Don’t Tell Mum

“Don’t tell my mother I work on the rigs she thinks I am a piano player
in a whorehouse.”

At my cafe, often the earliest customer. Charlie my dog sits beside me and everybody pats him, and more times than it’s worth mentioning they say, “What kind of dog is he, or what’s his name?” I often meet people that way but this day I cannot remember how we sparked up a conversation. Within minutes I was captivated by the cool stories he was telling me and instinctively knew he was not making any of it up! If he had I would have pretty smartly told him, “bullshit mate” but instead I said, “you should write a book.” Paul’s laughter accompanied his explanation that he had written a book, in fact several best sellers. As we are both story tellers we exchanged, over many coffees, experiences and stories about his family and the incredible things that he has experienced on his travels and work as an international oil rigger, author and raconteur. Let’s start at the beginning, first book, chapter one and give you deliscious little tastes from each book because no-one tells his story better than the man himself.

I left school early, I wanted money, I wanted rigs, I wanted to fly in a helicopter, and say Gawd-damn a lot. I wanted to wear one of those gold company cigar rings. (What can I say, it was the 1980s.) But most of all I wanted an adventure. It’s hard to get a rig job if you don’t know someone, harder still if you’re eighteen and green. I didn’t want to ask John (my step-father), I had to do it myself, but all I could get was a porter’s position in a swanky hotel downtown. I’d answered an ad in the paper and they hired me. I was punctual and polite, but lost the job because I was caught having sex with a guest by a room service attendant.

A brief stint as a waiter followed but that too was doomed. The head chef was young; we would regularly hide in the back alley smoking joints and drinking wine. One night during the pre-Christmas rush of corporate dinners, we took things too far. Fran, one of the waitresses, was a law student who looked down her nose at having to wait tables. To rattle her cage, I hatched a plan involving the chef, the biggest tomato he could find in the cool room, some raw steak and a meat cleaver. Fran could not stand the sight of blood, and whenever one of the chefs nicked a finger she would run, covering her mouth and honking about hygiene and food. So I cut the tomato in half, pushed my white shirt cuff over my hand and dropped the tomato down inside the hole where my hand should have been. With some strips of steak hanging over the edges and lots of tomato sauce, it looked gruesomely real. Fran came through the double doors into the kitchen doing her balancing act, both arms full of dirty dishes. I spun around, waving my gory stump at her. She froze, turned white and made the long fall, straight down, face first into a banquet trolley of half-eaten food scraps.

If you knew Paul you wouldn’t pick him for a practical joker but he is one hell of a fun guy and so this little snippet doesn’t surprise me in the least and having some crazy mates is par for the course when you are growing up dreaming of being and oil rigger…

Friday night was a ritual; it was my turn to fill the beer fridge out the back and provide dinner. We would sit around on the back porch in our underwear, everyone also wearing an obligatory funny hat, smoking joints and drinking beer, recalling the day’s activities and planning the weekend.

One typically hot still Perth summer night when it was my turn to cook, I waited until everyone was sufficiently stoned and then called ‘The Winged Wok’. Our Chinese takeaway food arrived and as we started peeling the cardboard lids off the steaming hot aluminium containers, someone farted. That may not seem overly funny, but when you’ve been smoking Pete’s special Denmark Death blend it’s bloody hilarious.

Iain roared, throwing himself backwards on the back legs of his plastic IKEA chair. But the legs snapped off, leaving him rocking precariously on the edge of the porch, so then he lunged forwards grabbing at the tablecloth, which dumped thirty dollars of piping-hot Chinese and a fruit bowl full of grass into his crotch. The high-pitched scream made us all grit our teeth as we watched him disappear over the side.

We peered down over the edge of the porch at him, sitting in amongst the roses which Pete’s mother had pruned the previous weekend, covered in sweet-n-sour and dope. Iain didn’t look up. We stopped laughing and jumped down to help him up, but he was frozen still, with his arm grasping his right thigh where the pruned stump of a rose bush was protruding through it.

‘Oh fuck . . . call an ambulance.’ I tried to scrape off the Chinese food and dope covering Iain’s leg.

Phil grabbed the phone.

‘Yes . . . he’s in shock, I think,’ Phil said, trying to sound normal. ‘You better bring a hacksaw or something, okay, okay.’

‘Where the fuck is Pete?’ I yelled.

Pete came running up with his camera.‘Okay …put his hat back on.’

‘You fuckhead!’

‘I’m okay boys,’ said Iain quite calmly. ‘There’s no pain.’

‘That’s ’cause you’ve been smoking this shit all night,’ said Phil, scooping up a handful of greeny-orangey goop.

