Marchello and her crew quickly realized the small company was disorganized and the regional management had little knowledge of North Dakota’s unique oil industry environment. There was little oversight from the corporate headquarters and no clear hierarchy at the North Dakota location. One manager would tell the crew to position the trucks a certain way, then another manager would yell at the crew to position the trucks a different way. One of the regional managers had frequent clashes with the crew, and he had a hard time with a woman in the ranks. “From the day I started, management didn’t like me,” Marchello said.
One day, the manager overheard a male employee call Marchello a “fucking cunt.” Marchello complained to the manager afterward, asking why he didn’t reprimand the coworker or stick up for her. She remembered him saying: “If you can’t be one of the guys, then don’t be here at all.”
The manager’s days were numbered, however. He was the first in a long line of a revolving door of C&J regional managers in Williston, and he left six months after Marchello was hired. The supervisors who followed him didn’t last much longer.
The schedule at C&J was also unpredictable and draining. Because C&J wasn’t yet a respected company in North Dakota, it often couldn’t secure enough work. When the company did have a well job, Marchello worked some 100 hours a week. A day shift could start at 4 or 5 a.m. and end around 11 p.m., when the crew arrived back at the man camp. Other times, she’d be on location for 24 hours, off for 12, then back to location for another 24 hours. She wondered, at age 56, how long she could maintain such intensity.
C&J often asked employees to drive semis with illegal load amounts or drive without the proper permits. “They’re always asking you to do illegal things in this business,” said Marchello’s son-in-law, Matthew Anderson. Overweight or nonpermitted trucks can receive fines from the state, and any violation goes on the driver’s record. In addition, crew members technically aren’t supposed to drive more than 10 hours in a 24-hour period or drive without a 24-hour break if they’d worked more than 70 hours in a week, but the company skirted the rules frequently. “They’d ask you to lie on the logs nearly every single time,” said Anderson.
Despite the downsides, Marchello was excited about her paycheck. With her higher wages, in May 2013, she finally achieved a lifelong dream: buying a home by herself. It was a five-bedroom, two-bath house built in 1912 in Ogden, Utah, and a short drive away from where her children lived. It cost $94,000, and she provided the down payment and secured the loan all on her own. “I worked really hard to get that,” said Marchello. “Because when I grew up, the women I associated with didn’t own property. The fact that I bought a house all by myself—my credit, my money, my choice—is a huge deal.”
But after only six months of working at C&J, Marchello’s crew decided they wanted to switch jobs. They didn’t like the company’s disorganization and felt some discrimination from the upper managers. They wondered if it was racial discrimination. The Polynesian crew often had to work the night shift, while a crew of white guys had the day shift. “The discrimination was evident from the very beginning,” Marchello said. “[Management] would make comments about them and take away their bonuses for no reason … things they weren’t doing to the white boys.” Marchello originally planned to go with the crew to another company, but when the offers started trickling in, she was the only member who didn’t get one.
Marchello was devastated that her crew was gone. Kenney asked to stay at C&J, telling Marchello he didn’t want to leave her, but he was transferred to a different crew. Meanwhile, Marchello was called to the office to talk to a manager named Mike Hambrick. He said he needed her help in the office and presented it as a promotion. She would still do some field work, he said, and her title would remain Pump Operator B. She remembered him saying: “This has nothing to do with the guys leaving. This has been in the works for a couple months, and we just haven’t been able to implement it.”
Marchello was fine with the change at first. Working in the field had been wearing on her, and sitting indoors in a comfy office sounded nice—especially since she was receiving the same hours and pay. The warehouse inventory and office organization was a complete mess. Necessary equipment hadn’t been ordered, and no one could locate items already in stock. Managers would reorder them and waste thousands of the company’s dollars. She began organizing the inventory and streamlining the ordering process. She took pride in her work, and she was good at it. “What I was doing, nobody had done since they opened the yard,” she said. “There were $8,000 pieces of equipment that no one was keeping track of.”
