Brothel

by Alexa Albert

  I tried to glance nonchalantly around the room, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary for me to be in a brothel. A jukebox blared out the Foreigner song “Hot Blooded” from the center of the room, in front of a partition that divided the parlor area from the bar behind. Against the walls sat several black velvet sofas and a cigarette machine. Neon beer signs and an assortment of Mustang Ranch T-shirts and windbreakers for sale decorated the walls above the bar. The lights were kept dim, and the room felt like a seedy biker bar, minus only a pool table and a pinball machine. On my left, a young black woman with seductive but disengaged eyes sprawled across one of the couches. Another woman strode across the parlor in spiked heels, smoking a cigarette. An Asian man in a 49ers sweatshirt chatted quietly with a redhead on another sofa.

  Slow Monday night, George remarked. He walked away to speak with management about my visit, leaving me at the bar to take in the environment. The three women in the room stared at me for a few minutes, but their interest eventually dwindled and I was left alone. George reappeared after about twenty minutes and surprised me with an invitation to stay at the Ranch so as to be close to the subjects of my study. Live inside the brothel? I hesitated. I had planned to stay in a cheap Reno motel, never expecting an opportunity like this. My head spun. Sensing my ambivalence, George assured me he’d check in regularly. I took a deep breath. No half measures, Alexa. I moved in that evening.

  That first night, I lay in bed listening to the doorbell ring continuously, announcing the arrival of male visitors. I had been given a vacant room down Hallway B, what was called the night girls’ hallway. My neighbors all worked the shift from eleven P.M. to eleven A.M. Because of the brothel’s narrow hallways, no wider than four feet, and thin walls, prostitutes’ rooms were typically clustered by shifts so that off-duty women could sleep undisturbed. I could hear a woman’s moans through the rice-paper wall at the head of my bed. For a moment, I was alarmed: Was someone hurt? Then I reminded myself where I was, and tried to figure out whether these were sounds of genuine pleasure. I couldn’t tell. Every few minutes, her customer emitted a rough grunt and occasionally they both laughed. I couldn’t help but think that the sounds the man was making were deeply unarousing; I tried to imagine being forced to act pleasured by some man I didn’t know making guttural animal sounds, and I couldn’t. At least I felt relatively safe, though I did have fleeting fears of awakening in the middle of the night to find a drunken man groping at my nightgown. (Although I’d locked my door, I was sure the push-button lock was easy to pick.) I closed my eyes tight and let the thoughts pass. I had nowhere else to go.

  The next day, I began interviewing women, with the help of Irene, Mustang #2’s manager. Irene had been at Mustang for two years. Unlike most brothel managers, she hadn’t been a prostitute. She had come to Mustang as a “square,” as prostitutes called those outside the sex industry. She took a job as a cashier four months after her husband’s death. Three months later, she was promoted to manager. She was a short, squat woman in her late fifties. Her matronly physique contrasted with a crass tongue and a gruff cigarette-scarred voice. She had seen her share of hard times, she told me, and believed it was just happenstance that she herself hadn’t become a working girl. An unwed teen mother in the 1950s, she had married a man she never loved to escape her mother’s house. During the 1960s, she worked at a racetrack in Philadelphia; there she had her first exposure to prostitutes and started a love affair with a married Philadelphia Tribune sportswriter. Eventually she married him and they lived happily together for twenty-two years, until his untimely death at the age of sixty-five.

  Her lack of experience in the sex industry had made her timid, even fearful, during her first months as cashier, Irene confided. Rather than mingle with the girls or customers, she kept to herself and stayed inside her cashier’s cage. But the loneliness of recent widowhood drove her to seek connections with the prostitutes, many of whom seemed as solitary and abandoned as she felt. Quickly, Irene became Mustang #2’s den mom, attending to the women’s needs and judiciously doling out hugs and discipline.

  Irene made it perfectly clear at the outset that she was the prostitutes’ advocate. She wanted the women to understand clearly the purpose of my study before they agreed to participate. To give the women some privacy, she allowed me to use her office for interviews. With her support, and the $40 cash I promised each woman upon the study’s completion, most of the prostitutes at #2 agreed to participate.

