The Driller

By Roger Girard

From an eighth grade education I worked from being a driller's helper to a driller, worked in construction and real estate, and started an international drilling company. I am a self-made multimillionaire, polo player, miner, and helicopter pilot. Dreams do come true if you work for them. The more I worked, the luckier I got.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Aug 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9780228854951

Roger Girard

I was about nineteen years old in this picture. We would spend months in tents when it was -30 or -40 degrees outside. The drum in the background held water to wash our faces and hands.Persistence is the key to success.

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 by Roger Girard

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-5493-7 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-5494-4 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-5495-1 (eBook)

Wolf Lake

The Driller, Le Petit Guy de la Rue Dallaire

Roger Girard 8 years old.

Contents

My father

The Mystery

My friend

First High School Dance

Lucky

Older Woman

Meeting the Mother of my Daughter

The Driller

Starting to be More Business Man

Broken Leg

The Hair Cut

The Black Monday

The Equipment

The Musket

Lost in the Desert

The Kidnap

PR in Hermosillo

Acapulco

Safari in Tanzania

Las Vegas

Meeting My Best Friend, Mike

Duck Hunting

The Split Up

My Twenties

My Cousin

My Younger Years

A Sad Love Story

Raped in Durango Mexico

For the Love of Gold

My Mining Prospector, Edward

A Frenchie in New York

Waiting

My Fantasy

The Door of No Return

The Ghost of Lake Dupras

Global Warming

My Stairs

Len

My Hero

My Brother, Gerry

Lying and Stealing

Brokers and Gold Shows

My Uncle Paul

My Love for Horses

Violence in Movies

My Columbian Girlfriend

Afterword

My father

I became responsible at a young age.

My boyhood ended on a sunny Sunday afternoon, August 28, 1966. I was eight years old. Normally on summer weekends, my family was at our cottage by Lake Dupras, my favorite place in the world, but for some reason, we stayed home that weekend. My father had been drinking since around 10:00 a.m. with the next-door neighbors, a young couple who had just moved in with their three young girls—two years, three years, and five years old. Those three girls were part of our lives growing up, and we are still good friends today.

Around 1:00 p.m., my father’s friend came and picked him up to attend a racecar event in front of the Rouyn-Noranda Airport at Belvederes race track. My father had a purple 1966 Thunderbird convertible with a white interior, a beautiful car and the current Car of the Year. The friend left in his own vehicle that day, and my father left in his Thunderbird for the race track.

My family has had the property at Lake Dupras for over fifty years. After the original cottage burned down, a year after tragedy hit our family, my mother kept the land until I was old enough to take care of it, even though it was a financial burden for her while living on welfare. It must have been tough. At sixteen years old, I build a log cabin on the property that lasted for twenty years—not too bad for a teenager who knew nothing about construction at the time.

That Sunday afternoon, when my dad was at the racetrack, I was kind of bored. The house was empty. My mother was with the neighbors, and my older sister, Françoise, was chatting with a friend, not caring if I was there or not. I was not interested in a couple twenty-two-year-old girls likely talking about their boyfriends, so I decided to climb onto the rooftop by way of a tree that grew close to the house. I would often climb the tree, then jump to the roof and sit watching the neighborhood from above.

About 4:00 p.m., I saw a car pulling into our long driveway. The house was built about forty-five meters from the road, and my rooftop seat gave me a clear view of the driver. I knew instantly it was the guy who had come earlier on this sunny Dimanche As the car approached, the thought struck me: my father was dead. I climbed down the tree and found my sister, still chatting with her friend. I told them Dad was dead, and they ignored me, so I repeated Dad is dead. Dad is dead before the guy in the driveway even got out of his car. When you’re eight years old, nobody listens to you.

Suddenly, the friend of my sister stared at me, and I saw her face change. She grabbed my sister by the shoulders. Your father is dead.

She had a flash of realization too, I guess. I ran outside where my father’s friend was meeting my mother. In a very soft, calm voice, he told my mother that Ludger had a terrible car crash.

My mother paused for a second, thinking. Is he dead?

Yes.

The sunny Dimanche in August turned into a nightmare at that confirmation. To this day, I remember the realization that hit me like a bolt of lightning, telling me that my father was dead before anyone in the family knew, before that guy in the car delivered the news.

Joke

A couple are lying in bed after they finishing making love. All relaxed, the woman asks her husband, If I die, would you remarry?

The husband answers, Maybe after a while, with time, if I meet another woman, yes, I would remarry.

Would you sell our house?

Yes, I’d sell the house not to have those memories in this house following me around.

Would you sell my car?

I guess so. No use having two cars.

