by Paul Carter
‘We’re in a police chase now . . . and my visa expired a week ago,’ I yelled at him.
‘It’s okay Pauli, we do this all the time . . . The cops here can’t drive for shit.’
He took the corners so fast that Dave’s bulk was raised off the road. Finally we darted down a tiny alley that was barely wide enough for us to fit, the police car stopped, unable to continue. Cameron dropped me off outside my hotel. I sat on the front step and had a smoke. As I was butting it out, Cameron and Dave shot past on the Ural being chased by another police car.
I HAD FINISHED ALL my advertising courses while at home in Sydney, passing some well and others by the skin of my teeth. The day I received my final results there was an agency party for one of their larger clients that I attended. Happy in the knowledge that I didn’t have to spend any more evenings at lectures or studying, I was in a great mood, but everyone at the function was even happier than me. Strangers were hugging me and talking the kind of bullshit that makes you want to move deepest rural Australia and build a mudbrick house. After a few hours I excused myself, later realising that I was probably the only person at the party who was not on drugs.
In some respects the advertising world is just as bizarre as the oilfield, but there was no time to find out if I was right about the party. The phone rang very early: there was a job in Japan, starting immediately. I jumped at the opportunity to go, as Japan is safe, clean and mostly bullshit-free. I had been to Tokyo briefly a few years earlier, and the people were as polite and as efficient as you would expect.
I had a two-day layover in Singapore then departed for Osaka, Japan, on a stormy Friday night. The job was twofold. First I had to go to a factory where some pipe was being fabricated, then to a rig up in the Japanese mountains. Osaka was much the same as Tokyo. They have the cleanest taxis in the world and the drivers wear smart uniforms with black hats and white gloves. They pull a lever to open and close the door for you.
There was a representative of the pipe company waiting for me at the airport. He chatted politely all the way to the hotel, organised everything, even what I wanted for breakfast the next day. I’m not used to that treatment; usually, once you walk out of the workshop in Singapore, you’re on your own. His name was Shouji, but I called him ‘Turbo San’ as everything the man did was at top speed. He would run to accomplish a task with the kind of urgency that left you wondering if he would get severely beaten or have a finger cut off if he was too slow. He had a complete itinerary that included, much to my amazement, cigarette breaks. He was so organised that I went to bed exhausted . . . and a little freaked out at having so much unexpected attention. I half expected him to spring from the wardrobe and tuck me in.
The next morning my breakfast arrived just how I like it. Turbo San was waiting in the lobby with another man who looked a bit like Eddie Munster with a bowl haircut. Turbo introduced us, Eddie was quiet, staying in the background, never joining the conversation. He wore a basic black suit, with a tie that looked like it had been made from my grandmother’s curtains. I stopped giving him shit not too long after meeting him as I discovered that Eddie was a ‘kendo’ champion and could kill me with his big toe.
I asked if we could take the subway to the factory—a bizarre experience. Nothing in the station is in English and every level is a carbon copy of the last. We went down crystal-clean corridors past tiny neon caves where Japanese hawkers sold tiny perfect meals to tiny perfect clones. Everyone is basically dressed the same, though occasionally, however, you see the odd punk, straight from a Sid Vicious production line, complete with ‘Never mind the bollocks’ T-shirt and safety pin through the nose.
As we waited for our train, Eddie walked over to a huge bank of vending machines and got himself a paper. I noticed one of the machines was getting more attention than the others. So I had a look. The other vending machines sold every kind of drink, snack, cigarette or consumable imaginable, but this one sold something only the Japanese would want. The machine itself was cool; very retro with big chrome knobs and dials. It had a large glass window which displayed Polaroid photographs of schoolgirls in pig tails, with their name and age underneath.
When fed money the machine spat out a ‘soiled’ pair of knickers with bunny rabbits printed on them in a zip-lock clear bag, with a dirty letter to you from said child, complete with a lipstick kiss at the bottom. Turbo looked embarrassed, and laughed out loud as the Japanese do when embarrassed.
