Most of what I’ll be writing about is true to the best of my knowledge, some of it I think is true, and some of it just makes the story better. Like the opening line in the movie American Made says “ This is a lie based on a true story.” - Jim Beath.

When I was eighteen years old, I spent the winter doing basic training, and A.I.T. for the Army in Fort Leonard Wood Missouri. It was the first time that I experienced temperatures below zero. I camped in a pup tent for a week in temperatures below zero, I guarded an empty shed one night in a blizzard, threw a couple  grenades, and shot an M16. I was trained how to use an air filtering respirator, they called it a gas mask back then. I was told to go into a building filled with gas while wearing it, told to take it off when I was inside, recite the Army’s three general orders, and then exit the building. I still remember one of them to this day, and live by it when I work on a job that has night, and day shifts.

I will not leave my post until properly relieved. More than a few times I smoked a cigarette,  ran, and sang cadence all at the same time. I had a Drill sergeant named Sergeant Faultz. He was a big black man close to seven feet tall, who would take us on marches, and yell out “DOUBLE TIME MARCH!”, then we would all start running in step with each other the best that we could. He would start running in reverse, pull out a pack of Newports, light one up with a Zippo lighter, and yell out, “ SMOKEEM IF YOU GOTEM!”  

All of us smokers would fumble for our cigarettes and lighters while running and trying to keep in step, all the while, Sergeant Faultz sang cadence and shouted obscenities at us for not being in step as he ran effortlessly backwards, grinning and smoking his cigarette. I did push ups with two lit cigarettes in my mouth and  Sergeant Faultz’s foot on my back once as punishment for smoking while on fire watch. Army basic training is something I’m glad I did, and I recommend it to any young person who is willing to suffer a little to become a stronger person.

After eight weeks of basic training there was a graduation ceremony, my real dad California Mike, who was a navy veteran made the trip to witness it, and so did my mom. My step dad Driller Mike didn't come to it. During the summer before this I was sent to California to visit California Mike to have the driller part of me de-programmed. That plan resulted in me throttling California Mike's neck against his garage wall one night when he tried to discipline me because he found pot seeds on the floor of his car that he let me borrow. I didn't like him pushing me by poking his finger into my chest, so I grabbed him by his throat and pushed him into the wall. It was the first time I saw fear in another man’s eyes, and I liked it because I thought of it as a little bit of payback for the day my mom found out that he had an apartment with another woman living in it. After the graduation ceremony mom and dad flew to Texas to spend a week together, and decided that they were going to get back together again. My mom flew back home, California Mike flew to California, packed up his belongings, made the trip to Florida, and moved in with my mom.

In between basic training and A.I.T. we were given three days leave to spend with our family members who came to graduation, mine didn't stick around. I wasn't going to waste three days off sitting around the half empty barracks doing nothing. So I took a nineteen fifties model government taxi to the gate for fifty cents. At the gate me and another recruit took a civilian taxi into Waynsville, the town just outside the gate, and chipped in on a double bed hotel room. It seemed like the whole hotel was filled with only recruits who had just finished basic. There were drunken parties in just about every room. I got a mohawk, reopened the hole in my left ear with a paper clip and wore it as an earring until I returned to the base. 

I returned to the barracks on time but feeling hungover, and was greeted by Sergeant Faultz who ordered me to drop and give him fifty. Fifty was way too many, twenty was the norm. I dropped, gave the sergeant his push ups and thanked him when I was finished, then he said in a loud voice, “Beath, as of tomorrow morning I’ll be training another group of recruits, until then your ass is still mine! You have double fire watch tonight , you're not on the roster but you will take the place of the two lucky sons of b*tches who are on it at zero two, and three hundred hours! Go to the barber and shave off that damn mohawk!” 

The next morning my platoon started training for our M.O.S. as heavy equipment mechanics, A.K.A. sixty two bravos. For eight more weeks I learned a lot about safety by watching movies off of a real to real projector titled “Don’t be a three finger Joe.” how  to repair dozers, pan scrappers, loaders, and backhoes with wheels and with tracks. It's very easy, anyone can do it,  just open a United States Army repair manual, and do what it says to do. I also learned the basics on how to operate them all. I was good at that because of my experience digging and cleaning mud pits on a backhoe with wheels.

When A.I.T. was over I was given orders to report monthly to a reserve unit in West Palm Beach, dropped off at the airport in Missouri, and flew to Orlando where my mom picked me up, and drove me to a welcome home party at her house. It was like I just came back from fighting in a war. It was all very nice but I didn’t want to be there, so I packed a small bag with enough clothes for two or so days, and snuck away to Driller Mike's house. When I got there, there were two men in the house, one named Terry, and the other one Dennis. They were both Mike’s buddies from Michigan where he grew up, and they were both Vietnam war veterans. I didn’t know either one of them, but they Knew of me from stories that Mike told them. We drank some beers, I told them about my experiences in Missouri, they gave me some sheets and a pillow, and I went to sleep on the floor of an empty bedroom. We didn’t call Mike who was now living with the realtor lady who helped him buy the house, instead we surprised him. In the morning I rode to the rig with Dennis and Terry in the back seat of a green seventies model Ford Maverick.

This job wasn’t in a grove, it was in a sewer plant, and we were drilling a monitoring well about two thousand feet deep. Mike was glad to see me, and welcomed me back with a big hug. He explained to me that Sr. and Jr. left because they had other work to do in the groves, but I soon found out that they found other work because they weren't getting paid on time. The job wasn’t going very well, so far they lost a kelly guide roller, and a twelve and a quarter inch lead bit from a three stage hole opener. 

