Chapter 43 Working in Ochelata

I got caught in the layoffs of 1989 and misguidedly accepted a job proposal with a small startup company in Ochelata.  Yes, Ochelata, just south of Bartlesville at the turnoff  there by the diner and filling station.  I think there was a filling station there.

 

The company was biotech company used for petroleum exploration.   It was founded by one of the research scientists who had recently been forced into retirement.  As part of the package deal for him to go quietly, Phillips licensed a proprietary surface exploration method based on the microbes in the soil.

I had worked on the project for the last four years or so, and knew the scientist in question.   He had served as advisor to our applied research group as we applied his techniques in the field for the various exploration groups who wanted to use it.  This resulted in me running over great parts of eastern Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado parts of Texas and Saskatchewan, Canada.

I was promised a portion of  the company, which was just one of the many lies that the owners told over the next few years.

I liked the guy, can’t say the same for his son, who was the company president.  I was named Chief Geologist. I was the ONLY geologist.  The mother was the drafts person, the dad, Don was the Director of research and we had a microbiologist and his wife and a variety of local yokels who did lab and field work.

So the leadership of the company was mainly made up of ex-Phillips people and the lab and field people were locals.

 As I said I worked with the method that was called MOST at the Phillip’s research center for five years.  We put a lot of time and effort into developing it and working out statistical methods for processing the data.  We developed a “how to” cookbook so that anyone could train themselves on how to do it, equipment needed, the whole shebang.

My contribution was moving the technique from glass pipets, where we were sucking on glass pipets by mouth to using “Mr. Pipettes” a Japanese invented auto pipet. You see them on CSI now they look like big fancy syringes you use with your thumb.  You press on a disposable plastic tip, depress a plunger with your thumb, and it sucks up a preset amount of fluid.  You squirt it out, the eject the tip with another thumb actuated plunger and you are goo to go again.  Quick, easy and light weight, compared to the weight of glass pipets.  One box of 100 pipets weighted about 40lbs.  100 plastic tips weighted about 12 ounces, the bulk of that was the plastic rack they came in. It meant a lot less crap going to the landfill.

The technique was called MOST and  was patented.  It stood for Microbial Oil Survey Technique.  They gave a release to Don to use it as part of his retirement agreement. He was the inventor but that they gave up some valuable technology shows how badly the company wanted him gone.

Don’s obituary of 2012 says he retired in “the early 1980’s” which is incorrect.  He and I were still at Phillips in 1989 and they pushed him out the same time I got laid off.  The startup company was founded that same year.  He lived to be 85 which is a wonder to me.  The guy smoked like a chimney.  When smoking was still allowed in PPCo buildings he would come down to our offices in the Geology Building at R&D and stand in the hallway and smoke so as to not pollute our offices.  There would be a pile of butts and ashes outside our doors depending on which of us he came to converse.

Both he and his wife had that nicely creased nicotine prematurely aged but well preserved facial skin.

So I started to go to work in Ochelata, running surveys and attending conferences to do marketing and sales.

Through contacts I had with Phillips I arranged to get us some surveys down in Bolivia.  This was work I had actually started while still working at Phillips.  So I ended up going down as a contractor to finish the work.  This led to three different surveys, of increasing size and governmental involvement.

I went down by myself the first time, took three additional Gringos down with me the second and then went alone again by myself to supervise a survey carried out by local teams the third time.

I did get to go to Palau, in the Pacific but that was for an Arizona oil company.  I scuba dived to collect gas samples bubbling up from the sea floor.  That is a story unto itself and I will go into that more detail later.

While at PPCo the field surveys I did took me to a variety of places and opened the door to many of the escapades related in previous chapters.

Working at the smaller company was a bit more boring, as I had gotten married and was faithful to my beautiful new wife.

 I still tromped up hill and dale collecting samples and after a few years I realized that the company was not going to grow and so my stake in the company was not going to increase in value either.   I had taken a salary cut in order to go to work there, and I was rapidly realizing that the company was just a place the son, could play at going to work.

You see, the son was a trust fund baby, who had been endowed with a substantial sum of money by his maternal grandfather who I was told was a muckety muck in old Oklahoma oil.  The boy lived down off of Riverside drive in a somewhat exclusive neighborhood just north of Maple Park, the last big vacant area along the River before you hit down town and where the pedestrian bridge, dam and fountain are located.

The son was somewhat of a “doofus”.  He was the CEO but really didn’t have much of a grasp on anything.   He didn’t need to.  The company could have been a total failure, and he probably would have still benefited, by writing the losses off.   They bought up a good portion of down town Ochelata for some reason, and we were in a trailer and metal lab building on a street east of town.

I served as the marketing person, sales person, survey planning person, field supervisor, report writer and presenter.

One of the things in the way of the company growing was the father was afraid of “Asians” specifically the Japanese getting control of the methodology, and surrounding it with patents.  That is a technique whereby competitors patent all singularly variations of your technique preventing you from modifying or improving it without infringing on their patents.

Anyway, I was trying to get us involved in Asia with some companies and was told no.

I enrolled in law school at the University of Tulsa and began to study law a night.  My wife was expecting our first child and I decided that I could no longer travel abroad as the law school had pretty strict rules on attendance.

This did not seem to be much of an issue till things started to get tense.  I had been particularly put off by what I perceived as willful sabotage of an ongoing research project I had started to try to make our analytical results more meaningful.

Let me explain.

The technique we used was called, MOST standing for Microbial Oil Survey Technique.  It is based on taking soil samples in potentially oil producing areas and analyzing them for the presence of soil metabolizing(eating) bacteria or micro organisms.

You see in nature nothing goes to waste.  If something can be utilized as an energy or food source then nature and evolution provides something that will eat it.  Look at th Giraffe.  Short animals cannot reach the tall foliage on the trees so evolution resulted in an animal that could.  The current Giraffe’s ancestors included a few with long necks, they could eat off the tall branches and were therefore bigger and stronger than their shorter siblings who had to compete with the other more numerous shorties.  Soon the tall Giraffe was getting all the girls and passing his tall genes on to all the baby giraffes that he produced.  Soon the average neck length increased and this went on and on till we see the long necked thing we see today munching on the treetops that no one else can reach.

