Big Dreams (45 page)

Doheny agreed to pump the oil and store it in tanks. The land was leased to him for free, and he got to keep a share of any profits. In return for such favors, Doheny enlisted his son to serve as a bagman and bring Fall $100,000 in cash to help him buy a cattle ranch—just a loan, Doheny claimed later, but he and Fall were swept up in the Teapot Dome scandal of 1924, and Fall was sent to prison.

Doheny beat a bribery rap and suffered less damage than his attorney, William Gibbs McAdoo, who was presumed to be guilty by association. When McAdoo ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1924, he heard shouts of, “Oil! Oil! Oil!” every time his name was put forth.

Bill Rintoul had a friend at Elk Hills, Ken Schultz, an employee of the navy, who was in charge of the drilling program. He was crew-cut and had the spine of a military man. Rintoul bragged about him and let me know that he had drilled about 1,200 wells on the reserve, among them the deepest well in California at 24,426 feet. Schultz seemed in awe of his own feat. After all, he had worked his way through college by toiling in a muffler shop.

“If you’d’ve told me I was going to do that when I was a young
man graduating from USC in 1947,” he said, in wonder, “I’d have asked you what you were smoking.”

Schultz wanted to show us a well that he was currently drilling, one that was targeted for 17,000 feet. It was hard to think about such a hole. Wouldn’t it lead you straight to China? We were given hard hats to protect our innocent heads. Objects sometimes fell from an oil rig, hurtling toward bystanders from on high. A wrench, a lugnut, a lunchpail—brainbusters were everywhere just waiting to happen.

There were about two thousand wells at Elk Hills, and about half of them were active. The Department of Energy had Chevron as a partner now instead of Doheny and granted the oil giant 20 percent of the take.

Schultz’s rig was visible from a long way off. It was a towering assemblage of girders, cables, ladders, and steps. Tiered platforms rose in a pyramidal shape some seventy or eighty feet into the sky. The rig was centered over the well, and the drill pipe had some small, industrial-grade diamonds imbedded in a hard matrix.

“It took more than twenty trucks to bring that rig in,” Schultz said appreciatively.

A subcontractor, Parker Drilling Company from Tulsa, Oklahoma, owned the rig. Mr. Parker was supposed to be so patriotic that he wore red, white, and blue underwear. An American flag was flying by the rig near a sign that said, 77 days without an accident—not long enough for me. The rig operated on a three thousand horsepower motor, cost about $250 an hour to run, and would remain up for about a month.

I liked the look of the rig. It had a structural integrity from all the tensed and braided metal. A wily artist might have pawned it off as a sculpture. The derrick stamped it inalterably as an oil rig, but at the same time the platforms, the busy workers, and the billowy flag suggested a ship that had somehow gotten stranded in the desert.

A drilling crew of five men was scurrying about—three roughnecks as all-purpose floorhands, a derrick man, and a driller to push the buttons. The driller was the top dog, followed by the derrick
man. The roughnecks did dirty, dangerous, back-breaking work for a pittance. They made about nine dollars an hour, while the lowly roustabouts who laid pipe, set pumping units, and handled the mopping up earned just six bucks an hour.

Still, a job at Elk Hills was considered a good one, Rintoul said. The men were guaranteed steady work and had a certain degree of security. They could live at home or rent a trailer in a trailer court. Other crews were much more mobile. If you happened to be out drilling shallow development wells, for instance, you had to move with the rig every three or four days. Sometimes you ended up sleeping in your car or pickup and subsisting on burgers and grease for weeks at a time.

In some ways, Rintoul observed, the oil business had gotten worse, not better, over the years. The technology had improved, but the profits had dropped, and the big oil companies had suffered losses and were constantly cutting corners. They were laying off more and more workers, and the men still working were pushed harder. When a rig was up and running, it ran around the clock in twelve-hour shifts. A man would work a forty-hour day shift and then rotate to a forty-hour night shift. Going from shift to shift screwed up the workers’ body chemistry and their internal clocks. Sometimes they drank to come down, an oil-field tradition.

