The Call of the Weird

by Louis Theroux

  Not knowing much about brothels before I came to the Wild Horse, to begin with I viewed the line-up as a kind of paradigm of the commercial nature of the relationship between the women and their customers. I assumed the brothel was like porn in three dimensions— emotionless and voyeuristic. But the relationships between the working girls and their customers could be surprisingly human and well-rounded. They liked many of the men who visited them. Occasionally they would get crushes. As I stayed longer, it was the naturalness that existed between the women and the customers that struck me. Many of the women had “regulars” who they might continue seeing for many years. Rather than libertines or satyrs, the men were mostly people who for various reasons— because they were shy, or ugly, or disabled, or because they didn’t want commitment—had difficulty finding girlfriends in the outside world.

  Again, like actors, the women’s roles leaked over into their real lives, even more so, since they were impersonating versions of themselves, working in a weird gray area between sincerity and insincerity. They were self-impersonators—paid to be the people their clients couldn’t find in life. Comfortable, poised, sometimes deceptive. For me, this brought its own set of challenges. They could be glib, their answers a little too ready. In my conversations with the women, I was aware that I, as a man, was in a small way being hustled, and in none more so than with Hayley.

  She’d had no hesitation about being interviewed. This in itself was unusual. Most of the women avoided publicity. But Hayley liked it, even telling me her real name, which was Tammy.

  She seemed to enjoy flouting the many conventions of brothel life. She said she sometimes kissed the guys in her parties, a big taboo for many of the women, and where the others made a point of separating the business from their outside emotional lives, Hayley talked about how “real” the job was. “Your masks come off when you’re asking for sex,” she said. “People see this as a very phony profession. It can get real emotional sometimes.” She said she loved her job, but it didn’t seem quite that simple.

  Tall, athletic, faintly Native American–looking, she was in her late twenties. She’d grown up in northern California, a few hours west of Reno over the Sierra. She’d been working as a prostitute for four or five years, having made the transition from dancing in clubs.

  One afternoon, as she got ready for the night’s work, I asked her why she became a prostitute. “I was very wild,” she said. “At first, I had a lot of issues. I felt, ‘Oh my God, I should have gone back to school.’ But now I’m lazy and I make great money and I’m not ready to do that. I may at some point in my life, if I meet someone that’s worth it, but now, no.”

  She professed that working girls have a “sixth sense” that allows them to size up customers. I pressed her on this. I asked her to size me up. “But to be honest the only way that you would really be able to embrace that or understand that is if you were a customer and you’ve never been a customer. Would you ever be a customer? Would you ever be with a working girl? Would you ever pay someone for sex?”

  “I like the idea that if I was with a woman that she wouldn’t have to be paid to enjoy my company,” I said, perhaps a little primly.

  But this suggestion, which had been thrown out lightly, took root and in the subsequent days grew into a standing challenge: Hayley would only allow me to continue interviewing her if I booked a party.

  I talked to Lance about it, mentioning that she’d set terms. “Oh, only for today,” he said. “Hayley is the essence of a manipulator. She plays, she grandstands, she titillates, and she’ll have a great deal of fun at your expense and mine, because she’s a very attractive, alluring, devilish little lady.”

  But more days went by and Hayley didn’t back down. If anything, her behavior toward me grew more unpredictable. Some days she would be friendly and talk engagingly about brothel life; others she refused to answer questions, flashing her breasts if I didn’t stop. For my part, I began to see some merit in the idea of a massage. I hadn’t found it easy to meet clients of the brothel. If I’m honest, I was struggling a little for material for my documentary. By paying for a massage I could be the client myself and enact what happens during a party, albeit a chaste one. In other stories I’d done, I’d been a “participant reporter”; booking a party seemed a reasonable and possibly revealing way to enter into the spirit of life at a brothel.

  We agreed on a price of $200. In her bedroom, I stripped down to my boxer shorts and lay face down with a towel round my waist. The massage itself was fairly embarrassing, which I suppose was half the point. She seemed to regard it as a coup to have snared me, the visiting reporter, into doing business with her. “I’m having a blast,” she said. Hoping to get my money’s worth, I peppered her with questions. Did she ever enjoy the physical side of it? Did she really kiss the guys? Did she tell guys she went out with in the “square world” what she did for a living?

