Brothel

by Alexa Albert

  By now, Brittany had settled into the bar stool next to me, completely absorbed in recounting her story, raising her voice occasionally to be heard over Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” blasting from the jukebox. Whenever the doorbell rang, Brittany ducked her head below the counter of the bar so as not to be caught skipping lineup by Blanche, the floor maid. Brittany’s behavior further substantiated my sense that management didn’t actually respect women’s status as independent contractors. I also wondered if brothel management would be angry with Brittany for revealing that owners once collaborated with pimps and fostered prostitutes’ dependence upon them. Frankly, Brittany’s candidness surprised me, especially if, as she said, having a pimp bore such a social stigma. It was as if Brittany wanted to get this secret off her chest and had picked me to bear witness.

  Hers was the classic story of being caught by a pimp, she said. At the age of eighteen, shortly after graduating from a Catholic high school, she met Bobby while working as a bank teller. He spent three months actively pursuing her, wining and dining her and lavishing her with bouquets and gifts, always acting the gentleman to win her affection. Brittany was flattered by all this attention from a thirty-year-old, and soon he had seduced her. Then one night over dinner, Bobby announced he needed some money—he had started running out—especially because of all he had spent wooing her. To maintain their standard of living, Brittany began charging their expenses and soon accrued a credit card bill of $20,000.

  When she told Bobby of her debt, his response was a cold-blooded “How are you going to pay that off?” Then, for the first time, he mentioned prostitution. Specifically, he told her she should consider going to Nevada to work in a legal brothel. At first, Brittany adamantly refused. She had been raised in a religious family and could never sell her body. But over time, as her debt accumulated and Bobby kept encouraging her to prostitute, she began to waver. She didn’t give in until he finally issued an ultimatum: either she start prostituting or he would leave her. “Why should I be with you if you’re not doing anything for me?” he asked her. Afraid of losing him, Brittany finally submitted.

  Using both guilt and the pretense of love, pimps baited and coaxed women to turn out, Brittany said. Sadly, they rarely reciprocated women’s love in any genuine way. Brittany explained that pimps like Bobby typically used insincere promises of fidelity to placate their prostitutes while continuing to philander in attempts to catch and turn out additional women. Most pimps strove to establish a stable of women off whom they could profit. By arranging for his prostitutes to work staggered three-week schedules in the brothels, so that only one would be home at any given time, a man could fool each woman into believing she was his one and only. Prostitutes who were aware of the existence of others competed ferociously to win their pimp’s favor. Many pimps exacerbated the women’s rivalry, pitting them against one another with the prospect that one prostitute would eventually win out and the two of them together would reap the benefits of all the other girls’ work. There was even an expression for this coveted position: “bottom bitch.”

  But Brittany knew only one woman who had claimed victory and ended up with her pimp: her friend April, who had retired off the floor, or quit prostituting, thirteen years earlier and now worked as a night floor maid at Mustang Ranch. One night April opened up to me and confessed that even though she’d prevailed and had been married for over eighteen years to her former pimp, the road had been tough. “I was bitter about my experience,” she said. “I couldn’t forget those early years. It had been very difficult to share my man with other women. Even after we’d been out of the business and out of the life for a while, he was always looking to catch one girl and to keep her for a couple of months to make some quick money. I had a big problem with that because I didn’t want to share him anymore.”

  More typically, relationships between prostitutes and pimps ended the way Brittany’s had. After almost three years of financial exploitation and some physical abuse, Brittany finally admitted to herself that Bobby was using her. But when she announced her intention to part ways, Bobby said she would have to leave all her possessions behind, regardless of the fact that she had helped him amass eight cars, several homes, and jewelry. In the end, she said, she barely got out of their house with the clothes on her back. With nowhere else to go, nothing to show for her years of work, and not enough confidence to try anything else, Brittany returned to Nevada’s brothels, only this time as an “outlaw,” a prostitute without a pimp. She had been working independently now for nearly eight years.