So bugs as in microbes evolved to eat hydrocarbons.

Numerous kinds exist and numerous kinds of hydrocarbons exist.

So we would sample the soil with the idea the theory that every oil reservoir leaks to some degree.  Rock is not impermeable and under the pressure of all he overlying rock squeezing down on it, some leaks to the surface in invisible micro seeps, usually as one of several forms of natural gas.

In some places in the work, natural gas seeps to the surface and ignites and has formed “eternal flames.”  The Zoroastrian religion of Persia the main religion before Islam conquered the place worshipped these flames and built their temples on top of them.  This was the kind of worship the Liberal Democrats evoked when they put the eternal flame on J. Kennedy’s gave in Arlington.

So you have these invisible seeps, and microbes feed on the associated hydrocarbons. So if you map the microbe concentrations you can map the seeps.

So we would collect samples, culture them in petri dishes (the same kind the culture your strep throat germs in) introduce a specific hydrocarbon and see what bacteria grow.  The technique was designed to be specific to one type that was most commonly related to oil.

Don, the dad advanced the method first invented by some Russian in the 1930’s and made it into a viable tool for use in the field.

There were only a few problems that had to do with time, weight, moisture and willful omission.

Since the technique dealt with living organisms the longer they are removed from their habitat it goes to reason that the total number of viable organisms decreases with time.  The time involved is the delay between sampling and removing them from the ground and getting them to the lab where they are cultured and provided with nourishment to continue to grow and replicate.

Another problem involved weight and moisture.  We weighed each sample and took 25 grams.  Well if the soil was damp, or outright wet the actual amount of soil you were sampling would be less due to the difference between the weight of water in a wet sample vs one in dry sample.  So your initial sample would be biased one way or the other.   This would introduce a lot of noise to the analytic results. 

For example a wet sample containing a lot of microbes would be weighted out and you would only get say 15 grams of soil and 10 grams of water.  A dry sample with few microbes would give you a full 25 grams of soil.  The results after plating, growth and colony counting might be the same or even higher for the sample with fewer actual microbes.  

The last problem was harder to prove and could be due to ignorance but I felt it was willful.  You be the judge.

We would count the microbe colonies in the petri dishes after a week of growth.  In the medium we place a nutrient solution that was toxic to any microbes other than the one we were interested in.  We did two plates of the same dilution and one that was one tenth of the first two.  This allowed us a check.  If one plate was out of sequence 1:1:x10 then would be discarded.  So if one plate had a count of 50 and anther had a count of 55, they were within tolerance.  If the third plate was 5 or one tenth that followed the dilution and everything was right with the world.

However it say one plate was 30 and the second plate was 120 then the 1/10 dilution should tell us which of the two first plates was the correct one.  If it was around 12 the second plate would be retained and the first discarded as an outlier.   The 1/10 plate would be multiplied by 10 giving two plates with counts of 120 for an average of 240 divided by two would give us 120 which would be the value assigned to that map data point.

What I found were obviously incorrect fliers or values that did not correspond to the sequence being included.  Using the second example let’s see the effect on the data.

120 +30+ 12x10) = 290

290 /3 (the number of plates)  =  96

So the end value would be 96 rather than the correct 120 a lower value by 20%.

I saw this going on time and time again.  Even by Don who should have known better and routinely by others including the son.

What this did was bias the data.

Another  thing we had a falling out over was how the data was presented.

A survey might last six weeks or sometime longer.  I looked at those samples taken over the same time period as a single population and evaluated those values with regard to mean values to derive a baseline to determine where anomalous exploration targets might occur.  That is after all what the clients were paying for.

I found that the owners were finding and identifying anomalous values on EVERY LINE of the survey instead of looking at the survey as one or as several discrete populations.

Let me explain.  If we ran a survey and the first two weeks was during a rainy period we were weighing out more water and less soil.  The second two weeks were dry, so the real measured amount of soil went up.  In the final part of the survey, the winter frost had hit and the ground was too hard to dig, except around certain plants (this happened in a survey in eastern Colorado so nearly every sample during that part of the survey was taken at or near ground cactus plants that had sufficiently dried out the soil that it did not freeze and we could dig in the frozen ground.

 Now each of those effects could cause the results to vary, but you could see that and adjust for it by normalizing the data using the standard deviation of the distribution of sample values collected during each period.  Simple and effective.

But no, I had to drag them kicking and screaming to do it.

The science project that was sabotaged was along these lines.  I wanted to take a population of samples from a number of samples and analyze them over time to see how the sample counts decreased over time from the same sample.  All it would take was to plate a few samples every few days to derive a “decline curve” or “death curve” that would define how much sample counts would decrease from the time it was collected to X days into the future.

This would be helpful since we commonly collected samples and they did not get sampled for up to a week after sampling if not longer. Others got sampled and analyzed the same day.

The curve would allow us after enough surveys were sampled this way, to derive a curve that would tell us how low a given sample would be 5 days after it was sampled vs if it had been analyzed the same day.

My efforts were scuttled by the old man when I was out on a project and he failed to count the plated samples he had been asked to count for me.  He could have had someone else do it and did not.  I have no doubt he did it deliberately.  It was something he did not want to address.

 

We never brought up all these intangibles to clients.

In fact the outright lied to clients about the data and what had or had not been done to it.  “Raw” data means unaltered, un-processed data.  The counts taken directly from the lab books was raw data.  But they sent out data that had been averaged and the clients never saw the three plate counts, nor the many spurious data counts included in the averages.

The addressed some of these issues after I left due to the fact that being in possession of their mailing list, I sent out a letter to some 100+ clients detailing all the “what you should know” points I am addressing here.

