Several years later federal judge Lucius Bunton compared the First National Bank to the Titanic. “The First National Bank, like the vessel, was a magnificent, extravagant, enviable Camelot,” he wrote in an opinion in a case involving the bank. “It was regarded as unsinkable, said to be designed and engineered to withstand the formidable forces of natural laws. The bank, like the liner, was doubly-supported, tightly-compartmental. If one of its parts were weakened or damaged, the other sections were designed to keep it afloat.”
It was a wonderful analogy, not only for the bank but for all of Midland. For eight years the whole area had been like the Titanic, a raucous, crazy ship equipped with every possible amenity, towering atop the nubby, gnarled brown sea of West Texas, its passengers dining every night at the fabulous first-class restaurant where between bottles of $150 wine they pulled out their wallets to show off laminated pictures of their jets and rigs and Brangus bulls, so caught up in the revelry and the merriment that they forgot it was still a dangerous, unpredictable world out there over which they had no control. Did Aaron Giebel see the iceberg looming as he built his San Simeon and dreamed his dream of cows strong enough to pull buildings? Did Tom Brown, as he took out $160 million in loans and signed promissory notes for $6.25 million without reading the paperwork? Did any of the hundreds of others who had expanded beyond all imagination? Of course not. Should they have?
Maybe it wasn’t the Titanic at all, but just a Ship of Fools turned mad by money and greed.
If Aaron Giebel was thankful for anything, it was that his son Mark had been there to witness the terrifying things that oil and money could to do a man. “I thank God that my son has been in here,” said Giebel. “He has seen all this, and thank God, he is not going to succumb to it.”
IV
In the fall of 1988, Midland and Odessa were still in the doldrums of the bust. Nothing quite as dramatic as the sinking of the First National Bank of Midland had taken place for some time, but by then people had become immune to catastrophe anyway. In July 1986, the nation’s rig count hit an all-time low of 663, some 85 percent fewer than the high it had hit less than five years earlier. At the same time the wellhead price of U.S. oil dropped to $9.25 a barrel. There was some slight improvement afterward, but not enough to make a difference. The oil production industry in West Texas had collapsed.
People had been drilling for oil in the Permian Basin for over sixty years. They had punched thousands of holes into the scrubby earth, and some believed it was only a matter of time before the place got tapped out. Unlike the Middle East, where oil almost literally flowed out of a spigot, finding it here was getting harder and more expensive. The days of the great gushers had been gone for years. It took extensive drilling to find what was there, and the yields were not enormous. When the price of oil had been high in 1980 and 1981, it was worth the cost. But when the price dropped, the frantic search for oil in the Permian Basin, and all of Texas, quickly became much less attractive. In 1987, the amount of oil produced in North America had actually been the same as the amount of oil produced in the Middle East, about 12.5 million barrels a day. But it took nearly six hundred seventy-five thousand wells to produce that amount in North America. In the Middle East, it took about forty-five hundred.
The bust had extracted a terrible toll, and the list of people and institutions that had been destroyed read like a horrible casualty list. Six banks had failed; ten bankers had been convicted of criminal activities ranging from embezzlement to fraud and received prison sentences as high as twenty-four years; hundreds, big and small, had filed for bankruptcy, and many more were still trying to extract themselves from the rubble of houses they couldn’t sell and creditors they were trying to pay off. All around were signs of what was and now wasn’t—office buildings of darkened glass in downtown Midland and Odessa that were virtually empty and had the scent of unopened boxes, streets where three-quarters of the houses were for sale, warehouse lots filled with beautiful new rigs that had never been touched.
There may not have been a more awesome graveyard in the country than the old MGF lot off Highway 80—thirty acres filled with equipment that had cost $200 million and in the fall of 1988 might have fetched $10 million—with three hundred thousand feet of new and used drill pipe up on metal stilts like pixie sticks, four hundred drill collars, and the guts of nineteen rigs.
In its heyday MGF Drilling had had about twelve hundred people working for it and about fifty-five rigs. Then the bust came and MGF, bloated with $121 million in loans from the First National Bank, was finished. It had filed for bankruptcy and was bought out by another company, Parker & Parsley, for virtually nothing.
