by Paul Carter
The Silver Peso was busy. Simon introduced me to the barman, telling him I needed a margarita.
‘Welcome, Aussie,’ the barman said, shaking my hand. ‘Would you like an eight-dollar or ten-dollar margarita?’
I went for the ten-dollar option and by the time I’d finished shaking a few other hands the barman passed me a bucket of margarita and, once I’d finished it, I was wrecked. Sally was on fire and making me laugh so hard I was crying. She’s golden, firing at full pace and volume from the moment she opens her eyes every day. She complements Simon’s laconic, almost lucid lethargy; if he was any more laidback you’d think he’d suffered a stroke. But that’s just Simon, and he’s not at all how he appears. He’s supremely fit, smart and very level-headed, just lucky to be able to switch it all off and relax. Two hours later I stumbled through their front door, managed not to vomit on their children and passed out on the couch to Simon telling me something about their house being in the liquefaction zone should there be another earthquake.
San Francisco in the bright glorious Californian sun is a wonderful city. I jumped on the practically empty mid-morning ferry and sat on the main deck with a bloody mary as we motored through the massive bay, devoid of the famous fog, past Alcatraz, with the Golden Gate Bridge providing an impressive backdrop. It’s a huge sprawling place where steep hills descend through a myriad of eclectic but perfectly preened multimillion-dollar homes that tumble down the hill and up in price as you get closer to the water. It’s the kind of place where I could live if circumstances allowed, but nothing is impossible. Sally and Simon are mates from Sydney. They went to San Francisco on a holiday years ago, then one day they just said, ‘Fuck it, we’re moving.’ Now almost six years later they have a successful business, two very happy children and a really nice life in this place.
But there is more to the city than nice bridges and expensive hillside real estate; I was lucky to have Simon and Sally to introduce me to all kinds of different people. San Francisco is the birthplace of Levi’s jeans and the martini, and it’s been the mecca for every bright young mind who turned over a billion on a dot-com since the late 1990s. It’s trendy high fashion that’s affordable, it’s the epicentre of the hippy and the earthquake. I rejoiced in all she had to offer by spending up big, mincing out into the late afternoon in a nice off-the-rack Tom Ford two-piece navy blue suit, British cutaway collar, Alden handmade polished black brogues and silk-knit black tie; they even threw in a glass of brandy and petal-soft matching socks.
Retail therapy, as they say, was working for me. I felt wonderful, having just dumped the clothes I left the house in that morning in a bin outside the boutique like the remains of my former self. I was going to enjoy a bar-hop stroll, I was going to have a martini, shaken, and not by the earthquake. I turned from the bin, adjusting my cufflinks, and ran straight into a polite but shabby hippy.
‘Hey, hi, can I have your clothes, brother? I see you’re tossing that bag.’ He looked like a cross between a cocker spaniel and Elmo, right down to the badly dilated sad eyes.
‘Sure, mate.’ I reached back into the bin and handed him the big paper bag with the boutique logo and my former skin.
‘Thank you, friend,’ said Elmo.
‘Not at all.’
I started to walk away when he called out, ‘You’re British, right?’ I turned without stopping and nodded as he yelled at me, ‘Good for you, man, enjoy the city.’
With pleasure, I thought, and that was how it turned out. I didn’t know it at the time but my walk was about to lead me through Castro, the biggest gay and lesbian neighbourhood in the US, and as you would imagine it’s a hub of sartorial refinement, very polite, stylish bars and more shopping, with more great service.
As the sun set I found myself faced with a choice of scotch whiskey laid out on the bar in front of me. Miles Davis mixing nicely with conversation in the background, I surveyed the stash being liberated from wooden cabinets . . . and, bang, there she was, almost empty, a Speyside malt from the Macallan distillery, year of our lord 1967. When that single malt was being bottled in Scotland, this city was giving birth to the hippy revolution that saw more than 100 000 people join together and kick off the start of modern cultural and political change, and then they all shagged each other silly and produced my generation.
