Boomtown Quotes

Woman,” he growled into my ear, “You were mine before we even left the bar.  I saw you walk in and knew right then and there that you were going to be mine.” 

I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet’s world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy.

The meaning of life is life itself.

Trust can be one of life’s greatest rewards, but it can also be the cause for the most destruction in one’s life.

And to fight this beast of wrong is what I intend to do. To do otherwise is to sidestp this rabid injustice.

You’ve looked in the mirror long enough. See everything as if it were narrated by another.

Gossip is an unavoidable evil at school, work, or wherever, but when the HR department gossips, it elevates into malice.

Every player eventually loses all their money.

... there is no magical formula to beat the casino. None. Save your money. Save yourself from the cons of an author and the cons of the casino.

It felt wrong for me to push Lady Luck to the side and for me to choose who ought to be 'lucky'. It didn't seem right. It wasn't fair.

Showing that those lost weren’t forgotten, nor unappreciated.   Chills

Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno.

In whatever decisions you make in life, you have to run them through a series of logic tests to make sure that there aren’t better alternatives. Don’t ever accept anything blindly— good or bad.

Since the beginning of time there have been people who see themselves as being above the law. To them the laws don’t apply. These people often hold positions in government and in the corporate world. Does a similar mentality exist within the casino world? You betcha!

A choking dry-ice smog of disappointment, pooling in the drops and troughs of suddenly uncertain ground. Mudyards, wit here and there the smoking wrecks of ideologies, their wheels and radios gone. River of litter rustling in a swollen course below the sky's black drag and in the ditches mustard gas, a mulch of sodden colouring books, imploded television sets. These are the fretful margins of twentieth century, the boomtowns ragged edge, out past the sink estates, the human landfill, where the wheelchair access paving quakes, gives way like sphagnum moss beneath our feet. It’s 1999, less like date than like a number we restore to in emergencies. pre-packaged in its national front hunting. It’s millennial mummy-wraps. The zeitgeist yawns, as echoing and hollow as the Greenwich dome. It’s April 10th; we find ourselves in red lion square....caught in the crosshairs of geography and time like sitting ducks, held always by surface tension of the instant, by the sensory dazzle. Constant play of light on neural ripples. Fluttering attention pinned to where and when and who we are. The honey-trap of our personal circumstance, of our familiar bodies restless in these chairs.

I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet’s world devoid of poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown energy. There are three Zen Gnostic assemblies and four High Muslim mosques in the town, but the real houses of worship are the countless saloons and brothels, the huge marketplaces handling the fiberplastic shipments from the south, and the Shrike Cult temples where lost souls hide their suicidal hopelessness behind a shield of shallow mysticism. The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

Eisner as Disney CEO in 2005. JONATHAN “JONY” IVE. Chief designer at Apple, became Jobs’s partner and confidant. ABDULFATTAH “JOHN” JANDALI. Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno. CLARA HAGOPIAN JOBS. Daughter of Armenian

It was hardly a boom-town, but it was a faltering step in the right direction.

ROBERT IGER. Succeeded Eisner as Disney CEO in 2005. JONATHAN “JONY” IVE. Chief designer at Apple, became Jobs’s partner and confidant. ABDULFATTAH “JOHN” JANDALI. Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno. CLARA HAGOPIAN JOBS. Daughter of Armenian

ROBERT IGER. Succeeded Eisner as Disney CEO in 2005. JONATHAN “JONY” IVE. Chief designer at Apple, became Jobs’s partner and confidant. ABDULFATTAH “JOHN” JANDALI. Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno. CLARA HAGOPIAN JOBS. Daughter of Armenian immigrants, married Paul Jobs in 1946; they adopted Steve soon after his birth in 1955. ERIN JOBS. Middle child of Laurene Powell and

I live by the belief that if you work hard and do the best you can, at the end of the day sleep comes easily for the dollar that was earned honestly. It was a lesson instilled by my parents. It was a lesson that I have always followed and found to be quite accurate.