  My first subject was Star, a young black woman dressed in a turquoise spandex bodysuit. She had long, straightened hair and ebony skin that was smooth save for one small raised scar over her left breast, from a cigarette burn many years earlier. As she walked into the office, she immediately made her reservations known. “I can’t waste no time back here. I have to earn some money.” I proceeded tentatively, glancing her way anxiously whenever the doorbell rang to announce a customer. In spite of herself, however, Star seemed to enjoy the interview and actually looked surprised when we finished nearly forty-five minutes later. A look of consternation crossed her face as I explained the next phase of the study.

  “You want me to save the rubbers?” she asked, incredulous.

  When I tried to explain that I needed to examine the condoms for breaks, her eyes glazed over and she cut me off. “Just so long as I get my forty bucks at the end.”

  I interviewed five more women that first day. Though very different in appearance, all were surprisingly attractive, I found myself thinking, from a buxom Native American with silky-smooth black hair to her waist and bloodred fingernails, to a bleached blonde with serpent tattoos spiraling up her calves. I guess I had expected to find only tough, hard-looking women. Many of Mustang’s women could have been mistaken for beauticians or department-store cosmetic saleswomen. There were even a few women whose endowments and overt sexuality suggested a centerfold, the American sexual gold standard: Ashley, for instance, a statuesque working girl in her early twenties who wore a sheer black peignoir trimmed with lush marabou over a rhinestone-studded black bikini and matching black marabou slippers.

  At the end of my first day, I felt relieved not to have offended anyone with my questions. Irene invited me to join her and Roxanne, the laundry maid, for dinner. I followed them into the brothel kitchen, a large open room with industrial refrigerators and a large stainless-steel restaurant stove. Cliff, the brothel cook, had prepared a buffet of warm dishes. I took some homemade fried chicken and a baked potato, and Irene chose barbecued ribs and collard greens. We carried our plates over to one of the six tables covered in plastic red-and-white-checked tablecloths scarred with cigarette burns. I was struck by how good the food was. Working girls continuously interrupted our meal to gripe to Irene about a customer who’d failed to tip them or a colleague who borrowed and mistreated an outfit. In between complaints, Irene and Roxanne groused about specific girls who copped princess attitudes and refused to clean up after themselves.

  That night I fell into bed exhausted, almost too tired to hear the sounds of sex coming through my bedroom walls. I wondered how much of my fatigue came from the shock of the new, and how much was due to the brothel’s poor ventilation and ubiquitous cigarette smoke.

  The next two days, I woke early and continued interviewing women. By now, everyone in the house—from working girls to cashiers and bartenders—knew I was George Flint’s guest, a researcher from a university who wanted the women to save their used condoms. Occasionally, staff members would come up to me to ask what I planned to do with the condoms. I got the sense that some of them thought I had a fetish.

  As the women became more accustomed to me, they grew friendlier. At first, they approached only to recount stories about collecting the condoms. One woman described how her client had wanted his used condom to be recognizable, so they had tied it up with a red ribbon. Another apologized because she hadn’t yet collected all ten condoms for which I’d asked; she had only had six “dates.”

  When I wasn’t inte
rviewing, I tried to keep a low profile, and hid out in the kitchen or television room, listening to the doorbell ringing in the parlor. I wasn’t sure whether brothel management would permit me to sit in the parlor among the women and clients. Would my presence seem disruptive? Would I distract the women from their business? What if a client approached me? Staying out seemed the best way to assure not wearing out my welcome. Still, I couldn’t help being curious.

  Irene must have picked up on this, for on my third night she invited me to join her at the bar and offered me a seat with good visibility of the parlor so I could watch as men came through the front door. The drill was remarkably systematized. To gain admittance, clients rang a bell on the electrically controlled outside gate. Before being buzzed inside, they were surveyed by the cashier or floor maid in the daytime, by a security guard at night. Men who appeared drunk, rowdy, or underage were denied entry.