I paid the man and took my time. There was a nice spot in the bar where I could survey the street life, spark up a small cigar without offending anyone and enjoy the end of a very old bottle. No scorched throat here, just a revelation of rich flavours unfurled over my tongue beneath the alcohol’s harder notes. Like a favourite song or the smell of a delicious meal coming out of the oven at home; I shut my eyes just for a moment and let my memory unfold at the same rate. All the way back to Woodside Avenue, Grantown-on-Spey, Dad, playing alone in Free Church Wood behind the house, and the first time I smelled this combination of barley, water, yeast, peat and oak; simple elements, yes, but in the hands of the artisans who do the business at Macallan, they make so much more than the sum of their parts, right here, right now, 45 years later. It’s not a bottle of whiskey; it’s a time machine with an international adaptor on it. Like some of my friends it doesn’t mix well with others but fuck, get to know it and you have something you’ll enjoy for life.
‘Thank you.’ I smiled and tipped the barman.
‘Don’t mention it, Mr Carter. Have a good night, sir.’ He got the door for me. If only I could make this a week-long Groundhog Day.
I met up with Sally and Simon at the restaurant they’d chosen for dinner. They are the perfect bohemian couple, at peace with each other and the world. Their friends were equally funny and just mad enough to make me feel like we used to, before we had responsibilities and businesses and kids and shit. Our night went into morning, I did the required cable car ride, danced badly to Jimmy Buffet and managed to dip my new tie in my clam chowder.
The next thing I knew I was getting off the plane at George Bush Intercontinental Airport and looking at my friend Gregg Cooper in Houston, Texas. We hopped into another Lincoln, but this time a modern ‘Town Car’. Gregg looked relaxed as he pulled on the column shift, popping the giant car into drive and gliding out of the car park and onto a huge highway. ‘So how was California?’ he asked.
I told him all about San Francisco, Tom Ford suits and tab collared shirts, the cable car, the whiskey, especially the whiskey. We talked about gun-related crime and my expectation—based on the fact that the US accounts for 5 per cent of the world’s population and 50 per cent of the world’s guns—to be mugged or shot in a drive-by while I was strolling alone in evening.
‘Well, just about everyone here is armed,’ Gregg explained, ‘but you don’t get that much crime because of it. I mean, break into someone’s home or try and jack a car in this city and you’ll get shot at.’
I smiled a nervous smile and wondered how many hand guns were in the gloveboxes around us.
‘Road Coke,’ Gregg said and handed me a can of beer.
We cruised to our hotel in the city and settled in. Tomorrow was day one of oil and gas madness that would see 100 000 people under one roof for four days.
H’TOWN
THE OFFSHORE TECHNOLOGY Conference (OTC) is a melting pot of just about every side of oil and gas, a madhouse four-day event involving people and firms from more than 100 different countries. I knew it was big, but I had no idea how big until I got to the Reliant Center; it’s a little overwhelming, the car park alone is big enough to land a space shuttle in. Houston’s clear sky radiated the heat of the blacktop up my trouser legs and down the back of my shirt.
We entered through the main doors, wheezing, and stood in the air-conditioning as thousands of people milled about. It made me tired just looking at it through the noise and gleaming corporate polish as I wandered randomly like a kid lost in the toy department, surrounded by so much new technology, innovation and flat-out remarkable shiny stuff, realising well and truly that my old job on an offshore drilling ri
g was superseded by a machine years ago. I found myself feeling nostalgic at one point when I rounded the side of a huge display stand with an entire land rig sitting in the middle of it and stumbled into a series of good old-fashioned rig tongs. So it wasn’t all fly-by-wire, integrated hydraulics, cyber chair, go faster all the time—some things are still done the old way—but having said that everything seemed to be getting bigger, more high-vis, fireproof and lighter.
