Don't Tell Mom I Work on the Rigs She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse

by Paul Carter

I was devastated. I had stupidly blown up my monkey with a coconut, and we’re supposed to be more advanced than they are? Have you ever tried explaining yourself to one of them?

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.

Every time I read Upstream, an oilfield newspaper, there’s an article like this: Bumfuck Nowhere: All nine passengers and crew died yesterday when a twelve-seater Sikorsky helicopter operated by Doom Air crashed in a really big ball of flames shortly after takeoff from Bumfuck Nowhere regional airport. Witnesses said the helicopter fell for, oh wow, ages before vanishing into the jungle at 1,592 miles an hour.

Many of the chopper pilots who work in the oil business flew in the Vietnam War and possess a kind of dynamic lethargy that makes them very calming to fly with.

Preparing for the holidays in Perth was rather like sorting out the household after a thermonuclear weapon has gone off. You’re going to need everything from stockpiles of gas to one thousand rolls of toilet paper.

The car was all over the place and it became apparent once he started talking that the driver was shitfaced. He took us on a brief but exciting detour into a lane of oncoming traffic, turning sharply down an alley and into the middle of a preriot banana branch-waving session.As soon as the crowd spotted my shiny bald white head they rushed the car.

Strangers were hugging me and talking the kind of bullshit that makes you want to move to deepest rural Australia and build an adobe house. After a few hours I excused myself, later realizing that I was probably the only person at the party who was not on drugs.