Breskin The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4835-8163-7
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 289 Seiten

Randi Bruce's hometown rocketed from a population of twenty-five hundred to twenty-five thousand practically overnight, and she wants her life to move that fast, too. By the time she lands a job as a blaster on an all-woman crew in a Wyoming coal mine, she's already been a water-ski champ and a waitress, a roustabout and a reluctant Junior Miss, a construction worker and a rock 'n' roll groupie. She's all of nineteen. Forthright, sexy, irreverent, Randi blasts coal as well as any man. Her exuberance makes her irresistible; her straightforward intelligence gets her in trouble and starts her thinking that maybe Karen Silkwood really was onto something, that the men in charge try to do to women what they've always done to the land: harness, control, rape, exploit, manage. In the diary Randi keeps during her shifts at the mine--Days, Swing, Graves--and later, at home, she tells us the story of her life on the new frontier: of dancing and drugging, of the Tough Guy Contest and Bedrock City, and of her own parents' ruptured marriage. Mostly she tells of her own longing for some kind of shelter, some kind of home amid endless wind and coal companies, amid bars and boomers of the modern American West. David Breskin's novel is a triumph of voice. His Randi Bruce both celebrates and challenges her times, and delivers to fiction an American we rarely see.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Breskin, David

Leseproben

SWING What I remember about growing up is mostly the wind. It was always pushing you one way or another, even in summer. The wind is like someone else poking you in the ribs, a distraction from being by yourself, just totally. And there were no trees out by where we had the trailer house, it was a 1964 New Moon, so the sun was really sun and nothing stopped the blowing. When Mom would go off to town, or maybe out with dad to service wells—he was in the oil field service business—they’d go off on their snowmobiles and she’d say, “Randi, don’t let the house blow down and don’t let you and Betsy get blown away.” Well, the roof would rumble in the wind, since it was only one piece, but we had the old truck tires on top to keep it down. In your high wind areas, everybody with a trailer puts something on the roof. Stones do a better job but they’re harder to get up there + there are more tires around here anyway. Anyway the T.V. would always go fuzzy and all squiggly during the best programs—we only had two stations to begin with—but we never did get blown away. And at bedtime, I’d tuck Betsy in like I was Mom, and we’d listen to it blow through the fence and up against the siding. We made up stories, about how it was going to carry us off to the North Pole, or Canada at least. And we made up a contest about the door banging. Because even if you hinged it the screen door would come loose and bang. The contest would be about how many times it would bang in a minute, and so one of us guessed and the other timed, just to make sure it was fair. And then we’d switch. I think the record was it banged like 18 times in a minute. I know that seems impossible. And when Mom and dad came back from the wells sometimes it would be after midnight. We’d wake up when we heard the snowmobiles. When it was coldest the cold made them sound like chainsaws in the snow, and we’d put on our mukluks and run to the door, and wait for them to come in. Dad would have icicles falling from his mustache and we had the Beatles by then so we’d shout “Daddy is the walrus Daddy is the walrus is the walrus is the walrus,” whatever that was supposed to mean. We didn’t exactly know. Things were slow and easy back then, and not just cause we were kids. When they weren’t working the wells they’d take me and Betsy out to the reservoir and set about turning us into waterski champs. Westhope Reservoir. They bought a ski boat with twin ‘Rudes with all their money. We competed, starting at 10 years old and at 8. Betsy was graceful and she could slalom real good. I was stronger, so I went in for the tricks—little skis, disks, jumps, fancy rope stuff, barefoot even once or twice. We’d go out to Westhope on the weekend, have red hot dogs B.B.Q. and ski, ski, ski. I remember the water rushing through my legs when I’d start—it would always swoosh and tingle. That’s why I never wanted to do flying dock starts, which they didn’t understand. Sometimes I’d pretend I was having trouble with the line or couldn’t get my tips up—that was the best. I just loved how it felt being dragged. Mom would yell from her spotter’s seat at the back of the boat, “God darn it Ran-di, you’re wasting time and fuel, get your God darn tips up!” Mom was real serious about it. She would never go in the water herself but she took lots of pictures of us skiing and glued them to the fridge door in the kitchen, so we could never take them down. Reminders of future glory, she thought. What dad did mostly is drive the boat. It was so powerful he could make it around the reservoir in 6 minutes. He knew all the angles. He could slide through the corners. He could turn back on himself and jump his own wake. He could dump even the best skiers. He was the best operator out there and everyone from town was always asking for rides on account of that. One summer we made this little jump out of fiberglass and wood and I loved going over it. It gave me that funny stomach feeling like on a swing, only more like