My job was to visit the stand of Jet-Lube, a firm who I do business with in Australia through Gregg. They asked me to sign my books and to generally mingle, chat, talk about the oil patch, and of course the advancements Jet-Lube have made in grease technology. I had some public-speaking gigs lined up as well.
‘You ready for this, champ?’ said Gregg when we got to the Jet-Lube stand. It was massive. They had posters with me on them and ‘Booth Bunnies’—basically two scantily clad eighteen-year-olds with dazzling teeth and wonderful gravity-defying body parts who slid across the stand and into the crowd in Jet-Lube’s black and orange colours.
I was completely unprepared for the rush when the book signing started. I’m used to the occasional book signing after a writers’ festival or something like that, but this shit was out of control; this was rig hands and scientists elbow to elbow, mothers and students, full-on flat-out for the next two hours. My writing hand was useless after the first 200 copies had gone; the last 50 looked like my son Sid had been doodling on the covers.
I beat a retreat to the Red Wing stand and hid among the coveralls, but I was in America, where standing idle in someone’s stand at their biggest trade show will have a fully clued-up bunny-assisted company representative front and centre, eyeball to eyeball and ready to answer your questions within 0.01 of a second.
‘Good morning, sir.’
I turned and smiled, still holding onto the trouser leg of a pair of their coveralls. ‘Great kit, Red Wing,’ I said, trying not to look at the bunny’s breasts in the background.
‘You bet,’ said Red Wing man. ‘You’ve worn Red Wing before?’
I was about to tell him I spent twenty years in them when another Red Wing man bounded over. He looked like the bunny keeper. ‘Hey, are you Paul Carter?’
What the fuck’s going on, I thought, then tentatively answered, ‘Yes.’
And that was it. He disappeared and came back with about 50 people who wanted to meet me and we spent the next hour swapping phone numbers and taking hundreds of photos. I backed out of the Red Wing stand with armfuls of gear and boots and baseball caps and cup holders, but no bunny, promising to return the next day to meet the Red Wing man in charge.
‘Beer time.’ Gregg appeared behind me, thank god, because I was quite lost. ‘I can’t believe how fuckin’ popular you are.’
‘Thanks.’
He laughed. ‘Don’t these people know you’re a dickhead?’ He hustled me through a side door and into the searing Houston daylight.
‘I guess not, Gregg.’
He looked at all the Red Wing stuff and pulled a raised eyebrow at me. ‘Well, I say milk that puppy till it’s dead, buddy.’
We had lunch in a restaurant with a barbecue in the courtyard that was so big it had its own dual-axle trailer to move it around. After eating half a cow and drinking my body weight in beer, I wandered into a boot shop and just stood there for ten minutes looking at thousands of pairs of cowboy boots. Bang, there was a dude in a fabulous pearl-snap shirt.
‘Good afternoon, sir.’ He was good, and within minutes I was swaggering out of a change room looking like Roy Rogers.
I know it’s a cliché but everything is bigger in Texas; my hotel room was huge, the car was huge, the hooters in Hooters were huge. Houston, however, presents it all to you in a wonderfully polite way.
I was on Gregg Cooper’s all-you-can-eat tour of Houston that ended at Montrose. Westheimer Road was alive with people, music spilled out of shopfronts, bookstores and neon-lit tattoo parlours and flooded the street. We walloped through the door and into a bar called Poison Girl, part-owned by a mate of Gregg’s. The place was exactly where one should hang out with Gregg. It was a long thin bar with a high roof cross-braced with dark thick exposed wooden beams, bright pink walls, and big ceiling fans whipping a rotor wash of old wood and beer past an eclectic bunch of characters propped up at the bar, nursing everything from a banana daiquiri to a pint of cider. We waded in past the locals and started Gregg Cooper’s one-on-one school of American whiskey appreciation.
His mates turned up, then it was ‘Randy and Jeff and Garry and Garry’s mate Bill and a random guy who walked in looking for directions and Gregg’s’ magical mystery tour of sour mash whiskey that will, and I mean it will, make you go blind. Poison Girl has more than 200 varieties to choose from, and Randy was quietly talking to the barman who disappeared and came back with ‘something special’. I can’t remember what it was because I went blind and had a nap for a bit, then woke up in front of another steak the size of Tasmania.
