by Roman McClay
This was the thing Blax could not be, he could not be a fraud , he thought. He could not be a fraud beyond a certain point anyway. And for this he was hated more than for any of his flaws or faults, for all his sins, and demonisms, the thing that everyone most despised was his refusal to overtly lie about the things they had all agreed to lie about. Without chagrin, he thought life was a moral -not survival- landscape. He was hated for his singular -if inconsistent- virtue; not his many, many, reliable faults.
Blax thought that until a man got this about both himself and Blax, they would forever be estranged. What most men call, polite or compromise or pragmatism , to Blax were outright lies , and he’d rather murder, cuss & curse, and reveal his greatest failings for all to see and condemn, than shame himself by engaging in pretend.
Murder at least was honest , he thought, lying was the true crime . He thought 99 out of 100 men were frauds, and liars and weak; and thus, it was no crime to insult and wound and kill them; anymore than it was wrong to take a mule-deer or elk buck from the forest or swat a fly into mush. Men, actual men, were to be respected, but mere squalid bourgeois apes, beta males with no code? Fuck them, and fuck what they admire , he thought. Blax hoped he was hated by such low men. Like Einstein, he thought the earning of the enmity of mediocre minds to be a talent to develop and revel in. The body fails, but the soul can carry on, if men only knew which was most important.
He briefly thought of how many men he had let escape his judgement; how he had sinned exactly where others thought he had acted wisely and ethically. He banished this thought at once.
The judge of that Ohio court was not impressed, not even slightly, and he gaveled the statement four words before Blax had finished his soliloquy. Blax had seen, and nodded politely at, the girlfriend of his friend Jason Harvey, a girl by the name of Lisa Toms, in the court room that day, apparently with her mother, who, Lisa would go on to say, told her, that boy looks like trouble, he ain’t a friend of yours is he?
Blax had been told also, this time by Harvey himself, that when Blax had come to the front door of his friend’s home one day looking for his friend -they were just 16 at the time- that Harvey’s mother had told Jason that she didn’t know who was at the door, but it was someone who look like he had, just rolled off a park bench .
They had laughed and done bong hits and dropped acid and drank more than would fit; they had raced cars and motorcycles and wrecked things and broke whatever was left. They had anarchy, not yet nihilism, in their hearts and they played Metallica as loud as the equipment could handle, before the neighbors called to say they could handle less than the machinery off which that nonsense was flung like metal objects from Trebuchet ; like ordinance from canon. They turned the music down but spoke louder amongst themselves to keep the same volume of noise around and about their souls.
He was an early amalgam of disparate elements that could barely be adumbrated by himself, with any cohesion, much less by those around him who clearly did not care to even attempt to get a faithful sketch down on paper. People hated him, and had from the beginning, and he had not known this, because he had friends and lovers so redolent in their admiration for him, that it insulated him from the fact that those for whom his ways were charming was less than 1%. 1% in numbers can be 50 people from whom he saw light in their eyes and winsome smiles and a coquettish squeal to their voices when he entered a room. In a school of 500 people, and a town of 5,000 he had in fact garnered about 50 to 55 people who genuinely thought he was cute to have around.
That the other 5445-5450 hated him with black venom and would insult him and curse him in their dreams and plot against him with the cunning that makes up for lack of courage, did not impress him as a problem, not until later in life; later when the 1% had -by then even- tired of his manner. He, if he was honest -which he more or less attempted- had to admit that he was in fact, ponderous, and tendentious and overly didactic at times. He was a preacher in a way that made Hazel Motes look ecumenical and open to other ideas.
Blax was always right, even when wrong, and this manner never ceased; but it did finally manage to alienate everyone, even those who admitted -grudgingly- that he was more right than he was wrong; or at least he seemed to read a lot and know things they couldn’t check out to see if it was right or wrong.
He, of course, would think he had not been right once in 30 years each time he sloughed off one philosophy and traded it in for its opposite; thus, the promiscuity of ideology that landed him with enemies on all sides; earning him comrades almost never. He was always feeling he was always wrong, but only in the past. The now, well, the now was where is was always right. This is how he managed to assert his humility while maintaining perfect hubris. That’s what brains are for.
