Oilhead - By N.L. Belardes

Originally written as a contest entry a few weeks ago...

Oilhead
By N.L. Belardes

South Bakersfield in the 1980s is a dusty memory of New Wave songs once spit on by punk friends of mine; they pierced themselves in each other’s bedrooms while laughing hysterically at Duran Duran. I sat on the outside of their world. I peered at my only conduit: MTV. “In a big country dreams stay with you. Like a lover's voice fires the mountainside” —fuck yeah. Only I didn’t understand the words then. “I just listen to the music,” I said to Greene. He carried books with Van Halen stickers plastered on them like Band-Aids. He was as freckled as the punks were fair-skinned eyeliner-wearing freaks. I probably would have became a freak but I shattered my leg while on vacation in San Jose and limped through the rest of my high school years not knowing who I was: someone extended not much farther than Garanimal clothing lines and after school music videos. I only liked the music I saw on MTV. Not heard—saw.


“What are you watching?”

My girlfriend wants to know why I watch the Animal Planet Steve Irwin re-runs. I swear it’s not the Garanimal connection—the cheap Montgomery Wards Corduroy rip-offs of OP. “MTV.” I lie.

For some reason I think of those old punks. They date-raped girls, wore make-up stolen from Merle Norman, and took whatever they wanted from convenience stores. They got kicked off busses and fought every cowboy they could get their hands on. I didn’t want to be them. I was intrigued by their rebellion. Even when a date-raped girl didn’t go to the police but got a group of girls together and buttfucked one of the punks with a cucumber. She and her friends said he liked it. “Trevor likes it deep in his ass. Come here little fucked up Venus Penis boy,” Veronica would say in the high school hallways. He turned gay and sissy punk ala Information Society. She became the holy high school outcast, sacrificed by the administration for being a punk slut junky. Junky, yes. I knew her. But I didn’t want to be her.


When I finally grow a Mohawk, it’s not until I drop out of college to go work in the oilfields. That’s me now. I’m confused. Am I a metalhead or a punk fuck? You tell me. It’s the working class music scene here. It’s the crossover mix and working class rebellious angst of fucking the MAN with screaming music; whether punk, pop punk, rural rock punk, metal, new metal, or post-hardcore screamo shit. It’s the first time I feel I belong to anything. Even as the college newspaper star columnist I was on the outside looking in. When I wrote about politics in the Buzzer, who was I interviewing anyways? No one. And then the alt city paper, the HonkyTonk, same shit—this is fucking Bakersfield, where Buck Owens’ ghost hangs in the shadows above newspapers, swirls above pool halls and his old restaurant where his body lay in a casket on the dance floor for two days straight. He was friends with the Beatles. He had more than a dozen country hits. He built a radio Hee Haw empire. He was a fucking punk rock country fucker.

That’s music history.

My columns, politicized bullshit, opinionated ramblings, Clinton-hating, Bush-bashing, and dreamscape pontifications about Bill Thomas raping my ass over a congressional office desk. Who cared? No one. I rarely got emails loving or hating my articles. “Write toilet paper poems,” was the only email retort I can recollect. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I feel like I know more now that I’m in the working class Bakersfield culture: the music, the work, the oilfield thought patterns.

The oilfields? I wanted to be outside, in nature. I was tired of offices and deadlines from fucks who cried about ten-hour days in an office. I couldn’t afford to live. I needed money. An old punk needing cash. Why? To live. Give me natures best: oil slicks from the deep. The Earth is as flammable as I’ve become.


Tonight an ashtray shaped into an empty skull sat on my kitchen table. As if some Mayan priest put it there. As if there were a cliff outside the front door leading into a volcano and I was about to be shoved into it. I’d already survived the volcano. I should have listened to the news when the Yemeni fucks were found in Bakersfield, when the anti-terrorist marches went down taunting the fucks to come to Bakersfield of all places and take on the working man’s blues... Who’d have thought they would have started busting asses in Bakersfield, the land of the UFW, where Nieto and Santos and all the Chavez relatives congregate for peace and love and Latino pride—the unification of immigration sensations and “Si Se Puede!” screamed in the thousands at Jastro Park, all the way to the courthouse and back. Only no hunger strikes this time. How many immigrants died in the bus explosion? I ignored the final statistics. It was too much.

