The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  “ ‘Why did you cry?’ I asked her.

  “ ‘For you and me and the god-damned world,’ she said.”

  Stanley shook his head. “Thus ends the saga of Stanley Cole.” He kissed me. “What’s life all about, Beth? Where are we all going?”

  I couldn’t answer. I kept thinking about that girL Stanley held me dose ... as if I might somehow vanish. We made love with a deep need for each other. Finally, I said, “I think she was really looking for something beside potatoes. She needs someone, somewhere, in her life who needs her.”

  “I guess that’s what life is really about,” Stanley said.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF STANLEY COLE

  September, the Second Year

  People who faithfully keep a journal or a diary, like Samuel Pepys or James Boswell or Arnold Bennett, do so out of a need to communicate as well as evaluate what is happening to them on a daily basis. Casanova, on the other hand, wrote his Memoirs in his lonely old age largely as an escape from the bitter present and as an attempt to relive his youth spent joyously jumping in and out of the beds of lovely ladies.

  Phil Tenhausen assigned all six volumes of the Memoirs as summer reading in Human Values. The other day Sheila informed us in the seminar that she had counted the women Case-nova had made love with. She arrived at the total of one hundred and twenty-two. But I am wandering. The real point is I have had no need to keep a journal either out of loneliness or the need to communicate. Harrad and the way we live here almost eliminates these feelings ... at least as problems. For me the value of this journal is for recapitulation. Since June, events happened to me so fast that for the most part my reactions have been objective and not subjective.

  Not without cause, either, because this past summer has been “My Sam Grove Summer”. Since June fifteenth until I landed back in Boston on the twenty-fifth of August, I was dominated by Sam Grove, and Sam Grove qualifies in my book for the most objective and completely self-oriented man I have ever met.

  Sam met me in June at the airport in Houston. “I don’t usually go to such trouble for a young squirt,” he said. “But since you are a potential son-in-law, you merit special attention.”

  “You may have a doctor for a son-in-law,” I told him as we drove to the headquarters of the Grove Oil Corporation. “Sheila and Harry Schacht have moved into an apartment on Beacon Hill for the summer. Sheila is studying piano at the Conservatory of Music and Harry has attached himself to the Mass. General Hospital as a bed-pan orderly.”

  Sam stared at me, “So, my virgin daughter has at last become a woman. Did you sleep with her?”

  I told Sam I had. “I like Sheila. Not because she conned you into giving me a summer job, and not because she is rich. I like her because I never believed a girl with so much money could be so honestly straightforward and undevious. Money means nothing to her.”

  “Depite what you might have heard to the contrary, money is not the motivating factor in my life,” Sam grinned. “Sheila intimated to me that you screwed around with some other broad ... but I gather she still likes you. I don’t give a damn who Sheila marries, just so long as she is happy. Beejee, Sheila’s stepmother, is always trying to arrange a merger with some other oil money, but Sheila ignores her. She is a lonesome kid ... had a fouled up life, largely because of me, I suppose. That’s the way the ball bounces. Some men can sacrifice themselves to the ideals and goals of a particular woman. I could’t.

  “Sheila’s mother is a happy peasant. The salt of the earth type but really dull, boring, and fixated on her little problems of survival. In love with everything that is certain and stable and routine. It is a characteristic of modern man, though most of them will deny it vehemently. Each generation must produce a few Sam Groves or the world would sink into the mud of contented lethargy. If I had been born in another generation, I would have been with Alexander or Caesar, trying to unify the world, or with Ericson or Columbus or Magellan, trying to find a new world. I only click with people trying to achieve the unattainable. Grove Oil has millions of dollars sunk into space research. My only regret in this life is that I may not personally get to the planets. I have an intense curiosity about everything. I violently disagree with Phillip Tenhausen. He is most certainly cracked, but I find him challenging. He appeals to me because he is flinging himself against the impossible. Human nature will always remain the way it is, and whatever is good in it will easily be swayed and dominated by the crass, the vulgar, the ordinary.” Sam chuckled. “I look at the newspapers every morning, expecting to find the biggest scandal since the Boston Tea Party ... the story of Harrad College.”