When I suggested normalizing the data both father and son were against it, since the said “they want us to give them anomalies!”   I had to point out that absence of results is just as useful and even more useful than a map covered with anomalies mapped from bogus data.  It allows you to know where you should NOT waste money drilling.   They felt giving them something even if it was wrong was better than saying “according to our results there isn’t anything there to indicate oil and gas is present.”

Eventually they adopted my methods.  I do not know if they still use them or not.

When I told them I could not travel overseas they tried to fire me with cause 6 months later but I in arbitration.  It was judged as a layoff entitling me to unemployment benefits.  I had to sell my share in the company and it turned out to be worthless, something they designed on purpose.  The company was a shell, all the assets were in their names.  I cashed out for $3000 since my wife was pregnant and they had tied up my unemployment benefits long enough to leave me cash strapped.

Years later I found out they found some other shills to act as their geology face.  One turned out to be a former colleague a section supervisor at PPCo.  He had moved on to  Unocal and had been the president of the Houston Geological Society.  Now retired, he hired on with them for something to do.   He probably brought in a number of additional clients who’s pockets they could then pick.  He authored a few articles touting the technique in the Oil and Gas Journal as well as other trade magazines.

They are still in operation and have moved on to do projects in SE Asia the same place I had proposed going two decades ago.

There are a few tie-ins to my trip to Palau which is covered in the next chapter.

When on my diving honeymoon to the Cayman Islands I met two Canadians looking for investors for a scam.

The scam had to do with a program in Canada similar to what we call CAPEX or capital expenditure.  It has to do with R&D monies being tax deductible.  The two gentlemen were presenting the Canadian program as an out and out scam.  Set up a company in Canada to do R&D, it can be a store front façade or shell company and you can make a fortune off the Canadian government who wants investors to pump R&D money in and create jobs.

I reported this to the company owners, to Don and his son, Doofus and they turned it down, as a nefarious scam. 

 

Ah, but avarice takes time to work, and it took them about 5 years before they succumbed to the jingling sirens call of the money that could be made and became involved in it.  I found out in a roundabout way that I will go into in the next chapter.

 

Chapter 42 The Maelstrom of a Woman’s Mind

This was not Bartlesville, but Tulsa and I was no longer working at Phillips Petroleum, but it is an interesting and bizarre story of that which women are capable.

I was working for a small company in Ochelata at the time…yeah  Ochelata…look that up on a map, it’s a virtual ghost town now, a few miles off of US 75 north or Ramona.

My wife was pregnant and we wanted to move into a less expensive rental house.  So we moved from up on 71^st at the top of the hill across from where Bennigan’s used to be, to a smaller place over near  49^th street on a cul de sac.  The house had just been vacated…rapidly as it turned out.  We were told we would get a free month’s rent if we cleaned the place out ourselves.  So I figured that it was an easy $500 bucks.

There was heaps of clothing in the garage and in the living room along with other sundry crap.  I just gathered it all up and trashed it.  Cleaning out the laundry room cabinet I found a diary. 

I kept it for a few years afterwards, but finally trashed it.

I am not superstitious but I believe that book was second only to the Necronomicon in the level of bad mojo it contained.  It was not bound in human skin, nor was it going to raise the Army of Darkness.  I do believe it was bad.   In fact reading it made you feel a little dirty.  It was like it had this aura of evil around it, and if you held it too long, or read too much of it in one sitting, some of the filth it contained clung to you.  It could be that whoever held it had a curse on having a lasting relationship. Lol.

I have never ever felt that way.  I mean you can read or watch porn, but you know that is fiction.  It is designed to push certain buttons, it’s almost in the realm of being a tool, fulfilling a function.

I kind of think reading from the diary was more like watching a snuff film.  It was disturbing because you know it was all true.  You could see where it was heading, and when I first found it, I was standing in the detritus of the book’s final chapter, only it had not been written down.

The book was a diary of some Cowgirl’s expedition to find a husband. 

She recorded each sexual encounter she had, what kind of penetration there was and so on.  It was pretty clear her intent was to have sex with a likely guy, get knocked up, then set the hook in him good.

Once she got pregnant the rest of the diary documented her efforts to narrow down which unfortunate schmuck’s spermatozoa did the egg penetration.

It was in narrative form, as if she was talking to herself or an imaginary friend as she tried to logically deduce which cocksman had done the deed.

If she had engaged in anal sex, the guy was obviously off the hook.

 

And so it went.  Encounter after encounter as she worked her way backward through a forest of stiff dicks.

Eventually she settled on a likely guy.  Not sure if the poor patsy was the actual father, or just the first of a few likely suspects that caved in and claimed paternity. 

Well, they got married and the quest finished, the Grail filled, the entries stopped.

Considering that the diary had been left behind and was in a pile of cloths on the floor, that the poor hoodwinked  guy stumbled onto this treasure trove of decadence and surmised he had been had. 

It might be that the kid actually WAS his, but the lurid details contained in the diary made it pretty obvious the owner was on a mission to find a husband so she would not have to work and her methodology was to have sex with every swinging dick in Tulsa till she snagged one. 

Now if the guy insisted on wearing a condom, she listed that too.  She hung in there for a while hoping I guess that she could hit an unprotected gusher and would be in then money.  

I cannot say, but the revelation of the diary may have led to the precipitous dissolution of the marriage. 

It’s a tragedy for the kid of course, as it always is.  I have always felt a little dirty when I think back to that diary.  Not due to the invasion of someone’s privacy, but due to the outright and unabashed attitude of the woman who kept it.  I am not quite sure what word to use to describe her.  Mercenary and calculating do not do it justice.  Maybe degenerate gold digger would do it, but that still does not explain why I feel dirty.  Maybe it is the callous disregard she had for not only the guy’s feelings, the cold way in which she set out to use some guy’s feelings of responsibility to “do the right thing” against him, and then there is the cold blooded way she brought a kid into the world simply to use as a pawn to seal what she hoped was a lucrative mercenary deal.

