Brothel

by Alexa Albert

  Old-timers who had worked at Mustang under Sally Conforte reminisced wistfully, not resentfully, about the days when she ruled the roost. Many women believed that Sally’s aesthetic standards enhanced their business. “The place had an aura of glamour,” said Linda. “The long evening gowns were feminine, and the shiny, glittery rhinestones Hollywood-like. Men felt compelled to spend more money.”

  The dress code had relaxed considerably since Sally Conforte’s day, partly because of the changing of the guard and partly because of changing times. Whereas men and women once dressed up to visit Reno and Vegas’s casinos and showrooms, now shorts and T-shirts were ubiquitous. Mustang had relaxed its rules to keep step, and now defined proper dress as “nothing tacky.” Specifically, women were to wear underwear at all times, and exposure of nipples or pubic hair was grounds for firing.

  Tanya and her friends weren’t only nostalgic about brothel attire. They reminisced about the handful of times they had to evacuate the brothel when the nearby Truckee River flooded, and about getting drunk at the Confortes’ annual holiday parties, where Joe and Sally gave all the women matching luggage or expensive perfume. But the story they liked to tell best was of being awakened one warm afternoon in 1990 before their shifts started and being told by Joe that the IRS was coming to seize Mustang Ranch for $13 million in unpaid back taxes. Prostitutes and staff scurried around the brothel, gathering their belongings, like chickens with their heads cut off. When Joe told the women to take anything they could get their hands on, Tanya and Linda frantically began gathering up appliances and pieces of furniture and even filled garbage bags full of frozen meat and vegetables out of the walk-in freezers. In spite of their efforts, most of the brothel’s furnishings were confiscated by the IRS and sold in a bankruptcy sale. When Mustang reopened several months later in 1991, the women returned with whatever they rescued from the IRS and proceeded to rebuild the brothel one trick at a time. “The first $50 trick went toward a microwave, and later that night we had enough money to buy towels and groceries,” said Linda. “It was a daily thing: ‘Come on, girls, we need a toaster!’ ”

  Mustang’s newest prostitutes studied Tanya and Linda’s clique from a distance, too intimidated to approach any of the women directly. These younger prostitutes said they experienced Tanya and Linda as hostile and dismissive. Unapologetic, Tanya and Linda admitted to standing in judgment of the new breed of prostitutes coming to work at Mustang Ranch. “Us working girls from the old school understand the value of repeat business,” said Linda. “We strive to please the guy and make him like us enough to come back to see us again or to tell a buddy about us. We get to know him, ask about his job, his family, and his granddaughter’s school project. But with gals starting today, they’re just looking at that man as a one-time-only customer and could care less if he comes back. They act like robots in the room, just going through the motions, hurrying to get him out.”

  The change in women’s attitudes over the years had had a negative impact on the business, they contended. “Guys who used to be decent customers and spent decent amounts of money are now becoming cheaper,” said Tanya, “because they realize they’re not getting a three-hundred-dollar party with a lot of the girls. They’re getting the same as if they spent a hundred bucks. It doesn’t matter if they spent a hundred bucks or a thousand; those girls have got them out the door in twenty minutes.” The telltale sign of a woman’s professionalism, Tanya said, was how the man acted when he emerged from her bedroom. “If he comes out walking real fast, twenty feet in front of her, nine times out of ten, he really didn’t enjoy himself, and will probably never come back again.”

  Linda took a slow drag on her cigarette before adding, “But these new girls don’t care; they figure they’re young and there’s always gonna be somebody walking through that door. They think their pussies are lined with platinum! If they only bothered to listen to what us girls who’ve been in the business a long time have told them—that eventually they’re gonna be our age sitting where I am, with one customer while the new girl gets ten. They’re going to be thankful for that one customer. We aren’t trying to be mean or vindictive. We’re just trying to make sure there’s guys coming back. If there ain’t business coming in, there’s no need for any of us to be here.” With that, she stubbed out her Salem Light into a plastic red ashtray and lit up another.