  Sam was still talking when we arrived at his Penthouse on the thirtieth floor of the Grove Building. He took off his shoes, stockings, and shirt, and strode around his office, a barrel-chested, slim-hipped man, stripped to the waist. “The rest of this building is air-conditioned,” he said. “Nobody tough left in the world. All most people want is their little creature comforts. Give them that, and they’ll trade you their souls. The trouble with people today, they’re all scared to death of a little sweat. I get in bed with Beejee, and she smells as if she had been sleeping with some Paris coutourier. I tell her I like the smell of her skin, to wash off that crap. She tells me I stink. What kind of man are you, Kolusakas? You changed your name. What’s the matter? Are you afraid of your origins? That’s one count against you. You couldn’t hold my daughter because you screwed another woman. That’s two counts against you.”

  By this time I was getting pretty fed up with Sheila’s egotistic father. “You haven’t managed to hold your women, either,” I said angrily. “Sheila says you’ve been married three times. I’m not asking any big favors from you. Just give me a job in one of your oil fields. I’m not afraid of sweating, and I’ll earn my keep.”

  Sam chuckled. “I can hold my women, son. The only reason I have been married three times is that I get bored with the scenery ... not the physical scenery of pussy, tits, hips, ass and legs, but the mental scenery that puts the physical scenery in motion. Women, by and large, are mentally dull. Most of them never find one damn thing to occupy their minds creatively. Rich females subsist on the latest fashions, doing what is socially ‘in’, seeking admiration from men for their sexual appurtenances, and daydreaming of ideal love. Middle class females imitate the rich ones. The poor female simply propagates endlessly because that is her duty to her husband, who arrives with a stiff cock in his hand, ready to discharge like a helpless salmon swimming upstream against the current, because his seminal vessels tell him he must spawn before he dies.”

  “What are you doing for the world?” I asked him. “What makes you so much more valuable?”

  Sam looked at me thoughtfully.”

  “I created a business that employs some twenty-three thousand people ... most of whom are intent on over-populating the world and making their grandchildren’s existence here considerably less tenable than their own. I don’t believe in philosophizing. I am forty-eight years old. I can live twenty more years or drop dead tomorrow.... My major problem at the moment is that my only heirs are a daughter, two ex-wives, and one current one. My personal estate is in excess of thirty-six million dollars, and this does not include my holdings in the Grove Oil which will be transferred to the Grove Foundation when I die. I’d like to transfer control of this product of my imagination into the hands of my non-existent grandsons.”

  “Are you afraid of dying?” I asked.

  “Hell, nor What’s that got to do with it.”

  “Then why do you care what happens to Grove Oil. What’s really bothering you is that you’re not immortal. In lieu of that, at the very least, you’d like to look down from heaven at this tower and your oil producing properties, rub your hands together, and say to God, ‘Look what I did ... and there’s my grandson, Samuel Grove III still running it.’ Why don’t you impregnate your current wife? That’s the only way you’re going to get a male Grove in the picture.” I had taken off my shoes and stockings and pr
opped my feet on Sam’s magnificent blond mahogany desk. “If I married Sheila and she inherited this empire, her first official act would be to elect me President, after which I would immediately change the name to the Kolasukas Oil Corporation.”

  Sam looked at me gloomily. I later learned he’d had an operation on his seminal tubes and couldn’t have children. “Stanley, you are a nervy bastard,” he said. “Don’t they teach you to mince words at Harrad? All I have to do is push a button and have you chucked out of here. You are still wet behind the ears. No one in the Grove Oil Corporation dares to talk back to me. Get the hell out of here. Tomorrow report to the personnel department on the eighth floor. I’ll find something unpleasant for you to do this summer.”

  Sam was good at his word. Three days later I was on a jet plane to Iran. At the Abadan airport I was picked up by a grinning Iranian who was driving a Grove Oil jeep. He drove me to Agha Jari where the Grove Oil operates producing wells under licenses from the National Iranian Oil Company. Grove is a member of the Consortium that plans Iranian Oil production. A new well had just come in. Molloy, a taciturn Irishman in charge, explained that this baby would produce 25,000 barrels a day. He told me to report to Gach Saran, where a gravity pipeline was being built to Khark, a small island in the Persian Gulf about a hundred miles south.