After a long pause, she asks, Would you give your new wife my golf set?

No, no. She is left-handed.

My father

The next day when I woke up, I thought it had been a bad dream, but as people came from everywhere to tell us how the accident that killed my father really happened, I quickly realized it was not a dream. We heard all kinds of rumors—that the 1966 Thunderbird had mechanical issues with the steering wheel, that my father had a heart attack while driving. One person told us he was behind my father’s car when he saw the hood of his Thunderbird suddenly pop open, which blocked my dad’s view, and he ran straight into a CULVERT in a ninety-degree curve.

The real story is that my father was drunk and wanted to enter the race with his Thunderbird. The racetrack official did not want to let him race, and they got into an argument. My dad grew really upset. Piss drunk, he got into his car, pressed the petal to the metal, and hit the highway at 100 miles per hour, tires screeching. He never saw the curve and hit the stationary CULERT full force, which moved it about ten feet. The impact was so great that his car was like an accordion. The steering wheel crushed his chest. The doctor told my mother that Dad died instantly because the impact was so powerful. The next-door neighbor who had been drinking with my father that Sunday morning thought about how he would have been with my father that day if he had gone to the racetrack, but the man was too drunk to go. My father killed himself because his veins were full of alcohol, leaving a family of eight children alone with my mother.

My father at the airport with my mother going to receive his Best Car Salesman award from Ford. He once sold twenty-eight cars in a single February, the slowest month for sales.

My father in his twenties wearing leather boots

My parents in love

The Mystery

In June of the same year, my two oldest sisters, Rachel and Denise, had run away from home without telling my parents. The only one who knew was Françoise, the youngest of the three girls. When the family came back from the cottage that particular weekend, Françoise, who had stayed home, was crying. My parents tried to get her to explain what was going on. After a shedload of tears, she managed to tell them that Denise and Rachel had fled to Montreal or somewhere in that direction; she kept saying she did not know any more than that. Both parents were trying to make her talk. Where? Why did they leave the house? No clear answers came out of my sister’s mouth.

My father was very protective, especially of his Denise at nineteen years old and of Rachel who was twenty-one. The reason the girls would run away was eating up at Ludger. How could they leave without anyone even noticing their bags were gone? After two weeks in the big city, one of the girls called knowing Ludger would probably be calm enough to hear their explanation for why they fled the family home. As an eight-year-old, I did not understand what was going on but knew something was not right. Apparently after talking to Rachel, our dad accepted that his girls were old enough to be on their own, and he even sent money to pay their rent in Valleyfield, Quebec, where they both found jobs in order to survive.

My mother shared, after my father died, that he thought Rachel had probably gotten pregnant, which would explain their decision to run away. My mother thought the same. When the girls heard the news from home that their father was dead, they came back for the funeral. It was then that the reason they fled was revealed to my mother. It was Denise who was pregnant. I guess my father died with mere suspicions in his mind, not facts. Now the hard part was coming—where would this baby be born? In those days, being a fille-mère was a hell of a sin. Parents of unmarried daughters normally would give the baby for adoption or force the couple to marry. Abortion was a solution too. My family even thought of telling the neighbors, once the baby was born, that the baby was my mother’s, saying she was pregnant when Ludger died so that my sister would not to be tormented by the Catholic Church, which was a strong influence in those years. The churches were still full at that time in Canada. Neighbor kids my age had to go at 7:00 p.m. in the middle of the week to listen to the priest offer mass on the radio. Imagine a young girl in this context with no religion. The neighbors would say, The Girard family are the devil’s children. We still do not know why, but apparently my dad came home one day and told his wife, Noella, that religion was out of his house. He had his oldest son baptized in the Catholic Church, but none of his other seven children were welcomed into the faith. This is why we all spoke English. The Catholic school would not accept us because we were not baptized, so Ludger sent all of us to the Protestant English school. I think that was the best gift Ludger gave us. With Rouyn being a French-speaking city, we were ahead of the French crowd, listening to English news, movies, and miniseries. By the time those programs were translated into French, they were finished airing on the English channel.

The Catholic Church wanted to control the people by keeping their followers ignorant, speaking one language, staying in Quebec, and making as many babies as possibly, once married of course. Keep them poor by having big families to feed. Large families could not afford to educate their children. Parents in the 40s and 50s in that area had eight to sixteen kids, which meant lots of mouths to feed and no cash for education. Our neighbor near the lake cottage was from a family of twenty-six children, none of them twins. Her father worked in the field with eighteen of his sons. There were no doctors or lawyers, bankers or politicians in that family or in most of the other Catholic families nearby. People from other religions outside Quebec had only two or three kids, leaving enough money to educate them. Then, the children would work in Quebec, holding the best jobs and earning the best salaries. They enjoyed lots of money, plus they had the dumb Catholics for cheap labor to work in the mines and in forestry, all owned by English companies and operated by educated professionals. The Pacific Railway was owned by English companies and even the goddamn hockey team.