  When I asked gingerly whether either woman felt envious of the younger girls, Linda defensively rejected the idea. “I don’t trip out on how often a younger girl gets picked versus me. I can’t compare myself to youth, to an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old. There’s no way. I’m satisfied with what I’m making and whatever she’s banking is her business.” She quickly added, “What she makes is what I used to make!”

  Tanya was more forthright about her demons. “I think I’m going through a phase right now, a little insecurity about my age and the younger girls in here. I think anybody over thirty goes through it, especially as vain as women are. But then I turn around and sometimes make off one date what takes the younger girls ten dates. So, it all evens out.”

  It wasn’t just the new, younger prostitutes who felt excluded and ignored by Tanya and Linda. Older, seasoned Mustang workers, like Baby, who shared the women’s same history also found themselves left out of their clique. Baby’s crowd consisted principally of night-shift workers, who tended to have wilder, more outgoing personalities. There was Daisy, an in-your-face prankster who liked to entertain her peers with parodies. One night she passed around homemade ballots so that everyone could vote on recipients of various farcical awards. Categories included “Whore You Don’t Even Know Has a Job Here (Because She’s Never on the Floor),” and “Whore That Is Banned from the Jukebox for Life (Because She Only Plays Crap).” Then there was Baby’s friend Selena, who couldn’t keep anyone’s name straight, only their astrological sign. She greeted me each evening with “Hello, Aquarius.”

  Drugs also connected many of these night girls. Although brothel rules prohibited illegal substances, use of marijuana, crank, cocaine, and crack did occur. Management tried to control the influx of drugs by having floor maids randomly search women’s belongings when they first arrived and then when they returned from vacation. They also required prostitutes to turn over all prescription medications, which were locked in the cashier’s office to prevent theft. While the house threatened dismissal of any woman caught in possession of drugs, I came to see that managers rarely enforced that rule. As for alcohol, the official Mustang rules stated: “In this house, it is a privilege to drink, act accordingly. If the bartender or the floor maid feels that you have had enough to drink, don’t argue!”

  Nevertheless, drinking and drugging often helped some of Mustang’s women cope with anxiety, boredom, and long work hours. Initially, women tried to hide their use of drugs from me, but as they grew more comfortable, they began letting down their guard and started getting stoned and cutting up their crank in front of me. One night, I had a talk with Mercedes, the woman who had a strange relationship with her regular named Gary. We sat at the bar, where I usually watched her overspend on drinks each night, and she ranted about the evils of alcohol, or “the devil in disguise” as she called it, and how Mustang shouldn’t allow women like herself—those with little self-control—to drink at all. “It’s the fear of being rejected that makes you drink in here. And the fear of sitting here quietly trying to look at the four walls that drives you to drink in here. You know if you bring out your book they [management] are gonna tell you to close it, so you come over here to the bar and drink instead.”

  Regardless of its prevalence among a subset of the working girls, drug use was far more controlled than what I had seen among the juvenile prostitutes of Times Square. Still, while some of these women had come to the brothels already addicted, quite a few, sadly, embarked on their drug and alcohol habits while at Mustang.

  Many of the working girls didn’t fit into any particular social group. One such woman was Dinah, Mustang
’s oldest prostitute (sixty-three), who preferred to keep to herself. Reticent about her outside life, Dinah found Tanya and Linda’s group too chatty and Baby’s clique too unruly. Described by her colleagues as “Mustang’s straightest prostitute,” Dinah abstained from not only alcohol and drugs, but also caffeine, and limited her intake of processed sugar. Dinah even paid her taxes. “When I first got hired, I went to my accountant and told him I was a hooker,” Dinah explained to me once. “I said I didn’t know how to go about doing my taxes. I heard everyone else say not to bother.” Inexperienced in such matters, her accountant called the IRS, who counseled him to declare her a “registered professional entertainer.” Last year, Dinah got back $1,100. “Imagine me, a hooker, getting money back from the government,” she said, chuckling.

  In many ways, management reinforced the brothel’s cliquishness and competitive tension. I remembered distinctly Irene’s admonishment to new prostitutes: “This is a cutthroat place. You’re here to make money, not friends.” While Irene’s words of caution were well intentioned, they served to perpetuate the underlying distrust between the women. When I asked the women why they hadn’t organized to form a union or joined together to purchase a brothel themselves, most of the prostitutes rolled their eyes and said they could never trust “another ho.”

