Hard News

that….”
    From inside a thirteen-inch Japanese television monitor, the color unbalanced, too heavy in red, Randy Boggs was telling his life story.
    “Greater opportunity. I was scared because I thought we were going to die—because I got ‘land of greater opportunity’ confused with ‘Promised Land,’ which I remembered from Day of the Ascension Baptist Church meant heaven. At the time I was close to eleven and religious. Okay, I got myself into some pretty fair scrapes at school. Somebody, some older kid’d cuss, ‘Jesus Christ,’ and I’d get madder ‘n a damp cat and make him say he was sorry and what happened was I got the hell beat out of me more times’n I can recall or care to.”
    Editing videotape was a hundred times easier than film. It was an electronic, not mechanical, process and Rune thought that this represented some incredible advancement in civilization—going from things that you could see how they worked to things that you couldn’t see what made them tick. She liked this because it was similar to magic, which she believed in, the only difference being that with magic you didn’t need batteries. The ease of editing, though, didn’t solve her problem: that she had so much good tape. Thousands and thousands of feet. This particular footage was from the first time she’d interviewed Boggs and it was all so pithy that she had no idea what to cut.
    “… Anyway, it wasn’t heaven we ended up in but Miami and some opportunity
that
turned out to be … Man, that was just like Daddy. This was right after Batista and the place was lousy with Cubans. For years I didn’t like, you know, Spanish people. But that was stupid ‘cause a few years ago I went down to Central America—the only time I was ever out of the country—and I loved it. Anyway I was talking about before, when I was a kid, and I saw these wealthy Cubans who were no longer wealthy, and that’s the saddest kind of man there is. You can see that loss in his walk, and the way he looks at the car he’s driving now, which isn’t nearly so nice as the kind he used to have. But what happened was they begun sucking up the jobs us white folks oughta’ve been having. Not that I mean it in a racial way. But these Cubans worked for next to nothing. They had to, just to get work and feed their families. Which were huge. I’ve never seen so many little shitters in one family I thought my daddy was bad. He’d practically roll over on Momma and bang, she was carrying. Home, I had six sisters and two brothers and I lost a brother in Nam, and a sister to ovarian cancer
….
    “Daddy had a head for mechanics but he never applied himself. I’m just the opposite. You pay me and I’ll sweat for you. I like the feel of working. My muscles get all nervous when I don’t work. But I have problems with calculating
.
My daddy was out of work many days running. My eldest brother signed up, marines, and I was coming up on sixteen so naturally I considered doing the same but started working instead.”
    The careers of Randy Boggs: warehouse picker, then carny hawker, then ride operator, then sweeper at a Piggly Wiggly then selling hot dogs on the highway near Cape Kennedy (where he saw the Apollo moon launching and thought he might like to be a pilot), then a stock boy, then fisherman, then janitor, then cook.
    Then thief.
    “I was to Clearwater once with Boonie, that was my brother, what I called him and a friend from the service. And we went to this drive-in and they were talking about the money they were making and how Boonie was going to buy himself a Bulltaco motorcycle, the kind with the low handlebars, and here I was—oh, heavens—I was nineteen and my brother had to pay my way into the theater? I was pretty embarrassed by that. So that night they went to a, well, you know, whorehouse—which wasn’t all that easy to find in Clearwater—and they let me keep the car for a couple hours. What I did, I was feeling so bad about being busted flat, I drove back to the drive-in, which was just closing up, and I did this distraction—set fire to some brush near the screen—and when everybody ran out to see what was going on I ran into the booth and was going to grab the money. Only what happened was there was no money. It’d been packed up and taken somewhere already, probably the night deposit at the bank. I run out, right into one of the owners. I’m a thin man now and I was a thin boy then and he saw what was happening and laid