I’m thirty-one and my girl pulls the ashtray away from me. “Quit your smokin’ you shit. You’re going to look like Kenny Rogers before long. Your face is going to be pulled funny from being so dry.” I could see something in her she wasn’t letting out. It’s her humor. It was biting, more so than usual. I winced. My torn sleeves on my blue work shirt weren’t so tough. My scars weren’t so tough. I’d flown from the bus like a circus freak. My body language showed that I was willing to hear it.

Say it.

Words don’t come out of me, just out of her. At first her lips are moving. I act tough like I don’t even hear her. My Mohawk is a rippling mane.

She’s talking about moving out. I can hear the national anthem. I can hear U2 playing at the Superdome. I can hear names being read at Ground Zero. I see fire and smoke rising from a metal wreck of a transit bus. I see punks who once hung out at the downtown pervert corner in pieces, or shredded, or moaning, and…

“I’m moving out. I don’t give a shit what happened to you on that bus. I don’t care what you’ve seen or been through. I am moving out. I’m just not ready to do this and I’m pissed as fuck.”

She can see love in me. I continue to whisper to myself: And then time moves backward, yes, to the point of an explosion, and before, to me sitting on the bus. Why am I even riding the bus? Because that’s what my friends do. We’re looking for a fistfight. Skin heads and hardcores. We want to fuck each other up.

“You’re making enough money in the oilfields. Go get your own place.”

She’s being a bitch; and she’s pissed that her dad left town on a long haul to Boston—from California, and never came back. I’d rather watch the oil wells pump each other anyways. I just need a six-pack to watch that shit.

She would fuck every guy in Blink 182 if she had the chance. But she’s punk hardcore and is a big fan of Screeching Weasel and the Queers and locals like the Twenty-Eights. She goes to the Bakersfield shows to see bands so obscure they’re not even going to be heard of more than six months later. She doesn’t care that I’m some sort of punker, or metal freak; that I don’t really know who I am. She didn’t care that I went to college and wore surfer shirts and did my homework.

The people I associate with now sit around and listen to podcasts. They surf local moderate and left wing blogs and write hate comments as some kind of societal online mutilation of bloggers. “We’re warmonger SPAMpunks,” they say. They’re subversive fucks who waved signs at the immigrant supporters at recent immigration protests. They made signs like, “Go home Latineeemericans!” and “Aliens belong on other planets not in the USA!” They added their own blood to the paint. Don’t ask me how.

When I went to college I was obsessed with Internet news. I wrote what would be considered politicized articles sympathetic to immigration. “Let them jump over fences or dig their way in like moles. I support them,” I wrote in the article, Build Walls of Freedom By Jumping Over Walls Of Freedom. I didn’t hold signs when all my oilfield metal and punk buddies were protesting against the protestors. I told them I was throwing up. I was. I really got fucked up over that. I’m fucking half-vampire and couldn’t make those protests my first blood with anti-terrorism signs. Although I suddenly want to smash my girl in the head with one. I can’t hear very well anyways. My ears still ring.

“You turned down a book deal. You were a writer. Now look at you. Metal-punk fuck.”

At what? Me? Because I didn’t take advantage? Who are you?

I’m not Yemeni but I suddenly feel like one. I feel like the fucker at the cigarette shop who got caught before the terrorist explosion in Bakersfield. He was selling goggles to Yemen. He was a spy. He was trying to buy government secrets. He’s a fucking hero to his fellow thugs. Now some Hezbollah fuck loosely related to that Yemeni fuck ruined my hearing and scarred up my right arm—my tattoo sleeve honoring all that is black widowish in the world. Latrodectus. She evolved right in a Bakersfield Honky Tonk.

But now that I’m on the inside. That’s the difference. I was twelve and watched the local surf punks steal magazines from Circle K and play video games with slugs. They became punks, heroin junkies. I stayed in school.

“I’m out of here,” I say, slam the door and head downtown.