There was another woman working in the office named Vanessa. She worked at the front desk and was essentially a secretary. Vanessa made significantly less annually than Marchello and didn’t receive per diem bonuses or time-off rotations—only a couple weeks of paid vacation. Many people began confusing Vanessa’s and Marchello’s positions. Marchello made sure to sign all of her office emails as Pump Operator B to clarify she was not a secretary.
In many ways, the position also caused her to become more visible in the company. She gained a reputation for being knowledgeable about the company’s business dealings in Williston. Workers from other C&J locations knew they could come to her if they needed something done. But a few seemed to have ulterior motives. They’d come by the office to chat with her and invite her to lunch. “It seemed like every dumbass that came up here thought she was the C&J plaything,” said her coworker Scott Morgan.
Marchello replied: “Well, they used to call me Hali Ho when I worked at Halliburton, so I don’t know what the C&J version of that is. But, yeah, I get my fair share of opportunities to spit.”
Four months after they left, the Polynesian crew members realized they made a mistake moving to another company. The new company made promises to them that were never delivered. They wanted to return to C&J. Marchello pulled some strings with the new manager, and in August 2013, a number were hired back. Marchello was thrilled, but she stayed in the office even after her crew returned. “At least I have my poker buddies back,” she said.
Soon, however, Marchello began to realize her transition to the office—a move she thought was temporary—was causing her to earn significantly less money. She wondered if the move was purposeful, to slowly and deliberately demote her, make her unhappy, and cause her to quit. She simply wasn’t working enough hours. Though C&J guaranteed her at least 84 hours a week when she was hired, she was now averaging only 56 hours. Her male coworkers were still getting some 120 hours a week when they were in the field. She asked Mike Hambrick if she could return to the field, but he said no—she’d been away for too long and it wouldn’t be safe for her, she recalled him saying. He asserted she wouldn’t remember how to perform the job well. “I think they were keeping me in the office because I was an old lady,” Marchello said. “I never would’ve chosen less money in the office. I don’t care that it was warmer. I don’t care that it was more comfortable. I came to North Dakota for the money, and I was never going to make field money in the office. Period.”
36. TOM STAKES
I visited Williston again in the middle of December 2014. Oil prices had fallen to around $58 a barrel, down from the high of $107 a mere five months before. Gasoline prices had dropped to below $3 a gallon, and most of the country was celebrating. But not Williston. Rumors of layoffs and bankruptcies spread through town, and with the holidays approaching, tensions were high. Workers traveling home for Christmas worried they might not have a job when they returned. On December 14, The Williston Herald splashed the headline OIL PLUNGES AGAIN across the front page, above an image of a thick red arrow pointing dramatically downward.
It was two weeks until Christmas, and the town’s central green space, Harmon Park, was crammed with illuminated wire-framed animal figures and lit-up candy canes. Strands of white Christmas lights spiraled around each tree and lamppost. In the middle was a wire-framed Santa in his sleigh and reindeer leading up to the sk
y with the letters API underneath, which stood for the American Petroleum Institute, and nearby was an oil pump statue wrapped with festive lights. Patches of crunchy snow, which had melted and refrozen many times over, speckled the dead lawn, and muddy mounds of snow, formed weeks ago by a plow, flanked the streets. It was Christmastime in an oil town.
I reached out to Tom Stakes to see how he was doing. Gary Westerman had fired him two weeks earlier for showing up to work drunk. He was now unemployed and sleeping on a couch at his friend Rick Sonstegaard’s house near downtown. Sonstegaard was living with his 90-year-old mother and had convinced her to let Stakes stay there. The property was an older two-story house with white siding, a slanted roof, and two large trees out front, their bare, crooked branches reaching up into the gray sky like skinny gnarled fingers.
Stakes spent most days zoned out in front of the TV, depressed. He had given up looking for work since the holidays were approaching, and he figured most employers would wait until the new year to hire anyone. The slowdown in the oil industry had trickled down to the construction business, and since he’d been paid under the table, he didn’t qualify for unemployment. He’d completely run out of money and relied on Sonstegaard and Sonstegaard’s mother to provide food for him. Occasionally Sonstegaard or another friend would feel sorry for him and slip him a $20 bill or buy him a bottle of vodka, but he hadn’t been drinking as much because he simply couldn’t afford it.
