Brothel

by Alexa Albert

  Women also described needing specific sexual activities to become sufficiently aroused: prolonged kissing, foreplay, fantasizing, dirty talk, loving words, and for some, intoxication. “He can’t take off his clothes and stand in front of me naked because it reminds me too much of work and all the other men I see standing there like that,” said Brittany. “He has to move slowly and we have to do special things, like take a shower together or play with our clothes on for a while, otherwise it’s too much like work.” Still, most of the women working at Mustang—including Brittany—said they had sexually satisfying relationships with their lovers. Over 90 percent of the women told me they orgasmed with their lovers, and almost half said they did so every time.

  After a few minutes of silence, Jon said that he had long sensed Brittany’s inhibition but hoped it would dissipate over time. What bothered him even more was her opposition to having children. Brittany couldn’t face the possibility of her kids finding out that she had worked as a prostitute. “Do I want to have to explain to my children what I have done for more than a decade?” Brittany snapped. Somberly, she added, “It makes me very sad, because I love children. There are a lot of girls that have babies, but the price seems too high to pay.” Working lawfully, as a licensed prostitute, didn’t seem to eliminate the shame associated with prostitution. Jon responded that he would defend Brittany’s past choices, if she agreed to quit working should she ever have children.

  But many of Mustang’s prostitutes, like Donna, worked despite having children at home. In fact, over one-third of the women who worked at Mustang Ranch were mothers. As Brittany suspected, however, the sacrifices were significant. Licensed prostitutes couldn’t go home at the end of the day to cook their children dinner or tuck them into bed. Often away for weeks at a time, they had to rely on others to look after their kids—lovers, family, or friends. Irene, the manager at #2, confided that she found this one of the saddest aspects of the job. She always warned new applicants just how limited their contact with their children would be. “Given that this isn’t a nine-to-five job and they can’t just run home, I ask how they’ve planned for an emergency, who has the authority to take their children to the hospital if they get sick.”

  Women tried to make it up to their kids with regular telephone calls, letters, and material objects. With their newly earned cash, prostitutes frequently paid the brothel runners to go on shopping sprees in local toy stores before the women left for home on vacation. The runners would return looking like Santa Claus, bearing shopping bags filled with hundreds of dollars’ worth of toys, from Barbie dolls and Beanie Babies to sneakers and video games. The overspending seemed so extreme, I couldn’t help but think it reflected the women’s effort to assuage their guilt and win their children’s affection.

  Donna was no different. One day I saw her bustling about, trying to decide what she should bring home to her kids on her weeklong vacation. She had already sent the runner out to Toys “R” Us to start stocking up. When Amber the “candy lady” stopped in, Donna rushed back to the kitchen to buy some additional treats. One of several door-to-door vendors who brought their wares to the brothel, Amber always came prepared. She knew that many of the women relied on her for presents for their families.

  Unlike some of the other vendors, who serviced Mustang Ranch weekly, Amber drove in from California to sell her homemade confectionery only every couple of months, usually around holidays like Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day. On this particular visit, two weeks before Father’s Day, she was offering chocolates molded into neckties and tool sets. But she also always had candy for children: dark, milk, and white chocolate in animal shapes from rabbits to dinosaurs. Amber’s prices ranged from $8 to $25 for individually boxed candy. On this particular day, Donna bought a hundred dollars’ worth of chocolate for her two children.

  In addition to chocolates and toys, Donna always brought home make-believe stories about her job as a stewardess. There was the tale of meeting Michael Jordan on a flight to Chicago, and the one about helping the pilot land the plane. It was common for the mothers to make up lies to explain their absences. In fact, most of the women, mothers or not, led double lives, keeping their profession secret from extended family and friends. What struck me was that most women told stories that were almost true. Savannah told her in-laws she sold phone sex on a 900 number. Lara told her mother that her large all-cash income came from selling drugs. I found it fascinating that phone sex and drug dealing seemed all that less objectionable than prostitution. Savannah explained that she wished she could tell her family the truth but feared rejection, and that telling partial truths felt better than blatantly lying. Feeling compelled to lie only reinforced the shame of prostitution.

