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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Paul Carter
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August 1 - November 2, 2019
the excon is the guy who looks at everything except what he’s eating without making eye contact.
He looked like a biker, with a long graying beard, shaved head, and tattoos up and down both of his massive arms.
make up for the one they destroyed, I feel a twinge of guilt, because essentially I’m a cat-loving pacifist who ought to care deeply about the environment. On the other hand, I represent people who would squeeze schoolchildren to death if they thought some oil would come out.
the entire planet is nothing but two feet of topsoil surrounding a huge ball of oil.
He was in two body bags in the cooler room within the hour. I asked why two bags and was told that they had used hot-loaded strung
We took off . . . so far so good. But about halfway through the takeoff climb my backside let go. I yelped in complete terror—I’d just lost my ass on a commercial airliner . . . oh my God.
Slamming the door I spun around, gripped the IV bag in my teeth, pulled down my overalls, disconnecting the IV bag from the needle, and sat down just in time for round two of the most embarrassing experience of my entire life. I think that over the next hour I must have shat my own bodyweight, and then the projectile vomiting started. I don’t know if you’ve ever been violently sick in an airplane sink, but in case you haven’t, don’t, because it flies straight back out and all over you. By this time I didn’t know if I should sit or stand, eventually opting for the more comfortable
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And I was scared to fart for a year.
Maurice needed a warning posted on his forehead, or explicit instructions for party hosts to lock up their wives and daughters and organize a team of men with restraints to capture him in case he went off, as Maurice had no concept of fear, or of consequences.
The flight was your standard economy-class nightmare exercise in confined-space-anxiety management, with a couple of infants screaming so loud that dogs thirty-five thousand feet below us could hear them. I ate the mini-meal with the mini-plastic silverware, watched the mini-TV trying not to get the headphone cord in my mini-mashed potatoes, while the overweight, flatulent senior citizen next to me made a concerted effort to have the whole cabin smelling like cabbage before the flight attendants had cleared away the trays. I’m
I could hear the two children from the flight still breaking the sound barrier and making people on the other side of Paris cringe and cover their ears.
politely showed me into the manager’s office. He was affable and smiled too much, and while he was offering me coffee I saw the “poor bastard” look in his eye.
CHING.They told me in Paris to arrive looking poor, no jewelry, etc., so I was looking worse than whale shit, and if you saw me at home you would cross the street to avoid me. But I could not disguise white skin;
After dealing with him and his two mates in customs, I was officially in Africa.
We drove into town, past filthy ramshackle neighborhoods and the kind of abject poverty that puts every creature comfort you have at home clearly in perspective.
He racked the cocking lever on the side of his AK, cranked down the window, stuck out the barrel, roughly pointing at the sky, and emptied the magazine. Everyone shat their pants.The weapon kicked in the guard’s hands, as empty brass casings spat across the inside of the car, hit the windshield and glanced off directly into the crotch of the driver, who was still keying the ignition and pumping the throttle like the drummer of a heavy metal band. Empty shell casings are extremely hot, and the driver was wearing shorts. He suddenly shot up, banging his head into the roof, but at the same time
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Only moments later I could smell something other than Africa.
In Nigeria, don’t turn your back on anyone, ever, even if your pockets are empty.
standing behind roughly constructed gallows—I was kind of surprised it wasn’t made of milk crates.Two police officers stood to the side, one wearing pajama pants and a combat jacket, the other in combat pants and a pajama top. The first two men died quickly, the rope snapping their heads back, breaking their necks instantly.The third man was at least three hundred pounds and built like an ox; his neck did not break. We watched him thrashing about on the end of the rope and started yelling at the two cops to do something.They looked at each other and in a well-rehearsed maneuver laid down their
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I had to step over a goat to get to the toilet which was just a hole in the ground anyway.
I had the welder make Colin a little house that we put on the drill floor right next to the control station that the driller stands in, coincidentally also called a dog house. Colin was the only one allowed to shit in his.
While I was hanging around Shekou I met Cameron, an aircraft engineer. Cameron was funny, in a slaphappy trigger-finger kind of way. A big heavyset character, ex-U.S. Ranger, he was majorly into motorcycles and having sex with women he hardly knew.
As I was stubbing it out, Cameron and Dave shot past on the Ural being chased by another police car.
That week in Sydney passed so fast that when I got back to Singapore I thought I’d dreamed the trip home. Sometimes I move around so much I wake up in a hotel somewhere and it takes a few moments to remember where the hell I am. I’ve caught myself about to pee in the closet more than once in a dark hotel room.
as usual, I had no idea what I was in for.
The whole aircraft looked like Andy Warhol had thrown up all over it.
“In the event of an emergency landing do not attempt to suck your own penis.”
Our contact was nice, but he looked like he was on the local wife-beating team.