I picked him up in the early afternoon on a Friday—it was overcast and cold, in the low 30s. When I saw Stakes, he immediately asked if I’d buy him a bottle of vodka. I said I couldn’t do that. Would he like some lunch?
“No,” he said. He wasn’t hungry.
“Coffee?”
“No.” A drink, he said. All he wanted was a drink.
I relented and agreed to buy him one drink at the bar DK’s, the outside of which Stakes had recently remodeled with Westerman. The job had taken three months, but he’d been fired shortly after they finished. We drove over to the bar and Stakes showed off the new green tin siding he had helped install, staring at the building like it was an ex-girlfriend who broke his heart. “See that, up and down the sides,” he said, pointing. “We did all that. We reframed it and everything. It was all nasty rotted wood before.”
We walked through the bar’s unmarked door into a dark, musty room. The tall, round tables in the center of the room were all empty at this time of the day. Two men sat at the curved bar watching television and drinking, and a female bartender dried glasses. A commercial about natural gas came on as we walked in. “There’s 60 percent less pollution…” the announcer said. The rest of the commercial was drowned out by clanking glasses and a sports game playing on another TV across the bar. A popcorn machine pumped out a thick smell of melted butter.
We sat down at the far end of the bar, and the bartender sauntered over to take our order. I asked for water and Stakes ordered a Long Island iced tea. He was going to get as much alcohol as possible out of his one drink.
Stakes hunched over on his bar stool and sighed. His beard and mustache had grown scruffier since I’d seen him last. His hair was hidden under a baseball cap with the Cattails bar logo on it. Under the lettering was a cartoon duck lying on its back holding a beer bottle in its mouth. Stakes told me he bought it for $20 at the bar, back when the weather was warmer and he was working outside most days.
I asked if he wanted to talk about why he was fired from his job.
“Well … it got to where I was drinking too much,” Stakes said. “Gary’d tell me, ‘Tom, do not come into work drunk.’ And of course, I would. He warned me five or six times, he said, ‘Tom, I will fire you.’ ’Course I didn’t think he’d do it, but sure enough.…”
The waitress returned with my water and Stakes’s drink. She thunked the tall glasses down in front of us.
“He could smell it on me,” Stakes continued. “But if I didn’t have a drink, I’d sit there with a screw in one hand and the screwdriver in the other and I couldn’t get the screw in.” He held up his hands, shaking them as he demonstrated. “But when I had a drink, I could get right to it. So he knew, he knew.”
Stakes felt betrayed, however, because many times, he and Westerman drank together after work. When they’d go to the bar, Westerman would order two shots of Crown Royal and a beer, and often he’d have another round. Stakes wondered if the real reason Westerman fired him was to save money. Eddie Bergeson, Stakes’s old roommate, had been fired too, back in October. But that was another story. Bergeson and one of his buddies had been caught eating hallucinogenic mushrooms in the men’s restroom at DK’s bar. He wasn’t on the clock at the time, but Westerman was furious. He fired Bergeson immediately. “He thought we were sellin’ drugs,” Bergeson said later about the incident. “But we weren’t sellin’ anything, we were just eatin’ ’em.” Bergeson left North Dakota in early November and returned to his home state of Mississippi.
“I just been kinda depressed,” Stakes said, as he sipped his Long Island iced tea, seeming comforted by the mix of vodka, rum, gin, tequila, and triple sec. “’Cause anytime something dramatic happens in my life, and I don’t know how to fix it, it’s just, what do I do? What do I do? So now, I’m waitin’. I guess that’s why I been vegetatin’ on the couch. But God’s always taken care of me, and if he doesn’t, well, it’s my time to go,” he said, pausing. “But I’m not gonna do anything drastic. I’m not suicidal or anythin’ like that. Death scares me in a way. But I know I’m comin’ up on it pretty quick. I’ve been smokin’ and drinkin’ most of my life … can’t be good for your body.
