Brothel

by Alexa Albert

  Keri, the woman who had been with the mentally troubled virgin, was a good example. Several years earlier, she told me, she had managed to turn a $60 date (Mustang’s minimum at the time) into a sugar daddy. In the course of four and a half years, she got this man to spend thousands of dollars on her, for her own apartment, clothing, jewelry, cosmetic surgery, and a car. “He came at the perfect time,” she said. “I was tired of the business. I wanted to be at home with my daughter. So I just came up with the story that I was sad because I wasn’t making any money and I missed my daughter. When he heard this, he said he wanted to provide for me and to take care of my daughter. He said he would marry me.”

  Incredibly, Keri managed never to have sex with this man. “When I met him at Mustang, I only gave him hand jobs and he felt my boobs. When I left the brothel to be with him, I told him I wanted to wait to have sex until we got married.” Perhaps even more incredibly, he believed her. Things finally ended, however, the way they do with most sugar daddies: he found out that she had two children and was pregnant with her third. Hit in the face with reality, he called the relationship off.

  All the women expected their relationships with sugar daddies to come to an end eventually. Sometimes they ended when the men became too emotionally attached and too demanding, and sometimes simply because the men went broke. I heard countless examples of men who went into bankruptcy trying to maintain their kept women. Only rarely would a woman stay long term with a sugar daddy, and then it was usually for security’s sake and not for love.

  Sometimes, though, it was the prostitute who complicated the professional relationship. Like a prostitute named Mercedes had done with a customer named Gary. Gary had been Mercedes’s regular for over two years. In his early thirties, with curly brown shoulder-length hair, a soft gentle voice, and acne scars across his face, Gary was a self-professed late bloomer who was very shy with girls. He first visited Mustang, in his words, “out of desperation.” Although he wasn’t a virgin, he had limited sexual experience. Gary picked Mercedes, a tall, slender African-American woman in her mid-thirties, out of a lineup because of his attraction to black women. When she provided his most exciting and confidence-building sexual encounter yet, he got hooked. To her surprise, so did she.

  Whenever Mercedes flew back to Reno from her home out of state, she called up Gary and begged him to come out to Mustang to keep her company. For reasons I didn’t entirely understand, at one point she began giving Gary a portion of her earnings. Gary once explained to me: “One night she said, ‘There’s nothing like giving the money you make to a man.’ When I told her I didn’t want her money, she started to cry. When I finally agreed, she asked me what my quota was. I didn’t know what to say except that she should figure it out. The next day, a cabdriver came to my place and handed me a manila envelope from Mercedes with nine hundred dollars in it.”

  To Gary, Mercedes was a little girl who needed taking care of, and turning him into a pimp was her way of communicating that she had chosen him to be her protector. Flattered that this prostitute was opening herself up to him, Gary soon developed a serious crush on his ward. Mercedes continued to give him money for a couple of months, until one day when she abruptly cut him off. “She told me she could give it to me as fast as she could take it away,” said Gary. “It was because I had lost my job and was beginning to get coddled by her. As soon as she saw me as weak, she got mean. Now she wants the money back that she gave me. I’m a failed apprentice.”

  According to Gary, Mercedes had an older man at home, an attorney, whom she considered her boyfriend, someone who took care of her, he speculated, “like it was his job because she’s so lost emotionally.” Had Mercedes chosen Gary to fill in while she was away from home? Surely she had learned over the years what effective tools money and sex are. Or had her years at streetwalking habituated her to bestowing her hard-earned money on a man in order to feel valuable and worthy? Gary wasn’t sure what role he served for Mercedes. He wasn’t even convinced that the emotions Mercedes expressed with him were completely genuine. He thought she had been a prostitute too long and had learned to sequester her emotions so well that she was unable to feel anything with her customers.