  She said she enjoyed the sex sometimes. “Yes. Of course! I’m human. You know, the body is alive. A feeling is a feeling. A sensation is a sensation. I would hope that I wasn’t totally shut off and I couldn’t feel any kind of thing. That wouldn’t be good, right?” As for kissing the guys: “Oh well, rarely. Only if they’re really good-looking. Like cowboys. I’m a sucker for a good-looking cowboy with a nice smile. And if he’s got a sense of humor, it’s a date.” She said she didn’t see many men outside work; that if she was in love, as she hoped to be one day, she wouldn’t be working in a brothel. And if the guy didn’t mind her working, “then I probably wouldn’t be with that guy.”

  After the massage, something changed between Hayley and me. Perhaps I no longer held any challenge for her. She was distant. She became unruly around the house. A few weeks later, she was thrown out. Several offenses were mentioned. The saloon in the new premises had recently opened and she’d been binge drinking. She’d been rude to one of the other women and made her cry. She’d got one of the security guards fired, tricking him into bringing her drinks in her room by pretending she was partying with a high-rolling customer. She’d also sassed a client in the saloon, a dark-skinned man from Fiji who was rude to one of the other women—she’d shouted out “Bye, Bin Laden!” as he left.

  But Hayley was back a few weeks later, having promised to keep her drinking under control. “This place is going to make lots of money,” she said, as I helped her unpack her things and move back into her room.

  A year later, when I was back in America meeting up with my old subjects, I called the Wild Horse from Las Vegas, and wasn’t terribly surprised to learn that Hayley had been thrown out again. “This time I don’t think she’s coming back,” Kris the office manager told me, with an air of finality. I drove eight hours through hundreds of miles of empty desert and arrived back at the brothel early one evening, in time for a dinner date with Lance and Susan and some business friends of theirs.

  A table had been laid, banquet-style, in the saloon. Above us, an extra-large TV showed soft-core pornography, frolicking nude models in artistic locations (desert gas station, old-fashioned corner store), which made it difficult to focus on what anyone was saying. I felt as though I were dining in a film by Luis Buñuel. The genteel accoutrements of the meal, the napkins, the arsenal of silverware, the discreet waiters in black suits, all of it seemed rather surreal as around us the sirens of the Wild Horse waited for business— Onyx in her see-through body stocking; Monique in her platinum-blonde wig and cocktail dress; Cicely in her fishnet top and lace choker . . .

  The next few days I spent loitering at the Wild Horse. As before, I felt oddly vulnerable speaking to the women. Unlike other worlds I’ve spent time in, populated by evangelists and pitchmen and people looking to make a name, here the women stood to gain nothing from publicity. The only possible benefit I could offer them was if I booked a party. Knowing this, I sometimes sensed that idea hovering unspoken, which added to the complications of my being there. I found that with no camera present, only my notebook, I began to doubt my own good faith. I fe
lt fraudulent, sitting around in the brothel kitchen all day or propping up the bar, jotting down notes. “Do you want some more cock?” the Hispanic bartender would ask. What exactly was I doing there? Did they believe me when I said I was writing a book? Did I believe myself? I worried I was becoming a “PT”—a “professional trick.”

  I never knew exactly where I stood with the women. One of the new courtesans was called Scarlett. She was thirty-two, tall, slender, with long red hair, brown eyes—she was also a registered nurse. She’d got in after watching a documentary about prostitution with her husband, Mike. “I don’t remember if it was his idea or my idea. It just came out, ‘Well, that looks like fun!’ On my own I’d thought about it, because I was interested in the money . . . So when I figured out it was legal and it wouldn’t affect my nursing, I just thought, ‘Go for it!’ It’s a kick-in-the-pants job. I can’t think of a better one.

  “Mike is awesome. Very open-minded and not caught up in that jealousy . . . And he likes that I get to explore my sexuality. I’ll be like, ‘Honey, I got a new position for you!’ He has a field day!” She shrugged and added, “Everybody has their quirk for sex. Mine is I like sex with strangers. I don’t like dating. I don’t like playing hard to get. So this keeps me out of trouble.” But the next day, killing time at the bar, I chatted to Scarlett some more, and this time she said she didn’t enjoy the sex that much, that for her the appeal of the work was that it was like nursing, answering people’s emotional needs.