Back during the early 1920s the Carpin brothers ran the small slapped-together oil boomtown a few miles east of Stinnett in what was little more than a den of bootleggers, gamblers and other criminals of low order. During those days of the roaring twenties, men on the far side of the law either rose to the top of the heap or got stomped under. For a brief time the Carpins were on the top of that heap. When Signal Hill was cleaned out by the Texas Rangers in 1927, the former boomtown imploded and the Carpins, who had managed to avoid arrest and capture, had dispersed.

This person sees not her own hand depositing the next dollar in a slot machine, but the hand of fate, or God. It’s her true conviction that there are forces at work for her to win a large jackpot— or at least to win back the money lost. After all, the only-for-show pictures of fruit had almost aligned with one another the last couple spins.

Move aside Ebola, smallpox, and AIDS; make room for narcolepsy. I would become shunned and avoided. Perhaps the people at the casino thought that this fatigue disease was contagious. Just because I yawn and you yawn shortly after doesn’t mean that you have suddenly been infected with narcolepsy. It would be silly if they had in fact thought this.

My casino experience is to someone else their experience with their employer, of how the company has elected to behave solely for greed, profits, and spite. But we shouldn’t give up hope in such situations. We have an obligation to separate the justices from the injustices. We should hold these corporate neighbors accountable for the wrongs that they commit. Someone has to.

My 1979 Top 40 In no particular order, this is the forty-track rotation I listened to when I was researching, prepping and writing 1979. They were all released in the late 1970s, though not all in 1979 itself. But then, like Allie, we all listen to tunes from our past . . . I hope it gets you in the mood for reading! ‘Picture This’ – Blondie ‘Lovely Day’ – Bill Withers ‘Automatic Lover’ – Dee D. Jackson ‘Brass in Pocket’ – The Pretenders ‘It’s a Heartache’ – Bonnie Tyler ‘Wild West Hero’ – Electric Light Orchestra ‘Because the Night’ – Patti Smith ‘Into the Valley’ – The Skids ‘YMCA’ – Village People ‘Like Clockwork’ – Boomtown Rats ‘Stayin’ Alive’ – Bee Gees ‘Uptown Top Ranking’ – Althea & Donna ‘No More Heroes’ – The Stranglers ‘Take a Chance on Me’ – Abba ‘Werewolves of London’ – Warren Zevon ‘Psycho Killer’ – Talking Heads ‘Kiss You All Over’ – Exile ‘Top of the Pops’ – Rezillos ‘Heroes’ – David Bowie ‘Don’t Hang Up’ – 10cc ‘English Civil War’ – The Clash ‘2-4-6-8-Motorway’ – Tom Robinson Band ‘Rebel Rebel’ – David Bowie ‘Glad to be Gay’ – Tom Robinson Band

It took the better part of six miles before he quit thinking of the beast he’d left on the trail. After that, he thought of the town. There would be hot baths, smooth whiskey, clean beds with cool sheets, and, of course, women. Walking, he began putting them in order of which he would take first. Each, after all, had its own advantages and pleasures. The trick was deciding how to mix them. Before he could come to any firm conclusions, the town appeared beyond an unexpected turn in the trail. It lay down a smooth slope of a hill, laid out like on a map. From a distance, it wasn’t much to look at. Eight or nine solid buildings of wood and perhaps double that many tents and lean-tos. It was what he expected of the Nevada mining town that had seen better days. Although never an outright boomtown, the place had managed

Any town considered a potential boomtown had encampments whose tents fluttered in the breeze like a squad of sailboats coming to port. People flocked to a town such as this for an opportunity for a factory job. A cloister of lean-tos, bivouacs, and canvas sheets stretched out for shelter formed a tent city that nestled against the town proper. In

The report paints a particularly frightening picture of the Piedmont region, stretching from Raleigh through Charlotte to Atlanta, with the overall urban footprint nearly tripling in size by 2060. Why? Because of the lure of the New South boomtowns, the car-friendly culture, and the proximity to the mountains and seas. The so-called Piedmont Megaregion would become an uninterrupted, four-hundred-mile ribbon of concrete with Interstate 85 as its spine. Metro Atlanta alone would stretch from Alabama to South Carolina. In 2014, about 7 percent of the Southeast was covered in concrete. By 2060, 18 percent will be. A map of the futuristic landscape accompanies the report. On it, Atlanta looks like an angry fever blister anchoring the southwestern end of the corridor with smaller, yet equally angry red and yellow splotches (Greenville, Charlotte, Greensboro, Durham, Raleigh) running to the northeast. The editors fail to credit Hieronymus Bosch for the map.

reverie.