Chapter 41 My Brush with Date Rape

I moved back from Houston and decided to live in Tulsa.  I got a place at One Eton Square.

It was the first and only apartment that I ever lived in where the billing of “singles” living actually lived up to the hype.  There was a fun but odd group of people in my building.  I had gotten a ground floor one bedroom off the second pool back from the main pool.  There were a couple of guys across the breezeway, a divorcee, a few younger women in assorted jobs like sales and marketing.  We kind of hung out together for a short time before people moved or drifted away.

 I met a nice guy there that I still stay in touch with, he moved up to Minnesota and works for Johnson Controls.  I didn't meet him till I was dating my Future Ex #2 pretty steady.

The apartment managers were real friendly and we had parties one a month at the main pool.  I would use my dive equipment to check out things in the pool for them every once in a while and in exchange they left me alone.

I remember one gal who worked for the Green Sheet in advertisement sales who I knew casually, called me up and asked me to come over to...uh, service her.  It was pretty cut and dried.  Actually it was pretty nice.  No games everything right up front.

At a party I met a surgeon.  She was a short haired looking athletic sort.  She was working down in Marfa doing a stint of government service to pay off med school.  She had been a flight surgeon and had to work off some of the med school costs the feds had picked up.  Her specialty was male urology.  She installed implants for erectile dysfunction.    I had no idea there were so many types.  Of course, Viagra may have put a dent in her future business. 

But this was in the days before the blue pill.  She described the pump, a kind of the Michael Jordan Air pump, only the little pump pad isn't in the tongue of the shoe but in the guys scrotum.  I wonder how many pumps it would take to get the thing erect.    It would inflate a bladder inserted surgically in the penis.  She said the pumping could be worked into foreplay.

The second and most ridiculous was the tent pole extension.  Two telescoping metal or plastic tubes were inserted surgically.  They nested into one another.  To use the thing the guy, or girl if he had a helpful partner would pull the ends of the two tubes and then twist them to lock them in place, just like two tent poles, or walking sticks. 

One had a cam that would bind up to hold the two tubes in place when they were twisted.  Neat, but oh so not cool.  According to her this type was prone to rupture through the side of the penis.  Imagine having the equivalent to the tube that holds a role of toilet paper in your penis and hitting something not too yielding inside your partner and having that thing ram against your pelvis or worse something too yielding.  You could ram the thing out the back of your scrotum, which I guess happened once or twice.

In the event we went sailing together after I met her at a pool party.  Turns out she was divorced.  Her ex had been a body building narcissist and she had come home to find him in bed with, dare I say, one of his body building buddies.  Not of the feminine persuasion either. 

 I guess in the twisted world of self love; he loved looking at himself so much that he fell in love with someone that looked like him.  Nah!  He had just married her to have a beard.  He was gay and just could not face up to it.  Now you know how AIDS crossed the heterosexual boundary.  Sharing needles?  Some, but by far it was infecting of unsuspecting females by gay men or bisexual men.  To this day the gay community still won't own up to it.  They want to continue the fallacy of casting themselves as victims.

Anyway, that kind of startled me and we talked and she point blank said the first thing she did was go out and get tested, then filed for divorce.  But it was a big ego hit for her.  How do you compete with someone from the opposite sex?  I found myself on the end of that dilemma about 10 years later with Future Ex #3 the bi-polar, sexually confused wunderkind.

There was one very bizarre thing that came out of my acquaintances at One Eton.  One of the guys liked to regale us with stories of his encounters and one in particular piqued my interest.  He spoke of a young woman who liked to be tied up, you know into BDSM or a bondage queen.  At the time, this predated the Internet, I was pretty ignorant of the underground community to which these people gravitated.  Well being the resourceful guy I am, I found out her name and where she worked and called her up for a date.

Talk about cold calling. 

Anyway, I proposed she bring a friend for safety, I described myself and said what I would be wearing.  Since I didn't have a clue what she looked like other than a cursory description, hair, eyes etc, and that she was attractive.  I wouldn't be in a position to recognize her.  She could come to the designated restaurant of her choice, check me out and if she wasn't interested just leave and I'd never be the wiser.  If she wanted to meet me she could introduce her self.  Well it worked out great.  We met and decided to date.   I went an picked her up at her apartment late one evening in pretty foul weather if I recall correctly.  We went to Incahoot's or whatever it was being called then. 

I knew I might have a head case on my hands when she wanted champagne. I obliged her and she immediately got wasted.  So much so she couldn't find her way back to the table after visiting the women's room.

In hind sight I would have to say she might have been Bipolar.  She drank like she was on a mission from god to get wasted.

The BDSM thing is now a give-away.  In my personal experience, people into that in a big way, have psychological problems.  Wife #3 wanted to delve into it in a big way, and I gather now, that there are several elements at work.  One is self-loathing.  They engage in it to punish themselves.  Second is a touch of infantilism, by that I mean they emotionally never grew up, and they put themselves in the role of the child, the Dom is the parent.  They want to be taken care of, and in exchange, they allow themselves to be punished.  Third is objectification.  They see themselves as an object for sex, they cannot differentiate between sex and love.  They are one in the same to them.  Anyone who used them for sex, loves them, so to be loved they let themselves be used.

It sounds fucked up and it is.

 There could be a touch of masochism and desire to be degraded too, that plays into the self-loathing.  Even sex can become an act of contrition, or punishment.

It’s kind of like they carry this load of emotional baggage with them and they are constantly wanting to make amends for something they were not responsible for.   Ever hear of autism, where the sufferer is kind of cut off from the world and resorts to head banging to feel something?   There could be an element of sexual dysfunction that laps into that too.  My ex needed intense pain not being whipped but still intense stimulation I would call pain in order to climax.