  I’d been hoping that if I stayed long enough I might learn where Hayley was. Certainly, there was no shortage of stories about her behavior, which everyone agreed had been obnoxious: She’d been drinking heavily; she had a boyfriend who’d supposedly got her mixed up with drugs; she’d insulted Susan’s masseuse, who had a leg brace from a motorcycle injury, calling him either a “fucking cripple” or a “handicapped fuck.” In another account, Hayley had been drinking so much and getting so little sleep that she began to think she was having an attack of some kind.

  “She got worse and worse,” Susan said. “I’d let her go. Then she’d promise to be good. She’d come back. But it would happen again. Before, even when she was bad, there used to be a little part of her that I could reach. But that went.”

  On the third day, I bumped into a working girl called Ricky, who I knew to be talkative and indiscreet. According to her, Hay-ley had been strung out on “crank”—the street name for crystal meth—“talking all this Bible stuff . . . how she thinks she’s figured it all out.” She also said Hayley had had sex in one of the negotiating rooms.

  “Is that such a big deal, having sex in the negotiating room?” I asked.

  “No condoms? No money? Yeah!”

  Hayley had either retired, started dancing in Sacramento, or was working out of another brothel. It was evidence of the loose attachments this business fostered that no one seemed too sure where she was or what she was doing.

  Even knowing the strange, alternate existence of brothel life, with its assumed identities, I’d thought there would be enough professional camaraderie between the women that one of them would have an email address or a way of leaving a message. It was a testament to the shame that was still so deeply embedded in the business of sex, I reflected. Everything at the Wild Horse was sequestered: the relationships between the working girls and customers; friendships between the women. No one even seemed to know Hayley’s real last name, or perhaps they were wary of giving it to me. I hesitated to ask Susan, sensing I might be crossing a line by poking my nose into their non-brothel lives.

  In one of my last conversations with Susan she mentioned she thought Hayley might be working out of a brothel in Elko. I knew Elko only as a name on the map—a town in the east of Nevada, toward Utah, out in the middle of nowhere. I called round a few of the bordellos listed in the phone book, and two said they recognized the name: a man at Sharon’s, who sounded drunk, and a woman at Sue’s Fantasy Club, who said: “She won’t be working here again.” If nothing else, I figured it would be a chance to see some of the old-style cathouses.

  The road was straight highway for 280 miles, through a landscape of distant suede-brown hills and flat, treeless semi-desert.

  Twenty miles from Elko, I hit Carlin. Sharon’s lies a few miles out of town, within sight of the interstate—a weathered old double-wide trailer, its eaves strung with Christmas lights, white walls, and bright red trim, with neon beer signs in the window. It’s set down on a rumpled blanket of bare brown hills with no other buildings in sight.

  The sky was broad and blue with wisps of cloud as I pulled up on the gravel parking lot. The owner and manager, Charlie, came to the door. Late forties, he had a moustache and a faintly camp manner and was dressed as though for athletics in a white T-shirt, a pair of sweat shorts, and sneakers. He was smoking a cigarette, and his voice was dark brown and boozy-sounding, even though it wasn’t yet lunchtime.

  Inside the front room was a small bar, the walls pasted with dollar bills signed in magic marker by truckers with their CB handles— Poker, Deuce, Snoopy—many of them old and peeling off. “Mother says it looks tacky,” Charlie said. “Tacky it may be, but I’ll never have to paint it again!” A row of workmen’s helmets, also signed, hung on the wall. A ceiling fan spun slowly. A Rockola jukebox stood silent. An old woman—not Charlie’s mother, who was away for the day—sat knitting in the corner.

  Charlie took me on a tour, down the narrow, low-ceilinged corridors, past the bedrooms. “I have seen a hundred and thirty-two women in sixteen years,” he said. “The shortest one worked for fifteen minutes, the longest for seven years.” there were stuffed bunny decorations on the bedroom doors, little signs saying “Welcome.” “This is one of the girls’ rooms,” he said, slurring so that “girls” sounded like “girlziziz.” I peeked inside. The room was homey, furnished with lots of cushions on the beds and chintzy oddments, bits of needlework, teddy bears, a TV, a VCR, mirrors on the walls and cheap wood paneling.

