Brothel (22 page)

8 .. AN EXTENDED FAMILY

I
often saw just how close-knit the brothel community was. That community extended beyond the prostitutes themselves; if anything, the other employees were more protective of the women than they were of each other. To be an employee at a brothel—a floor maid, bartender, cook, laundry maid, whatever—inevitably meant tolerating derogatory comments about the sort of women who would do “that.” One developed a tough skin.

One afternoon, for example, I overheard a customer sitting alone at the bar, hunched over his third Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, hiss, “Psst. Hey, bartender. Which of these bitches would you fuck?”

Brian, the day bartender at Mustang #1, was working.
He looked up from the sink where he stood rinsing beer glasses, cocked his head, and furrowed his eyebrows. “Excuse me,” he said, just barely concealing his hostility. “What did you say?”

Too drunk to recognize his bad manners, the customer repeated himself. “Which of these bitches is worth my money?”

Brian’s ruddy Irish face turned crimson. “Let’s get something straight, asshole,” he snapped. “These are not bitches, these are my friends. This may be a legal brothel, but at least you don’t waste your money buying a girl fourteen drinks with no promise of getting laid. Here, the ladies are straight up. You don’t have to buy them a drink, and you’re guaranteed a lay. You treat these women with respect or I’m going to bounce your ass right out of here.”

The man sat stunned. Under his breath, he mumbled an apology before slipping off his bar stool to head to the men’s room.

By the time the man returned, word had spread among the working girls there was a jerk in the bar. For the rest of the afternoon, every prostitute he propositioned “walked” him, deliberately quoting a prohibitively high price. They trusted that Blanche the floor maid would excuse them: a former brothel prostitute herself, Blanche knew all about partying with men who didn’t respect working girls.

When the customer finally left, as sexually unsatisfied as he came in and much more frustrated, I asked Brian about the confrontation. Fortunately, he said, customers like that were few and far between. Outside, however, Brian heard his fair
share of disparaging comments about brothel prostitutes, and he was just as quick to jump to the women’s defense.

Brian had never expected to become a defender of Mustang Ranch prostitutes. He had stumbled upon the job: working as a security guard at a nearby casino, he met a Mustang Ranch bartender who told him of the opening. Brian had found the salary increase and the schedule—one week on, one week off—more attractive than the fact that he would be working in a brothel. A “burnt-out” forty-nine-year-old ex-cop from California, Brian had no romantic visions of prostitution: “I’d had my fill of drug-crazed girls covered with sores, stoned or smashed out of their minds, propositioning me at the window of my patrol car.”

Despite himself, Brian had come to see the women less as degenerates and more as human beings in the two and a half years he worked at Mustang. He knew that some of the prostitutes abused drugs and alcohol, he said, but he respected the fact that the women sold sex as licensed professionals rather than as illicit hustlers. “I no longer feel prostitution is a moral issue or a question of someone’s integrity and principles,” he said. “I think it’s just a job to a lot of girls. I come and do my job tending bar, and they do theirs. And least they’re doing it responsibly and respectably.”

Instead of pitying the women, Brian had come to feel genuine empathy for them. He enjoyed listening to their troubles and giving advice. Flattered by their trust, Brian reciprocated with unwavering loyalty. “I [couldn’t] give a shit whether I make some guy a Bacardi and Coke correctly or not. I give a damn about the women. Frankly, they’re all I give a damn
about here. It took a lot for them to trust me. They figured I was just another bartender who wouldn’t last six months before getting canned for trying to get into one of the girls’ pants.”

Although Mustang rules prohibited employees from “fraternizing” with brothel prostitutes, all too frequently staff members assumed that employment entitled them to freebies, or at least discounts. (To confuse the message, George Flint did occasionally give male employees free passes as bonuses, but he expected them to be used at other brothels.) For many years, to prevent consorting, brothels wouldn’t hire men. Male owners were supposed to stay behind the scenes, leaving day-to-day operations to the female staff. Today, men are permitted to work more visibly—as cooks, bartenders, cashiers, and maintenance people—but women still hold all the managerial and floor maid positions.

But Brian hadn’t faltered. Having been divorced after eighteen years of marriage, he was committed to being faithful to his live-in girlfriend of almost four years. Despite Brian’s protestations, his male friends and the men he served in the bar kept fantasizing about all the free sex they thought came with brothel employment.

