. He gathered his courage and started the table again but barely applying pressure to the drill controls. The collar was turning but the bit was not.
“Holy Fuck! That shit fuckin’ worked!” Mick yelled with a smile on his face.
The bit was free. There was a brief attempt at celebration on the floor but it was actually more an expression of relief.
I would listen to lots of rig stories later that made me understand most celebrations like this were just about surviving to work the next day.
Industrial Petroleum 101
Randy had dropped into the store on his 28 day break and rented some movies as he usually did. He always rented them 5 or 6 at a time and would go back to his house and watch them all non stop. I knew he’d be in the next day and cycle his entertainment again. It was his MO.
As it went, Randy had been coming into the store for a number of months and we had spoken only in brief bursts here and there. He was always talking about these breaks of his and the places he had just come from in South East Asia. I was intrigued about what he was doing over there. Hearing tell of people traveling to such distant lands was almost unheard of in this part of Alabama, but I didn’t pry. It was clearly his job that took him there for 30 days at a time. I wondered what kind of company would give someone 28 consecutive days off. None came to mind immediately nor could I recall ever running across any one else with such a work schedule.
Then I heard someone say one day he was an airline pilot. His trips abroad and lengthy breaks would now seem to be explained. I had an uncle that was a pilot and he did get extended breaks. I didn’t recall them being 28 days though.
The next time he came in he made his selections as usual and strode up to the counter to check out. We performed the prerequisite southern greeting.
“Hey man. What you know good ?”
“I don’t know it, what you know?”
“I don’t know it.”
This was the exchange that southern males here did. There was never any deviance and both the challenges and the responses were required when friends saw each other. Randy and I recited the lines perfectly.
With the formalities officialy out of the way, the conversational field was now wide open and it would be no longer considered an offense worth shooting someone over for me to ask about his profession. I used to fly private planes so I was interested in talking with him on the subject of his career as a pilot. I thought too that I could probably remember enough to at least follow what he was talking about.
“So, Randy, which airlines are you a pilot for?”
My question was met with a very blank distant gaze followed by a stunned look of disbelief He was thinking about something and he was thinking about it hard. After a few seconds of the stare I became concerned that maybe I had somehow, inadvertently mind you, received some proprietary information that only dead operatives from his “company” knew about.
That’s it. He must be a field agent for some government organization with a three letter acronym for a name and no direct accountability to anyone and I, a crummy video guy, had just blown the lid off of his cover.
Aw gawd! Now what?
“Airline pilot?” he slowly questioned.
Now, here was my chance for redemption. I could deny all I had said with some quick thinking and sound alike phrase of some sort like “adrenalin riot.” I started formulating the sentence in my head.
“Oh, no, no. Ha. You thought I said airline pilot? Ha ha. No, I said adrenalin riot – which adrenaline riot are you for……… see?”
Oh shit. That’s stupid! He’ll never buy it especially if he’s a highly trained foreign operative.
I started to have that sinking feeling that my mental agility was again in the process of failing me. Temporary but sudden loss of my faculties seemed to be a daily occurrence. Today was obviously no exception.
I was out of time. The silence was reaching painful levels so I made a quick decision to go with the truth.
“Yes, I heard you flew planes for a living Randy.”
Slowly a smile began to form across his face. I was relieved the truth had worked, or seemed to at the moment anyway.
“Airlines. Ha! That’s a good one. Oh man!”
Not only was the truth working but it was funny besides. This faux pas near miss of mine was turning out rather well after all. I was pleased.
“Well, that’s what someone said anyway.”
“Man, I don’t fly. They fly me. I work in Jakarta.”
“Jakarta? Wow. What do you do there Randy?”
I felt I could risk venturing into this more deeply targeted territory just because I was now reassured that he wasn’t a trained killer with a hair trigger.
“Man, I work on a rig.”
“Rig? Uh, what kind of rig?”
“Oil. It’s an oil rig.”
He went on to tell me that he was an electrician aboard an offshore oil drilling rig. His shift was 28 days on and 28 off. We talked extensively over the next few days about the oil business and roughly how diesel electric rigs worked. I was interested because some of the things he talked about were familiar to me or at least the names for them were. I recognized SCR for example.
“I didn’t know oil rigs had SCR’s and it sounds like they work the same way the ones in TV’s do.”
“Aw heck man. It’s all the same stuff you already know” he said in a matter of fact way.
I had taught myself electronics and was repairing TV’s and VCR’s and, well, anything that “plugged up”. I had a rep in town as being on top of my game, so to speak, in the electrical arena. Now, this didn’t guarantee an income for yours truly. People would bring in things to fix, which I would do, then not have the funds to pick them up again. In fact, the business was a loosing proposition and I had my bank account to prove it.