  “I have two on the floor right now,” Charlie said, “Crystal and Suzanne.” In a back room, a conservatory, Crystal was giving directions to a trucker on a CB radio. “I love movies,” she was saying. “Ask for Baby Doll when you get here.”

  Back at the bar, Charlie poured me a Coke.

  I asked about Hayley. “I remember her but I do not know where she’s at. I do not know what working name she’s under, because the girls will change their working names, and that’s the reason some of’em rotate around from place to place. They get tired of seeing the same customers day after day. Mother will say to these girls, if you don’t get a marriage proposal a day, there’s something wrong. So that wears on them, hearing that week after week. If they wanted to get married, they’d go out and get married. They wouldn’t be in here working.”

  Something in Charlie’s manner made me suspect that Hayley had never worked at Sharon’s—maybe he’d claimed to know her on the phone just to get me down there, to generate some business or for publicity. But I asked if I could leave a message for her anyway. Then, thinking about what he’d just said and my own experience of the women, I said, “They’re not looking for love?”

  “I don’t think so. But, in our sixteen years we have married five girls out of here and two of’em are still married. I don’t consider that bad,’cause the national average is fifty percent divorce rate.”

  “Lance at the Wild Horse said some of the working girls come from abusive backgrounds,” I said.

  “I used to have a sign that said, ‘Six o’clock—the psychiatric hour is over.’ They want to hear a sad story? I’ll give them a sad story if I have to make it up!” Suddenly, from nowhere, Charlie sounded annoyed. “I don’t want to hear their sad stories! They’re supposed to be here to laugh and joke around!”

  He paused and said, “Some people go in bars to say the world’s shit upon them. Usually they’ve shit upon themselves.”

  I tried Sue’s Fantasy Club in Elko. A little old cattle and mining town, Elko ha
s a grid of streets slung like a net between the interstate and the railroad. Unusually for Nevada, instead of lying outside the city, the brothels are downtown, four of them in a small cluster on Third Street where it ends at the train tracks. Sue’s is a nondescript two-storey building, with an L-shaped bar in one corner, and a sofa and comfy chairs in another. If the bar were a reception desk, you could imagine the layout as the lobby of a budget motel, with a corridor of rooms leading off, where the women do their entertaining.

  The place was quiet when I arrived. A corkboard behind the bar said “Meet Our Ladies.” On three-by-four index cards were the names Frenchy, Dee, and Marie. Dee was at the bar, smoking a cigarette. She was fifty or so, with short red hair, wearing a figure-hugging stretch black-lace outfit. Like some other prostitutes I’d met, she’d got into the business via swinging. Before that, she’d worked in “medical management” on the East Coast; she didn’t care to be specific. She was well spoken and educated. She’d been the editor of various newsletters, and had two sons, who didn’t know what she was doing. One was graduating from college in a few weeks.

  “How have you been finding it so far?” I asked

  “Tedious at times. Frustrating at times,” Dee said. “I actually had more sex at home with a close circle of friends. And unfortunately so many of the guys who come for sex at the brothel are very basic. They don’t tend to play. And then you get the guys who come in like guys at the fish market, looking at you. Occasionally it can be hard on the ego. A lot of them are in the brothels because they have difficulty in relationships.”

  I asked about Hayley. Dee said she wasn’t sure—she’d only been at Sue’s a week. Before that she’d been working at a brothel in Wells, an even more remote town an hour east. “There was a $100 minimum there, but business was getting so bad we were doing $60 truckers’ specials.”

  She took me on a tour. A computer sat in the corner. Internet access had been cut off because the bill hadn’t been paid. there was a Jacuzzi room with wood paneling and decking for clients paying $500 and above. Dee’s bedroom was small, with painted brick walls—a little like a prison cell, I couldn’t help thinking. She’d thrown a scarf over the lamp, put some pictures on the walls. there was a bookshelf with ten or fifteen books: literary novels by Isabel Allende, James Carroll, two books about Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, including her memoir, Personal History.