by Robin Romm
A lot of people think of Pahrump as a trap. More than a trap. They talk about it as if it has this mythic power to hold people here and drain them like a succubus. My old friend Jessica married an out-of-towner, which doesn’t happen that much. He’s from Oregon and his name is William. One night we smoked cigarettes and played video poker together at the casino where they met when Jessica was a cocktail waitress. Jessica told me how she wore two padded bras when she was waitressing, to make her look bustier, how it was worth it, even though it hurt like a mother. My grandmother used the same trick forty years earlier, working as a change girl at Caesar’s Palace. You get better tips that way—the Pahrump version of “leaning in.”
“What brought you to Pahrump?” I ask William.
“I hit a deer in Arizona,” he said, “and my car finally broke down here.”
Mr. Carlin, a math teacher, was the speaker at my high school graduation ceremony in 2002. He was a fantastic teacher and has since left Pahrump, as everyone expected he would. I remember his speech being very funny, which would have been characteristic of him. But the only specific line I can recall was the last one, which he delivered with sudden severity: “You don’t have to go to college, but you can’t stay here.”
All to say, I think some of the students at the Mojave School are a little confused about why I’m back. Honestly, I’m a little confused, too. But perhaps no one is more confused than Jo Brooke Ann Longley.
“Pahrump’s a black hole,” Jo says. “Right now, I’m just so tired of it I don’t understand why anyone would come back.”
Jo Brooke Ann Longley says she’s getting out and I believe her. A chronic overachiever, Jo’s staggering ambition is exhausting even to relay: Jo skipped two grades. She started taking classes at the local community college when she was thirteen years old. She is now a seventeen-year-old college senior, and stalking a Fulbright.
She’s always been like this. At five she wrote book reports for her kindergarten teacher. At six she was doing sixth-grade math at her brother’s middle school. She’s volunteered at the library and participates in about half a dozen church groups. She’s worked as a barista and interned at the local electric company. She sometimes works nine or ten hours a day, four or five days a week. The other two days a week her mother drives her one and a half hours east, over the Spring Mountains to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) and back again. She’s a full-time student at UNLV. She usually overloads, taking five classes a term. When I ask her why she takes so many classes, Jo says, “So I can graduate on time.”
By “on time” she means by age eighteen. She has the crystal clear vision of what can happen to women that don’t get out early. She has, I know without asking, her own Jessica, her own change-girl grandma. She was raised under those same billboards.
When we meet, she’s enrolled in the Mojave School, taking summer classes, and working in the two jobs typical of girls not yet twenty-one: childcare and food service. At the day care where she works, she’s typically responsible for about a dozen toddlers. “Every teenager should have to work in a day care,” she says. “It’s great birth control.” She also holds down the fort at Seemore’s, the two-story frozen yogurt stand shaped like a castle with a huge plaster dollop of cream on top, in a wide patch of desert astride one of Pahrump’s two highways.
One day, Derek, my stepdad Ron, and I went to visit her at Seemore’s. It was 102 degrees. We met her friend Anthony, who fed toffee soft-serve to the bold and probably diabetic ground squirrels skittering between the benches. We all pretended not to notice two drunk bikers making out nearby. This was not easy. You might think there’s nothing grodier than two bikers sloppily making out, but that’s only until those drunk bikers have been eating ice cream, and whenever the wind dies down you are reminded of this fact, aurally.
Earlier that day, I’d asked Jo if she was bored at the Mojave School, which we set up for teenagers who’d never taken a creative writing class before, not college seniors majoring in it. “I feel like I do know a lot of what you guys are teaching,” she said. “But my goal was to come here and try to get a recommendation letter from you and Derek.”