I am not a psychologist although I had Psych 101 and 102  in college and had 7 years of on the job training.  My interaction with real shrinks makes me thing my diagnoses here have just as much validity as their half- baked arm waving does.

Okay, now that I established that there seems to be, in my opinion, a link between mental illness and BDSM, it tosses the whole premise of 50 Shades of Gray on its head.  Believe me, BDSM in not romantic.

Pause.  Stop. 

I need to write a whole entry on this.

Now that I have touched on it, let me continue.

The gal gets tanked, just like I later saw my wife #3 do all the time.  No reason, just a mission to get blotto.

I end the date early since she is nearly incoherent.   I think she might have popped something along with the Champagne.

I take her home.  I say by good byes but no, she wasn’t having it.  She barred the door, wanting me to stay.  I really did not want another Marilyn on my hands.

She then pulls off her top to show me her newly enhanced breasts, wanting my opinion.

Okay, so that did stop me from leaving.  I tell myself I put her in bed because I was afraid she would have followed me out and down the stairwell half naked.   She probably would have.

So I tuck her in bed.  She pulls me down on her and we start kissing and one thing led to the next and we had sex.

Okay, so I gave in.  I stayed until she was asleep and then I let myself out.

Again, I don’t call the next day.  How do you tell an attractive gal that you had a good time, but you really don’t want to go out with a hot mess drunk?  To this day, after wife #3 I cannot stand to even talk to a drunk when I am sober.  Drunks just make me want to throw up.

Well I finally get a call from her, and I guess as a face saving measure, insinuates I took advantage of her, when I am here to tell you, I did not.

I have been in the company of many drunk or passed out women and I never, not once did anything that was not by mutual consent by action if not word.

This was in the days when you did not have to get a signed consent form from the Dean of Student affairs or the District Attorney before two adults exchanged bodily fluid by sexual penetration.

Today it’s different.

At the time we exchanged words, I told her I think she was miffed because I hadn’t called her.  That pretty much tore it.

That is until I moved apartments.

I found this nice place called Green Briar on 61^st  near Lewis.  Quite, nice, a second floor apartment overlooking the pool.

As I am unloading my trailer with a buddy, and my future wife #2 imagine who I run into on the landing, of the same floor.

You guessed it.  All of a sudden the place is starting to look way familiar.  I had been there only at night.  I suddenly recall the little half moon turn out for the car around a tree at the base of the stairs.

As you can expect, the gal got her nose in a joint, thinking I was moving in because of her.  Our apartments back up against each other.  I was on the south side, she was on the north side, we shared a common wall.

As it turned out, I didn’t see her at all and she moved out not long after that. 

Small world.

Bill Cosby has now admitted to purchasing Quaaludes with the intent of using them on women to have sex with them.  If that is true, I guess they have to prove he did in fact use them.  If a woman takes drugs on her own, then drinks rendering herself incapacitated, I would not have sex with her.  It not only opens the guy to allegations after the fact, but what fun is it?  Pretty much like fucking a corpse only its warm.  In this case, the girl was quite active, but it was my bad for not taking my leave when I should have.  It was decidedly not date rape, far from it.  If I had recorded the session, it would have been quite clear she was an active participant, even if she could not recall it the next day, or chose not to.

In Cosby's defense some of the alleged instances took place at the Playboy Mansion, where I dare say that all the girls were there for the use of the many VIP guests that happened through.  If you care to read, "A Bunny's Tale" by Gloria Steinem (available on the web for free) written when she did an expose of the NYC Playboy club working as a Bunny for two weeks,.  You will learn that it was common for all the female employees to put out for VIPs both at the clubs and it follows, at the Mansions too.  Although it was "against the rules" to date customers, the girls were in fact pressured to do so by the managers.

2018 Update.  Considering the events of the last year and the formation of the Me Too! movement by militant feminists, I really do feel fortunate that my run in with "morning after regret" happened when it did. Men today have a mine field to walk when asking a woman out on a date. I truly feel sorry for them.

Chapter 40 A Midnight Horse Race at Place One

I lived for a short time at Place One in Tulsa, off Riverside Drive.  It was a nice two story apartment.  I had just gotten a Labrador puppy and knew it was a matter of time before I had to move because of the dog size restriction.

Well, I sailed catamarans and I had to park mine at the end of the covered parking by the end of my building.  I had a big blue tarp over it by the end of my building.  One evening we went up to the pool side pub and had a few drinks.  We were walking home, the distance was about 40 yards if that.   At my insistence we got adventurous. 

I pulled soon to be wife #2 under the tarp where it hung over the mast.  You could stand under it since the mast was in a cradle above the boat making a sort of tent.    The opening was held closed by a cord so we were in our own little enclosed space.   She braced herself against one of the trampoline cross members between the two hulls and I flipped her skirt up and we headed off to the races. 

Just after I left the gate and was at a full gallop sprinting down the track, some older gentleman out for his late evening walk just happened to be wander by.  Well the boat was a rocking and he should’t have come a knocking.

The boat and trailer were pretty light and our combined weight was making it move around a lot.    I had both the trailer and the boat rocking and the tarp flapping for good measure.  Lol.

Well the old guy must have thought there was someone out to mug him, or was trying to jack with him.  He got in quite a tizzy.  He started yelling wanting to know if someone was out there.  He wanted to know what we were doing.  Really getting himself worked up.  I slowed down to trot, and needless to say, we were both fighting to keep from laughing all the while trying to finish our business.  I guess the guy got himself unruffled enough because he kept on walking.

I gave it the spurs and increased my speed to a full gallop, but damn if my date didn’t get to the wire before me.  I guess it’s as it should be.  The mounts nose always gets to the finish line before the jockey does.

I still laugh my ass off when I remember the worried tone of the old guys his voice.  He was really panicked, little did he know that we were quite pre-occupied and if not for fear of having our privacy invaded, would not have given him a second thought.   The  whole thing was pretty hilarious.