  All summer I sweated continuously, ate sand and slop from a field kitchen, slept in the open, inhaled the odor of camel dung and urine until I was certain it was my own odor. With a team of Iranians, we inched our way across grubby country, working from sun up to sun down, and laying a quarter of mile of pipe a day; welding it, wrapping it, and burying it, until one day it would become a continuous tube of slow moving oil, flowing to storage tanks on the island of Khark. With the Memoirs of Casanova to read (the only books I could carry on the plane and stay within the weight limit), and for companionship Neville and Sincher (Britishers, in charge of the construction, whose idea of recreation was endless games of pinochle accompanied by oceans of gin and orange squash), by August I had convinced myself that Sam Grove’s plan was to turn me into a screaming idiot. I was ten pounds lighter and deeply tanned, but I had received no pay. When I questioned Neville on the subject, his opinion was that I must be on the headquarters payroll, since no provision had been made for me on the field payroll. Since there was no place to spend money, anyway, Neville’s feeling was “why worry about it ... think of the experience you are having.”

  On the second Saturday in August, two official Grove cars from Abadan led by Sam Grove in a jeep, which he was driving himself, screeched into our current location and stopped in a cloud of dust.

  “I see you survived,” Sam said, grinning at me. “Get your stuff together; you’re coming back with me.”

  An hour later, hanging onto the edge of the seat for fear I would be catapulted out of the jeep, Sam drove us at top speed over dirt roads toward Khark.

  “Sheila is mad as hell at me.” Sam clutched the steering wheel with both hands to steel himself against the bumps and road shocks. “She got your postcard in June from Abadan, and hasn’t heard from you since. I told her I’d come out here and either escort you home or give you a military funeral.”

  “You can pay me, too,” I said. “I’ve worked for Grove Oil for ten weeks. I figure that you owe me at least six hundred bucks, tax free, as depletion allowance on human flesh.”

  Sam handed me his billfold. “Take ten one hundreds. I wouldn’t want to underpay a possible future son-in-law.”

  His bulging billfold must have had at least one hundred hundred dollar bills in it. “It’s only money, son.” He said, noticing me staring at it. “I always carry five to ten thousand. Never know what might turn up where you can use a fast buck.”

  I took the thousand and asked him how Sheila was. He told me she was living alone in Boston. Harry Schacht had gone out to Columbus to visit with Beth Hillyer until school opened. Some interesting wheels had been turning, but Sheila hadn’t given Sam any detailed information on Harrad developments.

  In his hotel room in Abadan, as we drank gimlets together, Sam became expansive. “I operated out of a suitcase for years,” he told me. “I was worth five million dollars and I didn’t even have a desk. It’s easy to make money, son. Just think of it as a commodity. Borrow it as cheaply as you can and make it work for you. I made my money using other people’s money. If I needed a hundred million tomorrow, I could raise it in twenty four hours. Do you want to be rich, Stan?”

  I grinned. “Anyone who is poor wants to be rich. But I don’t want to be so rich that I don’t have love.”

  “That’s Hollywood and television crap, son. I can have any kind of love you can think of. Love ... screwing ... that’s not a man’s whole life. A man lives for what he can personally create in this world. Not children. Children are simply one product of his creative energy ... but the recreation of his world, his environment; a man’s ability to design the tallest building and then have it constructed, dig the longest canal, conquer the ice and snow of Antartica, literally project himself into the stars ... that’s man’s purpose, and if there is a God, that is why he created man ... to emulate Himself. Man is closest to God when he is determined to achieve the impossible, seek the unattainable.”

  The next morning on a jet plane to Calcutta, where Sam had a conference with the officials of an Indian refinery controlled by Grove Oil, we continued the discussion.

  “The Hindu is closest to God,” I told him, “and achieves the Brahmin state when he no longer seeks the material wealth, possessions, and attainments of this world. He achieves the Unattainable with a direct merger of his own being. All else is maya or illusion. When he has pierced through the veil of materialism he returns to Nirvana and reunites himself with the unending consciousness of the Universe.”

