content=ItÕs only 9 p.m., but the thump-thump of a driving base line is already wafting through the tiger stripe interior of the Astro Lounge, a downtown strip club, before flooding through an open door onto the street.
These days, the wait to get in can last an hour, says Jackie Painovich, a long-time bartender, and customers have been known to drop $800 on a payday binge.
Inside, the room is packed with men who have just spent 12 sweaty hours on the hulking derricks that pull prosperity out of southern WyomingÕs natural gas fields.
They are of a breed that virtually vanished from the American landscape when oil sold at less than $25 a barrel. Hard-bitten and strong-armed, they are a fraternity of the rugged and ready who can do a job few others dare.
Here, and throughout the West, roughnecks are back.
ÒTheyÕre all from somewhere else and theyÕre all here to work. The more money they make, the more money they spend,Ó Painovich said.
ÒIf there is such a thing as a slow night around here, I havenÕt seen it.Ó
With the West in the midst of a once-in-a-generation energy boom, industry experts say there likely will be 15,000 wells drilled in Colorado and Wyoming over then next decade and a half. The machines that do that job are 100 tons of belching, creaking, twirling steel.
For the towns that ring the regionÕs growing gas fields, the men who work those rigs are a mixed blessing. Crime is rising fast and drunken brawls are common. But the hotels are full and grocery stores have a hard time keeping food on the shelves.
Rock Springs Police Chief Mike Lowell sees the roughnecks as men who have to be riden, and riden hard.
ÒThese are people who arenÕt rooted to the community. They go into a bar and seem to forget everything their mothers ever taught them,Ó Lowell said.
A young officer when the last boom ended here in the early Õ80s, Lowell remembers the days of prostitutes walking K Street and fights that erupted into bar-emptying brawls.
During this boom, drug arrests in Rock Springs have gone up nearly five times and alcohol-related arrests have doubled in three years. Five to 10 pounds of methamphetamine are sold in the area every week. But Lowell is determined not to let his city descend into chaos again.
ÒWe want people to do what we say and we donÕt want any guff about it,Ó he said. ÒWe want them to feel theyÕre welcome. At the same time, while it may not be their home, we want them to realize it is our home.Ó
Drive in just about any direction from the place Lowell calls home and derricks rise out of the rolling prairie like iron skeletons.
For the men who work them, that iron is a metaphor. There is perhaps no other job like it in America, combining the heavy machines of the vanishing Rust Belt and the outdoor ruggedness of the empty range.
ÒEverything on a drilling rig is big and heavy,Ó said Casey James, a 29-year-old driller on a rig in the Jonah field north of Rock Springs.
ÒYou ask for hammer and you get a 5-pound sledge. You ask for a wrench, and you get a 30-inch pipe wrench.Ó
And itÕs weight that is constantly in motion. A rig typically operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Wenches squeal. Pipe lurches. Chains swing. A moment of misplaced attention can maim, even kill.
The workers tell a joke among themselves about a roughneck who goes into a bar and holds out the first and last fingers of one hand. WhatÕs that? the joke goes. ItÕs a roughneck ordering four beers.
ItÕs gallows humor.
Since October, five people have died on gas rigs in southwestern Wyoming. With an estimated 2,000 rig workers in the region, that makes it one of the most dangerous places in America to earn a living.
But the risk creates a bond some of the men describe as among the strongest in their lives.
ÒThe people that you work with out here, they basically become your family,Ó said Charles Kelley, 42, who blames long stretches in the gas fields for the break-up of his second marriage.
For a time in the Õ90s, Kelley said he left the job to chase a more stable life.
ÒOne phone call and I was right back in,Ó he said. ÒIt can completely tear apart your family. You can lose everything youÕve got. But itÕs what you love to do.Ó
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Exxon Mobil made $36.1 billion in net profit in 2005 as both oil and gas prices soared, or the equivalent of about $1,100 every second.
That company, as well as others like it, turns around and pays major drilling contractors as much as $22,000 a day for a rig and its crews to punch holes in the gas-rich fields of Wyoming and ColoradoÕs western slope.
And so it goes.
An experienced roughneck makes $26.50 an hour. Plus overtime. Plus bonuses.
Some rig workers on ColoradoÕs Western Slope pulled down $84,000 last year. Most never graduated from college, and some never finished high school.
For a far-flung swath of blue-collar America, the current energy boom is a major >>opportunity. In the packed trailer parks and hotel parking lots, the license plates tell of the draw of good pay and plentiful work: Louisiana. California. Texas. Michigan.
ÒSome guy flagged me down on a county road at 9:30 at night,Ó said Roy McClure, the mayor of Parachute, Colo. ÒHe told me he had driven 16 hours straight and wanted to know where he could get an oilfield job.Ó
ÒBy the time the stories get told back home and get embellished a little, itÕs the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for a lot of these guys.Ó
And if energy is gold, then places like Parachute and Pinedale, Wamsutter and Big Piney are the modern global economyÕs version of the Õ49er camps Ñ updated with satellite TV and catered meals.
These are towns where the bars open at 6 a.m., traffic jams around shift changes can last an hour or more, and a camping spot, much less an apartment, is nearly impossible to find.
Rig crews are crowded together in housing known as man camps. The best are modular compounds with weight rooms and professionally-trained chefs. Most are little more than trailers with bunks stacked in cramped bedrooms. One shift comes in, the next goes out.
And the shifts are long, usually 12 hours. In WyomingÕs high desert it can sink to 40 below in winter, and reach well over 100 degrees in summer.
