A straw-dry whistle of air blows across this sun-ravaged town as 15 working girls clad in blue jeans and T-shirts pile into a van for a ride to the community clinic. It is Tuesday--Doctor Day--the appointed day each week when the women are tested for occupational hazards of the Chicken Ranch, a lucrative bordello that attracts about 30, customers a year. It is a tidy sum for a small clinic largely dependent on community support to keep its doors open.
For many residents here, the ranch is something akin to living near a toxic waste dump--distasteful, but inevitable. We just tolerate it. What else can you do?
It is one thing, residents imply, to know that strumpeteering is taking place on the edge of town, and quite another to have leggy, buxom women flaunting their trade in the sun-beaten faces of its ranchers and alfalfa farmers, its retired citizens or its Nevada Test Site workers. The year-old former biology teacher and sex-education counselor from a Northern California high school knows that the unincorporated town of 5, has 13 churches, many of them Mormon.
He also knows that Plankington infuriated the community in the mids with local advertising Reade never advertises in town and by refusing to share any of his wealth with the growing town. And he knows that church-instigated petitions were circulated before his takeover to remove the Chicken Ranch from Pahrump.
He made sure the women never ventured off the ranch for the minute drive into town except for essentials. And his two cooks, nurse, bookkeeper, gardener, maintenance man and shift managers--or madams--were hired locally.