“I’m thinkin’ about givin’ it a good shot to go to AA or somethin’,” he said, looking up at me.
I raised my eyebrows. “Yeah?”
“You know, get things worked out that way. Get a new start. I’ve talked to some AA people around here and they seem to think it’s a great program. Nobody’s judgmental of you because they’re all in the same boat. They understand that if you make it for a while without drinkin’ and you fall off one day then it’s okay. They’ve all been there. You can network there too. There’s the old saying ‘Birds of a feather flock together.’ And that’s what we do as alcoholics, we all flock together. So now if I can get with this group and maybe fit in, maybe that’ll pay off. I could meet somebody—maybe they’ve been sober for a long time and understand my situation. They might give me a shot at a job, you know? That’s not the primary reason I’d like to do it, but it’s time for me to change my life. See what I can do.” He took a deep breath. “Since I lost my job because of the drinkin’, it’s best if I quit drinkin’, if I can.”
One of the “AA people” Stakes talked to was a man I’ll call Randy (he requested that I change his name) who lived down the street from the Sonstegaard property. Last week, Randy invited Stakes to an AA meeting, but he said no. Now he was reconsidering the invitation. “He got to that point to where his hands were gettin’ all jittery, but now he’s 100 days sober,” Stakes said.
Stakes had attended AA meetings once before in his life—back in 2009 at a Christian-based homeless shelter, the Adullam Project Men’s Home, in Española, New Mexico. Before that, he had been living in the cave in Red River and drinking every day. He’d walk down the mountain about a mile to go to the liquor store, and the owner would let him sweep up or do an odd job in exchange for a bottle of booze and some food. But when winter came, he worried he might freeze to death in that cave. He’d bundle up with three or four coats but couldn’t stay warm. His old church friend, Brother Russell, told him about the Adullam Project. Stakes lived in a converted old dance hall with 15 to 20 other men for about six months. They’d clean, cook, attend church, and do day labor to raise money for the organization. Only three or four men attended the AA meetings, and they became close. But as soon as Stakes left the Adullam Project, he started drinking again.
He’d tried to quit a few times since then, but his sobriety never lasted long. A week ago, he even tried
to quit when he ran out of money for booze, but it didn’t go so well. As soon as he had a few dollars, he bought more. “After a few days I got real jittery, so I started back. Now I’m gonna try to stop again, just see what happens. I love it, but I can’t do it ’cause I go overboard with it. It started elevatin’ to a point where in the afternoons, when I’d get home from work, I’d drink till I got ready to go to sleep. And that was fine. But then it elevated to a point where in the mornin’s, I’d get up and have to have a drink just to function through the day. I could see the gradual acceleration, you know?”
I nodded and sipped my water. He finished his drink, slurping up the last bit of liquid between the ice.
“So it’s time—I hear so many stories and it’s time to make a decision about it, ’cause I can’t just keep doin’ it or it’ll kill me. I been drinkin’ too many years and smokin’ too many years. Smokin’s gonna be my next issue. If I can control the alcohol problem, then I’ll start the smokin’ process,” he said. He pulled at his mustache as he talked. “But everybody up here drinks and smokes. I look around the bars and I see so many sad people. They come in every night. Every day the same people, over and over and over again. It got to a point where I couldn’t afford to go to the bars much anymore. I’d just buy a bottle and go home. I don’t wanna become that person. I don’t wanna just sit around the bar all the time, sad and worryin’ and depressed all the time. Ever’body I hang out with will sit and tell ya, ‘Man, I’ve been drinking too much, I need to stop.’ But we never do. That’s the thing about an alcoholic. We want to but we can’t, because there’s somethin’ that shuts down in our brain—we can’t make a rational decision. It takes over and it becomes the monkey on our back, the devil inside us, whatever it is.
The New Wild West Page 26