It used to be that a man might show up a little drunk of a morning, Rintoul told me, but now, in spite of screening tests for drugs, a few workers relied on cocaine and speed to propel them through. That upped the ante, in terms of accidents.

“At least you can tell when a person’s been drinking,” he said.

If I wanted to see how perilous oil-field work really was, Rintoul went on, I could go to Oildale, where many workers lived, and count the missing fingers and the missing limbs.

Loggers, millworkers, fishermen, and roustabouts. If you’re a working stiff, I thought, California is not the Promised Land.

These days, the big oil companies continued their policy of cutting costs, occasionally at their own expense. As an example, Rintoul cited
the Exxon
Valdez
, which had foundered, he believed, because Exxon had stopped paying for a pilot ship to guide it through the narrow channels up in Alaska.

“Penny-wise and pound-foolish,” he said.

P
ETROLEUM CLUB ROAD
, Shale Road, Midoil Road, and Gas Company Road were all byways in Taft, a desert town almost naked of vegetation. If shade could be bottled and sold, you could make your million there. Taft was renowned for its hard-nosed attitude and its redneck bent, going Bakersfield and Oildale one better. The town had not even considered integrating its schools, Rintoul told me, until its football team had started losing games to schools that had admitted blacks.

He remembered a time in his youth when Cab Calloway had been invited to appear at a charity event in Taft. There was plenty of consternation among the citizens, and a bargain had to be struck. Calloway and his band would be allowed to play, but they had to agree to stay somewhere else and be gone before dark.

Rintoul remembered sweeter things, too. He remembered being in kneepants and riding his bike ten or twelve miles to a gas station built all of wood. At a “little-bitty” counter, he bought wonderful chili beans for a dime a cup. Along the road, he passed the local bootlegger’s house, which seemed like a palace to him with its hardwood floors and the two grand columns that marked the driveway.

He remembered old friends and acquaintances and took me to the cemetery in Taft and walked me around it. A Lufkin pump on a timer began dipping on a hill behind us, the sound of it metallic and clanking. The country around Taft was not as harsh as it looked in high summer, Rintoul said. In spring, it could be spectacular.

“You ought to visit then,” he advised me. “There’re wildflowers all over everywhere.”

T
HE PREMIER COUNTRY-MUSIC
radio station in Bakersfield, KUZZ-AM and FM, didn’t play very many Buck Owens records, even though Buck owned the station and was the boss. He didn’t test well with the listeners, and neither did Merle Haggard. They preferred the sanitized songs of Garth Brooks and Clint Black to the gritty twang born during the diaspora of Okies and Arkies to California.

The real Bakersfield Sound cooked. It had some Woody Guthrie in it, and some Bob Wills, too, some rumbly washboard stuff along with the creak of a front-porch rocker and the sizzle of fatback bacon in a pan. It went in for mother-of-pearl buttons, biscuits with gravy, grits, and whiskey straight from the bottle. It tore you up with its melancholy, but it still made you want to dance. It was what you heard on the air twenty years ago, when Buck Owens had bought the station.

Evan Bridwell, KUZZ’s program director, was also perplexed about the listeners’ preferences. He felt that Bakersfield had the potential to become a Nashville West, but he had learned that the fans of country music were sometimes an enigma wrapped in a question.

“This is one tough town to impress,” Bridwell said, stating the obvious. In the new Bakersfield, he thought, all that mattered was selling real estate.

Buck Owens was not anywhere around KUZZ. Thanks to Dwight Yoakam, he had been liberated from an enforced retirement and was out touring again. His nephew, Mel, really ran the station, but Buck had an office suite there that was done up with the obligatory gold records. Its centerpiece was a piano upon which penciled songs-in-progress were spread, their penultimate notes still trapped in Buck’s head.

There were photos of Buck playing golf with Presidents Nixon and Ford in his “Hee Haw” days. There was a very conspicuous photo of Buck and Dwight Yoakam. Buck’s gap-toothed grin was sizable.