That he had landed on his feet at all, charged with edifying these stellar young men up in the mountains, was a testament to his idiosyncratic methods and beliefs and trait openness and overall competence and conscientiousness and not, to some likeable, or agreeable affect. Isaiah picked him, he was told, due to his strengths; his weaknesses were being ignored. And so he attempted to ignore them too.
He was surly and mean and haughty and mercurial in 9 out of 8 ways. He was violent and reckless and acted like a 17th century landowner who had just been insulted in front of a lady, a judge and the children of slaves. He dueled, in his mind, you could see it, and satisfaction was demanded over every goddamn slight. He blew up each job, relationship and dinner engagement if he felt even one thing go not exactly right.
He hated people, and their ways, and so they abraded him without knowing it most times, and when they did know it they obviously either wanted -or were insouciant to- his explosions, because everyone knew these conflagrations were coming; ignorance was no longer an excuse of his Natural Law .
He had held himself in reserve often though -way more than he wanted- not that anyone noticed that. The dog gets no credit for the bites it wanted to inflict but did not, nor for the molars not used in a nip; it is remembered only for those times and those teeth that it sinks.
And the oil field was too macho and atavistic to tamp down his instincts at all; it inflamed them, and he loaded up on endogenous testosterone, and hard work and 3,600 calories a day made almost entirely of meat and whisky. The long tours , 12-16 hours, the endless days in a row, 30-40-250, turned him into a bête noire . He stalked the pad, the well bore, the reserve pit like panthris negris with a tranquilizer dart in his haunch that had not delivered enough payload. He was pissed, permanently; and his 214lbs of doom, black hardhat, black clothes and black tattoos made him seem like a monolith sent from vengeful gods; arriving broken, not birthed, but roughly hewn.
And men older and wiser -and in no mood to put up with his shit- would punish him with hard labor, which he lapped up like a cat infected with toxo , greedily but with malice in his heart for the act. He piled the labors up as if they were meant for Hercules himself, he wrestled fluid hoses 4” in diameter like the Lernaean hydra, he racked back drill pipe as if it were the wringing by the neck of the Stymphalian birds, a brace of which hung from his belt up in the crow’s nest as he slammed the kelly-clamp and pissed down the pipe of the Grecian Fowls’ backs.
The tool shacks were his to clean and de-clutter like the Augean stables, and he loaded pipe wrenches 48” long weighing 70lbs over his shoulder and hung them from hooks three feet from his head. He slammed pallets of Milbar -nearly as ponderous as his lectures- and caustic -almost as corrosive as his language- and shrink-wrapped pistons for the tri-pumps by hand when most men waited for the loader -modern technology he scoffed at- to hang forks on the bucket.
He filled non-potable water into the mud tank, as the sun cooked his inert stare into the fluid as it churned and cavitated and roiled from the 6” inlet and massive impellers of four pumps in-a-row. He stick-welded railings without covering his face, just a pair of #6 goggles over his eyes as the UVs reddened his exposed skin of body and face. He looked like a racoon who had been staring at th
e sun in search of God when he ought to be sleeping at day.
He packed 100lb bags of drilling fluid amalgams on his shoulders and walked straight up ladders not stairs. He did this over and over until it looked like he was wrestling with the Cerberus hounds, the bags falling around him at the waist and the shoulder, and at his feet, exploding in grey plumes of detritus; dust-dogs who vaporized under order from Echidna and Typhon for fighting him merely to a stalemate.
He carried 7,200lbs a day -100lbs at a time- his hamstrings were as taut as war drum, his spine as compressed as the air-fuel mixture beneath a piston on the down stroke, his attitude was greedily outraged by pain he sought like wolves choking down bones in lieu of the meat.
His muscles strained, his tendons stretched, his mood grew darker each day. He never refused an assignment and even when they refused to pay him -and the company-man had said it was not his job to pay men but to drill holes , and that the checks were mailed from out-of-state - Blax merely told them they were scoundrels and ought to be ashamed, as he went back -right back- to work. He went up into the derrick and cast off the lanyard as useless and worse; as such safety measures -he thought- probably turned men gay.