  I was greatly surprised one morning, then, when the mother of a prostitute named Jasmine rang the doorbell at Mustang #1 with Jasmine’s two young sons, aged five and eight, in tow to pick up money for the household. When the grandmother and boys were admitted through Mustang’s gates, Jasmine rushed out to the front yard to greet them. The boys didn’t blink at their mother’s electric-pink hot pants; they were much more interested in the Popsicles another woman brought out for them. As Jasmine and her mother spoke, another prostitute chased the two children around the yard in a game of tag. The presence of these merry and energetic children transformed the entire brothel, giving it the cheerful atmosphere of a playground.

  Still, I found it jarring to see young children hanging around a brothel while men continued to ring the bell and pass through the gates. By law, people under eighteen weren’t allowed on brothel property, and the floor maid came outside to make sure Jasmine knew the boys would absolutely not be permitted inside. Later, Jasmine told me that her sons knew that their mother worked at the “famous” Mustang Ranch, but had no idea what the Ranch really was. I wondered how long it would be before they understood.

  What had the children thought of the fortresslike eight-foot fence behind which their mother worked? What had Jasmine’s mother felt on seeing her daughter dressed up in her working outfit? When the time finally came for the boys to leave, they burst into tears and had to be pulled from Jasmine’s side by their grandmother, who promised them a Happy Meal at McDonald’s if they would “just get into the fucking car.” When the blue Oldsmobile finally pulled away, I caught Jasmine wiping a tear from her eye.

  What hard choices these women made. It was a brutal calculus of sacrifices made for the large incomes most of them enjoyed. But isn’t ours a culture that reveres those who earn big, fast money? We don’t commend the women holding down two blue-collar jobs. We fail to adequately compensate or applaud social workers, teachers, and housecleaners. Weren’t the prostitutes doing what moralists have long preached? They weren’t looking for handouts or freeloading off the system.

  And they took their work seriously. Not only were they committed to earning a decent livelihood, but many of the working girls I met at Mustang Ranch tried genuinely to meet the demands and needs of their customers. Their dedication amazed me. I was still having trouble imagining being courteous and social with some of these men, to say nothing of sleeping with them. How did the women feel about the work they did? How did they bear it?

  *U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth, and Families. Child Maltreatment 1998: Reports From the States to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2000).

  4 .. PRIDE IN ONE’S WORK

  “I have a thing for large breasts,” I overheard a young man whisper almost apologetically to Blanche, the floor maid on duty at Mustang #1. The customer, a man in his late twenties wearing a beat-up aviator jacket, his hair pulled back in a loose ponytail that hung down between his shoulder blades, had come to the brothel alone. He had stood through the lineup and was disappointed with what was on offer. “I mean extremely large breasts,” he said, thrusting his hands out to make the point.

  The floor maid turned her head t
o the women standing in line. “Thank you, ladies,” she said, excusing them.

  As the women broke from lineup, a few of them made faces of disgust, irritation, and annoyance at the waste of time; the rest calmly returned to whatever they had been doing before the doorbell rang. The women killed time between customers the way people kill time everywhere: smoking, snacking, crocheting, gossiping, napping, reading, and playing cards. House rules forbade them from doing any of these things when customers were in the parlor.

  Blanche turned back to the young man at her side, who was nervously fidgeting with the zipper of his jacket. The brothel’s most buxom working girl, Lynn, was busy with another customer, she said, but shouldn’t be much longer. She ushered him over to an empty couch to wait.

  Lynn was one of Mustang’s veterans, a woman in her forties with huge, ponderous, water-balloon breasts, which she showed off with plunging necklines. She used her revealing clothes and a large collection of pornography devoted to busty women to entice customers with breast fetishes. When she finally emerged from her room about twenty minutes later, the young man leaped to his feet and broke into a wide grin of satisfaction.

