What's wrong with the petroleum picture?

'THERE must be some mistake," I said to the attendant, who didn't appear to have a pistol in his hand. Instead, he nodded toward the meter on the gasoline pump. The evidence, sure enough, was on his side: 18.6 gallons of genetic premium had been dispensed into my car at a rate of $2.68 a gallon. I had been robbed fair and square.

Still, the $50 sticker price was a shocker.

Perhaps it was the round number. Gas stations avoid whole numbers by using decimal points, such as $2.67.9 a gallon.

I remember the exact time when last hit by a $50-a-tank earthquake--the gas pump as well as the circumstance. It was Aug. 14, 1981. My family and I were packed and loaded for a 2,253-mile round trip from New York to Yellowstone Park. As I pulled into the gas lane, the attendant was rubbing his hands together at the sight of our rented recreational vehicle, a 1976 Dodge Coachman standing 11 feet high and measuring 22 feet bumper to bumper.

The seven-ton, orange-and-white aluminum RV had the aerodynamics of a brick and the thirst of a caravan of camels. The crisis of the petrodollar was cresting back then as the Arab states finally had wrested control of their oil from the avaricious hands of European colonizers. This defeat drove U.S. gasoline prices to the unthinkable triple-digit level--that is to say, at least 99.9 cents a gallon.

My RV tank held 50 gallons of regular and drank them up seven miles at a time. Filling up the tank that first morning cost $52.50.

It was gas-pump deja vu last week. Instead of 50 gallons for an RV, however, it was 18.6 gallons for a 13-year-old Audi. Inflation notwithstanding, half a C-note struck me as an outrage for a tank of gas. This would have constituted one-third of my weekly pay when I started this newspaper job. Back then, in fact, my mother, who never bought more than three gallons of Esso at a time, gave meaning to the forlorn gas station attendant in the lyrics of Chuck Berry's song, "Too Much Monkey Business": "Working in the filling station/Too many tasks/Wipe the windows/Check the tires/Check the oil/A dollar gas."

The experts maintain that the shock-and-awe prices at the gas pumps are due to increased global demands. These calm market specialists point to heavy users bellying up to the oil trough from such behemoths as China and India. Each of these developing nations has a population of at least a billion--a combined third of all the people on Earth--and may likely skew consumption for the foreseeable future.

Much of the blame for runaway oil consumption is still laid at the garages of U.S. consumers.

Looking out my back window, I can spot two thirsty Hummers as out of place on a peacetime expressway as a pair of penguins in the Arabian Desert. They recall nothing so much as the New Yorker cartoon where a potential car buyer turns down a Hummer in a showroom because he has his mind dead-set on "a helicopter gunship."

Are these Hummers and SUVs so essential to getting the kids off to the nursery? What accounts for the need to tool around in high-gloss assault vehicles that get past only about a dozen gas stations per tank? They have just as much right to such conspicuous consumption as cigarette smokers and may also have secondary effects on innocent bystanders. Is it time to curb these appetites?

Les Payne is a columnist for Newsday.