Back in ’73 I was young and full of questions. I was taking college classes and working for Easyriders. The pay was poor, but life was one party after another. A riding partner, Mick, worked in the oil fields as a driller/ manager of an oil well. He was a whip-crackin’ sonuvabitch, boot tough and rattle snake mean. He pissed off everyone around him and enjoyed every razor sharp tongue lashing. Actually the big sandblasted bastard had a heart of gold, strong as the oil well pipes work ethic and non-stop integrity until white powder got the best of him, but that was years later.
I grew up around the oil fields. My old man worked for the same Hydro Test, oil well testing company on Signal Hill near Long Beach, California, for 40 years. No pension, not a dime the day he walked away as the head of the joint and the uneducated engineer and tool designer. He had no professional schooling but knew the ins and out’s of a machine shop and could make anything or make anything work. As a kid, I worked cleaning the metal shavings out of lathe trays, sweeping the joint and doing the crap work no one else would endure. I actually met Mick through my dad during a time when my dad couldn’t stand the sight of my grubby ass.
Mick ran crews, on an oil platform, off the coast of Seal Beach, almost directly off the coast where the Easyriders offices were located, in a small apartment near the beach. This took place prior to the magazine becomming a regular publishing company. There were no high-rise buildings, no fancy offices. We just made do with the bedrooms of this small apartment, sorta like the HORSE crew does today.
My dad introduced me to Mick and I rebuilt a couple of Panhead motors for the guy. For punishment I had to ride with him for the next five years. He broke down on a regular basis, but it never had anything to do with my engine work. I knew what Mick was making on the rigs and it wasn’t peanuts. He hired guys off the streets and they made more than I did in a week, in one night. I watched guys who were sloppy get in tight shape in a month working on a slippery offshore rig. It was strenuous work and I didn’t know how strenuous until I volunteered one night.
Mick constantly sniveled about the guys not showing up for their shifts and since he worked in the middle of the night, I had the time to escape to sea, if he needed a hand. One night he did. Did we go to work, get covered in grease and sweat, roll home and have a beer? Fuck no. We were bikers, we had to fuck it up one way or another. Here’s how it went:
It was a winter day when I rode home from a brutal day on the magazine job and Mick hollered from the garage, “That sonuvabitch pal of yours just called. He won’t make it to the rig tonight, are you up for it.”
“No problem brother,” I said cracking open an ice-cold beer. “When do we head out?”
“About the time you finish that beer,” Mick said, “And snap it up. We’ve got to meet a boat out to the rig.”
I gulped at the beer and dug around for some really nasty clothes and boots that I should have thrown away a half-dozen years ago. I changed and took along the clothes I was wearing to change into after the shift. I was riding a ’68 Shovel cop bike at the time which I was just beginning to tear into.
“Let’s move,” Mick snapped, “We’re burnin’ daylight.”
The weather was typical winter months for Los Angeles, 75 degrees during the day and 70 at night. We pulled our bikes out of the garage when it hit me. “Let’s race,” I muttered and tossed the empty into the corner of the ratty garage. We had smoked dope and discussed a race around Long Beach since it was surrounded by freeways with the 405 running along the coast (north and south, sorta), the 605 and Long Beach Freeways running inland about 10 miles apart. The final loop was the 91 freeway which was inland and ran between the 605 and the Long Beach freeway. It was about a 30 mile lap.
We pulled out of our garage like two devils possessed. Mick was riding his long Panhead chopper which should have been crushed, melted down and remanufactured into a Japanese compact. He made the springer himself. The most godawful contraption you’ve ever seen. The springs rattled so severely they overshadowed his drag pipes, but he rode it as if Boeing engineers had designed and developed a low flying, sonic speed motorcycle just for him.