‘Pretty girls,’ he said, beaming.
We left the porno Wurlitzer and got on the train, which was so clean it was like riding in a long thin hospital. It stopped, lining up perfectly with markings on the platform floor. Everyone got off without any of the shoving and pickpocketing I was used to.
After our ‘immensely serious’ working day had ended, at five o’clock exactly, the senior man in the room and director of the pipe company stood up and announced to a packed boardroom that we would meet in an hour for drinks and dinner. Everyone then bowed to each other in a polite headbanging session for half an hour.
For the Japanese, work and play is like flipping a big switch. We had only been in the bar for ten minutes when the director jumped up onto a coffee table and with microphone in hand belted out a Sinatra number, much to the delight of everyone.
I was asked what I would like to drink; given this crowd’s expense account, I requested my favourite single malt and was assigned a small woman who had a whole bottle of thirty-year-old Macallan. She didn’t speak, just poured and went for ice. Ten minutes later I was on the coffee table, with my seat cushion up my shirt, doing my best bloated near-death Elvis version of ‘My Way’, complete with the belching and sweating. They clapped like lottery winners; Turbo hugged me with arms as broad as the Enola Gay.
We all got ratted and then went for dinner. I had Kobe beef, easily the best steak I’ve ever tasted. When I heard how much it cost I asked if they got a free TV set with that. The cattle which provide the heavenly steak are called Wagyu and come from Kobe just down the road. They are raised on a diet of grain and beer, and they get massaged daily. It’s hard to imagine such a profitable commodity based on a grain-munching, beer-swilling animal, unless you’ve had experience with large multinational oil companies.
The next morning I took the Bullet train to Tokyo and spent the day drooling in as many custom-motorcycle shops as I could visit, then continued up to the town of Nagaoka, 260 kilometres north, which was near the rig. Supersonic concrete gave way to a blur of beech trees through my squeaky-clean train window, as we left the high-rise metropolis which sprawled along the south coast.
Nagaoka was a world away from the industrial epicentre I left behind. It resides in quiet tradition that’s guarded closely. Its rolling green hills open up to snowcapped mountains. The town is split in two by the Shinano River that flows from the nearby Higashiyama mountain range. A vast patchwork of rice terraces were peppered with stooped old farmers, who would always smile happily, unfazed by an inquisitive gaijin, or ‘outside person’, wandering about in the middle of nowhere.
Nagaoka is the birthplace of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Harvard-educated naval strategist who planned the Pearl Harbor attack. Apparently he never wanted to go to war with the US. By intercepting and decoding a secret Japanese transmission containing Yamamoto’s itinerary, the Americans were able to shoot down his transport aircraft over the South Pacific in 1943, two years after Pearl Harbor. It was the first time the US succeeded in eliminating a major enemy leader by direct attack.
The rig was a thirty-minute drive from Nagaoka, at the foot of a majestic valley. It looked like a wart on the face of a centrefold, but it was the most organised land rig I’ve ever seen. Everything was done just so, and the crew started their shifts in company colour-coordinated starched tracksuits doing sit-ups and exercising in perfect unison. They have a work ethic that puts the rest of us to shame. The job went perfectly, they even cleaned our equipment for us when we rigged down.
I had two more day
s of exploring in Nagaoka before my train departed for Tokyo and home. On my last morning there was an earthquake, another one, I’m just lucky I guess. We were standing outside the train station eating rice cakes when everything started shaking. People exploded out of the station like shrapnel from a grenade. Like Californians, the Japanese are used to earth tremors except that they can run in terror and still make it look civilised, you know, without the looting and trampling of children. Nagaoka’s 200 000-strong population lost thirty-one that day with 3400 injured. It was a 6.8 quake, the deadliest since the 1995 quake in Kobe, when all those expensive overweight drunk Wagyu cattle must have made a mess. I went home to quake-free Sydney for a week of cheap steak and looting.