I watched men win and I watched them lose. They were playing a straight house. Nothing was loaded. The house took its own little percentage and got rich. Money made in bootlegging and gunrunning and dope smuggling and whoremongering was invested quite properly in an entire town that stood as a monument to human stupidity, a boomtown in the state with the sparsest population and the densest people in the country. Vegas.

Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.

If you have never seen a fracking boomtown, it can be hard to picture. You drive into a town that at first seems like any town, until you slowly notice that on this particular Main Street there are far too many hotels. Then you start to see the oversized white trucks, the hundreds of Rams and Rangers and Silveradaos that prowl the crowded streets, most displaying Texas and Wyoming and Oklahoma plates (even when you are nowhere near these places). You also note that the drivers of the trucks are twentysomething men, who, like their trucks, are almost all white.

Back during the early 1920’s the Carpin brothers ran the small slapped-together oil boomtown a few miles east of Stinnett in what was little more than a den of bootleggers, gamblers and other criminals of low order. During those days of big bands and prohibition, men on the far side of the law either rose to the top of the heap or got stomped under. For a brief time the Carpins were on the top of that heap. When Signal Hill was cleaned out by the Texas Rangers in 1927, the former boomtown imploded and the Carpins, who had managed to avoid arrest and capture, had dispersed. When I went up there to look around back in the mid 1980’s there was little left. So when the girl with the bitch sunglasses and the too-cute frown mentioned Carpin’s name, I naturally questioned her on it, and she not only admitted that the man who was after her was one of those Carpins, but that he was proud of his heritage.

Because the gunfight near the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, a year and a half after the Mussel Slough shootout, took place in a classic Western mining boomtown and involved classic Western social types (famed gunfighters against cowboys), the 'tombstone battle and its participants were enshrined in the West of' myth and legend.

All his life, if he’s given free time, he gets himself in trouble. He was a great soldier but a terrible civilian. He’s good at working; he’s terrible at not working.

she seemed caught between her desire to be treated as an equal and her traditional upbringing. “I fight and fight to be equal among the men,” she told me once. “But when they treat me as an equal it still makes me mad, because I should still get to be a girl sometimes. I should still have two or three buddies who will fix my tire for me.” Feeling unsure of where she fit in was isolating and exhausting. Which Cindy Marchello did she want to be, the fiercely independent woman who wanted to be equal in every way to her male coworkers, or the traditional Mormon woman who once looked to a man to provide the paycheck while she cared for her family? The person she identified with could change by the moment. “What do I really want?” she asked once. “Actually, I just really want a paycheck. Just leave me alone. Let me do my job and let me go home.

well site to find a coworker and spilled out everything that had happened. When she was done, the man replied, “It wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t such a dirty whore.” Marchello never officially reported the incident.

maudlin

I wonder, after working literally dozens of jobs in my life, that I

It seems like all anybody talks about up here is work,” he grumbles, wiping his mouth. “That is all anybody talks about,” I tell him.

homogenous.

supplicate

Archipelago.

mules

wagons about

met and a stranger,

toll road

next, he

Spivey funded construction of the road from Silverton and only took a small piece of the tolls, and Otto Mears finished the road down to Lake City himself.

Abuse requires constant short-term memory loss.

knuckles nearly scraped the earth.