This type of resume fluffing is expected from wide swaths of American teenagers, particularly affluent ones. But it doesn’t really happen in Pahrump. When I asked one class at the Mojave School whether they wanted to go to college, every single one of them said, wholeheartedly and without hesitation, “Yes!” But when I asked them where, their certainty crumbled. They said things like, “What’s that one in Arizona, the Christian one?” Or, “Somewhere with a good ROTC.” Two said the University of Washington, and when I asked them why they said that, they told me, “Because it’s green up there.” One girl told me, “I don’t even know any names of any colleges, except Princeton, and I think there’s one called Yale. . . . And isn’t there an ‘H’ one?”
And then there’s Jo, applying for a Fulbright for graduate school at Kingston University in London. She says it’s okay that she’s bored at the Mojave School because she just wanted to meet me “and make contacts in the creative writing world.” That Jo is engaging in the kind of savvy careerism you’d expect to find at a prep school is anomalous and, to me, beguiling. There’s something else alluring about Jo: certain hallmarks of Nevada femininity are conspicuously absent from her envisioned future—no padded bras digging into her, no children. I guess that’s why I came to Seemore’s.
Though I know it’s corny and probably self-aggrandizing, I start to think Jo and I are versions of each other. I left Pahrump eleven years ago, to go to one of the two universities in Nevada. Jo goes to the other. We got the same scholarship, from a fund created when the state of Nevada sued the tobacco companies on behalf of Nevada children like me and Jo, who’d been sucking in casino smoke all our lives. Jo’s an English major, like I was, and like me she has an emphasis in creative writing. We even look similar: short brunettes with heart-shaped faces, women you might call “cute” until we actually speak, a pair of deadpan cherubs. I am Jo plus ten years and some cooling of my hyper-achievement engine. Jo is me, minus the fooling around up on Wheeler Pass Road.
Only a few kids get to college from Pahrump, and fewer graduate. Of everyone I went to school with, I only know of four of us who have gone on to graduate school. I’m the only girl. I have a theory that only two types of kids make it out: kids gunning for something and kids running away. I find myself transfixed by Jo’s ambition. I want to know: Is she a gunner or a runner?
One day after class, on the NyECC campus where opportunity may or may not be, I ask Jo why she works so much. She has a full-ride scholarship, after all. “I’ve just always been obsessed with making my résumé top notch,” she says. “Just the more things I can do to be impressive—it just helps me feel better. I also just like staying busy. If I’m bored, I find myself slowly eking into depression.”
Why London, I wonder. Jo’s never been, but she knows it’s basically the exact cultural opposite of Pahrump: lots of people on a little bit of land, rainy and artsy. She says, “Growing up in Pahrump, I feel like I’ve sort of been denied access to a culture where if I wanted to I could just go out and see a play on the weekend. . . . In London, I know that there is not a weekend that I couldn’t do that.”
Another draw to London is YouTube. Jo’s a YouTuber. Username, TheLittleStar89. “There’re a lot of YouTubers based out of London,” she says. “And they actually have a YouTube headquarters in London where YouTubers can go and make videos and stuff like that, which is really interesting and cool.”
Another appealing thing about London, aside from YouTube and being the exact opposite of Pahrump: It’s fast. In the UK most master’s programs only take a year or two.
What’s the rush? I ask.
“It might just be a pride thing,” she says. “I want to say, ‘Yeah, I’m nineteen and I have my master’s and I’m going into my doctorate program. Ha.’ ”
In my notebook I write, “gunner.”
After the last day of the workshop, Jo, Derek, and I go to a sandwich shop in a strip mall. I tell her my volleyball team used to come here for lunch on game days, that it still smells like volleyball in here. She looks a little disappointed to learn I used to be something of a jock.
Jo knows the people who keep coming in and out. The sun is blazing. In this cheery bread- and volleyball-smelling place, I meet my seventeen-year-old self’s fear.
Between bites of a vegan avocado wrap, Jo says she feels like when we’re young, we’re fluid. We can change, try on new lives for ourselves. But at a certain point, we ossify, harden into adults and stay there. Like a game of musical chairs, except the music stops when you turn thirty and that’s where you sit for the rest of your life. If you’re not happy with that chair, too bad.
Intellectually, she knows that’s probably not how it really works, right?