In Buck’s private bathroom, above the sunken tub and the Jacuzzi,
some tiles in the storied red, white, and blue of Mr. Parker’s underwear spelled out BUCK OWENS. But the sign that said it all was the one over his desk, a link to Dust Bowl memories and the long haul to California: Poverty Sucks.

I
N OILDALE
, the blue-collar poor were making their last stand. Here, Merle Haggard, the holy infant of country heartbreak, had been raised in a converted railroad boxcar, but there wasn’t any monument to him. Folks in Oildale were too busy trying to pay their bills.

Oildale had no suburban frills, just trailers and bungalows. Residents parked their old cars in claustrophobic alleys between them, sometimes never to be moved again. Some alleys were death rows for automobiles. There were constant disputes about who had the right to which alley space, and men had been shot with handguns for violating a code known only to the killer.

In Oildale, there was a hapless store, Life Is a Beach, that sold bikinis and other swimwear appropriate to a seaside that was as distant as a fantasy.

The public life of the town revolved around two saloons, Bob’s and Trout’s. Oil-field workers still in their oily clothes drank at them with their tidy brethren who were about to depart for a shift. The armless and the fingerless were indeed propping up stools, just as Bill Rintoul had predicted.

Hard-faced young women in tight jeans stuck out their butts while bending over the pool table, having left the kids with a neighbor. The older women of Oildale watched in disgust from the bar. They were consigned now to the droopy men sitting next to them, earnest losers whose eyes brimmed with self-pity—the prey of skip-tracers, fellows who would as soon disappear into Mexico as come up with the monthly rent or alimony. So devoted to failure were these men that if you confronted them with a door marked “New Life,” all fervent opportunity on the other side, they would not be
able to open it and instead would set to king it until they broke a toe or somebody called the police.

In the afternoon glare outside Trout’s, I saw a California vision. Down the main drag swooped a biker in mirrored shades. He had a sweaty red bandanna wrapped pirate-style around his head. Riding behind him, arms circling his waist, was a little boy in a baseball uniform wearing a crash helmet. They sped down North Chester Street to Bakersfield Junior League ball park, where Pop dismounted and replaced his son’s helmet with a baseball cap.

T
HU LE OWNED L’EAU VIVE
, a Vietnamese restaurant, that was in a Bakersfield shopping center. She was among the second generation of immigrants to come to California from Vietnam, part of a much more substantial and heterogeneous Southeast Asian wave that continued to wash over the state.

The Le family had tried living in San Francisco first, but the city had stretched their pocketbook, so when Thu Le’s husband got a job in the oil industry, she was glad to relocate in the San Joaquin. She had been in Bakersfield for thirteen years now and seemed to be liking it less and less. The town was losing its semirural character, she thought, and becoming more like a suburb of Los Angeles.

Although business wasn’t terrible, L’Eau Vive was for sale. Thu Le had two teenage daughters, and she wanted to quit working and spend more time with them before they left home.

“Once they marry, you never see them again,” she told me, fluttering her hands in the air.

When I walked in, the restaurant had been jumping with loud rock music. Thu Le changed over to a classical tape and came to my table to apologize for the disturbance. It was her children’s doing, she said. She had granted them a kind of holiday and had let them dress in their street clothes instead of the more formal Vietnamese attire that they usually wore while they were at work.

Thu Le performed some mental reckoning and guessed that her daughters were about 55 percent Californian. They loved California, in fact. To keep them in touch with their roots, she and her husband took them regularly to Little Saigon in Orange County and immersed them in the culture of the old country.

“We feel lucky to be here, but we love Vietnam,” she said, pressing a hand to her sternum. “Would we go back if we could? Yes, we would.”

One of the Le girls brought me a menu. I did my own reckoning and judged her to be at least three-quarters Californian. In the new California, I reflected, things would be measured by the yardstick of Saigon, Phnom Penh, Rawalpindi, or Guadalajara, not by the European standards of my forebears.