At the bar a pregnant punk singer screeches and grits her teeth. She holds onto a blue Telecaster and can barely get her fingers to form bar chords. Her jaw flexes; she sweats and so do I. I’m just a gawking punk with scabs. She sings but can’t move much. I can’t blame her. I’m on a barstool and lean back on the counter. A cloud of smoke envelops my sweaty tan head. Temperatures reached a hundred-and-five degrees earlier in the oil fields. Rivers of oil. We’re all floating on them. Fill up my bath with the shit. Light a fire. Au naturale punk fuck death. It doesn’t feel much cooler in this Bakersfield dive.

Cockroach ghosts gotta be amongst the ice cubes in this dive. My kind of place.

Her trimmed eyebrows attract me more than the radiant glow of her pregnancy. It’s the delicate nature of precision waxing. What else can it be? Her brown eyes are filled with a moment of remembering lyrics, melodies and grungy punk guitar chords. She rolls her eyes. I imagine her over me, loving against my sweat, tugging on my Mohawk. I can tell her tits are more voluptuous than any I’ve ever seen. “Fuck if I haven’t seen a woman more beautiful.” I bark the words into the punk riff din. No one can hear me but me.

I smoke and squint; I sweat and slam a cigarette out in a plume of electrified smoke which sends an ashtray spinning. Smoking is supposed to be illegal but this is Bakersfield. Smoke holes abound. Suddenly the noise of music is too loud to my near-deaf ears. I reach up to the stubble on the sides of my head—soggy sandpaper roughness and my misshapen skull makes for a sleek Mohawk that stands three inches. My blue-buttoned work shirt hangs oily. I tore the sleeves off en route to a lead well earlier in the day. “What the fuck did you do that for? Are you fucking subhuman?” my boss said.

“Cause I fuckin’ wanted to. I don’t want my arms ripped off in a pinch.” My boss stood cold as if chiseled from the hard valley earth. He walked away. He would have kicked my ass if I said one more word.

Now I want to look at the Internet, read the news, forget about the bar, cigarettes, and my instant ex-girlfriend for a moment. I’m fucking subhuman I think and walk out of the bar, jump in my white Ford 150 and head toward the Kern River overpass. Midnight streets mean the occasional glow of a city building lit like a 1970s lava lamp. The architecture glows from the inside, hollowed, moving shadows, silent heat. Trash-lined Chester Avenue gutters are a shadowy cut on the main drag. The explosion was right there. I pass by 19th Street. A tree trunk misses its upper half. It looks ripped by lightning. A fucking hand snapped it in half. The gore of everyone long swept into the gutter and drained of cultural differences.

I turn away and suddenly feel like I’m in a typical Central California town lost in its own decades-old cultural residue. A Honky Tonk isn’t far away. My punk transformation still ferments. Wait, am I a metalhead or punk? A Dead Kennedys CD lies in moving streetlit moments and shadows on the passenger seat. It’s next to nu-metal Korn’s latest release, and Buck Owens greatest hits below that.


Bakersfield bars are a little bit farther down the chain of human understanding than a bar in let’s say, Santa Barbara or Hollywood. After all, it’s a city with subculture and culture in a constant flip-flop. A punk could be a business owner. A business owner could be a punk turned cowpunk.

I walk into the Honky Tonk. A big Budweiser sign glows a deep red. I immediately move to the bar and order a Budweiser. A few neon signs glow their suggestions for a drunkenness I need. A few girls move behind the bar. “You’re that fucker from the bus,” says a cowboy next to me.

“Fuckin’ leave me alone. I like Buck Owens,” I say.

“Bullshit.”

“If I pull a Buck Owens CD out of my car will you shut the fuck up?”

I’m smaller than the cowboy. But I don’t care. He looks like a skinhead to me all of a sudden. Is this how I deal with it? Who do I fight? Myself? The cowboy? My beer? We stare at each other as several other cowboys come by. “Get the fuck out,” one says. “Punk fuck survivor,” says another. I can’t even see his face. It’s too fuckin’ shadowy. I hear grumblings from the others. I see nothing but cowboy hats and moustaches. I smell cologne and feel like I should be in Wranglers. Karaoke is going on at the stage. I recognize Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee”. The bartender offers everyone a beer and advises me to leave after mine. I’m staring into the darkness, at faces I can’t see. And suddenly I take a swing…

*N.L. Belardes (2006)

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