Needless to say I had need for some money, or more accurately, money on a steady basis. In talking to Randy I found out rig workers are paid fairly well. In fact very well relative to what I was used to. My interest grew and Randy could tell I wanted a crack at it.
On his next 28 day break he told me he had talked to his superiors and there might be a spot for me soon. Pay would be around 50K a year. I was floored. I could not believe rig people made that much.
A couple of weeks later Randy called.
“Hey man. How quick can you make it to Louisiana?”
“I got a spot!? Oh, man. I don’t know. When do I have to be there?”
“You are late now. They are holding the spot but it won’t last. You need to go. There is a tool pusher that wants his man in the spot. He’s mad right now about you getting it.”
Not a great start I thought but, a start anyway. As I hung up the phone I was wondering what a tool pusher was.
I left about 11 AM that same morning and drove for some 4 and a half hours to make it to the Tri-Drill corporate office. I found who I was supposed to talk to and they hustled me into the office and we started to plow through the paper work.
A few hours later I thought I was done but, there was a problem. I hadn’t had a drug test and it was required by law. The dilemma for Tri- Drilling was that their need for an electrician on the rig was acute and immediate. They needed a guy now. In the oil game I would come to find whenever the word “now” was involved it meant “time to panic” in common English.
The managers circled up just out of auditory range for a conference on this test business. There was some arm waving along with some quick slicing hand motions. Then the vaporous whispering they were all doing grew into louder more guttural growls with a few sharp edged inflections here and there. Finally the group quieted and with a few nods the circle broke.
They had decided to improvise and administer their own version of a substance abuse test. Everyone insisted this was as close to legal as it got in Louisiana and there was no way they could be accused of any misconduct in the matter. All of them had agreed on the point and they had witnesses to prove it.
It started with two of the larger more threatening looking men moving forward and taking up flanking positions just inches away from me. I could feel their breath on the back of my neck. They were both biker looking types coated in various shades of stale grease. Neither of them had the worry of the complications too many real teeth can cause. They had both reduced their chopper inventory to the barest minimum.
They chose to take the direct approach to the problem by asking me 12 different ways “what drugs is yew on?” Each time I repeated I was not taking, nor had I taken any drugs prescribed or otherwise.
As this process ground on I could tell my interrogators were getting frustrated with their inability to break me down. As their supply of variations on the base question dwindled the tension grew. With each volley they launched their fists clenched a little tighter as I repulsed the attack with the same answer I had already given them ten different times. “I have not taken any drugs”
One of them turned toward the rest of the onlookers after about fifteen minutes of the interrogation and proclaimed “he aint gonna tell us no way.”
They had thrown in the towel. I felt the flush of victory.
Little did I know they had a hole card and now desperate, they decided to play it.
They called
her in.
She was a very well endowed tight sweater blonde with a sweet full smile topped off with dimples and a set of bedroom eyes.
One look at her told me she knew her business. She swished across the room moving every curve she owned and sat right in front of me. She wasted no time in going about her work.
She had one of those innocent sounding silky southern accents and I could tell she was capable of using it with the precision a brain surgeon would have killed for.
It wasn’t hard to see that she was accustomed to getting exactly the result she wanted any time she unleashed it's full power on a selected target. This accent plus the other weaponry in her arsenal made her flat deadly.
She started the ordeal by patting my hand softly and looking into my eyes. I was ready for her though. She would not break me godammit. I read Raymond Chandler after all and I knew what to expect from this, this, inquisition I was about to be mercilessly subjected to.
Gimmie your best shot babe I smugly thought to myself.
Then, I noticed her nipples getting hard and starting to show through her scoop neck knitted top. Oh my God! This woman is ruthless. I reckoned she could probably fake an inoperable tumor on cue too. She was good. Really good.
They had pulled out all the stops and I was starting to sweat just a little. I knew with her goods she could get me to admit anything and I wasn’t sure how much of her torture I would be able to stand. I tried not to look into her eyes by looking at her chest. Shit. She had skillfully made her nipples even bigger. I went back to her looking into her eyes and, at that moment she had me. I was lost in the seas of green that surrounded her pupils and the memory of her thin sweater top adhering perfectly to every undulation that lay below.
I was now breathing more quickly.
“Now sweetness, if you have had, well, a slip, we can fix it. You just need to tell me what it was. Please for me.”
I drew on every shred of courage I had and said in a shaky voice, “I have not taken any drugs”
“Aww, c’mon precious, you can tell me. I need to know just what it is – that’s all. Not too much for a man like you is it baby?"
“I have not taken any drugs.”
“Say, tell you what. Maybe you and I….well. You know, uh, later. I'm a single girl see. But, sugar I need to know what I need to fix for you.”
“I have not taken any drugs.”
With each of her queries, my patented answer came more easily.
So the grilling went. No one could believe I was telling the truth. It was just not possible that someone who wanted to work on a rig was not on drugs but the evidence was irrefutable. She had done her very best work on me but could not get me to confess.