  Like Philip, Gary didn’t know how the woman with whom he was infatuated really felt about him. This was a hazard of becoming entangled with a working girl. But it didn’t seem to matter all that much. Regardless of Mercedes’s true motives, Gary cherished the fact that she had opened up to him at all. He felt special. “I’ve resigned myself to be her little friend in Reno. Sometimes she says she loves me and other times she says I’m her boy toy. I’ll be whatever she wants and needs me to be for her. I only hope she gets some pleasure from me.”

  Pleasure. That was the question that had been on my mind since I’d first arrived in Nevada: Did any of the working girls enjoy the sex? Gary, Philip, and Norman each imagined sharing a mutually satisfying emotional connection with their favorite prostitutes, and so naturally they hoped or assumed that the women enjoyed the sex too. But Baby and Brittany explicitly told me they didn’t enjoy sex with Philip and Norman. Were prostitutes ever sexually satisfied by their customers, or were they always physically shut down during paid sex, as Brittany had told her husband at dinner?

  One morning a few weeks later, I had gotten up early and found the night working girls still busy. Some lay curled up on parlor couches napping, while others escorted freshly shaven men back to their rooms for morning pre-work quickies. I always wondered about these early birds—did they wake up burning with lust, or was this stress prophylaxis before a big day?

  I spotted Carrie, the woman whose mother pimped her, emerging from her room with her customer, a huge smirk across her face, used towels in hand. As she led him back to the front entrance, she winked at one of the other girls who had been dozing on the couch. She steered the young black man, dressed from head to toe in FUBU hip-hop gear, over to a coffee table to give him a book of Mustang matches as a souvenir and to give her friend a better view. At the doorway, she grazed the young man’s arm and stretched up to whisper in his ear. He pecked her lightly on the nose before turning to go.

  Carrie walked back into the parlor with a silly grin still plastered across her face. Her cherry-red lipstick looked smudged, as if she had been kissing, though house rules prohibited it. The spot of lipstick his peck had planted on the tip of her nose confirmed it.

  “Did you put your money in, too?” teased one of the girls from the couch.

  “No,” said Carrie in a serious tone. “But he was so fine. He had such a nice body.” She moved her hands as if to outline his broad shoulders and strapping chest. “And when he took off his baseball hat—oo-ee!” She turned on her heels and with a slight wiggle of her hips strode back to her room to clean up.

  The playful teasing of the other women contrasted sharply with the abuse heaped on a prostitute named Stacy a few days later when she announced to the parlor how tired she was after being with seven customers and having an orgasm with each one. I had stumbled upon a never-ending debate: Should a prostitute permit herself to enjoy sex with her customers? As I came to learn how divided the prostitutes were on this issue, I started bringing it up casually at mealtimes and saw how quickly emotions stirred and tempers flared.

  “I’m numb back there with customers,” a prostitute named Linda said with conviction one night over crab legs. “There’s nothing a man here could do to turn me on.” The two other women at the table nodded their heads in agreement. The three had worked together at Mustang for over a decade.

  “Working girls should never enjoy sex with a customer,” Linda added. “You save that for your man.” She spoke so loudly and with such authority that several of the women at neighboring tables stopped talking to look up. One of Baby’s friends sitting alone at another table stiffened her spine. Linda either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  Then one of the women sitting next to Linda explained how her man had taught her this principle when she first t
urned out. Her then-pimp spent almost two months preparing her. “He watched me have sex with his friends to teach me the dos and don’ts. You know, not to let him stroke me too long or fuck me too hard. He stood right there and watched to make sure I didn’t let the guy put his fingers inside me, that I maintained complete control of the situation and didn’t get aroused.” Such practices weren’t uncommon, Linda added.

  Linda’s man had turned her out in a massage parlor in the Midwest almost twenty years ago. Now in her early forties, Linda tended to attract older men, many of them widowed or divorced, who sought companionship and affection even more than sex. A blonde with teased shoulder-length hair and spiked bangs, she usually wore leotards with short-waisted jackets or belts to distract the eye from her middle-age spread. Although she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the house, she had a very sympathetic face and a demeanor that made her customers feel safe.