“Nah,” I say, as though I didn’t have that exact same fear at seventeen. As though I don’t have it now, at twenty-nine. Still, she says, “It’s hard to convince what’s in my rib cage to believe what my head is telling it.”
So sprinting through her education is Jo’s way of buying herself time. This way she can spend ten years trying to be a writer, getting a PhD in literature, looking for a job in publishing. And if that falls through, she’ll still only be twenty-four. She’ll still have time to start over in psychology, maybe become a counselor.
She says, “My ultimate goal isn’t to get so many doctorates. It’s to find what makes me happy and to cling to it, cling to it with all my might.” There’s no hint of warm fuzzy self-discovery in her voice when she says this. There’s urgency, and that fear.
So fear is driving Jo to London, and poetry, too.
She says, “Ever since Harry Potter, it’s represented a kind of freedom to me. Because that’s where he goes when he gets his letter: Diagon Alley. So it’s just been built up in my mind. I just see a community where I have a part and will be able to express myself.”
She can’t do that in Pahrump, she says.
“For a few years now, London has sort of been my utopian destination where when I go there everything will be complete and beautiful and life will make sense.
“I’ve seen everybody who’s left Pahrump and then they come back and they never quite get away again. And I’m so petrified that that’s gonna be me, and I’m gonna be stuck in this place where I know I don’t belong.”
In Jo’s family, a recurring joke goes, “We care about our children’s education, so we moved to Pahrump!” Her dad tells stories about his own boyhood high jinks in another small town. He tells her, “That’s why we moved here.” But Jo says, “That’s not what I have.” In her dad’s version, growing up in rural America was the time of his life. Jo says, “If this is the time of my life, shoot me.”
Jo has no patience for nostalgia, her dad’s or mine.
“Before graduation, everyone knows it. . . . If you don’t leave at once or if you come back, you’re never getting out.” And then, she says, “You slowly lose your teeth and your sense of manners.”
I remember that feeling, the town a succubus threatening to sap you bone dry by nineteen. Perhaps hearing the monster in her voice, Jo says, “It’s not bad or evil. It’s just not a place that I’ve ever felt welcome.”
“Me neither,” I say. In my mind I cross out gunner and replace it with runner.
We all want to be gunners. Gunners are admirable, driven, heroic. But runners make shit happen. I know, because I’m a runner, too.
And this is when I admit to Jo that I’ve started to think of us as versions of each other. It’s like I’m like you in twelve years, I say. Or you’re like me twelve years ago. I’m embarrassed, suddenly. I feel cheesy, like a stage mom, or a character in an after-school special.
But Jo nods. “I’ve seen it too.”
So I ask her what I’ve really been meaning to ask her all week: “Do you think that us leaving is a betrayal?”
She laughs. “To Pahrump? No.”
“Do you think it’s stupid that I feel that way?”
She says, politely, that she can see how I might look at it that way. But soon she says what she really thinks. “It’s a town. It’s not a person. It doesn’t have feelings.” She nods to the shop. “It’s not a team.”
I ask her if she thinks I’m just indulging in sentimental hand-wringing.
She says, without hesitation, “Yeah.” This is what happens when you get to ask your seventeen-year-old self questions: she gets real with you.
I don’t know why, but I confess to Jo that I feel like an outsider here, that I have all week. “Totally like I don’t belong here.”
She says, “Didn’t you feel that way when you were living here?”
I admit that yes, I did.
“But before, I at least felt like I belonged in little tiny parts of it,” I say. “Like my friend Ryan’s swimming pool. Or in the living room with my mom, watching Star Trek. And now those places are gone.”
She asks, “Why do you want to feel like you belong here?”
I tell her I don’t want to be someone who doesn’t belong here. “That would mean I’ve betrayed or turned my back on the people here, become aloof or selfish, struck out on my own, And all that’s probably true.”
She shakes her head no. “You’re just not as good at pretending you belong here as you used to be.”