Henri Richard, Quebec’s best hockey player of all time, started to wake up and the province began to wake up as well. It was the era of the Church keeping the people ignorant and poor to control them, especially keeping them from speaking two languages. What the hell—two languages? They would become smart and leave Quebec. Across the globe, most people speak three to five languages. Later on, when Rene Leveque was elected prime minister of Quebec, he wanted to follow in the footsteps of the Catholic Church by passing a law not allowing parents to send their children to an English school. They continued the same shit; keep the dummies dumber, and keep control of them staying in Quebec. Boy, oh boy, did I see people struggling outside of Quebec not knowing a word of English. No wonder when I was growing up the French would say, les modi englial [they have our jobs]. The Catholics invented the lying and bullshit the government followed. Someone who believes in this shit has to be out of his mind or a perverted. Adam and Eve must have had a pretty good sex life in order to populate this planet. If the firstborn were a son, he had to ball his mother. If she were a girl, Adam had to ball his daughter, or the sisters and brothers would ball each other. Imagine the mother, the father, and the children all having sex together at night. Very interesting. Maybe that’s why the priests have tendency to rape little boys and girls. They wrote the book.

I always respected my mother for what she decided when my sister gave birth. She said enough was enough with those Catholic believers who wanted to judge her. She told her daughter, You will come home with your newborn. It’s your baby. It is the most natural thing to give birth. You will stay under my roof. The hell with what the neighbors will think or say. My mother weighed about ninety-five pounds wet but had strong character. She meant what she said. When a shower was given for my sister’s baby, the family was surprised by all the attention from the Catholic neighbors who came with gifts and support. I guess the times were changing. A month after Ludger died,

Life Without Guidance

My father was a very well-known man in Rouyn-Noranda as a top salesman for Ford. He was awarded for being the best salesman in Canada by the Ford Motor Company ten years in a row. His death was on the front page of the Rouyn-Noranda newspaper. The whole town knew him. He was always driving the Car of the Year and had a big cigar in his mouth most of the time. He once sold twenty-eight cars in the month of February, which was the slowest month of the year to sell cars. Being well-known and making more than an average living, my father gave his family everything we could want—new cars, a boat, lots of toys, bikes, and more. I still remember my father coming home late from work bringing us apple pies and Chinese food from a restaurant. I remember the milkman bringing twelve big bottles of milk, chocolate milk as well as white, then the bread man would come with dozens of loaves of bread, donuts, cake, whatever we wanted. My father was a very generous man. I will never forget him taking us to school one winter morning, and seeing kids from a very poor family—there were maybe four kids—he grabbed them all and drove them in his car to SS Kresge, which was like the Wal-Mart of today. The kids had no winter clothes, no gloves, no boots. They were half dressed. My father dressed them in winter clothes from head to toe. I still remember this gesture from my father like it was yesterday. I will never forget that cold winter day that brought a smile to four kids’ faces who were lucky my father had a big warm heart.

Going back to school that fall was a burden. I walked into the schoolyard feeling everybody watching me, like I was from outer space. When I finally arrived in my classroom of about thirty-two kids, I could feel sixty-four eyes watching me as I walked to the back of the class. A female classmate had her hand up, twisting and bouncing in her desk seat, trying to get the teacher’s attention. Once the teacher asked what she wanted, the girl, in a very excited and, it seemed to me, vicious way, exploded with the news. With red cheeks, she stood up beside her desk and exclaimed, "There was a big, big accident, and the man that died was Roger’s father." I wanted to crawl under my desk. I sat at the back of the class, and she was in front. I suddenly saw the sixty-four eyes turning to stare at me. Luckily, the teacher took over, hushed everybody, and started to write on the blackboard to change the topic. I guess it was very nice of her. Slowly, school started to be normal again, but our life at home was not normal.

Life at home was not too bad for the first two to three years after my father passed. My mother had gotten an insurance payment from the accident, so we still had the phone, heat, and food in the house. When winter came, I had to act like the family man, shoveling that long forty-five-meter driveway every time it snowed. Even though we did not have car, this was done to show that the house at the end of the driveway was still inhabited. Then my brothers would come with their cars, or my sister’s boyfriend or a taxi would come down the driveway I remember my brother Gerry giving me money to clean the yard. Even when he was away working in other town, he would still give me money for my shoveling when he would come back home. He was a good brother to me, helped me a lot in my teens. He told me he would talk to me about the birds and bees. He said, Birds shit on your head, and bees stings, and then he added, You do not get the girl you want; you get the girl you can. That was his short version of my sexual education.