For most, itÕs seven days on, seven days off, but with labor in short supply, itÕs possible to work just about as long your body can hold up. Lance Hardy, a 28-year-old from Tyler, Texas, recently finished 28 days straight.
ÒWhen you work on your days off, thatÕs just more money,Ó he said. ÒYou got to make it while you can.Ó
Men with minimal connection to a community, lots of money and little to do can be a combustible combination, officials say.
In Pinedale, Wyo., bar fights between crews and locals have become an almost nightly affair.
In Parachute, a town tucked amid towering bluffs that once made it a magnet for retirees, police are investigating a brutal murder that appears to have started as a fight between roughnecks. The victim, Paul Graves, was so badly beaten that he was left in coma, and died in April after family removed him from life support.
In WyomingÕs Sublette County, a mostly rural area around Pinedale thatÕs seen some of the heaviest drilling in the West, a recent report by a local civic group found that the rig count was a far better predictor of the areaÕs dramatically rising crime than population. In less than 10 years, DUIs have quadrupled, assaults have tripled, and drug arrests have climbed 450 percent, according to Jeffrey Jaquet, the reportÕs author.
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From the outside, the roughneckÕs life can look rowdy, almost brutal. From the inside, men talk about it with a rugged appreciation, even awe. The rig is tradition-bound, hierarchical, intensely male and intensely proud.
ÒItÕs the last vestige of the male-dominated stronghold,Ó said Thomas Conley, a native of Pennsylvania whose been here since the 1970s.
ÒLike we used to say, ÔIf it were easy, a girl could do it,Ó he joked.
In fact, some can.
One is Rachel Miller. Originally from Oklahoma, her grandfather worked on rigs. So did her father. She was going to college in Utah when she decided to roughneck one summer to help pay for tuition. The rig challenged her in ways the classroom didnÕt, Miller said, and she never went back.
ÒI craved it. It got in my blood,Ó she said.
But Miller concedes that the rig is a place where the niceties of modern human resource specialists have yet to make much of a dent.
Those who donÕt fit in are weeded out mercilessly. TheyÕre given tasks they donÕt know how to perform, told to fetch tools that donÕt exist.
ÒBecause IÕm a woman, they didnÕt expect me to have the drive. TheyÕve been used to the thought that itÕs a manÕs world. The fact that a woman might be able to do that job hurt their pride,Ó she said. 
ItÕs a pride many roughnecks wear on their sleeves. Old hands talk about the oilfield as a lifestyle, not just a job, and many defend its traditions fiercely. 
On a typical five-man crew, the newest hand is called the Òworm.Ó If there is grease to be wiped off, a load to be carried, an errand to be run, itÕs the wormÕs job to do it.
For a worm, Lee Grazen is far from typical. HeÕs 46 and worked in the last boom. He quit after a crewmate with 30 yearsÕ experience had his arm mangled in an accident. ÒI left the field and swore IÕd never come back.Ó
When he drove to southwestern Wyoming recently, it was only to give his nephew a ride to a job in the booming Jonah Field. Exhausted, the nephew quit within a week, so Grazen, not willing to leave the crew shorthanded, signed on.
HeÕs got rheumatoid arthritis, and coming off a 12-hour shift, his legs often ache. But he said he also wants to prove to himself that he can do it one more time. 
ÒIÕve never been able to just punch a time card, to show up and do the same thing over and over again,Ó Grazen said.
ÒOut there, if youÕve got an experienced driller, he can pull pipe so fast that youÕd swear you can see that pipe stretch.
ÒWhen things are clicking, man, IÕm telling you itÕs fun.Ó
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Imagine a job that Ñ besides drudgery, back-breaking toil and bitter working conditions Ñ offers, with just a small error or a fleeting lack of focus, a myriad of ways to die.
Steel chain tongs can suddenly tangle, whip around, crush your skull. You can fall 50 feet from the top of a rig. Your arm, then torso can become entangled in a spinning drive shaft.
Those are all ways in which roughnecks working in southwest Wyoming have died in the last seven months.
For most on the rigs, those kinds of catastrophic accidents are an abstraction. Something you put out of your mind in order to do the job.
But on a recent Wednesday, that abstraction ended for the crew on Pioneer rig #41.
In a death more random than most, a hand on the rig was pulling on the steel blade of a forklift. The blade slid out, struck him in the skull, and then landed on his throat.
Casey James and Dan Wilkey were scheduled to work the rig that night, and the accident hit home.
The first thing they did was call their wives. Then they talked about it.
They reminded themselves of statistics that show itÕs more dangerous to drive a car than work on a rig. They talked about how theyÕd be miserable going to an office every day.
ÒItÕs something hard to talk to them about. ThereÕs times IÕve hurt myself and just donÕt mention it. Sometimes the less they know the less they are going to worry,Ó James said of the conversation with his wife that night.
James has four children in Vernal, Utah, and when heÕs not on shift he drives back. The money he makes roughnecking is a devilÕs bargain.
It allows his wife to stay home with the kids, a choice few American families have. That makes it all Ñ the time on the road, the grueling work, the risk Ñ worth it.
He still thinks so, even if nights like these starkly define just how precariousness the job is.
ÒYou go out there in a bad frame of mind, and someone is going to get hurt. You go out there and youÕve got problems at home, someone is going to get hurt,Ó James said.
ÒYou canÕt ever relax. You canÕt ever let your guard down. There is danger in everything we do.Ó