  Although the brothel industry no longer worked in collusion with pimps, Brittany felt outraged that owners and management didn’t do more to rid the business of pimps altogether. Instead, the brothels maintained a hands-off policy, perhaps not wanting to deprive themselves of the constant supply of prostitutes still furnished by pimps. Law enforcement officials in Oregon, where for some reason many of today’s West Coast pimps allegedly originate, estimate that pimps in the Eugene-Springfield area have over forty women working in Nevada’s brothels who regularly send tens of thousands of dollars back home. When I asked George about this, the next time he drove out to Mustang to check on me, he downplayed it. Rather perfunctorily, he said it was a shame that the women had pimps, and it was nothing the brothel industry was proud of. He could no more understand why the women would give up their money to pimps, he said, than he could understand why the women tended to date ex-cons. (His question was a good one—why were some women emotionally vulnerable to such men and other women not?)

  Brittany and the few others like her who had broken free of pimps tried to warn women who had them that they would eventually be left with nothing to show for their years of hard work. Occasionally, a woman took her colleagues’ words to heart and left her pimp, but usually the efforts were futile. Once, I witnessed a couple of women trying to encourage a working girl named Monica to leave her “old man.” He was one of two infamous twins from Oregon, Henry and Harold, black men in their late twenties or early thirties who “kept” thirteen or fourteen girls apiece, all almost identical. Monica typified the look with her tall, long-legged frame, blond hair, and fresh, cover-of-Seventeen-magazine face. The women shared something else: the twins had marked all of them with identical ankle tattoos.

  The women tried to point out to Monica how cruel her pimp was; he forced her to work without a single day off for over five months. Didn’t Monica see how he was using her? Monica resisted; Henry had trained her well. He loved her dearly, she insisted, and only wanted her to work hard so they could be together sooner. The two had plans to run away to California and start a family. When the women asked why Henry never seemed to want to see her, never visited her or flew her home to Oregon but still expected her Western Unions to be timely and bountiful, Monica started crying. Inside, she had obviously wondered the same thing. But she wouldn’t dream of questioning Henry, she said, or she might lose him. She didn’t know what she would do without him. Wasn’t it proof enough that he loved her, Monica asked hopefully, that he cried and begged her forgiveness after fights they had over the telephone? Deep down, she said, Henry needed her, and she didn’t want to disappoint him.

  Brittany contended that husbands like Donna’s and men like Bobby and Henry and Harold were all pimps, period. Other women sharply disagreed; I found that whether or not their significant others should be regarded as pimps was a hotly contested topic among brothel prostitutes.

  When Brittany had decided to get married, four years earlier, she was very careful. Even though her husband, Jon, unlike her former pimp, held a full-time job as an accounts manager for a manufacturing company, Brittany knew she could easily fall back into the same old role: “He says he’d never take advantage of me like that. But I tell him he wouldn’t have to. I’d let him do it, because I’ve been in that role before—of giving, giving, giving. It’s all I know how to do.” Brittany refused to combine their incomes and insisted on splitting all bills 50–50. “There’s no mo
oching. I don’t send him my money or come home and hand him my purse. My money goes directly into my checking account, and I can spend as much as I want. He doesn’t ask me about my money. I’m careful not to let him cross that line.”

  My long discussion with Brittany at the bar ended abruptly when one of her regulars found her sitting with me and asked to go back to her bedroom to “talk,” the brothel euphemism for negotiating prices. As soon as Brittany walked away, I became aware of feeling empty. Knowing that so many of these women had been manipulated by men they loved cast them in a new, more tragic light. I felt sickened by the thought of such controlling, self-serving men, using these women who had sincere hopes of creating a plentiful, secure future for their loved ones.