  Customer obsessions like this no longer startled me. In a relatively short time, I had seen a wide array of men come through Mustang Ranch with an equally wide array of predilections. About 200,000 men visited Mustang Ranch’s two brothels annually, accounting for fully half of Nevada’s brothel business. They were businessmen, conventioneers, fraternity brothers, truckers, hardhats, oil and mineral drilling crews, migrant farmers, disabled veterans, traveling salesmen, bachelor party guests, politicians, and even nationally known celebrities. One evening, a busload of fifteen Japanese tourists on an organized sex tour filed in, accompanied by a tour guide acting as interpreter. The men’s tastes all differed, so nearly every prostitute managed to “break,” the word for having at least one customer daily. Some of Mustang’s customers wanted breasts, others buttocks. Many preferred blondes, others demanded brunettes. Some sought out the raunchiest-dressed women, and still others looked for the girl next door.

  Men’s manners ran the gamut as well. Most were courteous, but others were blatantly rude. Some men walked up to within inches of the women in lineup, breathing heavily and slowly giving each the once-over as if she were a mannequin. Within earshot of the women, one cocky frat boy muttered to his buddies, “Don’t they have anything pretty in here?” The women stood stoically as the floor maid snapped that maybe he needed some taste. Other men came into Mustang and walked right past the lineup to the bar as if oblivious to the women standing at attention for their benefit. “Do they stand like that all the time?” a customer mumbled incredulously to his pal. “Oh, yeah, we stand here like plastic dolls for your entertainment,” one of the women shot back.

  Frankly, I hadn’t really expected the men to behave well. I always assumed that any man who would patronize a brothel and buy sex from a prostitute believed deep down that women were commodities. Most of the prostitutes were unfazed by bad behavior; they’d seen and heard it all before. Most understood that customers’ rudeness was usually a front for insecurity, fear, and embarrassment. The lineup, especially, could be an intimidating moment for even the most self-confident of men. Ironically, that brief moment of deciding which prostitute to pick was a man’s only real moment of power in the brothel. After that, the women seized control, determining what type of sex would be made available and at what price. A man who behaved like a pig in the parlor was guaranteed to pay inflated prices in the bedroom, both as a punishment and as compensation for the anticipated additional work needed to tolerate him.

  Some of the men tried to act gentlemanly; they bought the women drinks, asked them about their interests, and tried to establish a rapport. Because business negotiations and explicit sexual talk were prohibited outside the bedrooms, these preliminary exchanges amounted to superficial small talk.

  The women’s work in the parlor and bar had become almost routine to me now, but once the women walked out of the parlor and headed to their bedrooms with the men in tow, I was left to my imagination. I understood that the prostitutes needed to negotiate prices, examine the men’s penises, and put condoms on, but I didn’t know how they choreographed all this. And as for the sex, I couldn’t imagine it as anything but mechanical, dispassionate, and impersonal, like the quickies homeless teens sold on the streets of Times Square.

  But maybe not. Mustang Ranch was very different from the fleabag motels, cars, and alleyways used by street prostitutes. The working girls here had their own private, personally decorated rooms. In fact, many of them had done up their rooms elaborately with fancy wallpaper, curtains, and light fixtures. On the walls hung posters of women’s favourite musicians and movies, Playboy centerfolds and Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendars.

  But the women went back with up to twelve men per shift: it was hard to imagine sex not becoming mechanical. And the challenge of having to cope with some men’s bad behavior was equaled by that of needing to tolerate others’ personal hygiene. Gene, for example, a Mustang regular, always wore the same soiled jeans, torn, rank baseball jersey, and dingy baseball cap; he chain-smoked down to the filter and scattered the ashes everywhere. Most women kept a row of cleaning products in the bathroom to wash down the toilet seat, bidet, and shower after each client, a grim necessity. Then there were the drunks who threw up and passed out on the women—a not infrequent occurrence.

