The Jeans Seller
Clatter-clatter-clatter.
The sound of plates and forks knocking together.
Beside a plate of bacon fried crisp and brown, the soybean paste stew my mother had cooked was sending up a steady curl of steam.
An American-and-Korean breakfast table side by side—a perfectly ordinary immigrant family morning.
I had overslept for once.
A privilege reserved for college students home on vacation.
When I took my seat at the table, I saw my father and my uncle wearing freshly pressed shirts, stiff with starch.
They looked a little strange without their grease-stained work clothes, but I supposed I’d have to get used to this too.
My mother tugged lightly at my father’s collar.
“Honestly, I still can’t get used to it. You look just like some bookish clerk. I liked you better in your work clothes.”
“If I’m being honest, so did I. It still doesn’t quite feel real. When I wake up before dawn, I still reach for my work clothes out of habit.”
“Big brother, I’m the same way. The second I put on a tie, my stomach starts acting up.”
My uncle chimed in, chewing on bacon.
I watched my family with a spoon in my hand.
Our family’s gas station business had now expanded into a franchise operation.
The owners of the franchised stations—including Grandfather Morgan—handled the truckers from dawn on, while my father and uncle only had to manage crude supply and settlements.
In the past, my father had been up at four in the morning dealing with truckers before sunrise, and at night he’d wrestle with thermometers while adjusting valves at the refinery.
My uncle, meanwhile, had spent his days lying under rusting cars in the junkyard, inspecting the undercarriage and scavenging useful parts, with grease never quite leaving his hands.
Now the field staff handled all of that, and my father and uncle were left with management and oversight.
Of course, they still went out to inspect the sites and handled problems personally when something came up, but they no longer had to wear their bodies down for money the way they used to.
This was the very picture I had wanted to create first after my regression.
An environment where my family could stay healthy and live long lives.
And I truly, honestly hoped that everyone working with me would gradually come to enjoy the same things my family now had.
Then—
“Oh, right. Last month’s settlement results are in. Can I talk about them now?”
My uncle asked my father.
My father looked over at me and nodded.
I nodded too.
Refining crude didn’t just produce gasoline and diesel.
I had been selling and distributing the many byproducts created in the process through my uncle.
Specifically: sulfur, petroleum coke, asphalt, tar, paraffin wax, and petrolatum—better known as Vaseline.
Crude refining was the process of separating components by temperature in a distillation tower.
Light gases escaped from the top, while heavier components remained as you went lower.
And at the very bottom, in the high-heat zone above 350 degrees Celsius, what remained was the byproduct residue.
In the old days, it had been nothing but a nuisance that cost money to dispose of. Now each one had become a tidy source of income.
“First up, sulfur. Fifty-five dollars a ton. We shipped 150 tons last month, so that’s a total deposit of $8,250. How’s that? Pretty good, right?”
My uncle read the first item aloud and jabbed my side with an elbow.
Sulfur was a yellow solid mixed in with crude as an impurity.
During refining, it was separated through a desulfurization unit, and it was mainly used to make ammonium sulfate, a key ingredient in fertilizer.
“I heard a Dow Chemical rep came by last week, so from here on out we can just send the inventory straight to the fertilizer plants.”
Sulfur was an essential element for plants to synthesize protein.
That was because it formed a core part of the amino acids cysteine and methionine.
If a crop lacked sulfur, no amount of nitrogen fertilizer would make it grow properly.
On top of that, in the alkaline soils of the American West, sulfur even helped lower pH.
From staple crops like corn, wheat, and soybeans to crops like onions and garlic, where sulfur compounds determined the flavor—demand for sulfur in American agriculture never let up.
My uncle moved on to the next item.
“Second, petroleum coke. That’s running at about thirty dollars a ton these days.”
“You said last month’s output was around 200 tons, so that comes to roughly $6,000.”
Petroleum coke was a black solid mass of carbon created when crude residue was thermally cracked at high temperatures.
It looked almost exactly like charcoal, but with a higher calorific value than coal, which made it popular as industrial fuel.