The camera f lashed, making Iain blink.

‘Someone’s pulling into the drive.’ Pete panicked. ‘Hide the dope!’ But his paranoid attempts at hiding the dope only had him smeared in it from head to toe.

The paramedics took one look at us and asked, ‘Has the patient taken any drugs or alcohol . . . other than what he’s lying in, gentlemen?’

In what seemed like seconds they had Iain on a gurney with the rose branch still through his thigh, sticking up under the sheet.

‘He looks like he’s got a boner,’ said Pete.

‘Can we come too?’ asked Phil, but they slammed the ambulance doors and were gone, sirens blazing.

I suggested we follow them and so we all piled into my Holden, still in our underwear, liberally covered in Chinese food and marijuana.

‘I’m still hungry,’ Pete was eyeballing a McDonald’s drive-through. So then we stocked up on burgers and munched our way to Fremantle Hospital, Pete dipping his chips in the greeny-orangey goop.

Not surprisingly the hospital staff wouldn’t let us in but they did accept a burger, which Phil insisted they pass on to Iain as soon as he felt up to it.

So he gets his first job on a rig somewhere in the middle of nowhere (near Kalgoorlie) and thankfully this was pre – mine drug testing or this book may never have been written…

We decided to throw a party for my birthday, only about ten people showed up, but we had a good time. I drank too much scotch and tried to spot some hash with a hot knife over the stove, but ended up passing out on the kitchen f loor. That’s when two of the guys who were electricians decided to go out to their trucks and get as much gaffa tape as they could carry then tape me naked to the kitchen f loor. I came to thinking I was a paraplegic. Everyone spent the next hour laughing at my attempts to pull the tape off my body. We’re not talking about a small piece of plaster here—by the time I was tape-free I didn’t have any body hair left either.

Craig gave me a big joint ‘for the pain’, so I did manage to calm down, then half an hour later, I had the munchies like never before. But as usual we had no food. Luckily, the camp chef had made me a birthday cake earlier and had even saved me a slice during the feeding frenzy that occurred while I was taped to the f loor. Of course, it was the best cake I had ever tasted but I was still starving. Looking into the fridge the way you do when you’re stoned at two in the morning, hoping that by some miracle you’re going to find a whole barbecued chicken hidden in the back, I saw nothing but beer and mouldy half-eaten TV dinners.

Then the camp chef told me that when he

was making the cake, he had cracked some eggs into a tea cup, and suggested I fry them up for a sandwich. Like a man possessed I grabbed the tea cup from the fridge, threw the eggs into the big frying pan, lit the gas plate and started frying. But nothing was happening.The eggs wouldn’t cook. I checked the gas, it was on; I turned it up. Still the eggs just sat there, refusing to cook. Hungry, half-naked and still sore from pulling every last hair from my body, I ran into the living room and complained, ‘My eggs won’t cook.’

By this time the party had reached stupor stage and no-one felt inclined to help me. Craig, however, managed to haul himself off the couch and make the long trip to the kitchen. But when he got to the stove he started laughing. Craig had discovered why my eggs wouldn’t cook.‘You’re trying to fry apricot halves Pauli.’

Dont worry as we progress into the stories Paul gets wiser and less immured by illegal substances as we all do (the ones that survive it that is)…

On one occasion, I had a few days off during a blisteringly hot summer and Craig and I were driving down the main street when he suggested a beer in the Wet Mess, one of the two bars in town. Except this was the bar for the wild men.

‘No way . . . I’ll get raped,’ I protested, but Craig was already getting out of the car and heading towards the bar, chuckling at me.

It was early afternoon so there were only four haulpack truck drivers shooting pool inside. They were all Maori, two of them had tribal tattoos covering one side of their faces. All stood over six feet and looked like they’d been genetically engineered to crush small buildings. They nodded hello as we walked in. Everything was concrete— the bar, the stools—beer was served in plastic cups, and the windows had heavy bars instead of glass. We decided to play pool on the other table, and Craig paid the deposit for two cues and a tray of balls. (This was normal practice because every weekend they got demolished in a brawl.)

An hour rolled by and soon the four truck drivers started getting rowdy. They suddenly broke out in a vicious fist-fight, all four trading blisteringly hard punches.We panicked . . . but there was only one way out of the room, past them.

The fight spilled over on top of us, I made for the door but ran straight into one of the fighters, then his elbow ran into me. It was painless, really. I’d never been hit hard before, not hard like that. My brain went numb, lights out. I was on the f loor, my nose wasn’t working, tears were streaming down my cheeks. I could vaguely see the back of one giant bent over the pool table, his right arm swinging up and down, delivering his fist into the tabletop. I could feel the vibrations in the f loor as he pounded on the felt. Then as quickly as it had started it was over, and they were gone. The barman was also gone, having locked the bar door and the steel grille between the roof and the bar counter behind him. My nose was smashed; blood f lowed into my mouth and down the front of my shirt like two GT racing stripes. I got up slowly, and that’s when I saw Craig. He looked dead.