when a plane hits an air pocket. And when you’d come down, the splash would send water everywhere. For a second you couldn’t see anything—everything was completely water—cause you’d have to crouch low when you hit. I remember before I jumped the first time dad told me, “Use your knees like the shock absorbers on the Yamahas.” I didn’t really know what shock absorbers were, I mean how they worked mechanically, but it sounded real slick—shock absorbers—just the way it sounded and those snowmobiles were pretty nice machines so I didn’t mind being compared. We’d get worn out, Betsy and me, in and out of the water all day, feet all wrinkly purple and cheeks pink like Mom’s toenail polish. Mom wanted us to be #1 in Wyoming but she knew the vacation people over at Jackson Hole had always been the best, with their money and time and all, and that got her pissed. So we worked hard at it. Betsy got up to #9 in Rocky Mountain Juniors. After we’d finish for the day, we’d eat hot dogs and Ruffles and Kool-Aid on the rocks. Then we’d be told to go play with the other kids and their families so Mom and dad could go out in the boat alone. We’d take in the rope and put on our Bruce Ski Sisters windbreakers. They were orange, day-glo. Then we’d watch them go off. They’d cruise around the lake and the sky would get big and that summer black-and-blue color like the bruise I had between my knees on account of the tow rope on my no-hands tricks. After a while we couldn’t see them—just the boat bobbing out in the middle of the reservoir, with the little green light and the little red light, and little lights above them too, which were all the stars we learned about in school which the teacher said we should feel lucky about because people in the East and the cities couldn’t see them. Mom and dad always brought a bottle with and they said they liked to drink and drift, just drink and drift. And I asked Mom once why we couldn’t see her and dad out there and she said, “That’s because we like to lie down on the bench seat together and look on up at the stars.” But whenever their heads would disappear from what we could see from the rocks, I would always turn to Betsy and giggle a little. I was older. SWING Last night he came to get me again in my sleep. He was dressed like a cowboy, but he wasn’t a cowboy. It was more like he was dressed up in a cowboy costume. And I was just laying there sleeping when he came in the front door, which should of been locked. I’m sure I locked it. But it wasn’t. So he comes in and looks around downstairs—it’s like he’s looking for something, the way you look for keys or matches, like it was something he lost. I don’t know why I could see him since my door was closed—but I could, in my head. That’s the way a lot of my dreams are. And then he didn’t find what he was looking for and so he came up the stairs and opened my door, and he walks into the room like it was his room. As soon as I open my eyes the first thing I see—because I’m sleeping on my side so I’m looking sideways and down cause I like laying right at the edge of the pillow and the edge of the bed—so the first thing I see is his boots, his black boots, coming up through the green shag carpet. And then I see his hand reaching down to brush off these little fuzzballs that had come off the carpet onto his boots, and he says, “Damn.” And as soon as he said that, I woke up. I was sort of scared. But I don’t know why really, because he might of been coming up to my room just to say hello, or drop something off, or to see how I was doing. I mean, any of the normal things your dad would do. SWING The reason I’m doing this is cause there’s nothing else to keep me from going crazy hauling coal. I mean, when music was allowed everybody had radios and everybody listened to KOAL, and that was pretty cool, even if it does play the same songs over and over. But then they decided that we couldn’t have radios in the trucks, so some of us smuggled in those new tiny little tape players that have headphones. But they caught on and stopped us. They made it a suspension if you got caught. So we had to settle for reading, which was okay with me—but a lot of the guys were bummed that don’t like to. Long romantic paperback stories could get you through a week probably better than anything, except getting interrupted was bad. So mostly I just ended up reading People or Time or one of Spike’s Penthouses. But pretty soon they decided that we couldn’t have reading in the trucks either, cause there were still too many little accidents going on and mistakes being made. Nothing major, but still. Of course everybody knows what’s really causing all the screw-ups. The company isn’t so dumb that they don’t know. But it’s a lot harder for them to stop all the candy and the crank and the weed and stuff, so they took everything else away instead. Which figures. So now all us haulers are left with nothing to do but haul. And it makes the deadtime—like being loaded or waiting to dump or waiting on a blast + breaks and downtime—it makes it really dead. So all I got to do is sit in my truck and think about Spike, who is my sexy supergreat old man who works for Antelope Exploration and is going to be making beaucoup bucks pretty soon and is going to be marrying me pretty soon. And thinking about all of it sort of drives me crazy, so I have to have something else to do. Sam suggested it actually. She said, “You’re always telling stupid stories about stuff. Why don’t you write them down to keep from going stir.” See, they kept Sam on blasting when...