The man in charge of the yard, Don Phillips, pointed to Rig 79, a twenty-five-thousand-foot beauty that was built for $9.5 million in 1982 and had never been used. It seemed like a steal at $2.5 million, but with the glut of rigs on the domestic market there weren’t any takers.
“We’re asking two and a half and we ain’t sold it,” Phillips said.
He drove through the yard pointing here and gesturing there, giving the history of this one and that one, as if the gigantic metal shapes in front of him were ancient artifacts that had come from a fantastic archaeological dig and were waiting to go off to a museum somewhere, the symbols of a fallen empire.
“That one right there is a fourteen-thousand-foot rig.
“The brown one right there, that’s a twenty-four- to twenty-five-thousand-foot rig.
“That rig right there was a seventeen-thousand-foot rig. It did one well. Cost $3.5 million brand-new. If I was gonna sell it, I’d try to get $400,000.”
On and on the lot went, with gigantic pieces of equipment lying in the gravel as far as the eye could see, as forlorn as bloodied elephant tusks: Rig 201 with its 144-foot pyramid and five-hundred-ton hook; Rig 202, powered by three GE Custom 8000 generators that kicked in at seven-hundred kilowatts apiece; Rig 10, Rig 11, Rig 23, Rig 203; even Rig 1, which had first been used in the fifties. It was appraised for over $400,000, but Phillips knew he would be lucky to get $40,000 for it.
Phillips drove to the last rig MGF Drilling had had running before it crashed, HCW no. 2. He climbed up the metal steps to the top of the substructure, an elevated base upon which sat the draw works and the doghouse for the roustabouts and the tool pushers. The rig was perfectly assembled, but sitting in the middle of a warehouse yard, it looked as if someone had put it together to use as a toy.
The view from the substructure was stagnant—the drab warehouses along Highway 80 with parking lots that were either empty or filled with jaunty-colored trucks that never went into the oil field anymore, the pockets of brick houses on crescent-shaped streets in half-finished subdivisions, the clump of rust-colored freight cars sitting along the railroad tracks, the ribbon of the interstate with the tiny silhouettes of trucks making their way across the country in the shimmer of the heat.
“There’s days I sit here and look and I wish all of these rigs were working,” said Phillips. “You can stand up here and see a lot of equipment. The worst part about it is, you look at good equipment.
“When I was in business, it was a dream to have a yard like this and equipment like this. Now it’s a nightmare.”
As for the boom, it had become a faraway blur, a kind of confused, powerful, contradictory dream that made some people chuckle and others wince in the retelling of it. Many said they were glad the boom was over, that it had been too wild and both Midland and Odessa had suffered for it. But others were more honest.
Leaning back in the soft chairs of their offices with plenty of time on their hands to talk and reflect, they said they had come to grips with the hard reality of the world. They loved their President Reagan and they would no doubt love their President Bush, but they knew these men didn’t make a damn bit of difference anymore. They knew their economic livelihoods were completely at the mercy of OPEC and that it was all but impossible to have much say in the matter when the average American well produced 13 ba
rrels of oil a day while the average one in Saudi Arabia produced 6,881 barrels a day and the average one in Iran 27,233 barrels. The Saudis, the Iranians, the Iraqis, they called the shots, they were the ones with the vast stockpiles of oil, not the Americans, where the holes were running dry. They set the price of oil, and that felt funny as hell. But things could always happen over there—it wasn’t the most stable place in the world, after all—and then a little devilish smile came to their lips. You could see the light go on as they visualized the days when all those beautiful rigs crippled on their sides over at MGF would be up and running once again and the whole place would be gloriously, sweetly mad and out of the lips of everyone would come that beautiful rallying cry: The boom is on!
It could happen. Anything could happen in America.
“After all,” one oilman reasoned, “we’re just another Middle East war away from another boom.”