We tore down the street toward the 91 freeway as if all the cops in the city had been called to a ghetto uprising, and we had been given the green flag. We bounced and jiggled onto the freeway, just after the hordes of 4-wheeler rush-hour slim balls slithered off the asphalt into their drywall boxes. It’s a rare moment, in the middle of the city, when for some drug-induced reason, we felt that we could get away with 100 mph on a downtown freeway. We jammed as if the race was condoned by the Daytona Speedway, from the 91 to the Long Beach freeway heading toward the coast. We slithered past cars, as if they were colorful rubber obstacles, placed for our weaving amusement.
We came to our senses as we departed the 405 in Seal Beach making the nearly 20 mile run in 10 minutes. We were two bank robbers who escaped the shackles of the law by the hairs standing up on the back of our necks. We were dancing on our foot pegs as we pulled into the parking lot next to the crew loading docks, a remarkable 15 minutes early. Standing on air, we gabbed about each shift, each car we peeled paint from as we passed at high speeds scaring the living shit out of the drivers. We half expected a battalion of police to storm our location and arrest us, but we safely bordered the crew boat with the rest of Mick’s offshore oil rig gang for the ride to the rig.
Whatta ride, but my night was long from over, as the sun shinged it’s fiery perimeter into the Pacific, and we splashed our way from one swell to another, to the rusting ladder that hung down from the concrete pillions holding the rig securely against the torrent of ever changing tides.
Mick was the boss of this gang, the “driller” as he was called. The Pusher was the executive of the well, but the work was managed by the driller and Mick took on the roll like a Marine sergeant, shouting orders, harassing and taunting the members of the gang. I had the grunt job, working the platform of the rig, manning tongs that unscrewed one 50 foot length of oil pipe from the next. I discovered that oil rig work was handled, as if we were a team destined to break the record for removing 200 stands of pipe from the depths of the well. We ran at the work like a football team in the playoffs. No wonder the regulars were in taut shape after slinging stands of pipe for eight hours. I labored, standing in several inches of grease and mud spinning off the slippery stands of pipe. Chains, ropes and tongs were flying as one stand was removed after another. Mick screaming at me every time I slipped and slithered in the slime.
Eight hours later I knew why these guys were paid $60 bucks a night, and there was no way I was going to give up my day job tinkering with motorcycles, to risk breaking every bone in my body on a daily basis. I don’t care how much money they throw at you as you step over the side of the slick, steel rig and fall to your death in the chilling Pacific below. Covered in mud and slush from head to toe (especially the two platform guys, which I was one of) we struggled, limp with fatigue down the rusting ladder toward the lapping briny swells below. We stumbled onto the deck of the crew boat and rumbled toward shore.
I gave my 8-hour stint hell. I grew up with a hard driving bastard father. I could take it, but Mick snickered anyway and gave me shit for being, if nothing else, the new guy. I had cleaned up as best I could on the platform before boarding the 30-foot skiff. Holding onto the railing of the boat and watching as we collided with one swell after the other. I clung to my grease-soaked work togs while wearing shades. Twenty minutes later we swung along side the narrow wooden dock swaying in the harbor tide. A crewmember tossed a line and Mick stepped off the boat onto the quivering dock about three feet wide. I stepped off the swaying crew powerboat in the early morning darkness and took another step toward the shore. I stepped off the dock instead of turning parallel to the splashing craft and fell into the water alongside. I hit that cold brine like a beach ball bounces off the surface of a swimming pool. I don’t remember if it was shallow and I pushed off the rocky bottom, but I came out of the drink as fast as I was immersed. In a fraction of a second I was back on the dock, soaked like a drowning rat. Now Mick had a field day with my watery predicament and the fact that I had my dirty clothes in my arms as I went down. I had nothing dry to wear. I wrapped myself in a threadbare army blanket that I usually carried on my scoot and started the ride home.
I’ll never forget the guys in the 76 gas station where we refueled before we rolled onto the freeway. I was a fuckin’ mess, soaked to the bone, shivering. My long hair and beard was plastered to my head and face. They strained not to burst out laughing. We rolled on to the freeway at half the speed we flew to work at and finally made it in to the arms of the babes at our pad. I still came down with a kick-ass cold. Did I learn anything? I doubt it, but it was a night I’ll never forget. –Bandit
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