They were able to drill through the roller, but fished for a month trying to get the bit out, and ended up calling in Rainbow Fishing Tools to take a down the hole impression, and build a tool that caught it on the first try. Then we lost circulation, and spent a fortune on lost circulation material that Mike paid for through the company that was drilling the bigger, deeper injection well at the same plant. They were the ones who contracted Mike to drill the monitoring well, and they were also paying and providing the three man crew that worked on our rig at night. They were paying Mike, but a lot of money was coming out of his checks before he got them. The big rig's tool pusher broke both of his legs when two forty five foot joints of six inch drill pipe rolled off the pipe racks onto his legs. Mike had a dog named Bumpy that fell asleep in a pot hole at the plant and got run over one night, while sleeping in the hole. Mike was drilling during the day, and he put me on the brake most of the time so that he didn’t have to do it, and could look for more work. Me, Dennis, and Terry weren't getting much pay, but didn’t have to pay to live in his house and we had enough to live on. Cigarettes, beer, and food in that order was all I thought I needed back then.

We finally finished that job, and had the rig towed to a big cattle ranch owned by a judge in Fort Drum, because we couldn’t drive it on I95, the Turnpike, or any main roads. It wasn’t legal, the derrick now stuck out about fifteen feet in front of the cab, the tail lights didn’t exist, the drivers seat was a deep sea fishing fighting chair, and it probably wasn’t insured, but we used to drive it from one grove to another. Mike drove the pipe truck, a cab over Kenworth with an overloaded flatbed trailer, not to where the rig was going, but to the yard behind Brother Dale’s shop. Meanwhile back at the ranch; we bolted on a rotating green light in the crown, raised the derrick, connected the wires from the light to the rig batteries, started it up, and went home. That night I was sent to check if the rig was running, light on, and fill the fuel tank. A couple of days later we lowered the derrick, drove the rig to a grove owned by a lawyer in Fort Pierce, raised the derrick, and turned on the green light. We were doing some repairs on wells that had holes rusted in the casing, or got hit by tractors, and every once in a while we would drill a well if someone really needed one. We were moving the rig around a lot, getting paid regularly, and Mike recuperated financially from the big loss on the monitoring well.     

There was another driller in town, I'll call him Tom because he’s still alive and in the country. He used to hire a guy with a nice back hoe and dump truck to dig his mud pits and clean the location afterwards. That back hoe guy also had a very big and fast deep sea fishing boat, a huge fancy house. He had a corvette, a big fancy pick up, and a Harley Davidson for himself and one for his wife too. There were rumors that he made the money for his equipment, boat, and big house by smuggling and selling cocaine. His wife was also the sister of the judge in Fort Drum who owned the property that we used to set the rig up on. One day at the ranch in Fort Drum one of the cowboys figured out why we were rigging up and not drilling. He got there early, found a bag filled with bundles of coke that a plane would drop where it saw the green light. I wonder if the pilot was Barry Seal? Mike was accused of taking the drugs, and was at the house one day when we weren't working. I was in my room exercising, and looking out the window into the front yard where Mike and Dennis were drinking beer, when Tom pulled up with the backhoe guy right behind him. Tom got out with a pistol in his hand pointed at Mike, and the backhoe guy tackled Mike and pinned him down in the grass. I ran out of the house, dove into the backhoe guy, knocking him over and was on my knees punching him in the face. Remember the snake gun that Jr. shot the gator with? Terry grabbed it out of the truck window and put the barrel against the side of my head, Mike tackled Terry, and all the while Dennis was sitting on a porch swing that was hanging from a tree, enjoying the show and a beer. It didn't take long for them to find the guy who took the drugs. He was trying to sell it in bulk to someone that Tom knew. The backhoe guy sent a couple bikers from a "one percenter" club to his house, and he gave it all back without a problem.

I guess Mike was making more money than he could manage to take care of himself, so  he hired an accountant to do it, or someone else involved made him do it, I’m not sure, but Mike wasn’t happy about it. Every week I would have to go to the accountant’s house and take my paycheck and Mike’s out of his mailbox. Within about three months after the accountant came into the story, the backhoe guy stopped coming around. He got caught because someone from his past got caught and talked. Tom seemed to own the guy’s equipment after that. The backhoe guy talked as well, and I heard that he went into the witness protection program. The accountant disappeared too, along with all of Mike’s money. Mike went to prison for a year and a day, and Tom didn’t get in any trouble at all. He stopped drilling, bought a barge, and started shipping cement to the Cayman Islands. The Lawyers and the Judge who owned the land where the drops were being made started a bank, along with the guy who was The County Sheriff at the time. Mike’s house got sold to support his girlfriend, who he had a daughter with, and one on the way. Sr, Jr, and Dennis drilled in the groves, and Terry went to work for Tom. 

I took a job drilling house wells for a State Representative named Ken Pruitt in Port Saint Lucie, on a Gefco rig called a mini star, putting in two or three, two inch wells per day. It was then that I realised that cigarettes, beer, and food wasn’t all I needed. Mike was gone, he wasn’t blood kin to me, but he understood, and cared for me more than anybody with the last name of Beath ever did. I needed something to fill the void in my life that was my step dad, and extra beer seemed to do the trick.

I hope you enjoyed this story. It's a little longer than it should be. In the next episode I’ll tell you about the time I got a DUI while Mike was in prison, and while I was in the holding cell waiting for the bus to take me from the courthouse back to jail, the door opened and in walked Mike wearing an orange jumpsuit, and handcuffs. Until then drill’em straight, and try not to fill your voids with extra beer.