About the only thing in the two towns that had maintained its frenzied tempo was the rivalry between Permian and Midland Lee. In 1983, when the two teams met each other in the quarterfinals of the state playoffs in Lubbock, thirty-two thousand five hundred people were in the stands. In 1985, the second game of the National League playoffs between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Los Angeles Dodgers was preempted by the local NBC affiliate for a live broadcast of the Permian-Lee game.
Forty years earlier, playwright and author Larry L. King, who had grown up in Midland back when each town had only one high school, had had the misfortune of being a member of the Midland Bulldogs when it came time to play the Odessa Bronchos.
“Their savagery was intimidating: we sissybritches Headquarters-City-of-the-Vast-Permian-Basin-Empire boys lost to Sintown by 20 to 7 and 48 to 0 in my time,” wrote King in Texas Monthly. “Only by joining the Army before my senior season did I avoid the record 55-0 plastering of 1946. High school football was, I think, a legitimate cultural and psychological measuring stick of that time and that place: many of us concluded that Odessa was, indeed, the rawer and tougher community.”
Little had changed since then, except in one fundamental respect.
The sissybritches, maybe because they weren’t thinking about building fifty-story office buildings anymore, had learned how to play football.
Never in his entire life had Mike Winchell felt more embarrassed than he had his junior year. The Rebels scored more points against Permian in a 42-21 win than any team had scored against them in twenty-three years, and Winchell’s own performance had been abysmal. With twenty thousand fans filling Ratliff Stadium that night, he had been nervous, almost scared, and had thrown three interceptions. Boobie, under the glare of all those screaming, raging, madcap fans, had trouble holding on to the ball. Jerrod McDougal remembered the taunting of the Lee players, their gleeful finger-pointing and gloating, the way they just loved letting Odessa know that its pride and joy wasn’t so fucking tough anymore and that Permian had become the new sissybritches. Even Brian Chavez, who usually maintained some perspective, had cried after the game.
But this year it would be different. Permian was rated a twenty-one-point favorite over the Rebels, and now would be the time for sweet redemption, to drive them, and everything they stood for, straight into the snot-assed ground from which they came.
The night before the game at the private team meeting behind locked doors, Gaines told the story of a swimmer named Steve Genter, who had been set to go to the Munich Olympics in 1972 in the two-hundred-meter freestyle when his lung collapsed. He was cut open to repair the lung and then sewn back up. Doctors said there was no way Genter could swim unless he took painkillers, the use of which was illegal under Olympic rules. But Genter, who had dreamed of going to the Olympics since the age of nine, decided to swim anyway—without medication. In the silent locker room, Gaines told what happened next, for he clearly saw a message in Genter’s actions.
“His face was ashen-white because the pain was so excruciating. He hits the water, he makes the first lap, does a spin turn at the other end and pushes off, and comes up for air and lets out a blood-curdling scream. Because the pain is so intense, the sound just echoes off the walls of the swimming arena. He makes a split turn at the end of the second lap, pushes off, and he breaks his stitches, his stitches split apart and he starts bleeding. They said he lost a pint and a half of blood over the course of the next two laps.
“I guarantee you, I’d want him in my corner,” said Gaines of Genter, who ended up losing the gold medal to Mark Spitz by the length of a finger. “When the chips were down, I’d want a guy with that kind of character in my corner, I promise you, ’cause he’s a fighter.”
Steve Genter had come too far to let it all go, and Gaines saw an obvious parallel. “You guys are not that much different than he was, because many of you in this room right now, when you were eight, nine, ten years old, were dreamin’ about sittin’ in this locker room and wearin’ the black and white of Permian High School.
“You guys are fighters and you have proved it. And we’re gonna have another chance to prove it tomorrow night. We’re playin’ for somethin’ very important, everybody knows what’s at stake. Everybody knows what’s ridin’ on it.”
Gaines and the assistant coaches then left the locker room to let the captains address the team.
“I don’t know about y’all, I’ve been waiting for this game all year ever since last year when we lost,” said Brian Chavez. “After that loss I just wanted to kill ’em so bad, I was just so pissed off. Last year they were the bad-asses. They came over to Ratliff and they kicked the shit out of us. This year we’re the bad-asses and we’re gonna kick the shit out of them. I’m not talking five or ten points, I just want to fuckin’ maul ’em, thirty, forty points.