Not every employee was as carefully chaste as Brian. There was Jeffrey, for example, another bartender, a big burly man who looked not unlike Popeye’s nemesis, Bluto. Jeffrey was Mustang’s resident bad boy, and with his long sleek ponytail, goatee, and Harley-Davidson, he did nothing to negate the image. He let it be known that he had ridden briefly with the Hell’s Angels. Jeffrey came from a long line of Mustang
old-timers, among them his father, Joe Conforte’s former bodyguard and right-hand man and one of only two employees to be given a lifetime pension for his years of service. Jeffrey had tended bar and provided security at Mustang since he was twenty. Now in his thirties, he was nearly a Mustang institution in his own right.

Jeffrey felt entitled to ignore brothel rules, and he had amassed a history of dalliances with working girls, sometimes seeing several women simultaneously. It wasn’t unusual for women to buy him expensive gifts in order to win his attention and affection. Rumor had it that Jeffrey wasn’t beyond getting Mustang prostitutes to pay
him
to have sex. “He’s very protective, and that’s seductive,” explained one woman. “When a guy gets out of line with one of us and we hit the panic button, Jeffrey usually gets there first, even before security. I think a lot of the girls become infatuated with him, wishing they had somebody like that with them all the time.”

Curiously, the women felt very little ill will toward Jeffrey, despite the numerous hearts he’d broken. I never heard a bad word said about him, and I heard plenty of dirt dished on other brothel staff. Most of the working girls felt indebted to him and consequently were very loyal. One working girl would only say, “Me and Jeffrey go back a long ways. I would kill for him. Actually, I’d rather not talk too much about Jeffrey without him here.”

I got to see Jeffrey in action as soon as Heather appeared on the scene. He strutted past her with his chest puffed out, pretending not to see her, for the first few days. After almost a
week, he began honoring her with an occasional glance or grunt when he served her drinks. Then one morning I caught the two of them cozying up to each other at the bar. Without much persuasion, Jeffrey had gotten Heather to pull out two porn magazines with back-page advertisements for the Houston “modeling agency” where she used to work. Coyly, Heather flipped the pages, showing off the ads that featured her dressed provocatively with a cartoon bubble over her head saying, “I speak Greek.” Heather explained that meant she performed anal intercourse.

After their tête-à-tête, Heather placed eight dollars on the bar and seductively mouthed a thank-you before she turned to join the morning’s first lineup. Jeffrey grinned devilishly, obviously pleased. Brothel patrons were notoriously unappreciative of bartenders, who were left to rely on the generosity and good fortune of the working girls on busy days. Before Heather’s tip, Jeffrey had only made $33 in tips since starting his shift six hours earlier, at two
A.M
.

The next thing I knew, Heather started blowing off our daily runs. The first time it happened, she said she had gone running earlier in the morning with Sheba, the brothel dog. The next morning, when I went to scratch at her door (the women preferred scratching to knocking), she didn’t answer. When I asked Blanche, the floor maid, if she knew where Heather was, she said Heather had already left to go running. At first, I was perplexed. We had been running with such regularity; why would she suddenly snub me? But all became clear when I confronted her and she said that instead of running the
paved road past the neighboring Peri brothers’ farm, she had been running up the dirt road behind the brothel, “past Jeffrey’s trailer.” (A number of brothel staff members rented trailers from the brothel and lived on this dirt road.) So Heather was sneaking over to Jeffrey’s place each morning. I wondered how her boyfriend, who was back home in Texas minding her two daughters, would feel about this.

A few days later, Heather wanted to recommence our morning jog. I asked her if anything was going on between her and Jeffrey. She blushed and said they were just friends. She did volunteer that she went up regularly to Jeffrey’s trailer to visit, but nothing physical had happened. I volunteered, in kind, that I thought Jeffrey was hot. Guiltily, she blushed again.

Jeffrey wasn’t the only staff member to defy brothel rules and get involved with the women. Most other men got burned in the process, however. Sally Conforte used to warn her employees to save themselves the heartache and “not fuck her girls.” For some men, pain came from watching their love interests seduce countless other men. Others were disappointed when their illusions of the women as ideal mates were shattered by reality. “You can’t help but get jaded,” Brian said. “When people ask me if I like working in a brothel, I say, ‘Sure, if you like working around fifty-four girls with multiple personalities who are all on the rag at the same time.’ ”

In truth, working for the women of Mustang Ranch
was
tough, but the employees generally appreciated how demanding the women’s work was, and knew the women relied on
them for protection. The staff’s stewardship did not go unrecognized. Once employees were considered dependable and trustworthy, women acknowledged their efforts with extra tips. On their birthdays, they got cards signed by the working girls, who also contributed cash. And when catastrophe befell an employee, the brothel community rallied in a show of support. When a fire left a Mustang kitchen assistant named Kent, his wife, and their three children homeless, the women took up a collection that amounted to several thousand dollars. A Mustang employee for less than two years, Kent wept when he opened the envelope.