Chapter 38 Nursing Stories

My girlfriend from college that came out to Bartlesville from back east was a nurse.  The trouble is that she didn't much like it from her experience with clinical in nursing school.  So on arriving in Bartlesville she went back to bar tending which put her through school.

We rented a house on Greystone just east of the Quarters at the top of the hill.  She went to work for Larry Lively and things were pretty hectic what with working for the guy and having to help his girl friend after he beat her up regularly.  But she stuck it out with him.  He stopped on the side of 75 on night coming back from Tulsa and pulled her from their car and beat her with a belt.  On another occasion he nailed her in a closet of their home where she was hiding from him.  Not her physically, just the door.

As the world turns.

Well my girlfriend and wife #1 did take her nursing boards at my urging and landed a job at Jane Phillips.

Now, I want to say here, that she deserved a lot better than she got from me.  She was a wonderful woman, smart, outgoing, headstrong, pretty, a real keeper.  I just met her too soon in my life it seems.

Well she took Jane Phillips by storm. The hospital had such a shortage of registered nurses that if you had a BS-RN you were immediately given a lot of responsibility.  In her case she was made charge nurse of a unit.  After a few weeks of wearing a dress, hat and the proper shoes, she started wearing white pants and tunic and ditched the hat.

The hospital administrators were not keen on that and it escalated to the board and she allied herself with some doctors who agreed with her that her choice of dress did not impact her nursing care if anything it made it better because she was not afraid of giving the staff a moon every time she had to get up on the bed to help roll one of their "large" patients.

She won.  I was proud of her, but would have not expected anything less.

She used to come home from work and regale me with stories.  She did some time in the ER and those storied were the best.

On weekends there was never a shortage of excitement.  The casualties and such poured in from Pawhuska.  Those Osage Indians really knew how to party.  I recall one episode she recounted to me.  Seems late one Saturday evening a middle aged lady came in with a problem.  Seems she had something lodged in her vagina.  As my Future Ex # 1 recounted it, the woman was drunk off her ass, and just kept laughing hysterically.  She laughed the whole time the doctor worked on her.  It appears she had a tampon lodged crossways in her vagina. To make matters worse, it was still in the dispenser tube. It appears that in her inebriated state she had failed to insert it correctly and remove the tube.  She had just shoved it in and forgot to remove the tube.  She then proceeded to engage in sex with several gentlemen and in their zeal they were not about to let something like a tampon get in their way.  So onward and upward they went, figuratively and literally.  They pounded the thing in pretty good and it lodged crossways high up in her vagina.  I guess she thought it was pretty funny since she was still laughing when she left.  I have to say I am very impressed with the rigidity of the tools of the men involved.  I think I would have given up if I had started pounding the end of my pecker into something as unyielding as a cardboard tampon tube.  But hey, maybe the quim of  a heifer cow or ewe feels that way.  You never know, right?

The next funny story was about someone being brought in with a heart attack and the doctors failed to revive him even after prolonged CPR and defilibration.  That was before her shift.  They pulled the screen around his bed and when my Ex came in told her that she had a patient.  She walked over and stepped behind the curtain to see the obviously dead patient.  Good fun, right?   She said he was in pretty poor shape, ribs broken from the CPR and what not. 

 

We were sitting on our front porch of a rental we lived in off Greystone behind the Quarters.  We were both laughing and having a glass of wine when our neighbors drove up and looked pretty devastated.  Being good neighbors we struck up a conversation and asked how their day was going.  "Not too good," they replied.  It seems the wife's father had died that very day from....yeah you guessed it: a fatal heart attack.  My Future Ex #1 just about choked on her wine.  It was pretty funny at the time.

This wasn't so much a funny story but a commentary to the abiding stupidity of man.  The hospital had a Garp ward, named aptly for the book, The World According to Garp.

It was peopled by head trauma injuries brought about by failure to wear motorcycle helmets.  They would jokingly refer to going up to feed and water the plants.  Referencing the fact that the unfortunate patients resembled members of the vegetable family and only needed to be turned and watered. (turned to prevent bed sores and have IV fluids changed.)

My current secretary just lost her Ex-husband and father to her two kids to the same oversight.  I can only imagine that it has to be a fundamental lack of gray matter or basic IQ to think that your head is harder than a concrete road bed when impacting it  in excess of 50 miles per hour.

If you think it is safe to ride a motorcycle without a helmet.  Get an egg and drop it from about 3 feet.  The terminal velocity (velocity at which falling rate equals drag) won't be large but what do you think will happen to the egg.  Now throw another egg at the ground at about 50 mile per hour.  You think you'll be walking away if it were your head?

 

If you want to feel the air going through your hair, get a convertible.

I think it is Darwin's Natural Selection at work.

Chapter 37 Conflict of Interest

I worked in the R&D division under John Mihm and had been there for five years.  Wanting to further my career, I personally requested a transfer to an operating group and got one to the Gulf Coast Exploration group in Houston.  A bunch of us were transferred to Houston in 1986.  I arrived in Houston New Years night 1987.

Earlier that year before I was officially notified I was getting a transfer by the company, I was walking through the Frank Phillips Building Tunnel connecting to the Phillips National, I mean First National Bank.  The greeter sitting at the desk, was some one with whom I had a passing acquaintance.  You can imagine my surprise when she, as I walked by said " Hi, I understand, you're going to be leaving us?"  I assured her that I wasn't going anywhere as far as I knew.   When she say I was mystified she suddenly got sheepishly quiet.

 

You see First National Bank held the mortgage on my house. 

As it turned out apparently the people at the bank knew before I did that I was getting a transfer.  It was either a reflection of the close working relationship the bank had with the company, or someone with inside information was leaking information on pending transfers of employees.  

 

I never found out if there was any kind of sweetheart deal going with realtors or something shady, but if the info was leaked to this realtor or that, it would give them a leg up on the competition.   

To me it stunk to high heaven.  I seem to recall there was some noise about Mr. Mihm giving his wife inside into, and that there was some fallout over it.   