The tribe was unprepared for the boom, he believed. After centuries of colonization—of federal entities weakening and displacing tribal institutions—it did not have the resources, let alone the expertise or regulatory power, to control the oil industry. It had no environmental agency to monitor leaks or spills; no transportation department to track trucks; and what was more troubling, it had no criminal jurisdiction over the thousands of non-Native men and women who had come to work, since the U.S. Supreme Court had stripped tribes nationwide of the right to criminally prosecute nonmembers. “It’s like the lottery winners you see on TV,” Fox said. “Their lives get worse, because they’re not ready for it. We’re the same way. My biggest fear is that we end up like other reservations I know—industry comes in, money’s thrown around, everyone celebrates for a while, and when industry leaves, the reservation is in worse shape than before.

Poverty is a habit.

vesicular

vacillated

Nationally, 85 percent of oil industry jobs are held by men, and most women in the field work as engineers, administrators, medical personnel, or on cleaning staffs. Oil companies tout this as gender diversity in their press releases, but women hold fewer than 2 percent of the jobs beyond those positions. The gender inequality in the field has made nearby Williston—the only population hub for over 100 miles—look like a seething all-male metropolis complete with strip clubs, greasy burger joints, Coors Light chugging contests, bar fights, and seatless Porta Potties on oil rig locations

Many women in the area complained of feeling unsafe, and local statistics supported their fears. Cases of assault, harassment, domestic violence, and rape had risen dramatically since the once-sleepy region began attracting thousands of male workers. Women spoke of carrying concealed weapons when they shopped at the grocery store and avoiding the bar scene, teeming with lonely males looking for female company. Rumors were rampant about where the next attack might occur—I frequently overheard women chatting about which areas to avoid or where a friend of so-and-so was attacked while walking to her car.

I met a guy who was a driller up here in Williston and he said, ‘Number one, quit applying everywhere and go to Halliburton in North Dakota.

I was over 50 and a woman and I was on unemployment. They got all kinds of tax breaks for me. Most of my bosses are, like, my kids’ age.

man camps,

At times the newcomers stood out because they were more diverse than Williston was accustomed to. It was now not uncommon to see Black, Hispanic, Native American, African, Asian, or Arab workers walking the streets or at local restaurants.

skid shacks,

human debris.

And a typhoid epidemic nearly wiped out 10 percent of the population of Grand Forks in 1894 after sewage leaked into the city’s water system.

Others saw their parents feel betrayed after staying loyal to a company or participating in a union, so they had little desire to do the same.

It was easy to see the financial appeal of oil field work.

It’s difficult to prepare workers for what to do in a situation when a $2 million piece of equipment breaks in the well or when a highly pressurized hose releases a razorlike stream of air through a pinhole leak, potentially cutting off the limbs of anyone who walks by; or when a tank full of flammable liquid explodes into a ball of flames; or when a tornado touches down a few miles from the well, as happened to one supervisor.

; 20-year-old Kyle Winters died after power tongs collided into his chest when he worked for Heller Casing; Joseph Kronberg, 52, was electrocuted on site.

voracious

Rawlins,

Crime was increasing. Statewide, homicides were at the highest level in nearly 20 years. Rapes were at the highest level ever, according to data going back to 1990. And there were 2,872 drug-related arrests in the state, up 64 percent since 2002. In 2012, the NorthWest Narcotics Task Force, which covered the oil patch area, confiscated more than $85,000 in methamphetamine. And alcohol was a factor in more than half of the deadly traffic accidents in the state that year. Headlines on the front page of the Williston Herald in 2012 included “Man Robbed at Gunpoint,” “4 Arrested on Kidnapping Charges,” “Man Shot in Williston,” “Two Arrested on Burglary, Drug Charges,” “Man Jailed for Indecent Exposure.

Evidence of sex trafficking and prostitution in the area added to the uneasiness. Ads for female escorts in Williston filled Backpage.com, like “Riley,” 22 and from Hawaii, who “always aimed to please.” And “21-year-old Megan,” who claimed to be “fetish friendly.” Rumors spread about prostitutes targeting man camps and truck disposal lines, where truckers would sit and wait for hours to unload oil field waste, to find new customers. Williston resident Gloria Cox stopped letting her 13-year-old grandson walk anywhere alone because of the child trafficking rumors she heard.

