A Pahrumping we will go

Scott Dickensheets

Thursday, March 7, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

"We need guns," someone boomed from the back seat.

He was joking, of course. Because we did have guns, and several hundred rounds of ammunition. We were going to visit Pahrump, after all, and a little good-natured gunplay seemed mandatory.

With me were three SUN staffers, who, for the sake of plausible deniability, will be referred to only by their first names. Geoff had spent much of his adolescence in Pahrump, and was to act as our guide. Bryan is a computer whiz with a quick wit and a smart mouth. As for Steve, the less said, the better. Suffice it to say he's a quick hand with a pistol and an even quicker hand with a cheeseburger. Both could turn out to be useful on the sort of bent pilgrimage we had in mind.

We had all the road-trip essentials -- Geoff's spacious four-door, Dom DeLuise rations of junk food and a simple agenda: breakfast at the Pahrump bowling alley, a visit to the bookstore, a little petty redneckery, then shoot some things. Go native for a day. All by way of Geoff proving to us that Pahrump isn't the sinkhole we thought it was.

This, then, is a tale about how travel broadens the mind, even though my mind resolutely resists broadening. My plan on this trip, as it is in most of my life, was to mock, condescend and make jokes at others' expense.

But, of course, that was before we met Fred the Clown.

Why, oh why, oh why

At this point, a question naturally arises. How, exactly, did we end up spending a perfectly good Saturday in the jewel of Nye County?

The answer begins with a confession: I've always thought of Pahrump as the place where the white-trash mother ship landed and disgorged its toothless hordes. A place with a higher than average concentration of people who'd appeared on the cover of Weekly World News under such headlines as "THESE PANTIES SAVED MY LIFE!" Bryan and Steve shared similar views.

Not entirely true, Geoff would say patiently, fobbing off on us his fond memories of life among the young elite of Pahrump. Eventually, he talked us into going there. I think subliminal hypnosis was involved.

So it was that we recently we found ourselves Pahrumpward-bound on State Route 160, an hour and a half out of Vegas, inching through a fine sunny morning behind a 100-year-old hermaphrodite driving a slow-moving VW microbus. We were excited by the prospects for National Geographic-style adventures among primitive cultures, the chance to meet new and interesting people.

Mostly, though, we were excited because it was almost time for breakfast.

We arrive, eat

From the highway, Pahrump looks pleasant enough, clusters of buildings sprinkled throughout the town's 364 square miles in the seemingly random manner of communities without zoning codes. It looked like a downmarket Mayberry. The 15,000 residents are mostly retirees, Test Site workers and independent types who want to give their lifestyle that gritty frontier feel but still be within shopping distance of the big city.

Pahrump, however, isn't without its share of big-city ills. Snobbery, for instance. "This is the south end of town," sniffed Geoff, a north-ender himself, as we entered the town proper. "There's a lot of farming and stuff down here. We don't approve of that." Ah, seething class resentment rears its ugly head!

Already the small-town wisecracks were flying. "In Las Vegas," Bryan said, eyeing a passing pickup, "the problem is how to drive while you're using your cellular phone. Out here, they have have to worry about driving while they shave their backs."

Geoff wanted to drive around awhile, find some beer bottles from his youth, but it was time to feed Steve. "Where's the bowling alley?" we cried.

Breakfast at the Pahrump bowling alley. Six words that struck fear into my heart, even though, being from Henderson, I've dined at some pretty rank troughs in my time, and Taco Bell as well. I pictured a damp dining room, redolent with the odor of sweaty bowling shoes, in which the "Star Wars" cantina scene could have been filmed sans makeup.

Thus the day's first epiphany: Neither the food nor the people were as freakish as I'd expected. Most casino eggs taste like lightly flavored spackle, and the Mountain View Casino Bowl's were no exception, but the rest of the food was fine. Except the blintzes -- I don't know what sort of half-life these things have, but as of this writing, the two bites I ate are still riding high on my duodenum.

Peoplewise, the strangest person I saw during breakfast was a 14-year-old boy with a 400-gallon cowboy hat. It was a Texas-size hat on a Rhode Island-sized kid, and it marked him as a tourist.

"No one in Pahrump wears cowboy hats," Geoff said. True to his word, I didn't see any cowboy hats the rest of the day. Imagine my disappointment.

The relative normality so contradicted my expectations that I began to suspect I'd been duped. "What have you done with the real Pahrump?" I was going to demand of Geoff, but he was busy exchanging pleasantries with the cook, an old high school buddy.

Steve finally pushed himself away from the table. "Let's shoot something," he said cheerfully.

We don't shoot yet

Since some of us had never seen an actual brothel, we took a post-breakfast jaunt to the Chicken Ranch. Now, maybe I was spoiled by "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," but I expected something along the lines of a large, lavishly decorated Victorian house. It looked more like a jumble of portable classrooms.

"We used to go trick-or-treating at the Chicken Ranch," Geoff said. "We thought it was real funny."

We posed for snapshots in front of the brothel's sign. I sucked in as much of my stomach as I could, puffed out what there is of my chest, and tried to look like the sort of big-city stud to whom provincial prostitutes would gladly offer chickens in return for an hour of his time. But the air went out of my act as I imagined the working girls watching us through hidden windows as they combed each other's hair.