  Sam laughed. “All the mystics and the logicians in the world ever offer man are rationalizations for poverty. Jesus Christ preached to forsake all others and follow him. If the Christians had taken him seriously, the way the Hindus and Chinese have taken Ramakrishna and Buddha, the Western World would be wallowing in dung. If all men lived their lives for the next world, man would never have invented the flush toilet. He’d be up to his ass in his own shit. Wait until you have seen the dregs of Calcutta, son. You’ll see what living for the next world can do to man in this one.”

  At dinner in the Great Eastern Hotel in Calcutta, we were still at it.

  “From what you told me about Harrad and the Tenhausens,” Sam said, “I’m convinced the whole idea is unrealistic. Their theories of educating a man in such a close contact with women will ultimately feminize the male. The average male today has already gone too far. He seeks the female ultimate ... security.”

  “If virility is hydrogen bombs,” I grinned, “it may not be such a bad idea.”

  “Do you expect you and Sheila will achieve this perfect love and maintain it for a lifetime? It sounds a little sloppy to me.”

  “I don’t know, Sam. I do know that if Sheila and I, or some other woman, develop and grow together, it won’t end up in the vast wasteland of modern suburban marriage. The marriages the Tenhausens envision would have constantly evolving strength and drives, not for money or power but to project for all men a higher image of themselves. The idea behind Harrad is infinitely larger than pre-marital sexual adjustment. Ultimately it is a belief that man can take one more step up the evolutionary ladder ... lift himself by his own bootstraps, and develop a society and culture that is emotionally and mentally in control of itself. What we would be seeking may be just as unattainable as the goals you set for yourself. The difference is that the values that drive us are not so ego centered as yours.”

  The next day Sam took me on a tour of Calcutta. “I want you to see a small portion of this best of all possible worlds, Kandy Kolasukas.” He was delighted with his own joke. “Get it, son? Candide? ... Kandy? Okay, Kandy Kid, look around you.”

  Adamantly, Sam expounded his philosophy of hopelessness. In a taxi
driven by a Sikh we drove through miles of poverty-stricken shambles overflowing with Indians living little more than an animal existence. We pushed our way through markets crawling with flies, plunged into alleys reeking with slop and sewage, forced our way into mud and bamboo houses that gave shelter to families of ten or more plus chickens and cows all living in one or two rooms that completely eliminated privacy. In the sweltering heat, on the edge of a muddy tributary of the Hoogly River, we watched men and women bathe, washing themselves while they still wore their shabby saris and dhotis, in water thick with silt.

  For a few rupees Sam convinced one Indian family to share their meal of grimy rice and fish, and grimly insisted that we both eat the tasteless concoction, while they watched us with grinning approval. We finished the day at the burning ghats, a funeral practice of which Sam heartily approved. “Millions of them die before their time. Very sensibly, they realize that any man’s life on this earth is not much more than a few puffs of smoke.”

  The next night Sam had to go to a formal dinner at a British Polo Club, but he continued his campaign to unnerve me, hoping, evidently, that I would renounce my “Pollyanna” philosophy. He had reserved separate rooms for us. In case, as he put it, something turned up. I think he was disappointed when I told him that I was going to bed early.

  Around nine o’clock, just as I had flopped on the bed with a sigh of relief, I heard a knock on my door. I scrambled into my shorts, opened the door an inch, and was staring into the saucer brown eyes of a very pretty Indian girl. She was wearing a red sari, a simple necklace, a tinkling profusion of bangles on her arms, and tiny bells on her ankles. She smiled timidly at me, revealing very white teeth that contrasted with her mocha skin. She handed me a piece of paper. It was a note from Sam: “Less than an hour ago this girl was given a thorough medical inspection. She’s clean, healthy. No V.D. She knows at least ninety positions and will demonstrate them with no thought of love on her mind. She isn’t even a good business woman. She’s yours for the night. Fifteen rupees. Pay her when you finish. Compliments of Sam Grove. She didn’t ask to be born a whore. It just happened that way in this best of all possible worlds.”