Here is a pic of the Oklahoma sky, taken as I walked out of the WalMart near my house.

Fiction South

Like almost everyone else in today’s economy, my finances have suffered greatly in the past six month.  Unlike almost everyone else, this is not my first rodeo.  I was a millionaire before turning thirty and dead broke before I reached forty.  Now, at my present age, I am neither.  Today’s events bring back memories when times, at least for me, were much worse.

I cannot remember the exact date, but it was sometime in the nineties.  Oil and natural gas prices were in the dumpster with no one drilling any wells or buying any geologic prospect.  I had a deal in Coal County, Oklahoma and thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.

I had an old friend named Don, a petroleum engineer that got a showing for me with another petroleum engineer.  We met Neil, the other petroleum engineer and his geologist Dave in a sleazy motel room in Dallas.

“This is a great prospect,” Neil said.  “I think Dave and I can sell it for you but we can’t pay your price until we sell it.”

Neil was a bankrupt oilman that had gone from rags to riches, and then back to rags.  When I met him, he was somewhere in between.  Despite my own personal difficulties, I thought I was the best oil finder alive at time.  Neil was not intimidated by my swagger and showed me a couple of tricks about economics and return-on-investment that I still use today.

Dave was about my age and a crackerjack geologist.  He could not find oil like me, but he understood every concept of petroleum geology.  Together, we honed the prospect until it was near perfect.  Then the unthinkable happened.  Neil developed pancreatic cancer.  He fought the disease like a trooper but lost his fight in less than six months.  By this time, Don had started work with a would-be oilman, intent on starting a dynasty.

Richard was a Wharton MBA graduate, and related to the family that owned one of the most famous retail stores in the world.  He bought the prospect for ten thousand dollars, with the proviso that I would help him promote it to other oil companies.  He paid my traveling tab and for the next year, I earned enough air miles for ten free tickets on Southwest Airlines.

This story is quite complicated and I could easily write a four-hundred-page book about it.  To abbreviate, Don and I showed the prospect more than a hundred times, from Houston to Los Angeles, and managed to place fifty percent of it.

Richard got a divorce and lost interest in oil and gas, the prospect never drilled, at least by anyone whom I sold it.  Newfield drilled horizontal Woodford Shale well in the same section last year and completed it for a couple million cubic feet of gas a day.  No one ever drilled my deeper zone, and probably never will.

Don’s wife, Mary Kay, succumbed to Alzheimer’s, much like my Dad.  Richard’s money kept Anne and me afloat for a while and I remember the people I met and the things I learned with fondness.

As I think back, filtering the past through the rocks of time and age in my brain, I consider my own life, and my relationships, both failed and successful.  I also remember Anne, my shining star that never abandoned me, despite my failures.  Anne died eleven years ago today.  As I recall the past, some of it happy and some of it painful, I realize that I will miss her until the very day that I die.

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