You can imagine what would have happened to your average Joe employee if he’d done something so egregious.  Public flogging, drawing and quartering followed by hanging of the remains would not have been adequate enough I bet. 

But remember the Golden Rule: "They who have the gold, make the rules."

 

As it was the housing market was so flooded at the time, the company bought my house and held it off the market for about six months to keep the prices higher before it was finally sold.  A guy who was dating a gal I was also dating at the time (my future wife #2 as it turned out) and was showing off all the work I had done in the house, the kitchen remodel and floors.  It was funny because I had taken her over to the house on one lunch hour before it was put back on the market and gave her a grand tour.  I knew how to get into the house even though I did not have a key any longer.  I went by the house a few years ago, and the privacy fence I put up back in 1982 is still standing.  They did at some time replace the arched oak front door with a modern piece of shit.  The old siding was replaced and a new roof and A/C was put on it before the guy bought it, so he got a bargain.  It was a nice old house.  It is the red brick one with the brick front porch, with a very steep pitched roof, almost gingerbread looking, just two houses up from the Cherokee Street split north of the high school.  A few blocks south of the Frank Phillips Mansion.

Chapter 36 Phillips 66 Credit Union

Around Christmas time used to bake assorted German Christmas cookies pack them in the little tin cookie cans from Pier One Imports and take them to the tellers at the Phillips 66 credit union. 

 

There was a tall attractive gal who worked there.  She eventually made it to head teller if I recall.  I can't remember exactly how we met outside of the Credit Union, probably at Happy Hour at Patrick's or the DI or maybe a party. I cannot remember, but I bet she could.  Women remember that kind of thing. 

 

She lived in Ramona with her parents I believe.  She was a single mom.  I don't remember much about how we started off, but I think she came home from the DI with me one weekend night.  It turned into a thing that happened every now and then.   Not always at my place but always on her terms.  She's leave early so as to be home when her child woke up.  She'd leave notes in the mailbox at my house asking if I was going to be free and if I was, then we’d meet up.  I guess we defined the term FB..fuck buddies before there was a term for it.

I remember one weekend she was house-sitting, so I met her where she was staying.  We watched TV had some wine and had sex.  Nice simple, no strings attached.

I guess she was lonely and just wanted company and sex.   Those terms are usually agreeable to a guy, they were with me.   I don't ever recall the subject of a relationship ever coming up, we just had the occasional night together enjoying each other and that was it.  I guess she had enough in her life raising a child on her own.   I recall she finally did get married again and moved out of the area.  Before I left for Houston she had been promoted to Head Teller.  She was an all-around nice young woman.

There was one fringe benefit, she would call me if an incoming check of mine was not going to clear and hold it for me till I could transfer some money to cover it.

 

I never once met the kid, so she was on the ball there.   Why?    Years later when I was dating I recall going on a date with a blond gal, another single mom and she dragged me back to her house after a date to meet her son.  If she was trying to fill the void left by the absence of the kid’s father, she was doing it all wrong.  I tried talking to the kid, and he said, “Don’t waste your time trying to be nice to me.  I know you won’t be around in a week.”  The kid was older than his years and had been irrevocably scarred by his mom’s frequent dalliances and inability to stay in a lasting relationship.  That was enough to kill any desire I might have had for GI Jane (she had just finished a stint in the army).  As much as I wanted to, I could not have bonked her there knowing her son would probably be listening to the headboard pound the wall.  I had kids of my own at that time and I didn’t want to think about them being in the same position.

This brings me to Miss Brown.  Miss Brown was a sweetie that I met at the YMCA gym.  I used to watch her pump out set after set of squats.  She had a bum on her that you could have bounced a baseball off of and thighs that would have made Mr. T cringe.  She had short blond hair and a cute face. 

 

This was just another demonstration of how small Bartlesville was and is.

 

Turns out her mother was a loan officer at the credit union.  I had gone in to open a signature loan line of credit and her mother is the loan officer I spoke with.  I don't think her mother ever knew about me.  As it turned out Ms Brown and my friendship was short lived.

 

We ran around for a short while but it was doomed because she had made up her mind to move to Tulsa.  At the time I couldn't blame her.  I wanted to leave too but was saddled with a house.  There was little opportunity for her in Bartlesville.  I went to visit a time or two in Tulsa, after she moved into her new apartment.  I seem to recall even going furniture shopping with her to the big what’s it’s name warehouse furniture place.  We went out for lunch and spent a bit of time together.  I would have liked to get to know her better, but it was not to be.  I am kind of surprised I didn’t’ run into her when I bounced at Incahoot’s but she struck me as more the country and western cowgirl, so she probably frequented Wild West or some other place on the east side.  Regardless she was a sweetheart.

Chapter 35 Crime, Canoe Trip Rules and Dale C.

We had one gal on our volley ball team report she was raped.  I never read about it in the papers.  Crime was something the powers-that-be in Bartlesville back then didn't like to publicize.  They'd rather have people victimized than let them be forewarned.  Heaven forbid that people should think crime existed in B'ville.  Two friends had their homes cleaned out by a gang of thieves.  They lived in the country just outside of town.  One off of South 75 one up in the Osage hills just over Nike Hill.  The gang would approach from the prairie side of the house and just load up trucks or whatever was handy and take everything they could.  They usually had all day to do it.

A friend and ring leader of our group of horny young people was a guy named Dale C.  His family was from over in Arkansas or at least that is where his mother was living.  He worked in the Catalyst Lab and organized canoe trips over on the Buffalo River.  We would drive over and camp on his mother's living room floor in Harrison the first night and hit the river the next day.  Imagine 20 people sleeping on your living room floor!  His mother would even get up the next morning and make ups breakfast.

Some of us would pair off with a partner on the trip, either female or male.  I had my own canoe so took a date along.  In my experience, if a gal got an invitation to go on a canoe trip and camp it was pretty well understood that there would be sex.  It is like inviting someone to go on a trip knowing ahead of time you were sharing the same room and the same king size bed.