  She had learned to disassociate quickly after her first couple of dates as a new turn-out, she said. “It’s like putting up a block in your mind. You go through the motions, but you’re not really there, you’re taking a trip out of the room. I put myself on a sandy beach somewhere. Or, I think about something I really want to do, say plant those shrubs and do a garden when I get home. Or, I think about the money. The calculator is always cha-ching-ing while the guy’s fucking me.” I imagined how deflated any of her regulars would be if they could hear her cha-ching-ing.

  “Why would I want to enjoy sex with just anybody that walked in off the street?” Linda said. “That’s like a one-night stand. I’ve never been that type of person. I have to be comfortable with the person. There’s got to be more to it for me to enjoy sex with him.”

  I almost literally had to bite my tongue. Linda had never been a person who was comfortable having one-night stands? What did she sell daily? Weren’t one-night stands with countless anonymous men the prostitute’s job description exactly? She didn’t see it this way. Professional sex was work, and very different for her from personal sex.

  “To enjoy sex with a customer is to lower yourself to his level,” Linda added. Her remark exemplified the fundamental disrespect that—despite the pride they took in their work—almost all prostitutes had for their customers. But Linda’s low opinion of johns did not preclude pride in her work or the ambition of pleasing her customers; what it did was enable her to be an ever-accommodating chameleon for all her customers in a controlled, contained, deliberate way, all the while justifiably compartmentalizing her experience and keeping her emotional world inaccessible to these men.

  “I think women who enjoy sex with customers are fooling themselves, looking for love in the wrong place,” said Linda. “They can’t find a man on the outside so they get some in here.” At that, Baby’s friend at the next table abruptly rose and stormed out of the kitchen. Linda and her friends pretended not to notice.

  No one spoke up that night to contradict Linda, but a few days later, Baby and the woman who had stormed out of the room approached me. “We just want you to know that some women see nothing wrong with enjoying sex with their customers,” Baby said. “It just depends on the customer.”

  The other woman added, “Linda and those other women were lying. With as much sex as we have, how could a woman not enjoy it occasionally?”

  Still, they explained, most women who did enjoy sex with their clients didn’t speak openly about it in the brothel for fear of stigmatization and of upsetting their partners at home. Baby said she had no shame admitting it to her peers, but there were consequences. She had to put up with cruel gossip and derisive remarks: “Baby freaks for her customers”; “Baby loves to get nasty with her tricks.”

  Instead of denigrating the women who refused to enjoy sex with customers, Baby said she felt sorry for them. “I try to make my sex life good anytime I’m having sex. If you’re gonna have sex with strangers, your best bet is to try to make the most of the situation, you know. Honestly, I think some of the most uptight, sexually frustrated, sexually repressed women I’ve ever met work in whorehouses.”

  After a little more inquiry, though, I found that sexual arousal occurred more frequently than not. In fact, over three-quarters of the women confessed to me in private that they had experienced sexual excitement with clients, and a full 70 percent admitted to having had an orgasm with a customer. Ten percent of the women confided that they orgasmed more often with clients than they did with lovers, and 8 percent said they did just as frequently.

  The reality, of course, was that women could and did enjoy sex with their customers despite pressure from their peers not to. Concealment perpetuated the stigma. That this of all professions would have a code of propriety that stigmatized enjoying sex with customers struck me as ironic.

  Much more taboo was actually falling in love with a customer. This was viewed by women like Linda as not only unprofessional but self-destructive. Veteran prostitutes believed that working girls in love with johns were doomed because the relationships could amount to only one thing: pain. Although all was usually well at the outset, as soon as the couple began having disagreements the man would inevitably tell the woman she was nothing but a whore. “He makes it clear that he’s done you a favor by getting you out of there,” said Linda. “And that you can’t do nothing without him but go back and be a whore.” Too frequently, this power imbalance destroyed the relationship; the woman returned to the brothel, humbled by having trusted a trick.