  By the time men reached the front door after walking up a sixty-foot pathway, women had arranged themselves in a lineup in the center of the parlor. Customers were greeted by the spectacle of twenty or thirty women of all shapes and sizes and in various degrees of undress, standing at attention like a row of X-rated Barbie dolls. “Welcome to Mustang Ranch, sir,” said the floor maid, who greeted men at the front door. “These are the ladies available to you. Ladies, please introduce yourselves.”

  One by one, the women went down the line offering their working names, aliases such as Bambi, Fancy, and Champagne. On cursory inspection, most of the women appeared pleasant, smiling cordially but reticently, in compliance with house rules. A few dared to flirt more candidly, teasing with a sly wink or flashing a coquettish glance. On closer examination, the women’s eyes revealed more genuine feelings: annoyance, indifference, desperation, disdain, agitation, and occasionally intoxication.

  The customers didn’t seem to notice. They were simply too stunned. Some communicated their astonishment with awkward exclamations: “Holey moley!” “Wow, what a spread!” The dramatic ones staggered backward; a few even clutched their chests. One astonished man dressed in a cotton jersey and sneakers stood motionless and asked, “What do I do?”

  “You choose, honey,” said the floor maid. It was her responsibility to shepherd along baffled customers.

  Finally, after scrutinizing the women for a few seconds, he pointed nervously to one on the far right, at the end of the lineup. “The animal print outfit,” he exclaimed. Like many other customers overwhelmed by the formation, he had failed to catch the women’s names.

  Many seemed to get stuck on this detail. “Can they do that again? Say their names again?” asked a balding man in his forties, dressed in a red polo shirt, khakis, and leather loafers. The floor maid maintained her hospitable smile, but furrowed her eyebrows to indicate that she had no intention of making the women stand on display a minute longer. When the man still didn’t pick, she shrugged and gave a nod to the women to disband.

  Irene remarked that the floor maid on duty that night was strong on sales and peddling the merchandise. Instead of asking customers if they would like to select a lady, she asked, “Which lady would you like to select?” When a customer opted for a drink at the bar instead, she pitched hard, telling him that any woman of his choosing would be more than willing to serve him drinks in her room. I watched as several men submitted under such pressure. (Unlike Nevada’s so-called parlor houses, Mustang was a bar house, which meant customers didn’t have to select immediately from the lineup but could opt first for a drink at the bar. After downing some liquid courage, however, customers were expected to choose a prostitute. To that end, women one by one approached the barflies and tried to lure them back to their rooms.)

  Once a man picked a woman, he followed her back to her room to negotiate a “party.” Most customers settled upon a price, which usually ranged between $150 and $500 (“fantasy sessions” cost more), depending on the time of day, the day of the week, the customer’s attitude, and how drunk or high he was. Mustang accepted cash and most credit cards, but not American Express, which refused to service houses of ill repute, legal or otherwise. An innocuous, unincriminating company name appeared on the invoice; at Mustang it said Nevada Novelties, Inc. There was even an ATM in Mustang’s parlor, in case customers ran out of cash. Customers who couldn’t reach an agreement on price with a prostitute got “walked,” or escorted back to the front parlor, where they were free to negotiate with a different working girl. With an average of six customers per day, prostitutes earned $300 to $1,500 daily.

  As the staff grew more comfortable with my presence over the next couple of days, they permitted me to roam throughout Mustang #2 as I pleased. I spent hours on the parlor sofas watching the lineup, entertaining myself by silently handicapping each woman, asking myself who was most eye-catching, or whose outfit was most shameless. Was it the wet-pink vinyl, lace-up cat suit, or the sheer, sapphire baby doll? Over time, I learned to read the women’s facial expressions and could pick out who looked most desperate for a customer and who was avoiding eye contact with a client in the hopes of not being picked.

  I also got good at identifying each woman’s particular way of greeting a customer once she was picked from the lineup. Tilly made physical contact immediately, either offering an outstretched hand to shake or, more aggressively, grabbing the man’s arm and leading him back to her room. In contrast, some of the newer girls, like Samantha and Amy, gave every customer the same forced smile before turning on their heels and heading back to their rooms, the men following silently like puppy dogs.