He figured if he fell 60 feet the company would get sued by his next of kin, and that would teach them, wouldn’t it? His own bodily harm was punishment against not him but the world , he surmised, chronically or acutely, over time or all-at-once. His revenge was performed on his own body like he was the voo-doo doll , and they the victim; he was mildly surprised when that theory-of-body turned out actually to be true. With the final pins in him he began to leave a mark or two on modern man, he thought; and this produced a grin.
Nobody liked him, not even his friends; they avoided working the same tour as him. He sinned -by missing the mark- when he hit their hands with sledges as they held metal he was supposed to pound; he then demanded they strike him with it next if they refused to stop whining, and sometimes they considered it.
He offered to work for -in place of- new men who had just arrived from a drive of six hours into the field, and for this offer they had taken offense; they told him it was not his place to tell anyone what to do, even if it was to take it easy . He had nodded and wrinkled up all of his face to keep the bile and violence from leaking out, in his mind he had been offering them a rest that he could provide them as he was only 13-hours into his day and they would want to be fresh for that night when they went on tour . But, those coon-asses from Louisiana, did not take it that way.
Nobody took anything the way they’d take it in the world, for the oil field was like prison, each rule in society was inverted. Kindness was seen as a trick, or an unjust elevation or high-handed symbol of something sinister. Anger was seen as merely a sign that a man was awake. But, the pecking order was enforced and no low-man on the pole would bark up hill, and that is exactly what Blax excelled at. He hated authority and hated anyone who lorded it over him, he was never -ever- to be spoken to that way. He’d strike the sun if it insulted him , he used to quote when the subject came up and they looked at him as if he had said something from some other age.
He set things on fire, he dropped 5000lb monels on the ground from 60 feet up by releasing the kelly clamp with one hand and walking away. He over-charged the mud pump and jammed 100 barrels of fluid down a hole & annulus that couldn’t keep up; hot cuttings and brown water exploded at the wellbore and men scattered like cats who had bitten into a lit firecracker at the center of a mouse they had found.
He broke tools and cut himself and bled all over the place. He punched floor hands in the face for showing up late, and he was held back from killing the tool-pusher exactly twice. He parked his lifted black Dodge diesel truck aggressively in front of the company-man’s shack, a taunting that was noticed by all. He wore more black the hotter it got, as a reminder that he was tougher than they were, and that pain and discomfort were what he fucking sought, while those pussies searched out cool drinks and dark shade and rest from the toil he dug inside wasps nests and rabid-dog kennels for sharp objects & the mouths of mad beasts also abused by the world.
His beard was black, his knuckles that color too and blue, and his teeth shone white like a baboon just before a strike. He ate with one hand while mixing chemicals with the other, and he threw the last bite of his meat into the hopper as if it were a trash can at the zoo. He bitched at the driller and the tool-pusher for fucking around and chatting like girls. He told the company-man -as if he was the man in charge- when -exactly when- they were TDing and how long they’d circulate to heal the hole. He arrogated powers to himself purely based on his knowledge; and the fact that he was right, was all that mattered to him. And it ought be all that mattered to the world too, he thought as they all shook their heads. That fact meant jack shit to the command structure and they overrode his orders 99% of the time. Even when he was right they’d make some adjustment of no-consequence just to make it seem that they had truly decided what to do. He laughed at them in the face, and spat at their feet and said shit like, you’re all hat and no cattle son , to men almost twice his age .
He quoted The Author when the tanks overflowed and he rattled off Shakespeare when things looked most dour, and he could insult 10 men in half an hour with oblique references to Milton or Twain. “And Satan hates me, yet is loath to lose me,” he’d said to the bosses when vexed; he was certain they’d get none of the fruit of the poetry but just the pit at the center of the hate he sent forth.
He quoted Lord Byron, and knew himself a villain but made sure they knew that he knew that they were cowardly hypocrites and he was not just tougher and meaner than they but more moral, upright, and Godly too. These men never thought of ethics in the oilfield, so his moral indictments fluttered away with the wind and burned up in the flames once Schlumberger or Halliburton -that Red Army of Work- had cased the well in concrete and moved on.