Flat on his back in the middle of the pool table, he was covered in dark red blood, bubbles formed in the middle of his face. I didn’t recognise him. The big trucker had shoved a ball in Craig’s mouth, balled up another one in his fist and beaten Craig’s face into a pulp. He had lost all his teeth, his jaw looked broken, as did his nose.

I carried him out to the car and struggled to get him inside. His blood spilled down my back as I positioned him. My head was spinning. I caught my reflection in the window—I looked like I’d just murdered someone.

The tyres shrieked to a stop in the doctor’s driveway. Craig was unconscious, slumped forwards against the seatbelt, his head hanging down with a series of bloody saliva strings connecting his face to his crotch. A young woman was at the door, telling me that her father the doctor was in Perth for a wedding and she was unable to help me. The nearest medical help was a two-hour drive to Leonora. I ran back to the car.

Craig had a pulse, and was making a rhythmical gurgling sound so I knew he was sort of breathing. I f loored the car as much as I could, regularly checking his pulse and trying to light bloody cigarettes with the car lighter. Finally I began passing signs to Leonora and felt triumphant just getting him there alive.The doctor lived in a modest whitewashed house and he had the f lying doctors on final approach for the main street within an hour.

The plane’s large rear doors swallowed up my friend in superfast time, its departure sandblasting everyone in red prop wash as it vaporised down the main street and into the afternoon’s dust-bowl sky.The doctor explained that Craig was stable but would need facial surgery and new teeth and his jaw was going to take more than a month to reset. He gave me a shot of anaesthetic, then he straightened my nose: shoving a wooden tongue depressor between my teeth and bracing my head between his knees, he quietly said, ‘Now this is going to hurt’. It did.

During my drive to town, I had managed to cook the head gasket on the car, but luckily the doctor lived next door to a used-car yard so I just traded it for a Ford ute that had ‘Killer Deal’ painted across the top half of the cracked windscreen. I drove back to Leinster slowly, with my face a mess, bruised and swollen, squinting into the sunset on the straight desert highway through the ‘Killer Deal’ windscreen.

Being an oil-rigger isn’t as glamorous as you thought it was dear readers as you can see, and we are still in chapter numero uno. The next insert eloquently demonstrates the echelons involved in the extraction process which sees ‘suits’ in offices vicariously living dangerous lives through the experiences of those ‘at the coalface’ (so to speak), the roughnecks…

SPENT A LITTLE more than a year working in Western Australia’s goldfields when a friend of John’s rang me out of the blue and offered me a job. The oilfields were booming then, with jobs available just about everywhere. I hopped from one company to another, working mostly in Asia. My twenties went by so fast I got whiplash.

In that first year working offshore my initial attempts at fitting in were fumbled. Then I got lucky and found myself standing on the drill f loor with Erwin Herczeg. Erwin had done it all; run every kind of pipe, on every kind of rig, on three continents, in more than a dozen countries. His reputation was impressive to say the least, but he never bragged about it nor belittled anyone with ‘been there done that’. As luck would have it, he took me under his wing and I learnt from the master. Erwin imparted his knowledge in a steady, patient way and I retained just enough to keep my limbs intact and my sanity preserved. I looked forward to any job that he was on, and I took every opportunity to work with him.

While my working life was on track, my social life became bizarre. When I got off a rig, I’d stand in front of the big board at Changi International Airport in Singapore and choose a f light to wherever. I had money burning a hole in my pocket and no financial sense, so I’d take off and fuck around in Tunisia for a month, returning broke to a rig with only some obscene Polaroids and one too many drunken stories.

Everybody’s got something to hide except for me and my monkey…I want a pet monkey as do most of us but they are prone to tearing your face off if they don’t get what they want (kind like your girlfriend only hairier)…

Brunei is a small sovereign state on the island of Borneo, located pretty much in the middle of the South China Sea. It’s a beautiful place, free of most of the problems that corrupt other South-East Asian countries. The locals on the crew were hospitable beyond belief, hard working and cooperative without the ego-driven hardline attitude of the Western crews I was used to.

The staff house in Brunei was located in a small village on the coast. I shared with Drew, the base manager, who was a pleasure to live with, and our home life was clean, comfortable and quiet.