My uncle nodded.
“These days, the aluminum smelters are buying it in bulk. Don’t ask me why.”
“Probably because they use it for electrodes when making aluminum.”
“Ooh—Harvard teaches that kind of thing too? First antiques, now this. My nephew really does know all sorts of things.”
“Power plants in Texas are burning it instead of coal too. It’s cheaper by heat value. We might as well sell it through both channels.”
At last, my uncle read the third item.
“Third is asphalt, at $110 a ton. Trucks haven’t stopped coming to the scrapyard because of this stuff. We shipped 120 tons last month, so that’s $13,200.”
Asphalt was the black residue left at the very end of crude distillation.
It was sticky and highly viscous, and when mixed with gravel, it became road-paving material.
My uncle had been dining and drinking with Texas Highway Department people a lot lately, according to him, and that probably had everything to do with the highway construction boom that had continued ever since President Eisenhower’s days.
Roads had to keep being laid, and they had to keep being maintained. Demand for asphalt was endless.
And since it could also be sold to private construction firms, not just the highway department, I could already picture the many salesmen from construction companies swarming around to butter my uncle up.
My mother flicked my uncle on the head.
“You’re not going to those clubs full of strippers every night because of all this hospitality, are you? Keep it up and see if the IRS doesn’t rip you apart.”
“What, no. I’m never going to places like that now that I know they could put a tail on me. Forget it! Next is tar. Ninety dollars a ton. Eighty tons shipped, so $7,200!”
Tar was similar to asphalt, but thinner and mixed with more volatile components.
It was mainly used for roofing waterproofing and preserving lumber.
“The timber companies buy the hell out of it. They need waterproof coating on roofs, and it has to go on utility poles and railroad ties too. If you don’t coat it, the summer sun just melts everything down or rots it away.”
“Uncle. What about the paraffin wax?”
“Oh, that was next anyway. Four hundred and twenty dollars a ton. We shipped 60 tons, so that’s $25,200.”
“Wow, that’s gone up a lot. I think it was $350 a ton last year.”
“Yeah. Wax is crazy expensive these days.”
Paraffin wax was a white solid wax extracted from crude oil.
It was the moist, melting substance that dripped when you lit a candle—that was paraffin wax.
It was essential in candles, lip balm in cosmetics, cheese coating, and crayon manufacturing.
“Which company was it that made crayons again? They’ve even put down a deposit and are waiting.”
“Crayola?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
Crayola was America’s national crayon brand, born in Pennsylvania in 1903.
It supplied crayons to schools and homes all across the country and produced more than three billion of them every year, all of which contained paraffin wax.
“And finally, petrolatum. Seven hundred dollars a ton. We shipped 40 tons just last month, so that’s $28,000.”
Petrolatum was a semi-solid jelly commonly known as Vaseline.
It was separated along with paraffin wax during crude refining and divided into industrial and pharmaceutical grades depending on its level of purity.
“There are a ton of buyers for that stuff. Cosmetic companies and pharmaceutical companies are all going crazy over it. Lip balm, hand cream, ointment for wounds, anti-rust coating for car batteries... there were more, but I forgot. Anyway, it gets used in all kinds of ways.”
“So all together, that should bring in around $100,000 a month.”
“More exactly, it was $90,000, but last month was a little light, so averaged out that’s about right. For the record, it’s all cash.”
One hundred thousand dollars a month... a full hundred grand.
In a year, it would almost certainly blow past a million dollars.
And that was only from selling the byproducts, on top of the profits from crude sales.
I need to fold this money into the income from antiques sales and rentals, then report it together.
In the shop, we were genuinely selling antiques and vintage goods, and if I mixed the refinery’s cash earnings into those revenues in the right proportion, it would all become clean, legitimate income with a proper paper trail.
From the IRS’s point of view, the tax categories might be different, but as long as the taxes themselves were being paid diligently and in full, they wouldn’t have much of a case against us.
Besides, I had already settled things properly with Team Leader Alfie Solomons, and even now I was still feeding him information on major tax cheats by drawing on my pre-regression knowledge whenever I could, so I could put aside any worries about a tax audit for a while.
