Brothel (10 page)

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.

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.