  On my fifth day, I finished interviewing all the women at Mustang #2 who met the study’s eligibility criteria. It was time for me to venture over to Mustang #1 to enroll more women. But I dreaded the prospect. By now, I had picked up bits and pieces of gossip about the other house. According to the working girls at #2, the prostitutes at #1 could be vicious. Mustang #1 tended to be full of experienced working girls known to be competitive, stuck-up, and insolent; Mustang #2 got more of the turn-outs—the first-time working girls—who helped to make the place more hospitable and neighborly.

  Although they were under the same ownership, Mustang Ranch’s two compounds had always differed considerably, it seemed. Larger and more opulent, Mustang #1 was considered the main house, #2 merely an annex; it had been built in 1984 to handle #1’s overflow. Rumor had it that Joe Conforte used to put all his girlfriends over at #2, safe and out of sight of Sally, his wife, who managed both houses from her suite at #1.

  With trepidation, I headed over to #1, where Vivian, the manager, greeted me. Vivian had been in the business off and on for over thirty years, first as one of Joe Conforte’s working girls in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Fifty-four years old, she was an attractive, slender woman with high cheekbones and a mane of auburn hair that she had the habit of swinging from side to side. She quickly led me through the kitchen—twice the size of Mustang #2’s—and back to an office, where she informed me that I could expect “excellent” participation from her girls. If anyone gave me trouble, I was to contact her. Unlike Irene, Vivian had simply announced she expected all of the prostitutes to participate if they wanted to stay her girls. They needed to give something back, she explained, for the privilege of working in a legal house.

  Vivian sent women back one by one to be interviewed; indeed, they immediately struck me as different from the women in Mustang #2. Although most were polite, they seemed impenetrable, aloof. Tanya, an older brunette who barely cracked a smile, asked me with thinly veiled disdain who I really thought cared about the condom information I was collecting. She had never had a condom break or slip off, and frankly, there wasn’t much else to say. Later in the afternoon, another woman informed me that some of her friends didn’t like the way I had phrased certain questions. Do you think we’re stupid? she asked. Is that why I’d used the expression “come” instead of “orgasm”? Still, I managed to complete six interviews my first day at #1 and to convince all six women to continue with t
he study—although Tanya made it clear, “Like I’ve already told you, I don’t break condoms.”

  Despite Vivian’s civil reception, the staff, too, was more hostile. I had barely glanced into Mustang #1’s parlor—a large octagonal room with a two-story vaulted ceiling, skylights, scarlet wall-to-wall carpeting, and eight hallways extending out to the women’s bedrooms like spokes on a wagon wheel—when I was accosted by a floor maid named Shelley, a woman my age who wore oversized plastic-framed glasses and had her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. (I later learned that she had been a working girl at Mustang several years before, and that she had specialized in sadism.) “You’re the one asking questions,” she barked, her cold eyes piercing mine. I nodded, assuming she meant my research questions. “Well, you can’t be in here,” she continued. “You don’t belong here.” “Here” was the parlor, but deep down, I suspected, she really meant the brothel. Effectively bullied, I apologized and asked her to tell Vivian I would be back in the morning.

  As I rushed across the parking lots dividing Mustang #1 from #2, the fresh, balmy desert air touched my skin, and it hit me that until today, I had spent the past five days entirely indoors at #2. Every day through the windows I had noticed the sun sparkling off the sagebrush-speckled hills, but I hadn’t thought much of the fact that I hadn’t been outside. On a few occasions, I had caught sight of a carload of tourists posing outside the brothel fence for a photo, and it had struck me that the brothel residents actually lived like animals in a zoo. The gates that surrounded most of Nevada’s brothels were supposedly built to protect prostitutes, staff, and customers alike from outside provocation. But whereas the non-“working” staff and the customers were at liberty to come and go, the working girls were required to remain on the premises and were let out for fresh-air breaks only in the enclosed front and back yards. (At management’s discretion, they could occasionally take twenty-four- and forty-eight-hour leaves from the brothel.)