Getting processed into Russia is quite an ordeal; there’s a lot of waiting with people who look like they’re auditioning for Schindler’s List, as well as some very novel baggage-handling techniques. We waited two hours for our bags to travel a hundred feet on a trolley being pulled by a tractor that looked like it had just finished plowing a field. Then the bags, smeared in mud and cow shit, were hurled through a hole in the wall. It was like going back forty years, with bad fashion and lots of vodka.
It doesn’t matter where you go in the world, the two things you’re guaranteed to see are Coca-Cola and the AK-47.The
Everyone was smoking; the air was thick with
any double amputee who enjoys taking a dive out of the window of a moving train is okay in my book.
My cabin was comfortable, I shared it with Peter: he had been with the company for a long time, and he has pissed more blood, drunk more beer, and fucked more bimbos than anyone, and, oh yes, he’s never been sick at sea. (A week later we were on a six-hour crew boat ride to the rig and Peter spent the whole trip on all fours vomiting.) Peter’s a real character and always has a story that leaves you feeling like you just got all the enamel peeled off your teeth. But he’s good at the job and I never had a problem with him.
His white coat had blood splattered all the way up his right lapel and there were Cyrillic tattoos on his knuckles.
Once I’d lined myself up with the bowl, I let fly, but the aircraft hit some turbulence and I pretty much just peed all over the place.
which is predominantly rural and full of picture-postcard villages that made me want to wear collarless shirts and baggy pants with suspenders.
One day I was driving through the rolling hills going nowhere in particular when I saw a well-dressed man strolling through a grassy field with a big bird on his arm.
I can’t remember the hawk’s name, but going from its ability it should have been “Death from Above.” What is it about birds of prey? They know they look cool. Anyway, at least it was more civilized than blowing the bunny’s head off with a shotgun.
What if she was an environmentalist and decided that I was nothing but a meat-eating ecovandal who raped the Earth for a living?
It’s simply fear, I think. I always had this notion that I could just roam the planet and run pipe, get into adventures, continue fucking about like I had since I was in my early twenties. Meeting Clare made me think about the next ten years—shit.
With that she had a laugh—her laugh is priceless, like watching someone yawn.You find yourself laughing with her; throw in a few drinks and I’m on the floor, crocodile tears streaming down both cheeks.
the most danger I faced was a wayward paperclip or perhaps an overly hot cup of coffee.
But without fail after a few months I would get what my old boss called “a rabbit up my ass” and I would start looking for a rig again. The characters you meet in the oilfield are unbelievable—from full-on rocket scientists with multiple Ivy League degrees and a keen interest in painting to-scale miniature sixteenth-century military figurines on their bunks, to Billy Bob the brain-dead redneck excon whose misspelled jailhouse tatts, fart jokes, and new truck back home are all he can talk about. Put a combination of twenty guys like that in a rundown backwater bar in some Godforsaken corner of
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We were hiding under the table together when I saw the first flash of panic on his face. Panic is a black leopard that sinks its claws deep into your skull; it makes your body burn and shake. Some people ball up, some freeze, some focus, I tend to poop my pants.
“You buried ten grand in your brother’s front lawn?” “Fuck no, but he’s a prick and it would have served him right.”
“Are you okay? Don’t move, don’t take your helmet off . . . your brains could fall out.” I looked at the man and pondered that. “Can I use your phone, please?” “I saw the whole thing, you’re really fucking lucky, mate.”
The weather had worsened by the time we arrived on the tiny Okha airstrip so the supply vessel was going to have to wait until the next day. Our accommodations for the night were a forty-minute truck ride inland, into the woods. It was very weird, we drove down a small dirt track ever deeper into an ominously black pine forest.
Darkness fell quickly, adding a sense of urgency that silently crept up everyone’s spines.Then, towering above the woods, black against the sky, stood our lodgings. The building was another award-winning design from the Russian “Fear Works” school of architecture. The only thing missing was a few well-placed gargoyles. It was a nuthouse. I pictured a Soviet version of The Shining with some crazed Boris hobbling about in the snow with a big fuck-off axe.
Random lights shone weakly in the upstairs windows, but when the truck circled and backed up to the main door, only its red taillights illuminated the entrance. It started raining hard as we unloaded the bags, a dark figure opened the heavy iron door and right on cue a bolt of lightning cracked down over our heads. I wondered what this place must have been like during the Cold War—I thought about the possibility of salty-looking KGB film noir spies torturing people in the basement. The woman in charge was perfectly suited to the spooky scene; Hollywood could not have cast this any better. She
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Dinner was boiled mystery meat and boiled something else, yummy. We sat up late, swapping stories, catching up on the last few years while the wind beat a distinct rhythm through the rain on the cracked windows. We woke early to cold showers, clear skies and no breakfast.Then it was back on the truck to the jetty and the waiting supply ship.