  I suddenly missed my home, and my husband (my fiancé and I married in 1994). How would I have felt if he had suggested I increase our family’s income and give Mustang Ranch a try? I would have felt as if he’d sold me down the river. I suddenly felt desperate to call Andy. Wanting to stay immersed in the immediate experience, I hadn’t called home much, but now I found myself homesick. Then I remembered it was Saturday night, when phone use in the brothel was forbidden. From six P.M. Friday until six A.M. Sunday, Mustang’s phone room, a small room off the parlor with four pay phones—women’s sole means of communication with the outside world—was locked. When the prostitutes griped, old-timers, like Blanche the floor maid, waxed on about how much more restrictive the phone rules used to be: back in the 1970s, women were allowed two incoming and two outgoing phone calls per week, and no calls were permitted between four P.M. and nine P.M. Phone prohibitions had always been justified on the grounds that news from home frequently disrupted women’s ability to concentrate on the job.

  Indeed, I had seen that happen. I’d seen Baby storm out of Mustang to patch things up with her boyfriend of eight months after he gave her an ultimatum over the phone: quit the business immediately or he would leave her. I’d heard Tanya screaming into the telephone receiver at her husband almost loud enough to be heard back in the bedrooms: “Here I am trying to make some money for us. I don’t want to just make minimum payments on our J. C. Penney’s, Montgomery Ward, and Chase credit cards. Don’t you want enough money to do the things we’ve been talking about doing? You’re not doing your part. Ever since your brother came around all you do—all you think about—is getting to a bar. You’re going to become an alcoholic.”

  Even I was bickering more with my husband the few times we had spoken. While I wanted to share all that I was seeing, I felt protective of this world, and I found myself impatient when he failed to respond as I wanted him to. At the same time, I wasn’t really that interested in what was happening to him in his world. I hung up many times feeling more alone than I had before I called.

  Some of the women apparently felt the same way; I observed that they tried to minimize contact with home during the weeks they worked at Mustang. In fact, a few women didn’t talk to their families at all from the brothel. Those who had pimps, by contrast, were harassed and checked up on throughout the day. When the women did talk to home, they were generally unforthcoming about what was happening at work, for fear of upsetting their husbands or lovers. Brothel prostitutes ended up keeping their workplace stresses to themselves. Almost no one discussed the sex they had with customers, with the exception of a prostitute who told me that her husband, a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agent, was aroused by stories of her sexual encounters with customers.

  Although Donna’s husband originally claimed that he wouldn’t be bothered by her having sex with strange men, she learned early on that he wasn’t as indifferent as he had professed to be. “It was all so new, all the different types of sexual experiences men wanted; I only knew about oral sex and straight sex,” Donna confessed sheepishly to me one day. “Of course, I wanted to chat about all of it with him; he was my best friend, the only person who knew what I was doing, the only person I could talk to. I can’t remember what I said one evening, but he gave me this look of disgust and said he didn’t want to hear about what I did to these other guys. Then he changed the subject, and I knew right then and there that I’d never mention anything ever again. And he’s never asked.” This was the only way, Donna said, that her husband could cope with her work. I was skeptical, however, that a husband could effectively block out the knowledge that his wife was having sex with other men.

  I had a chance to judge for myself when I met Brittany’s husband. Out of nowhere one day, she invited me to join them in Reno for dinner after she finished her shift, her last before a vacation. She claimed she wanted to prove to me that Jon really wasn’t a quasi-pimp.

  When Jon walked into Mustang that night to pick us up, the women initially mistook him for a trick. Within minutes, two working girls had accosted and propositioned him. Blushing, Jon laughed and explained that he was there to see Brittany. As soon as she emerged from her bedroom, where she’d been with a customer, she spotted him waiting alone in the bar and rushed over to greet him. Self-conscious, they didn’t kiss publicly but just nuzzled for a few minutes. Then Brittany led Jon over to the parlor couch where I was sitting, to introduce us and ask if I was ready to go.

  En route to dinner in their brand-new Ford Explorer, I asked him what it felt like to walk into Mustang and see Brittany working. Before he had time to answer, Brittany interrupted to say that he never saw the customers; he blocked them out. Jon agreed, and added that he was just relieved that the facility wasn’t a flophouse, scummy and dirty with cockroaches and people shooting up drugs in the corner—in short, the typical caricature of the prostitute’s world.