The oilfield was so long ago and so far away , he then thought as his mind returned to his book on Japanese tattoos.
He looked out of his bedroom; a bedroom that made a study when the murphy bed was up. He looked out over the pine trees and ridges that loped like green waves in the sun, with the Japanese book in his lap and these memories of the oil patch in his mind just behind the eyes. He ached for that place; for work left undone, for wells aborted, for tools left down in the hole. He missed that pain, which was unlike today’s. Then it was acute and enraging, not vitiating and hobbling like now. He was limping not bleeding now, he ached, he was entropic, he was bent awkwardly now, he was not the hunted beast with arrows in his back from Apache ; no, he had left the battlefield of work , he thought, damaged, not dead in a glorious way .
He brought his wife to the oilfield to cook, and to keep him half way civilized. She -Brandee Skye- had been so beautiful, so striking that it made him half mad with jealousy that any man even had eyes. They would breathe her in from a distance of a meter and he would stand between them and growl; she would laugh and the guy would back off and the diesel engines of the rig never did shut off. He’d sleep in his clothes, pass out on the steps or in the shower that was way too fucking small. They lived in fifth-wheels built for men half his size and with 10% of his goddamn pique.
Those travel trailer showers had left an imprint on him that made him build custom showers four and five feet wide from then on. He hated to be hemmed in whilst under water; it was an ethos developed inside him not by him.
His former wife was an angel, with a vulva as narrow as the Hellespont , a straight he could barely navigate, so tight she was on his girth and length; it was like trying to pour 5 gallons of water in a 1-gallon bucket. But it was the one thing he found no cause about which to complain. And despite this trait in women that is crucial yet never discussed for reasons Blax never would understand, he treated her like a succubus, a devil, sent by Lucifer himself to steal his remnant of inner soul.
He berated her for her previous life, not yet knowing himself well enough to eschew marriage unless it be to a v
irgin. He had waited until a year in to discover his ahistorical jealousy -a madness defined by an obsession of where one’s woman has been even before she was his- something almost all men, but never women, understand. A husband owns not just your pussy now, but in the past and future too, and for a wife to have had any men, no matter how few -and it was always 15 wasn’t it?- was insufferable and disgusting and enraging, he thought. And he hated her for things she didn’t know -things she had never been taught- and for the ways in which the culture had let her down. He blamed her for the crimes perpetrated against her; the same way the world blamed him for their crimes against him .
He never allowed her to get up off the floor with that moral weight pressing her lithe frame to the ground. He ought never have married her of course, but how was he to know, his jealousy did not arouse him until after they had tied the knot , he thought. He knew nothing of the data, that showed this was the case, and nobody had schooled him at all. His own father was of that baby boomer generation, the laissez-faire and clueless shitheads who lost the Vietnam war with their weakness and never wanted to get involved in anything at all. A father offering no advice; although had he offered it, would Blax had listened? The answer was no, three times , Blax admitted as he still condemned the older man for his lack of sage instruction.
He stored his weapons under the bed and ordered more and more gear. They were making $10,000 a month and spending it on doomsdays weapons, medical supplies and night vision gear. He saw brown bear -that were actually black bear- at night by the garbage and he saw malice in every man’s visage. She was a good girl, now, and he blew it, but he knew it was all for naught. He knew he was not built for compromise with the group; and so he found himself a good deal alone .
He shaved his head and grew a beard; and he grew sullen and punitive in ways that were cruel and unforgivable. But she did forgive him, because she loved him, because he had a heart so large that it had roared out of his chest and then licked her face from time to time. She had seen it, been in awe of it, never had she met a more passionate man. He loved the things he loved with the same detonation of the explosives he used to blow everything up. He adored poetry and literature and read to her, day, night and in the tub. He loved things, and would weep over things, that she didn’t even see; and he presented her with gifts made from skulls and feathers and black sand from the antipodes . He drew her portrait in charcoal and she dropped tears of her own upon the rough page.