“Right here, tomorrow night, that’s what we’ve worked for a whole year, off-season, all the gassers, all of their bullshit, everything, man, tomorrow night.”
Brian felt supremely confident until right before the game, when he glanced over at Coach Gaines. In the team meeting Gaines had told the players to ignore the pressure, to put out of their minds how much was at stake and how much the game meant to the people of Odessa. But as Brian stared at Gaines for those few seconds, he didn’t see someone who had blocked out those enormous pressures at all.
He saw a man who looked as ashen-white as Steve Genter.
(12)
CIVIL WAR
I
Eventually, the sobs came to an end, so did the embraces that under the gray glow of the moonlight seemed as lingering as a slow dance with someone you suddenly knew you no longer loved. One by one the members of the crowd, usually so buoyant, so unshakably optimistic, quietly tiptoed into the night.
Once they were gone, Sharon Gaines entered through the double doors of the field house with some medication for her husband. The place was empty. All those little pictures on the Wall of Fame with those square jaws and steely-eyed gazes, all those heart-shaped plaques with the inscribed, once-glittering names of this player or that one who had been the very best at running back or linebacker or lineman, all those typewritten phrases of inspiration on the bulletin board painfully culled from such sources as H. L. Mencken and AC/DC now looked like decorations for an elaborate wedding that had suddenly been canceled without warning.
In the aftermath of a win there was no place more giddy than the locker room, the players whooping and hollering, readying themselves for the spoils of victory with strokes of the comb as meticulous as brushstrokes by Michelangelo and gobs of Lagerfeld aftershave as pungent as the smell of ripened Juicy Fruit. They would leave the field house and waiting outside for them would be a haze of boosters and parents and Pepettes and cheerleaders. The faces of the parents and boosters would be etched with the same stunning kind of pride you might see in a hospital delivery room, eyes shining and brimming and filled with love at the joy of their creation. The cheerleaders and the Pepettes would be coy and coquettish and adoring, their blond hair falling down in wonderful piles as high and soft as down pil
lows, dressed in letter jackets from their boyfriends that fell to the knees and had white patches on the back as bountiful as uncontrolled clusters of daisies. For the players it was impossible, whether you were a starter or a fourth-string substitute, not to feel as though you owned the world at that very moment, that everything you had ever dreamed of, imagined, prayed for had somehow come true before you were even twenty. But in the aftermath of a loss the field house emptied quietly and quickly, as if the place was cursed and it was somehow shameful to be there at all.
And no loss had been worse than this one, by a single point to the Lee Rebels.
Winchell asked someone to walk out of the field house with him and act as if the two of them were deeply engrossed in conversation so he wouldn’t have to face anyone and hear all those people tell him how sorry they were. He knew they meant well, but he couldn’t stand scenes like this. McDougal’s eyes were red when he left the field house: he had sobbed in the stadium dressing room immediately after the game; he had sobbed on the way to the bus when he and his mother, who was sobbing also, had clutched fingers through the tiny holes of the fence separating them; he had sobbed in the locker room of the field house when he sank his head into the arms of a male cheerleader. Billingsley’s eyes were red also, but as girl after girl came up to him to give him a long hug, he realized there were possibilities in the situation he had not yet considered. “This is better than winning,” he whispered to someone with that wonderful shark’s grin.
Chavez, his hands in the pockets of his gray-and-black letter jacket, had a little smirk on his face, as if he knew exactly who was going to shoulder the blame for the whole disaster. Boobie Miles left the scene almost immediately, convinced that the coaches had deceived him into letting him think he was going to get into the game, consumed with the rage of having to melt away on the bench in front of thousands. “I’m not going to play anymore,” was all he said when L.V. picked him up. Ivory Christian, filled with so many tortured feelings about the whole thing, didn’t show any emotion one way or another. They had lost to the Rebels and instead of winning the district championship and guaranteeing themselves a trip to the playoffs, there might be only one game left in the season. But Ivory didn’t know whether that was bad. Or maybe good.