That week in Sydney passed so fast that when I got back to Singapore I thought I’d dreamt 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.
SINGAPORE IS WHERE MOST oil service companies base their Asian operations. There is a massive industrial complex on the island’s south-east coast called ‘Loyang Offshore Supply Base’. It’s from there that everything starts. I had been freelancing on a day-rate basis for the last four years, so wherever I went in the world, it began and ended in Loyang.
Singapore itself is basically one giant island shopping mall; all the crews who constantly pass through the place tend to congregate in the same places. Namely Orchard Towers, a four-storey building downtown that houses seedy bars from top to basement, affectionately called ‘Four Floors of Whores’, with some of the most unimaginative names in public house history such as ‘The Bar’, ‘The Pub’, ‘The Beer House’, and full of drunk rig hands and Filipino prostitutes looking for a meal ticket.
The word from Loyang was that there was enough work kicking off in Russia to keep me going for two years. The first job was on a mono-hull rig offshore for Shell, and later BP were planning on drilling a wildcat well, or exploration well, in the same region probably with a semi-submersible rig. All this drilling was to take place off the coast of Sakhalin, an island peninsula running some 300 kilometres up Russia’s north-eastern seaboard and ending in the Sea of Okhotsk. Sakhalin is predominantly a flat tundra with only a few hills dotting an otherwise harsh landscape, and winter temperatures that plummeted to minus 60.
We would be flying via Seoul, Korea, to Yuzhno, the biggest town on Sakhalin and located on the southernmost point of the peninsula. From there we would take a train all the way to the top and a town called Nogliki where a camp was in the final stages of construction. Choppers would ferry men to the rig from there, especially in winter when the sea froze fifteen feet thick around the rig.
Hearing about all this in an airconditioned office in Singapore was surreal, as usual, I had no idea what I was in for. I went through the normal preparation for a new location but I couldn’t imagine what minus 60 would feel like. The rest of my crew arrived in Singapore over the next few days; only one had been to Russia before and he said in winter you could go outside with a hot cup of tea, throw the tea up in the air and it would land frozen solid on the ground.
It’s a constant battle trying to get your gear and logistics sorted out, always the cheapest option. Unfortunately most of this is organised through a management system run by personnel who either have never worked in the field or haven’t been offshore in twenty years. But they regularly stand around crowded oilfield bars telling stories about the time they put out the fire, drilled the well with one hand tied behind their back, got the chopper just in time, and fucked Playmate of the Month in the back seat of the car on the way home.
A few days later we were on a plane and picturing attractive buxom Russian girls mincing about in the snow in furry bikinis. Collective daydreaming shut down when we boarded the Soviet-made airliner in Korea. Next stop Mother Russia.
The flight attendant looked like the offspring of Boris Yeltsin and Eva Braun, and the seats had not been reupholstered since the mid-1970s. The whole aircraft looked like Ken Done had thrown up all over it. Instead of having individual seat pockets containing the emergency card, sick bag and in-flight magazine, there was just one great big photocopy of the emergency card nailed to the wall next to the toilet. Someone had written something in ballpoint pen under the picture of a man demonstrating the crash position: ‘In the event of an emergency landing do not attempt to suck your own penis.’
After a while the captain crackled to life over the PA system. He sounded British and was definitely in a bad mood. ‘Yeah this is the captain. I’m up here on the flight deck with first officer . . .’ SNAP . . . SNAP . . . We could hear him clicking his fingers at the co-pilot, who fired off his surname loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘Right . . . We’ve levelled off at our cruising altitude of . . . SNAP . . . thirty-odd thousand feet and ah . . . if you look out the window on the right side of the aircraft, you’ll see a big wing.’
Nice one, I thought.