  One day, I caught a glimpse of sex between a brothel prostitute and her customer. I had gone down to my room to use the toilet and found my bathmate’s door slightly ajar. It was early afternoon and her room was dark, so I assumed she wasn’t inside and went to pull the door shut. As I reached for the handle, I heard soft murmurs coming from inside the room. I froze in place and held my breath. As I leaned forward to listen more closely, figuring it was just two working girls gossiping, it suddenly registered. It was my bathmate and a customer!

  Shamelessly, I pushed open her door a crack more. All was dark except for a red lightbulb in the table lamp, which threw a soft, warm glow over the bed. There, two pairs of bare legs were entwined and rolling back and forth. The couple’s movement was natural and fluid. Instead of being stiff and awkward, the sex looked soft and gentle, almost intimate. I stared for a few seconds before creeping away.

  Later that night, I found myself alone with Baby, and I told her what I had seen. I said I was taken aback to see that sex between a prostitute and her customer could be so tender. Baby smiled. That was the prostitute’s job, she said: to act, to satisfy the sexual desires and fantasies of all her customers. Not all clients wanted hard, impersonal sex, she pointed out. Many wanted soft lovemaking. Others had more specific needs. There was Hangman Harvey, a necrophiliac, who paid Mustang prostitutes to pretend to be dead during intercourse. Or the man with AIDS who turned up at Mustang Ranch searching only for kindness and compassion. The prostitute who serviced him recalled, “He announced to everybody that he had AIDS and didn’t want to have sex. He said that everybody had been treating him badly since they found out he had AIDS. He just needed somebody to talk to, some companionship, and some human touch. I gave him a long backrub.”

  The men were as various as their demands. There were the “normal” men seeking types of sex unavailable to them at home or elsewhere, like fellatio or cunnilingus. One thirty-year-old drove over seven hundred miles from his California home to have sex in the brothels because of his girlfriend’s vow to remain “as pure as the driven snow” until marriage. One of Baby’s many regulars was a professional golfer who was afraid he would scare away his longtime girlfriend if he requested the rough sex he felt comfortable asking for only from a prostitute. There were workaholics too busy to invest time in relationships, and commitment-resistant men who craved sex unfettered by responsibilities or obligations. And of course, there were always the men desperate to lose their virginity.

  I met one of these the day he came in with his father. The boy was a tall, gangly
adolescent dressed in typical slept-in-looking teen garb—loose-fitting jeans, rumpled plaid shirt, sneakers, and a baseball cap. Underneath his cap, his eyes darted about frantically; he was very tightly wound. The boy, whose name was Zachary, didn’t choose a woman out of the lineup; he remained quiet as his father started grilling one of the prostitutes seated on a couch, Keri, about how the brothel worked. Suddenly, in the middle of one of his father’s questions, Zachary stood up and indicated that he was ready to go back to the room with Keri. Watching from the sidelines on a different parlor couch, I wondered if the boy actually wanted to go or was just trying to get his father to stop talking. “You’ll take care of him, won’t you?” his father called out to Keri as she led Zachary away.

  As soon as Zachary was gone, his father let out an audible sigh of relief and pulled out a Time magazine from his Patagonia jacket. Although he tried to appear engrossed in the text, I caught him scanning the parlor every couple of minutes to check out the scene. Interested in why a father would bring his son to Mustang Ranch, I went over to introduce myself. He assumed I was a prostitute coming to hit on him. “I’m really not interested, miss,” he said. He was only there for his nineteen-year-old son, he said. They were en route to Las Vegas for a little “R and R.” When I explained that I wasn’t a prostitute, he relaxed a bit and slowly began to tell the real story.

  A college freshman on the East Coast, Zachary had recently suffered a psychological breakdown, characterized by delusions and auditory hallucinations. Zachary had had a rough first semester, his father explained, being three thousand miles away from home and having to make new friends. His father attributed his psychological break to an adjustment disorder, along with the fact that Zachary had found himself the brunt of his peers’ jokes for still being a virgin. After watching a segment featuring Mustang Ranch on 60 Minutes, his father decided that this would be the safest and surest way for his son to lose his virginity and, he hoped, remedy the entire situation.