One day our neighbours came back from a trip into the jungle to visit relatives who still lived in an old-style ‘long house’. They had a baby makak monkey with them. Someone had killed his mother with a blow gun and on retrieving the body discovered the infant still clinging to her. He looked pathetic, sitting in a bird cage on their front porch, just skin and bone and so small you could sit him in your hand. When Erwin, who regularly came through and stayed at the house, saw the monkey he took pity on the little creature, and before long the monkey was ours, acquired in exchange for some company caps and T-shirts.

We named him Joe and he quickly became a very cool pet. By the time he was fully grown, he stood at about one-foot tall, with brown eyes and dark grey hair. For all intents and purposes he thought he was one of us. After his first year he developed a taste for beer, speed-metal music and headbutting the bathroom mirror. Unfortunately Joe also enjoyed the odd cigarette. This wasn’t a worry at first, but then he started turning into a pack-a-day monkey, and, because he couldn’t figure out how to light up, he would steal your lit cigarette, perch on top of a cupboard, coughing and smoking, and then discard the butt rather carelessly. We soon became very concerned about him burning down the house, especially if he’d had a few beers.

Joe only became a problem when he hit monkey puberty and started masturbating ten times a day. You’d be watching TV, glance over and there he was, on the couch, feverishly batting off through clenched teeth and a menagerie of high-speed facial expressions. He spent most of that time outdoors for obvious reasons. That pissed him off, so he took it out on the postman, and anyone else he didn’t know who came to the house. At one point Joe got pretty bad, everything from verbal abuse up to, and including, throwing shit.

It’s worth buying the book just for the monkey stories, which is what you will have to do if you want to hear the one about the ceiling fan and the dutch mine manager’s wife…

While I was in Brunei, the oil company was spending money on training and team building, positive activities for guys like me who were isolated for long periods of time. One of these team-building exercises for the upper management was held in the Brunei jungle. A few of us ‘commoners’ also got to be involved. It was fun explaining to upper management that there was no shower or cold beer.They thought it would be a piece of cake, like one of those ‘outward bound’ courses. You should have seen their faces drop when the team leader said, ‘If you boys want to eat, you’re going to have trap and kill something.’

The upper management guys were not used to the thought of having to kill for food. For most of them, hunting and gathering meant rolling down the car window and grabbing a burger, which they could do without too much trouble.

The upper management exchanged blank looks until finally one of them took charge.The idiot actually tried to lure a monkey from its branch with a fucking banana. Then he attempted to beat it to death with a rock that he cleverly hid behind his back. Of course, the monkey, with a lifetime of guerilla warfare experience, promptly retaliated by getting his mates to systematically piss all over the manager. Wherever he went, it was open season and for the next hour all you could hear was whooping and chattering from the canopy as the monkeys had a laugh at his expense.

At the end of the day everyone was shattered. Their beds were simple ‘A’ frame hammocks, slung a couple of feet off the ground. One guy was freaked about having to spend the night in the bush, so he popped a couple of sleeping tablets. His hammock sagged during the night and he woke up to discover that half the jungle had crawled and slithered into his shorts—even his bites had bites. He screamed like a madman, rolling on the ground and fishing madly in his crotch.

It was great to see these arrogant men who enjoy throwing their weight around in the business world so wonderfully far out of their depth. Standing around in the jungle, bunched up, paranoid and alienated, businessmen look as out of place as a 50-foot pyramid of severed heads in Taylor Square.

Surprisingly, most of the businessmen really enjoyed the jungle experience. They learned new things about themselves, like how not to beat a monkey to death, and dropped a few pounds in the process. Although, as soon as they got back to Singapore, it was beers and dinner and ‘Thank God that’s over’.

In the oil business, like most industries, it’s the accountants and lawyers who call the shots, and these people make decisions that ultimately put crews in situations that affect lives in ways they could not possibly comprehend. How these team-building exercises were supposed to help them make better lawyers and accountants I don’t really know. A wise man once said,‘The road to hell is paved with lawyers and accountants.’

This is where we have to wrap up this story for now (I can hear a collective sigh of dissappointment) but thankfully Paul has agreed to allow us to serialize his stories so you can get a taste of what are some of the funniest and best written stories I have ever read (and I read a lot of lofty literature). God knows how many issues of The Swan it will take to tell even these abridged pieces of his books? Until the next edition you will just have to wait…or you can go out and buy his books which will make him very happy because as he says, “you should try supporting a wife and two kids and a very expensive car.”

Paul drives an Aston Martin now, a far cry from the ‘killer deal’ ute but after what he has been through he deserves it. All four books, published by Allen & Unwin are available from the usual suspect book sites. And the latest book ‘Ride Like Hell and You’ll Get There’ is in all good bookstores right now.