Yuzhno is rough. There were thirty-seven murders, not to mention eight bear attacks, in the month when we arrived. It has the highest crime rate in the entire Russian federation. It helps to be an alcoholic just to live there. Our contact was nice, but he looked like he was on the local wife-beating team. Eighty years of communism doesn’t just disappear and in this part of Russia you could be forgiven for assuming Perestroika had just happened.
Getting processed into Russia is quite an ordeal; there’s a lot of queuing 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 fifty metres on a trolley being pulled by a tractor that looked like it had just finished ploughing 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.
We piled into a big 4WD and drove to our agent’s office where he gave us border passes and train tickets. The train was like something out of an old war movie, with wooden carriages, lots of smoke and billowing steam. The journey up to Nogliki was going to take sixteen hours; we had fairly nice compartments with a heater and comfy beds. I shared my compartment with an American driller named Bobby; it was his first time in Russia too, and so far he was loving it.
Just as we pulled out of the station a guard came into our compartment. He was wearing a big furry coat, a huge hat with ten pounds of brass macaroni on the brim and a shiny AK-47 rifle. 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 guard explained that the whole train belonged to the company we were working for, and we were not to leave this carriage under any circumstances. We even had to sign a form to this effect, and on departing he turned and said,‘No vodka da’.We both grinned and nodded.
Two hours later Bobby was getting bored. The window was steamed over with condensation, and I had my nose buried in a book, so he got up and announced he was off to find some Russian dudes to talk to.
‘You can’t go into any other carriages Bobby.’
‘Fuck all that. C’mon.’
We carefully opened the sliding door and stepped into the long narrow corridor. The motion of the train rocked us to and fro and every now and again we had to hold on tight to stay on our feet. Bobby opened the outer door of the carriage; the wind slammed it back against the wall. Ice covered the hand rails and the wind bit into my face. We were standing on a small grated platform, the frozen track whistling past below us.
‘Jesus, Bobby, fuck this,’ I said. We had to jump over the train’s carriage coupling in order to get to the other carriage.
‘Come on man, it’s just like a Western’ and with that he was over, on the opposite grating, thumbing at the door lock.
I jumped over and huddled next to the door, the cold was starting to freeze me. Bobby got the door open and we stepped inside the carriage. I slammed the door shut and tur
ned around to see about twenty Russians, all motionless, mid-conversation, staring at us. Everyone was smoking; the air was thick with the stench of foul Russian cigarettes, BO and vodka.
Bobby raised a hand and beamed.‘Hey fellas.’
‘Just like a Western mate,’ I said and elbowed him in the ribs. All I could hear was the track’s rhythm and the awkward silence. My brain was frantically searching for the Russian ‘Hello’ but I was blank.
Someone yelled out from the back of the carriage, but the smoke was so thick you could not see that far. We could hear a weird squeaking sound near the floor coming closer. Then out of the blue smoke a man on a small wooden trolley emerged; he had lost his legs well above the knee, and was propelling himself along with his gloved hands. The trolley looked homemade, using furniture castors. There was a huge bottle of vodka wedged in the man’s crotch between his stumps, and a small silver cup dangled from a chain around his neck.
He pulled up at Bobby’s feet, pointed at the two of us, yelled some more abuse and punched hard up into Bobby’s crotch.
There was that weird two-second pause which happens when something hits your balls. Bobby’s hands shot down grabbing at his crotch, he spun around, his face distended as if about to sneeze and then the pain hit him. It was like watching a big tree fall over. The legless Russian bobbed up and down on his trolley with excitement. Two men next to me burst to life, so I backed up, fumbling to open the door, but they grabbed the legless man, barked at two guys near the window, who opened it, and threw him out of the train . . . trolley, vodka, the lot.
‘Fuckin’ hell, Bobby, get up, get up.’ I was back at the door, my right leg vibrating at the knee with adrenalin: it’s a condition called St Vitus’s Dance, and I get it when there’s going to be a fight, or if I have to speak publicly.