  Brothel staff also seemed to benefit from the women’s rivalries and discords. Women offered management and workers gifts and financial kickbacks in order to gain preferential treatment. Most offered money voluntarily, in the hope of earning special privileges and keeping brothel authorities out of their hair. As one woman put it, “I pay my ‘insurance’ at the beginning of the week because I don’t know what sort of shit is going to happen to me; I might need the indemnity.” But staff members were also notorious for pressuring prostitutes into making payoffs. Speculating that the Nair incident could have only occurred with the tacit approval of a floor maid, one of the bartenders encouraged Heather to start tipping all of Mustang’s floor maids extra to buy their loyalty.

  Despite how antagonistic relations between brothel prostitutes could be, there was another side to the story. Along with jealousy and competition, I also found camaraderie and real solidarity. Although the women didn’t articulate their support for one another very often, they demonstrated it in a number of other ways.

  One day I saw Tanya, who had been so outspoken about her hatred of training newcomers, pull aside a young turn-out to warn her that one of Mustang’s more infamous regulars had just come in. Tim the Barker was a wealthy local bachelor who was renowned throughout the Storey County brothels for his special tic: he barked like a dog when he had an orgasm. New prostitutes who hadn’t been informed in advance were known to panic, mistaking Tim’s yaps for a seizure. Those alerted ahead of time usually managed to remain calm. “Even though Tanya warned me about him,” the turn-out later told me, “when he started barking like a schnauzer, I almost died—I thought he was going to bite me.”

  Crisis also drew the women together. One day everyone in the parlor heard a panic buzzer go off, an eerie, shrill sound that resounded through the brothel like an air-raid siren. Within moments, a woman could be heard screaming in one of the rooms. Because the women at Mustang took pride in controlling their own parties and didn’t resort to using the buzzers hidden at the base of their beds very often, everyone in the house knew to take this signal seriously. (Allegedly, no woman has ever been seriously hurt at Mustang Ranch.*) Immediately, the bartender and cook—both men—rushed from their stations down Hallway C in the direction of the screams. As was typically the case, a customer had become belligerent when he was too drunk to maintain an erection. To save face, he had decided to blame the prostitute, pinning her down on the bed with one arm and striking her with his one free fist. Luckily, the bartender and cook pulled him off the woman before he seriously hurt her. Although brothel management sometimes called in the local sheriff in cases such as this one, they simply threw out this customer—literally—into the parking lot outside Mustang’s gates, and ordered him never to return. Back inside, women clustered around the woman who had been assaulted to comfort her. A few prostitutes even interrupted their parties, leaving customers alone back in their rooms, to console their colleague. All the women could identify with the distress of being victimized by a customer, and no one held back any empathy.

  The women also came together in times of celebration. Tiffany’s baby shower was a case in point. When she got pregnant by her boyfriend, this Mustang prostitute of eight years decided to keep working to save cash until she began showing at about six months. When she finally “came off the floor,” management offered Tiffany a job as day cashier so she wouldn’t fall too behind in her bills. Before she quit this job, just before her delivery, the other prostitutes threw her a surprise baby shower.

  The women decorated the ceiling and walls of Mustang #1’s kitchen with white balloons and blue, pink, yellow, and green streamers. Sarah, the day bartender, baked a flat chocolate cake and decorated it with vanilla frosting and a candied carousel. The women and staff had all chipped in to buy Tiffany a slew of gifts, from a bassinet and stroller to a playpen and hamper, each brimming over with still more presents, all gift-wrapped in paper decorated with pastel storks and teddy bears. They must have spent close to $1,000. When Tiffany was led into the room, it was apparent from her stunned expression, trembling lips, and tearing eyes, that she was deeply moved by her colleagues’ generosity.