  Our conversation continued in that vein through dinner. A tall, attractive man in his early forties with bleached blond hair and a face that reminded me of Sting, Jon was remarkably, well, normal appearing. I was struck by how protective he was of Brittany, and how obliging he was of me. Having been warned by Brittany that I would probably bombard him with questions, Jon sat patiently and answered me earnestly. When I asked him how he blocked out the customers, he admitted that he had been very inquisitive at the beginning of their relationship, asking Brittany a lot of questions in an attempt to understand her experience. In particular, he needed to know how she kept from becoming emotionally involved with customers, especially if the men were “really good in bed.” “I would never tell him anything descriptive or graphic,” Brittany put in. “He didn’t need to have visuals. My answers were very vague and simple.”

  Jon said that Brittany had put him at ease when she described her standard technique for emotionally detaching from her clients during sex. “I didn’t understand what she meant when she said that she could separate from her work. Then she explained how she disconnects and doesn’t feel anything. She said she sees blackness and nothingness where the man’s face should be.” Jon decided to challenge himself to master Brittany’s technique of repressing the reality of her work. “I asked myself, What am I, a wimp, because I can’t block it out and she can? I’ve learned not to think about what she does. She sells things. She’s a salesperson just like I’m a salesperson. She doesn’t know necessarily what I sell, and I don’t necessarily know what she sells. I see nothing else and I just don’t dwell on it.” Still, every couple of days Jon felt compelled to call Brittany on the brothel pay phones to ask her to tell him once again how much she loved him.

  Meanwhile, Brittany admitted, she wasn’t sure how she wanted Jon to feel about her work. Women who, like Brittany, had been in the business long before meeting their current partners, often harbored conflicting desires—wanting their lovers both to hate and to respect their professional choices. Brittany wanted Jon to tell her to stop working, yet didn’t want him to encroach upon her independence. “While I want him to try to get me to quit, I wouldn’t respect him if he did. That means messing up my money. But I also wouldn’t want him to be indifferent or not to care.”

  Jon had learned his lesson about two years earlier, when he decided to put his foot
down and refuse to share his wife with strangers any longer. Deprived of her source of financial security, Brittany grew increasingly anxious, until finally Jon reconsidered. “I guess if I had the opportunity as a man to make the money some of these women do,” he said, “if I tasted the kind of money some of these women make, I’d have trouble suddenly giving it up, too. She wants to build a nest egg for our family.”

  What did bother Jon was the effect Brittany’s work had on their sex life. Burned out physically and mentally, she had difficulty becoming sexual immediately upon returning home from a stint in the brothels. Needing to acclimate, she often preferred to catch up on sleep instead. Even after several days, she sometimes had no interest in sex and favored cuddling and talking. Although he was usually frustrated after they had been apart, sometimes for weeks, Jon said he tried to be understanding and to leave Brittany alone until she made the first move.

  To add to Jon’s difficulties, Brittany was uncomfortable initiating sex, having come to associate that responsibility with her role as a prostitute. “I have to literally coach myself in my head that this is my husband and that I can get into it,” she said, glancing nervously over at Jon to watch his reaction. “Sometimes it offends me because I know he wants sex. I don’t mean to, but all my defenses come up. As soon as he starts becoming sexual, I become almost frigid!” While Brittany spoke, Jon didn’t lift his eyes off his plate, empty now save for a few cold French fries and a couple of colored toothpicks that had decorated his club sandwich. He looked as if he had just had the wind knocked out of him.

  I was surprised by Brittany’s response. To the extent that I’d considered the matter at all, I assumed that an advantage of being a professional prostitute was learning precisely how to please a man, and thus developing great sexual self-confidence. In reality, many of the Mustang prostitutes, like Brittany, confessed that they had grown sexually repressed and inhibited at home since beginning their careers.