What remained was where to put all that laundered cash.
I already had that figured out.
As if he had read my mind, my father asked at just the right moment, “Son. Cash is piling up pretty well these days. What do you plan to do with it?”
“I’m going to buy more land around Wishville Mine. I want to build a mart, a motel, dormitories, and a large restaurant there.”
“Hmm? I thought you said you were going there to dig gold. Why all of a sudden a mart and a motel?”
My mother, sitting nearby, asked the question.
I gave her a little quiz.
“Mother. Do you know who made the most money during the California Gold Rush in 1849?”
“Hmm. Let me think. The mine owner? Or a lucky miner?”
“Wrong.”
In 1848, gold was discovered near Sacramento, California.
The rumor spread across the United States in no time, and by the following year, 1849 alone, 300,000 people had poured into California.
A mass migration unlike anything in history.
But of the people who actually mined the gold, only a tiny fraction became wealthy.
The miners returned home mostly penniless, crushed by brutal labor, disease, and the collapse of gold prices.
But in the middle of that chaos, one man became truly rich.
Who was it, you ask...
It was the jeans seller.
In 1853, a young German immigrant named Levi Strauss arrived in San Francisco.
He hadn’t come to mine gold.
Levi Strauss had come to sell goods to the men mining it, and the goods he brought were canvas cloth for tents.
That tough fabric was used to make tents for miners camping out, and that was where Levi Strauss discovered an unexpected demand.
The miners who bought tents all complained about the same thing: their work pants wore out far too quickly.
Kneeling, digging, scraping against rock, falling into muddy water—of course ordinary cotton pants wouldn’t last even a month.
So Levi Strauss began making pants out of the tent canvas he had brought with him and selling those instead.
Later, he reinforced them with copper rivets at the pockets and used a tough twill fabric imported from the French region of Nîmes. That fabric was called de Nîmes...
what we now know as denim.
And those pants became the beginning of jeans.
The company he founded, Levi’s, is still selling jeans all over the world more than 140 years later, and Levi Strauss became richer than any miner without ever digging up a single grain of gold.
Gold mines are nice, but the people they attract are even better.
With knowledge from before my regression, I had discovered a genuine gold mine.
And thanks to that same knowledge, I already knew exactly how many people would flock there, how much infrastructure would spring up around it, and what kind of city would eventually be built there.
“Once the mine takes off, thousands of technicians and laborers will pour into the area. Wishville is nothing but a backwoods dump right now. There isn’t even a proper mart, lodging, or restaurant. If I build the only mart, lodging, and bathhouses there, what do you think?”
“Just the thought of it is incredible. You could knock out dozens of towns the size of Garden Queens in no time. You’d be the one collecting taxes there. In other words, you’d be no different from a governor. And on top of that, you’d be the owner of the mine—the very source of power in that area...”
“That would make you basically an emperor in your own territory, wouldn’t it?”
At my uncle’s words, I nodded.
“If we develop this oil field, we’ll have that kind of standing even within Garden Queens.”
“Unbelievable. To think you could become a king in your own hometown. Just imagining it makes my blood run hot. Could this uncle get a little piece of the pie too? As the king’s uncle, I mean.”
My uncle let out a snicker, and my mother reached over and pinched his ear.
“There you go again, thinking about strip clubs, aren’t you!? You’re just using your nephew’s name so you can grope women’s chests!”
“Ow-ow! Damn it, you got me again—how’d you know!?”
Anyway, my blueprint was now almost entirely on track.
All that remained was to actually develop it all for real.
I ordered a cup of coffee at Daisy’s Diner, a restaurant-cafe in the suburbs.
Stephanie, who was working part-time there, had come over and once again asked me to show up at the reunion, and I had answered that I would, sliding her a hundred-dollar tip.
Before long, the person I was supposed to meet today opened the café door and stepped inside.
...Ding!
Vito, who had come driving a red Ferrari, sat down in front of me.