That night, the Mojave School students give a reading at a local coffee shop to celebrate the end of the workshop. My two oldest friends drive out from Vegas to listen. Ryan and Jason are twin brothers. Ryan is, as far as I know, the only person from our class to get a PhD. He’s also the only person from Pahrump I’m still really genuinely close with. After the reading, I propose we go buy some beer from the grocery store. Jason doesn’t want to go because he works as a checker at another store in the same chain in Vegas, and he hates it. But we go anyway. We have trouble finding our way around inside, even though it’s the same store we walked countless times, the same store where we used to go fishing for booze, hanging around the parking lot with cash we’d earned at minimum wage, waiting for an adult shady enough to buy six bottles of Boone’s Farm for three teenagers. We never waited long.
We do find beers and drink them beside the motel pool. The lights of the NASCAR-themed casino are bright as a full moon, and we pretend there is one. We talk about the swimming pool at Ryan and Jason’s old house, the place I told Jo about. We talk about the juniper trees around the pool, which the new owners have cut down. We do not mention our mothers who both died here within a few months of each other, and in their dying left us with no reason to come back and every reason to keep running. We do not mention all the work we did to get out, all the distance we have traveled and want to travel still, except when Jason looks up at the would-be moon and says, “It’s hard to reach escape velocity.”
Today, on the treadmill at the gym at the expensive university where I teach, I saw a T-shirt that could have been a poster on the wall at the NyECC. It said, “Effort Equals Success.” I’m home now, back east, and Jo is probably at Seemore’s with Anthony and the bikers and the ground squirrels. Seeing that T-shirt I thought, What’s it all for? UNLV. Kingston University. London. A job as an editor, or a counselor.
It occurs to me that Jo is working really, really hard for a life most of my female students would consider Plan B.
When Jo imagines herself in London, she’s not at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre or YouTube headquarters, or in Diagon Alley. She’s at home, alone, in a tiny apartment. “It’s snug and bright and open,” she says. “It’s just me by myself in my apartment! . . . It’s almost a studio, but the bedroom area and the kitchen are separated by a back room, and the wall in the back is an all-glass sliding door leading into a cute, little backyard. And it’s just all bright and open, and my own color palette that I get to choose.”
Jo’s mom’s a painter and so far she’s been picking the colors.
“There’s a cute
little folding table,” she says, “that comes down and up. And the kitchen is stocked with weird vegan ingredients that I won’t feel weird having because it’s my apartment, gosh darn it, and I can have whatever I want.”
What color is it? I ask.
“It’s a tealish blue, a coralish pink, a very light yellow, a light lavender, white. White is the main color with the other colors as accents. And silver.”
A tealish blue, a coralish pink. They’re the same colors as the Chicken Ranch. The colors I used to hold my breath for as the school bus passed. “Sounds pretty,” I say.
Jo says, “It’s gorgeous in my head.”
Is Jo hungry for London or running away from Pahrump?
Is there really a difference?
“Effort Equals Success.” It’s a fantastic idea. But it takes so much damn effort for someone like Jo to scrape and claw her way within the grasp of even a modest version of success. Meanwhile someone else, from another town, another class, can just reach out and take it.
Jason was right. It’s hard to reach escape velocity. You need fuel. Dreams are fuel, sure. YouTube headquarters and Diagon Alley and Shakespeare. But if you’ve got a really long way to go, the best fuel is anger. If Jo had asked me how to get out, I might have said, “Learn to hate the place you’re from.” Get disgusted by the people who stay. Call them toothless. Call them speed freaks. Call them dirt farmers. Call them scrounge or townie or white trash. Learn how real college students talk, how they walk, what they read, and what they eat. Learn what they do for a living and where they go on vacation. Learn to care about what they care about. Learn to laugh at what they laugh at. When they ask, say you’re from the middle of nowhere, or buttfuck Egypt, or Podunk, or Over the Hump in Pahrump the Dump. Or don’t say anything at all. Spend all the energy you have and more trying not to look like you come from here and then, one day, you won’t.