After a couple of years, my mother had spent the insurance money. I saw the telephone torn out of the wall by the phone company and the gas for heating the house closed off. Everything came at the same time. The house was falling apart because of a lack of maintenance. The roof started to leak, and my mother would put pots and pan under the leaks at night. I could hear the water drops falling from the leaking roof, and tears of sadness would roll down my cheeks. That was the year I started to realize I needed to help my mother as much as I could. I learned how to repair the roof and the windows. In the fall, I would put plastic outside the windows, so it would get less cold inside. I made a kind of veranda to keep the wind from getting in. It was a matter of survival.

Later, as teenagers, we were in school with no telephone at home. We could not call a friend or be called. My sister came back from working in the Yukon, and she had the phone reinstalled in the house. The phone number was under her name for as long as I could remember. She then convinced my mother to apply for welfare, which she did. By now, the last three children were at home as, eventually, our older sisters and brothers were living on their own. My brother Gerry stayed a bit longer, helping pay bills, and then my mother’s brother came to stay with us, giving his pension to my mother and helping a lot.

Joke

Two lesbians were my next door neighbors. I always said to them, I wanna a watch, I wanna watch So one day, they bought me a Timex.

Joke

John and his wife were at a cocktail party for a special event in London. John’s wife saw their friend Robert from a distance with a stunning red-haired young woman. Is that our friend Robert? Who is that woman with him?

It’s his mistress, the husband replied. A second later, a blond woman passed by and gave John a kiss on the cheek.

Who was that? asked the wife.

My mistress.

Your mistress? Well, it’s a divorce, for sure, she angrily told her husband.

Be reasonable, my dear. You would lose all your condos in Paris, London, New York, all your credit cards, the private jet, the beach house in Miami, the shopping around the world.

She looked at Robert’s mistress again. Well, our mistress is much prettier.

Joke

I feel sorry for people who do not drink because when they get up in the morning, it will be the best they will be feeling all day (Dean Martin).

Joke

An elderly woman walks into a grocery story. She asks the young clerk if she can buy half a cabbage. The young clerk tells her that he needs to ask the manger. He walks to the manager’s office and tells him, There is a stupid old woman who wants to buy half a cabbage. As he says this, he notices at the corner of his eye that the elderly woman has followed him. Immediately, he says, And this wonderful woman wants to buy the other half.

At the end of his shift, the manager goes to see the young clerk. You had wisdom today with that woman who wanted to buy half a cabbage. You think fast. I think you may be a good manager. There is a position opening in Rouyn-Noranda.

In Rouyn-Noranda, he replies, only prostitutes and hockey players are living there.

Hey, the manager says, my mother is from Rouyn-Noranda.

Oh, what hockey team did she play for?

My friend

My uncle was so strong it was unbelievable. He would stand in a steel five-gallon water pail, grab the handle with one hand, and lift himself up. Try this sometime.

My uncle knew exactly the date and hour he was going to die. The judge told him. The family always knew he was innocent. His version of the story was that he was peeling an apple with his knife outside the poolroom, and a guy came running out, tripped, and fell on my uncle’s knife. The judge just could not believe that the guy fell four times on his back on my uncle’s knife, but we believed it.

Joking aside, my real uncle, my friend, the guy who introduced me to spaghetti sauce and red wine, Yvon Frechette, my mother’s brother, was a character. He traveled all over the world. He left home when he was fifteen and managed to reach Vancouver from Quebec. In those days, that road was gravel, tough to travel even by bus or hitchhiking by car. He got a job on the commercial boats and traveled the world in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It was quite an experience for a young man from Quebec. He learned to speak English, and he became fluent in Spanish. He had the most interesting stories I ever heard. I loved to hear him describing his trips to France, China, Spain, Russia, Japan, and Mexico, just to mention a few countries he visited. He went to bordellos all over the world. He tasted all kinds of different foods and wines. My family was not used to hearing those kinds of stories or enjoying different food, so one Saturday afternoon, he came to my mother’s house with two big bags of groceries and a gallon of wine and told the family, Tonight I am cooking dinner, an Italian spaghetti sauce. We had never heard of that. My mother made pasta with only tomato sauce or with ketchup.

Hungry?