“This time I even arrived thirty minutes early... and I still ended up being late, Boss.”
“You can take your time. I came here early because I like this restaurant.”
I handed Vito the title deed I had found in the abandoned warehouse.
...Mining rights registration completed — the owner of this certificate shall hold exclusive rights of exploration, extraction, and disposal over all mineral resources buried within the above zone, and these rights may be transferred, inherited, and pledged under the protection of federal and state law...
I went straight to the point.
“The time has come. I’m going to file a quiet title action against the county government and the state government, based on this old document, to confirm the mining rights for Wishville.”
A quiet title action was a legal procedure that officially established ownership or rights to a specific piece of property through the courts.
In the case of mining rights, ownership of the land above and the mineral rights below were often separated, and when a company that had acquired mining rights in the 1920s went bankrupt or shut down, it was common for no one to know exactly who had inherited those rights.
Land in that state was called clouded title.
The documents I had could serve as evidence proving the legitimate chain of succession for these mining rights.
Vito stroked his chin.
“Since they’re so old, it may be difficult to have them recognized one hundred percent. Still, I’ll fill in the rest with lobbying.”
“There’s a lobbyist I’d like to recommend for that. Would that be all right?”
“If it’s the Boss’s recommendation, of course he’s trustworthy.”
At Vito’s words, I thought of Caroline’s father.
Then Vito asked, “Boss, you sound as if you’re absolutely certain there’s gold in this mine. Do you have some kind of evidence?”
“That would be...”
Just as I was about to answer Vito’s question—
“Sanha! Sanha! Phone for you! It’s that number you asked for!”
Worth every penny of the hundred-dollar tip, Stephanie came running over breathlessly to deliver the news I had been waiting for.
“It’s Team Leader Armstrong! He says he’s looking for Sanha Lee, the president of the SalmonPink BirdEater Mining Company... Wait, you had a company too? You’re the president? Wow, just how successful are you!?”
Leaving the flustered Stephanie behind, Vito and I moved deeper into the café and took the call.
Armstrong’s voice came through the receiver.
[President! Can you see the fax right now!?]
Previously, I had instructed Armstrong to run a sonic survey based on the map of the mine interior that had been discovered in the abandoned warehouse.
The fact that Armstrong was now worked up beyond measure was a very promising sign.
I asked calmly, “Tell me. What happened?”
Excitement was thick in Armstrong’s voice.
[We cross-checked the underground deep-scan data with the 1920s map you gave us! And this is... I can hardly believe it! At a point 350 meters below the X-marked location on the map, we detected a strong resistivity anomaly. Its electrical resistance is dramatically lower than the surrounding granite layer. That’s a textbook sign of a hydrothermal alteration zone. It means there’s a huge quartz vein down there. A quartz vein containing gold! And very high purity gold at that!]
The note some nameless geologist had left behind a hundred years ago hadn’t been a mere scribble.
It really had been a treasure map.
Armstrong reached the conclusion.
[Even allowing for the data margin of error, this is certain! There’s something down there! And it’s huge!]
“When can we begin a full-scale geological survey?”
[We could have started yesterday if you’d given the word!]
“Good. Start right now.”
[Yes sir! Understood, President!]
I hung up.
When I turned my head, Vito was already gathering the papers.
“Looks like this is really... something big is about to happen. This smells like a jackpot. We shouldn’t be standing around.”
“That’s why we’re moving fast. Prepare the lawsuit paperwork immediately. Cost doesn’t matter—assemble the most expensive lawyers you can find.”
“Leave it to me, Boss. I’ll clear every obstacle out of your path.”
“I’m going straight down to Wishville now. I need to see the geological survey site myself.”
“Then I suppose I’d better go meet that lobbyist. I’ll see you on site, Boss.”
Vito saluted, then dashed off in a hurry.
I turned away, leaving two hundred dollars on the table for the phone and fax charges as a tip.
“Oh my God. He’s so, so cool.”
From behind me, Stephanie muttered it out loud, deliberately and very, very loudly, as if she wanted me to hear every word.