Chapter 6

This was all in the future. Early Monday Tab and Elvis headed to their next destinations, as for me I stuck my thumb out and headed North on Highway 101.

It turned out to be an easy trip, and I found myself out by Long Beach midafternoon. One of my rides told me that if I were looking for work he knew the oil rigs were always looking for roughnecks.

This was a high-paying dirty hard job that required a strong back and a fairly weak mind. I met those qualifications. All the walking and daily exercising I had been doing certainly had me in better shape.

I got a hotel room for the night as sleeping on the ground in Long Beach was out of the question. I could not resist the name, Hotel California. It showed I was really there. Years later when the song came out I wished I had sent some of their postcards.

However, the next day, after breakfast I did check out and leave the Hotel California. My first stop was to buy a new pair of boots, seems the stitches had all dissolved, from my Mexican shoe shine. After that, I found my way to the Union hiring haul.

My SAG card and ten dollars got me into the International Oil Rig and Drillers Union. I asked the guy who took my money if he thought I would have a hard time getting on. He just pointed to all the derelict drunks sleeping on benches in the hall.

It turned out one oil rig was hiring roughnecks at sixty dollars a week for a two-week stint. They had some extra stuff going on and thought they would need the help.

Well, I was hired. I had to buy a hard hat, safety glasses, and steel-toed work shoes. I was taken by water taxi to the rig which wasn’t that far from shore. I spent the next week dirty, tired, sore, and absolutely certain that I would never want to do this regularly.

They had so many men on board, that we had to hot bunk. One guy would get up. Another would take his place in the bed. Drilling for oil was around the clock; talk about a stinking mess of unwashed, farting men. The food was a horrid greasy mess, and showers were salt water. This was not what this Ohio boy was ready for.

I toughed it out but knew I would never come back. All my clothes, but one set were ruined in the first two days. I saved one set after I realized I would have to buy new ones when the job was done. They gave us coveralls, but they didn’t help.

That all said the guys working the rig were a hard lot, but they didn’t seem to resent me in any way and would give me pointers on how to do things. I quickly became known as Kid. “Hey, Kid, do this”, “Hey Kid wake up,” “Hey Kid get your head out of your butt.” This was all yelled, but never in a mean way.

I mentioned that to one of the supervisor types one day, he told me, “Kid these are really hard cases; they have learned to be polite to each other and the world in general. They have nothing to prove and if a fight broke out here, there would be dead men. You don’t want to see a dead man.”

I didn’t tell him at my young age I had already killed two men. As a matter of fact, no one on the rig had asked my age, and I didn’t volunteer.

Events took a sudden turn on the second week when I heard a big voice yell, “Hey pilgrim. What are you doing here?”

I turned and there was John Wayne. It seemed he was doing some location shots for a movie called ‘Hell Fighters,’ a take on Red Adair the oil rig firefighter. That was why the extra crew had been added on.

Since I already had a SAG card, I was hired to be an extra in the movie. I was being paid twice, once to do the job and the second time, so they could take pictures of me doing the job. When the finished movie came out you had to look quick to see my face.

My stock certainly went up with the other roughnecks when Wayne told a group at lunch one day how I had got in a fight down in Mexico and had to bail my buddies Elvis Presley and Tab Hunter out of jail. That is when I found out there were pictures in Variety magazine.