  According to Linda, customers were a different caliber of man than any she would consider marrying. Customers had to pay for “it” and were apparently incapable of getting their needs satisfied without offering women money. “Once a man walks through the door, he’s a trick,” said Linda. “That’s all he’s ever going to be. I wouldn’t have any respect for him, because he’s buying sex. I couldn’t look at him without that crossing my mind.” And what was to say he wouldn’t pay for it again? As the brothel adage went, “Once a trick, always a trick.” Day in and day out, brothel prostitutes depended on adulterous men to earn a living, but like the rest of us, none wanted to be on the other side, to be the betrayed lover.

  Despite these arguments, I often heard George and other brothel owners recount tales of women who met their Prince Charming in the brothels. These stories were typically told to show that brothels offered women opportunity, including the chance to fall in love.

  During my time at the brothels, I witnessed one such case myself. Alice was a new turn-out, a forty-seven-year-old recent divorcée who hadn’t prostituted a day in her life. And you could tell. Dressed in sheer silk blouses with a camisole underneath, tailored slacks and skirts, and a string of pearls, she looked as if she belonged at a country club. She’d come to Mustang Ranch after watching a special on the brothel on an evening news show. Her husband had just left her for a younger woman, but not before cleaning out their checking and savings accounts, and she needed to provide for herself and her developmentally disabled teenage daughter.

  With the elegance of a retired Southern beauty pageant winner and the fresh, naïve look of a new turn-out, which always seemed to appeal to Mustang customers, Alice was picked frequently. She said she got through her first trick—a sweaty trucker who refused her offer of a shower—by closing her eyes and envisioning her daughter’s face.

  It was in her first days at Mustang that she met Bruce, a divorced fifty-year-old ex-cop who had recently moved to Nevada. Bruce had been celibate for over nine months, channeling all his energy into a new business. It was his woman-chasing business associate who dragged him out to Mustang, where Bruce only intended to grab a beer to be able to say he had visited the famous brothel. But when Alice joined him at the bar, he found himself smitten. They talked at length, and after Bruce and his friend left, Bruce found himself unable to get Alice out of his mind. Impressed by her sophistication and refinement, he decided to turn around and drive back to Mustang. “I just couldn’t believe the words she was talking,” explained Bruce. “She wasn’t trashy.�
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  Back at the brothel, he followed Alice directly to her room. In fact, Bruce drove out to Mustang every night for a week to follow Alice to her room. It was only a matter of days before he fell in love and started fantasizing about being with her long-term. “I’ve never felt this way before, and it isn’t because I was taking her to bed. I could come out here, sit in her room for two hours, and just talk to her. She’s an intelligent lady, and I would love to be with her all the time.” Many customers admitted to me that they had similar short-lived fantasies but most talked themselves out of it. Bruce’s friend tried to do the convincing for him, thinking Bruce had lost his grip on reality, was spending money recklessly, and was probably being duped.

  But Alice had also begun falling for Bruce. As they talked more and more, she found herself fantasizing about being taken care of and loved by this man. “There was something very special about him. He was very, very sensitive about my needs. He didn’t ask the usual questions, like, Why is a girl like you here in a place like this? I loved that.” In short, Bruce treated Alice like a normal woman. She didn’t need to be ashamed at having resorted to prostitution. She even let herself begin envisioning rebuilding a life with Bruce not unlike the one she’d lost—a stable life with a decent man by her side.

  Although the other girls told her never to trust a trick, Alice found herself unable to stop. Bruce seemed different from the other customers, she told herself. Just to be certain, she asked him if he would ever use her work to pass judgment against her. His response: “I don’t care what’s happened in the past. Once you walk out of here, that’s the past. I will never hold it against you.” While Alice found reassurance in his words, some of the skeptical veterans confided to me that Bruce’s answer was classic, no different from that of other men who dreamed a relationship with a prostitute might work out.