I took a co-worker by the name of Kathy R. a very bright and sexy lab technician in the Geology Branch.  She was pixyish, short hair an impish smile and game for anything.  A months later after the canoe trip, we did a stint of field work in Paris, Texas.  We went to a restaurant in Paris, and I got some bad imitation crab, or maybe it was real crab they had driven up very slowly from the coast.  In the event I had severe Hershey squirts and was dehydrated to beat hell.  I was afraid to drink water for fear of leaving a trail of diarrhea across N. Texas.  We had to walk about 7 miles in the heat climbing fences and carrying shovels and samples.  I became weak as a kitten, but she soldiered on and carried all the equipment for me.  She was a real trooper.  I made it up to her later.

One of the other team members, who was pretty clueless, must have heard noises in the wee hours of the night and inquired at breakfast about what had been going on.   He must have been Mormon. No, even they know about that stuff, they have huge families.  I mean really, what did he expect me to say? "Oh, that was just Kathy and I boxing the compass last night on my bed..."   Cathy and I had a FB (that does not stand for face book), relationship for some time and personally I don't think it was his or anyone else's business.  Kathy left R&D to go back to school I think.  She was pretty lonely in B'ville, living in some apartments near down town; it was this square apartment complex, with a center courtyard, more like a motel.  Anyway, I don't know what happened to her we fell out of touch.

On the canoe trip we had some excitement, turned over at least once, camped at the first 12 mile takeout below Lost River and it started to rain.  We had a fun cozy night together.  I really liked that.  Didn't get too wet, not from the rain anyway.

The next day the river had risen to flood proportions and the rest of the group bugged out.  Left their rental canoes and booked.  I on the other hand had to get down stream to my truck, which I had already had shuttled to the takeout point.  It was the most exciting canoe trip of my life. 

 

I sent Cathy on in a car to the takeout point and another guy volunteered to be my second in the canoe.  We covered the 6 miles in a couple of hours.  You could not see the shore, the water was up in the trees so you had to stay in mid channel to avoid reall trouble..  We dumped once just upstream of a strainer, a flooded stand of trees.  I was able to get to shore with the canoe before we wrapped it.  Not having wet suits we were border line hypothermic.  The hot coffee we had helped.  We finally started following a guy in a solo canoe who knew what he was doing and had no further problems.  There were standing waves a good 4 feet high in some places and water would come over the bow and drench the bowman and fill the bottom of the canoe.  We were glad to make it to the take out point but were very exhilarated as well.

 

I went on more than a few canoe trips and took dates along, a single mom here, a single gal there, and we always had fun.  I tended to do the luxury canoe trip.  Cooler with food, beer, wine, it was rigged properly with no fear of loosing anything from the canoe in an upset.  Dinner might be cajun blackened fish or shrimp etouffe.  Dessert might be strawberries and cream.  Drinks, beer, wine and even champagne.

I even found a blind date; no she could actually see, for a friend from Houston.  He came up and we paired him up with her.  She was an acquaintance of my future Ex # 2 and the "Canoe Trip" rules applied and she was ready and eager to go.  Another friend and his girlfriend came along.  On the way over from OK to the river we were having a few drinks and on one stop, both Future Ex #2 and the date got out and had to throw up form the alcohol.  My buddy, he was the one who married the Indonesian gal, looked at me with a serious face, the cracked a smile and gave me two thumbs up.  He was like that.  He knew he was in like Flynn.

 

We three couples shared a cabin the first night at Lost Valley on the Buffalo.  My god she was a screamer.  My girlfriend and I lay awake half the night listening to them by the fire place.  The other couple had taken the loft and we settled in on a pull out bed by the bathroom. The couple in the loft, well the female half was so disturbed by it all; she spent the night, according to her boyfriend, with her pillow over her head. 

It was pretty humorous at breakfast the next night.  This same later on the river saw fit to pitch his tent next to mine, when I took great pains to camp away from him and the carnal soprano companion.  The next morning I got up to fix coffee and almost walked into a used condom hung from a tree branch in front of my tent door.  Those kooky crazy guys.  He was the same one who detested a pink tie I owned.  So on an occasion of me staying at his apartment, with said tie and my camera being present he waited till I was gone on an errand.  He enlisted the help of a friend, dropped trouser, tied my tie to his penis and documented it on film in my camera.

I got quite a laugh when I got the pictures back.  He though I would be appalled.  Not so, I still have the tie and the picture.  To be honest I don't' think I ever got it cleaned.  It is silk and you know how delicate silk is..

Dale hooked up with a troublesome gal from Dallas who played the jealousy card on him a lot.  She would drink want the attention of other guys, then have to deal with the consequences.  It jerked him around a lot.  He finally married her, which was not the solution, obviously.  She didn't stop or change and I lost contact with them before they flamed out.  Too bad.  She was a very attractive gal which was probably why he tried to hang on to her.  I think she had some problems though.  From a guy who married a bi-polar woman (Future Ex #3) I now know the symptoms by heart and run the other direction. 

I am sure the alcohol and drugs going around that part of the group probably didn't make things any better.

Update.  With Facebook allowing people to connect, I reconnected with Dale just in time to experience his death.  It was just a few years back.  Dale was always a trend setter.  It seems he had cancer, and just about knew the time of his expiration.  So he got on Facebook and posted a good bye to all his friends and then cashed in his chips.  It was kind of eerie, but nice in a way.  Everyone got to hear what he had to say about his life and the end of it and then if you were lucky, you had time to respond.

 

I lost another good friend and classmate to his excessive drinking and tobacco.  Sadly he did not heed nature’s and his bodies warning signs until it was too late and had a massive cardiac event that left him brain dead.  Facebook seems to have turned out to quasi memorials to people, which is fine.  We all posted pictures and memories of the guy and new and old friends got to see him in different periods of his life that they might not have known about.