Yvon Frechette’s Famous Spaghetti Sauce

1 full onion, diced

3 green peppers, chopped

1 whole celery, chopped

14 large mushrooms, cut in thirds

1 and 1/2 pounds ground meat

1/4 cup olive oil

Fry these ingredients in a large pot until the meat is brown. Add a dust of garlic. Next, add the following.

2 tablespoons heavily ground black pepper

1 tablespoon salt

Enough hot red peppers to make your tongue sting

1 tablespoon red hot chile sauce

500 grams’ whole tomatoes

80 ounces tomato juice

1 small can tomato paste

1 cup red wine to finish

Simmer on low for three hours, stirring frequently so as not to burn the sauce.

After that Saturday, we had Italian spaghetti every Saturday for as long as I can remember. My mother had the recipe, so she would make her own sauce, adding her special spices, of course, and then once my siblings and I left home, we all made our own spaghetti sauces. My uncle told me that you need to drink red wine with Italian spaghetti. When I realized how true this was, I started to say that Italian spaghetti without wine is like having sex alone. I remember one Saturday having our favorite dinner and drinking red wine when I about seventeen years old. My uncle used to tell me, Apprend a boire comme du monde. I have been drinking red wine since.

At one dinner, after drinking about half a gallon of cheap wine with my uncle, around 11:00 p.m., we both decided to hit the town. I left with my motorbike, a 350 horsepower Honda, half trail, half road, and I am still wondering how I did not kill myself with that bike. My uncle left in a green Volkswagen Beetle. He had that car about twenty-five years, changing the motor from time to time, a small air-cooled four-cylinder engine in the back of the car. In the winter, there was no heat or defrost, so he would drive the car in his Ski-Doo suit, big winter boots with felts, and a big fur hat. He would drive and at the same time scrape off the ice on the windshield inside in order to see where he was going. What a sight. After we both hit the town, we went our separate ways and came back home in the early hours of the morning and went to bed. A few hours later, I could hear tires spinning in the gravel and the motor of the Volkswagen growling at full speed, like it was stuck in the mud or something. What the fuck? Is this still a hangover from too much drinking? I got out of bed to have a look outside, and there was my uncle in his car. He had tied the back bumper to a big tree in the yard and was trying to straighten out his bumper. He had backed in something or another, a car or a house; he could not remember where or what. He had stories like this most of his life. He lost his driver’s license more than a few times, but it was always the cops’ fault. They rigged the machine, he used to say, just to take my license away from me. I was sober. He once told me he was walking on the sidewalk when the cops stopped him and warned him not to drive his car. In this drunk man’s mind, he was sober, and it was the cops who did not know what they were talking about. He jumped in his car and drove for about 500 feet where the cops were waiting him. He lost his license again.

Yvon was five feet, three inches tall, with a full head of black hair. He looked twenty years younger than he was. In a bar with his nephew and older brother for a beer after work, at a time when someone needed to be twenty-one to order a drink, the waiter asked for my uncle’s ID to see if he was old enough to drink. Looking at Yvon’s ID, the waiter’s face froze—Yvon was forty-two years old. The nephew was barely twenty-one. Yvon was young looking until he died at the age of seventy-six from stomach cancer. It’s no wonder he died of stomach cancer with all his homemade booze, making wine with any and every wild fruit or flower. Once when the yellow flowers that grew in the spring blossomed like balls of wool and the pollen danced in the air, he told me it was time to go trout fishing.

Joke

This guy tells his wife, I am going trout fishing for a few days.

Yes, I know, exclaimed his wife, your trout just called.

After coming back from a long weekend fishing trip, the husband tells his wife, You packed my suitcase for my fishing trip, but you forgot to put in any underwear.

The wife looks at him with concern. I put them in your tackle box.

Yvon invited me to taste his wine made with red Cormier, which grows on trees near grapes. One can’t even eat the Cormier because it tastes like ear wax.

Taste this, Roger, the best wine I ever made.

He poured me a glass, and I took a sip. I spit it out faster than it went in. How fucking disgusting this shit is. How the hell can you drink this shit?

His one-bedroom apartment smelled like a graveyard, not a vineyard. He had an idea to make medicine with natural plants, so he went to the bush to collect birch. He was cutting the tree down to get the birch from the top to make a tea, but those tees were protected by law, and he got caught on his first birch-picking trip. He was fined 500 dollars for cutting the trees down, and that was the end of birch medicine. I still can hear him barking at the government with all their fucking laws. What a character he was. He was scared of bird feathers until the day he died. How can a grown man be scared of feathers? He made himself other medicines, like the time he put beaver kidneys in forty ounces of cheap cognac, let it sit for a month or so, and then drank that shit he called medicine. The problem was that he drank it all in one day.

He never got married and never had children. I asked him why, and