  We nibbled on cake and watched as Tiffany opened her gifts while new customers were forced to wait in the bar. We oohed and ahhed as she unwrapped baby booties, bibs, blankets, and even a couple of handmade afghans crocheted by house elders like Linda and Tanya. When Tiffany came upon a pair of infant swim shorts in leopard-print Lycra, one of the women kidded, “For your hooker child.” The room broke into gales of laughter.

  The event that gave off the greatest feeling of kinship among the women was Tanya and Linda’s joint birthday party, the year they turned forty-two and forty-one, respectively. The party had become a brothel tradition in the more than ten years that both women had worked at Mustang. Recently they had begun calling it the old-timers’ party. There were days of planning and prep work, with women sneaking in bottles of liquor past those floor maids and members of management who didn’t approve.

  The party began on a Saturday night around eight o’clock, back in a free bedroom. Only Tanya and Linda’s small clique and a few other women were initially included, but the festivities opened up about an hour later, when the partiers came running into the parlor in the midst of a heated Silly String and water balloon fight. The rest of us looked on in astonishment to see the house elders acting so carefree and youthful, uncharacteristically indifferent to the customers and business at hand.

  The rest of us were then invited down for “purple hooters,” concocted of vodka, sweet-and-sour (or lime), and Chambord raspberry liqueur. Tanya made a toast to all the women over forty years old still working in the business. Then, in an effort to inspire, she added that the younger girls could also work to that age if they so desired. Others followed with more toasts, many acknowledging each other as “real hos”—prostitutes who knew trade secrets for satisfying any man—and for being good businesswomen who maintained their senses of humor and had the guts to wear big wigs.

  As the women got tipsier, they grew more sentimental and began reminiscing. “Remember the time when there was that explosion across the highway and they evacuated the whole valley? Joe and David [Burgess, owner of the Old Bridge Ranch] put us all up in the Hilton.” Others jumped in. “News of our coming spread like wildfire. People playing the slot machines and blackjack just gawked when over fifty of us girls walked through that casino. Like, Oh my God, look at all the Mustang prostitutes!” And, “Boy did we have a party that night. Our attitude was, We got a day off!”

  At one point, someone noticed that Dinah hadn’t come down to join the festivities. I wasn’t surprised, because she didn’t feel ve
ry comfortable with Tanya’s clique and also didn’t drink alcohol. “Somebody go get Dinah,” Tanya yelled, chugging down another purple hooter. Dinah was as much a part of Mustang’s sisterhood as anyone else, Tanya went on to explain, and she needed to join the rest of them in celebration. When Dinah finally entered the room and the other working girls broke into applause, an embarrassed but pleased expression crept over her face. To be a good sport, she even offered up a toast and drank a purple hooter.

  Suddenly, Mercedes, who had been busy with a customer and missed much of the party, barged into the room, dragging behind her a scrawny-looking man half her height wearing lopsided glasses and wrapped in a sheet, toga-style. “It’s his birthday today too,” Mercedes proclaimed. She began singing “Happy Birthday” in her high-pitched Michael Jackson voice, then all of a sudden she yanked off the man’s toga to reveal his naked body, erect penis, and sweat-beaded chest. The room roared with laughter. Amid the hoots and catcalls, someone yelled out an offer of $50 for a fuck. The poor man blushed at all the attention and the women cheered him on for his good sportsmanship. The party went on (without Mercedes’s customer) into the early hours of the next day. Although not much business got done, the women viewed the evening as a total success.

  Theirs was a strange circumstance—to be competing fiercely with one another while also sharing a deep sense of solidarity. Brittany put it succinctly: “I love these women here, even my enemies. Even if we don’t like each other, we’re still on the same team. We’ll protect each other, because we’re all working girls.”

  In truth, few outsiders—family members or otherwise—could truly identify with the prostitutes or offer them support. Despite their legal status in Nevada, many women returned to homes in different states where prostitution was still criminalized. Given the social stigma of prostitution, these women kept their work secret from neighbors and square friends, making it difficult to establish honest relationships in their home communities. Most of the prostitutes I spoke with told me they had decided long ago not to establish outside friendships, so they wouldn’t have to lie about what they did for a living. In fact, I was learning that even in Nevada, where brothels were historic, legal institutions, licensed prostitutes still faced considerable condemnation.