After a short conference in more whispered words, they decided I was not going to change my story. They were still very afraid that somehow though I had bested her skill with some sort of sideshow trickery.
“Maybe it’s the drugs he’s on” one of them offered as explanation for the spectacle they had just witnessed.
They decided it wasn’t possible because no one could take enough narcotics to fend off her full assault with such aplomb and still be conscious.
They were in a bind. They had no options left and signed me up for my first “hitch”. A hitch is a 28 day cycle in the oil business. I was on my way to untold riches.
My instructions were to leave for Brownsville Texas whenever I wanted just as long as I was there at 6 AM, gulp, the next morning. It was past 5 PM now. I was told to stop on the way out of town for back x-rays. From Louisiana the drive to the tip of Texas was at least 6 hours, more like 8 maybe. I’d have to drive most of the night to make it on time then work the whole of next day on an hour of sleep. I wasn’t used to this at all and I didn’t much like this whole work on no sleep idea. Thus began my stint in the petroleum industry and my introduction to what the word “now” meant to these people.
Randy had taught me a few things in our conversations. First there was a lesson on the types of rigs. I learned terms like jack up, platform and semi. The rig I was to be on was Tri-86. It was of the jack up variety and this was what I was to look for at the ship yard. There were no more specific directions than that.
“It’s a lil ole jack up dawn aya. Onlyiest one around.”
I’ll find it. Hell, I know what jack up looks like. I had seen pictures in a magazine Randy had shown me. No problem.
I arrived at what I thought looked like a ship yard at about 3 AM. I was looking for 3 tall legs towering in the air about 400 feet. This normally would not have been a problem but, everything in the yard, which stretched for a mile and a half up and down the small bay had steel structures sticking up in the air 400 feet. Well, shit.
I drove up and down the main road outside the yard trying to pick out a set of jack up legs.Finally, on the 3rd slow trip back down the yard, I saw what I was sure were the legs of a rig rising only slightly above the rest of the thick clutter of steel pointed skyward. From where I was on the road though it looked, well, small and I was, quite frankly, disappointed. I was expecting big. Maybe even something bigger than my concept of the word big.
That’s not what I was seeing though at least from where I was at that moment.
I had perhaps a quarter mile walk to get to where I thought the rig was. As trudged down the small path, gear in hand, the sea of steel stuff started to part and thin. As I moved forward I started to pass the other shipyard refuse and I was thinking I could begin to make out the triangular shape of the hull.
About half way there I was sure it was the rig I was looking for. The closer I got to it, the larger the machine became. Each time I glanced up at it, it was twice the size it was before and I had only walked a few paces.
One hundred yards out I looked up again and I was in awe. It was big. Very big. It had also acquired a definitely menacing appearance somewhere along the way.
The size of the machine along with the increasing pungency of the raw petroleum odors and the still of it’s massive steel structures hanging motionless against the moonlit sky gave it the character of a sleeping metal colossus that could crush me in an instant if I woke it up. I was now afraid of the machine.
I pushed myself up the mountain of steel steps that seemed to lead up to the deck. There were 3 flights of them and I was tired as I labored upward. On stepping onto the rig for the first time I looked up and my immediate impression was that everything was ridiculously oversized, would probably hurt to pick up and would probably kill me if I was the least bit careless. I turned out to be right on all 3.
The thing was cold, gray and very raw looking with streaks of rust poured down the vertical surfaces and apparatus along with piles of parts were everywhere. The scene before me would make any junk yard look like a garden spot perfect for a picnic. This place was a wreck.I realized looking around I had no idea where to go. To the left was quiet shadowy mechanical stuff of some sort. On my right was a 3 story building that stretched all the way across the middle of the rig. There were windows and lights. I headed for that.
I found a door which was actually more like a ship’s hatch and went inside. My only directional choice was down. The smell of every oil based product I have ever been around was concentrated just inside the hatch. I found over time on the rig that this smell never went away. It was always there. Later in my career I came to understand this was due mostly to the mud room buried down here.
I explored the lower deck inside the monster. Again apparatus and parts all of which were big and heavy looking were everywhere. I had never seen any of the tools that were scattered about. Pipe wrenches as long as I was tall. Bolts the size of my wrist. There was a room I happened into holding 3 identical looking machines of some sort that were each easily the size of a city bus. They were pushed through cut outs in the floor with cat walks all around them. I was curious as to what they were but, I needed a place to sleep and clearly, there wasn’t anywhere to lay down below deck.
I found a stairway and went up again. After more stumbling around the building thing, itself the size of a ship, I located the galley. There was a vinyl sofa along one wall. It had a thin coat of oil on it but, no matter. It was 4:30 and I needed sleep. I was very tired. Six AM would be there all too soon.