‘He’s okay!’ shouted one of the boys. I had lost some time here. It was now dark and everyone was lit up in pink neon.
I laughed that night, Gregg’s friends were just plain fun. We stood at the entrance to the hotel waving them off. Randy drives a 600-horsepower Camaro that sounds like an air-raid siren eating a tiger; I could still hear him leaving as we rode up to our floor in the lift. Now that I’d been fully vetted into the H’Town bourbon appreciation club, Gregg announced that tomorrow’s festivities would include a Mexican breakfast, a visit to the Jet-Lube factory, and my choice of any one of the eighteen museums in Houston.
For most people from my part of the world, the name ‘Houston’ conjures up thoughts of drilling rigs and oil, not the sheer volume and choice of culture, art and theatre and the brainwashingly good food; and as for the locals, well, if you’re a polite person any random Houstonian will fall over themselves to help. This place is also the country’s centre for healthcare and medical research, and it has a large population of students as well. I went to sleep that night thinking about the space centre, perhaps a visit to NASA, but as is my want, everything just ends at Hooters.
OTC day two, post Mexican breakfast, double the punters turned up looking to get a signed book and at least one of the bunny’s phone numbers. I talked and talked until my voice started to go, then beat another retreat, this time to Gregg’s place where we had some lunch and decided to go shooting for the afternoon. His place is not too far from the airport, so I could grab a shower and make my late afternoon flight to Dubai and then home.
Now unlike Australia, the United States, as we all know, has a different policy on firearms. In Texas, to go out with a gun, shooting as a sport or pastime, is as normal an activity as fishing or footy or taking the dog for a walk. So we arrived at Gregg’s local gun-range-slash-store-slash-wonderland and, of course, it was huge and empty because everyone was at the OTC. The lady behind the counter was extremely nice, asking straightaway if I was visiting from overseas and was elated to hear that I had come all the way from Australia; she gave me a tour of her facility that included a shop with a small arms section that started with handguns. A glass counter top stretched some 50 feet down the length of the back wall containing just pistols, and from there it escalated to shotguns, rifles and all the hundreds of products that spin off an arms market like no other.
Gregg, being used to all this, elected to leave me there with his 70-year-old M1911A1 pistol, John Browning’s pivotal handgun design that stayed with the US armed forces for the next 74 years. He could see I was going to be happy and just told me to give him a call when I needed picking up. That was me taken care of for the rest of the day. I purchased several hundred 45 rounds and went to the outdoor range. Other shooters soon turned up with all kinds of weapons.
‘Mornin’,’ said one guy and smiled.
I smiled back.
‘Nice day,’ said another.
‘Nice old piece,’ commented a big man with an army-issue haircut.
Within five minutes they had me in a shooting merry-go-round that lasted the rest of the afternoon and would have gone on into the evening had Gregg not turned up to tell me I was in imminent danger of missing my flight.
There was a rushed shaking of hands and thankyous as he bundled me into his Lincoln and took off towards the airport.
‘Sorry, mate.’ I coughed up all the usual excuses but he just smiled knowingly.
‘I’ve got your bag in the back, I just didn’t want you to miss your flight, buddy.’
We were about to get on the freeway when he slammed on the brakes and started swearing. Then he looked at me.
‘What?’ I didn’t like this.
‘You’re not going anywhere, man.’ He looked at his watch.
‘Why not? What the fuck are you talk about?’
‘You just took a four-hour bath in nitrates.’
This was not enough to make the question mark scrolling down my face go away so Gregg explained as he threw a U-turn and sped off in the opposite direction to the airport. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t think of it—you’re covered in gunshot residue, Pauli. You’ll have ten cops and five dogs on top of you if you try to check in for a flight.’