The region lacked mental health services and alcohol and drug treatment programs. There were no psychiatrists in Williston.

It became kind of a beacon for people,

Despite her newfound independence, Cindy didn’t seriously consider divorcing Richard.

The boom brought an increase of crime, drug use, and damage to sacred tribal lands. Industry trucks dumped toxic fluid into ditches by the road or unloaded radioactive waste, a byproduct of fracking, into garbage bins and backyards.

Basically you can do anything short of killing somebody.

scoria

for Real Oilfield Wives,

Children froze to death only yards from their homes, women committed suicide, cattle … blew over in the gale force winds and died where they fell.” As the snow melted, dead cattle were seen drifting down the swollen Little Missouri River. The next year, another blizzard killed nearly 100 people. Others suffered from frostbite.

Medora.

There also was evidence of sex trafficking on the reservation. Native girls as young as 12 and 13 would disappear from their homes, then resurface a week or two later with matching red flag tattoos. Investigators suspected pimps had branded them.

Everything they enjoy. Every. Single. Thing. They get it from me. They get it from me and a group of the toughest, meanest motherfuckers I have met in my life. Men they wouldn’t like, men they look down on, invisible men they will never see in a state they dismiss as flyover. They owe it all to the hands. All of it.

Shit load is actually kind of a technical term. A shit load is a load made up of random stuff, a bunch of different shit. Drivers complain about getting shit loads because they are more complicated to tie down. More important, because the weight of a shit load is harder to distribute, they are dangerous to transport. When a trailer is weighted unevenly, things can get squirrelly. As a new swamper, I learn to hate loading and off-loading the shit loads because the rigging is complicated. Unloading a regular load, a large square box, for instance, it is pretty easy in a glance to know how to get it off a trailer. But a shit load is like a difficult math problem if it were greasy with invert, dust, dirt, and diesel and worn by time and weather. And if it were heavy enough to kill you.

myopic

ruminates

effusive.

Like war stories, oil field stories stand as testament to the survival of the teller. The more gruesome the account, the tougher the sonovabitch who lived to tell the tale. It’s a cruddy, cruel bravado.

It empties the lines and crevasses of my face of dust and scoria.

inside the truck the radio rattles and clicks with the constant clucking of vulgar hens, a sewing circle of truckers and crane operators nagging at each other in a constant stream of bilious invective. It spills out of the speakers and fills the cab with scab picking and snark. Dressed up as jokes—with all the plausible deniability that provides—the operators compete relentlessly to get under each other’s skin.

The old man is lecturing me on rigging, his maw a senseless, wet noisemaker. He yammers on and on, a blathering display of trucker-mouth diarrhea.

sitting swamp side.

In the seven years I lived in New York, the perpetual youth machine kept me preoccupied. I hardly noticed that my Baltimore friends were buying houses, getting married, having children, and growing into lined faces. It happened gradually, but when I return to Maryland it stuns me. I arrive at a dinner party and my clothes feel the wrong size. I get brunch with couples and their kids and my mouth feels the wrong size. I can’t say the right thing. Or speak like a normal person. My volume knob is broken. I seem only to holler when saying something inappropriate or mumble incomprehensibly when trying to explain myself. I feel the coil centered in my belly winding tighter. The easier the conversation, the tighter that coil seems to wind. I find myself looking at my friends for weaknesses, getting angry at the smallest perceived slights. I challenge lifelong confidants in tight-lipped arguments over truly trivial matters. I can’t find a job. I apply for bartending jobs and construction work, mostly.

the humiliation of endless, enduring poverty makes him bitter.

Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom by Brian Black, The Great Oildorado by Hildegarde Dolson, Pithole: The Vanished City by William Culp Darrah, Sketches in Crude Oil by John J. McLaurin, and The History of Pithole by Crocus. Two books by Sebastian Junger supplied me with a lens through which to view my experience with the men I worked with. I read War while

There were people pulled over on the side of the road with candles lit, and signs saying RIP and Thank you for your service.  There were even fire trucks with their ladders raised and American flags flying on top of the over passes.