"Some more city boys too scared to come in."

"Yeah, and look at that one suck in his gut."

Well. A nadir of sorts had obviously been reached, and it was time for something really unusual.

Send in Fred the Clown.

A clown for God

Not far up the road from the Chicken Ranch, but miles away in spirit, Fred the Clown lives among his plywood animals and memories of circuses past. We'd originally stopped to look at the painted wooden animals that sit in his side yard, along with a sign identifying the place as the Freedom of Life Park. Unfortunately, "park" is misspelled, so the sign reads, "Freedom of Life Prak."

As we stood there, Fred, the prak's proprietor, came out to meet us. He looked like he was in his 60s, and walked like it, too. "I'm a clown, Fred the Clown," he said. A friendly man, he invited us to look around. "That clown over there," he said, indicating a clown trimmed out of plywood, "I've had that since I was in Arizona." That was about four years ago.

Out back he had set up a small theater, the stage backed by brightly colored panels bearing the words, "A vision of God" and "Circus of the Universe."

"Everything I do is dedicated to God," Fred said.

He took us into his house and showed us his wall of memories, a collage of old circus photos, clippings and other memorabilia. "This is a woman I danced with in the Moscow Circus," he said. "And this is a bear I danced with." Another photo showed a woman putting her face into a circus lion's mouth. Fred was particularly proud of a drawing of Christ composed of all the words of the Gospel of John.

Back outside, he learned that Geoff was a Pahrumpian moved to Las Vegas.

"You'd rather live there than here?" he asked, incredulous.

"Well, that's where the jobs are," Geoff replied.

"Not for long," Fred said. "This place is growing."

"You think so?"

"I don't think so, I know so. We got a new casino going in down there. It'll be a nice-sized one, too. There's a new Smith's, too. I see three or four new houses a day go down this road. In a year ..."

"That's incredible," Bryan said after we'd waved our goodbyes and driven away. "Just incredible."

I agreed. Although it would have been easy to make fun of Fred the Clown, he was too nice and simply decent for that, and I remember thinking that any neighborhood with a guy like that in it was probably the more interesting for it. Alas, I thought, he'd probably be CC&Red out of most neighborhoods in Las Vegas. That's the problem with master-planned communities -- not enough prak space.

A checklist o' fun

Other highlights of the trip:

* Visiting a vacant lot in the Pahrump suburb of Crystal. It used to be site of the Geoff's family homestead. As a boy, he used to do a little gardening for the nearby Cherry Patch Ranch. "This used to be our septic tank," Geoff shouted excitedly, pointing to a shallow hole in the dirt. He hoisted a twisted piece of metal. "I think this was part of my bike." Oddly, he didn't seem to recognize the Dr Pepper can I kicked out of the dust.

* We finally shot things. In the vast emptiness beyond Pahrump, wired on the pure redneck thrill of loud gunfire, we shot cans, bottles and roadside trash, and when that was gone, I shot dirt. (Disclaimer: Kids, don't try this at home. But if you do, employ full safety measures, as we did.)

Signs of civilization

Nothing, not even a devoutly religious clown, can either confirm or dispel your preconceptions about a town like its bookstore. After passing through a business district that would be the envy of Nelson's Landing, we came to the Reading Oasis, and it was there that I finally changed my mind about Pahrump.

Any small town whose bookstore stocks volumes by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naghib Mahfouz, American Nobelist Toni Morrison, a lot of brainy history books and the latest New Yorker is a place with a lot less chromosome damage than I'd thought. There was even a nifty cat purring on the floor, something for which I've searched the supposedly sophisticated bookstores of Las Vegas in vain.

House hunting

There are thousands of stories in this dusty town, and you can read some of them in the dwellings of its citizens. "Sixty-three billion trailers to our left, dirt farms to our right," Steve said, but it was even more diverse than that. There is a certain eccentric charm to a place where rusting trailers abut nice houses, while across the street is a place done up in Late American Haphazard. Some lots are meticulously tended, others look like split-open pi~natas, the occupants apparently conducting their whole lives in the front yards. Curiously, there seem to be a lot of self-storage units for a town this size.

"That's because there are a lot of new people here now," Geoff explained.

"Yeah, they're city folk. They don't understand the concept of just dumping everything in their yards," Bryan said sarcastically.

But even Bryan, Mr. Sardonic, seemed to warmed to the place.

"In fairness to Pahrump," Bryan observed, "this is uptown for Nevada. Compared to the rest of the state, this is Manhattan."

We had other adventures, of course, but you'll have to wait until certain statutes of limitations run out before you hear about those. It's enough to say that eventually all this road-tripping had us feeling a little Kero-whacked out. The journey had accomplished Geoff's purpose -- I left Pahrump thinking it wasn't such a bad little place after all. Of course, that probably won't prevent me from making fun of it in the future, but at least I'll know how wrong I am.

Anyway, on the road home, before the conversation turned to gleeful rumormongering about our co-workers, Steve, with that accidental eloquence of his, managed to sum up the real lesson of the day: "So many of our friends could never make a trip like this," he sighed, "having lives as they do."

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