The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (24 page)

I think corporations could learn from many of these practices. The people you work with are your other family, and you probably spend more time with them than you do with your real family. It’s not enough to throw a Christmas party every year. You should treat your people as if it were Christmas every day of the year. The people who work for you are your most valuable assets, but most CEOs don’t even know their names. I know all my girls by name and I take care of every one of them — and sometimes I even fuck them.

I have the greatest job in the world.

E
ARLY IN 2001, I GOT
a call from Rebecca Mead, a staff writer with the
New Yorker
, arguably the most prestigious magazine in the western world. She said she wanted to do a profile on me, and I was a little concerned. The last article she’d done for the magazine was on a Christian weight-loss center and it wasn’t exactly a hatchet job, but it was clear she had found the place amusing. I have a pretty good sense of humor, but I had put a lot of time into promoting the ranch, into talking about the benefits of legalized prostitution, into describing our safe sex practices, and into explaining how much tax money we poured into local coffers. The last thing I needed was negative publicity, especially from a magazine with that kind of clout.

I made a few calls, reaching out to friends in the media, and they all said the same thing. I should take my chances. It didn’t get any better than the
New Yorker
. And even if the magazine was a little snooty, they would do their homework and probably do a balanced job.

I called Rebecca and told her I was game, and she asked for a two-week commitment. I okayed it, though I didn’t know what the hell we were going to talk to her about for two weeks. Suddenly, however, I had something else to worry about: On the phone I realized she was English, and I think the English are generally very conservative. You say
prostitute
, they think,
Jack the Ripper
.

I had her fly out on a Thursday, so she could be there for the tea party, and I think she saw it for what it was. Part bitch session, part staff meeting, part gabfest, part gossip, part motivational sales meeting, and part positive thinking. Before the meeting started however, I introduced her to the staff. “This is Rebecca Mead, a reporter. She’s going to be writing an article about us. She’s going to be here for a while, and she’s going to want to talk to many of you. Please don’t hold back. I want you to be as open and as honest as possible.”

After the tea party, I took her aside and reiterated what I’d said in front of the girls. “I’m giving you full access and the doors are open at any time of the day or night. You can talk to anyone. You can ask them anything. But in return there are a couple of things I’d like from you. If you’ve come in with the preconceived notion that all my bunnies are from abusive homes and that all of them have been sexually molested, please let me point you in the direction of the many studies that have been done on the subject, because that’s not the case. The girls will talk openly about their sexual history, because they’re in the sex business, and that openness tends to perpetuate the myth that they are all damaged goods. But I know from the studies and from my conversations with several thousand girls, that this is not the case — that the incidence of abuse isn’t significantly greater for my girls than it is for girls beyond those doors.”

(Okay, so maybe I was trying to sell her a little too hard, but I can’t help myself: It’s who I am.)

Mancow

My name is Erich Muller, but people know me as Mancow. I do a couple of syndicated radio shows out of Chicago, and Dennis has been a guest many, many times. Let me start by saying I love the guy. He’s immensely entertaining, fun to talk to, and always great to have on the show. The brothels, on the other hand — that’s a different story. And while Dennis has a legal right to do what he does, I also have a right to disapprove.

Look at it this way: The Devil doesn’t come to you with pointy horns, a forked tongue, and a tail. He comes to you like Dennis Hof, bearing a platter of young women.

• • •

I’ve been out to dinner with Dennis and some of his girls, at charity events, at black-tie events, at nice restaurants, and Dennis will tell one of them to crawl under the table to give me a blow job. This could be a girl he just met in the lobby of his hotel and he’s already got her thinking about the quarter-million dollars she can make at the ranch every year, so she will do his bidding and crawl under the table.

And you know something? I don’t like it. That is not for me. Everybody else seems to think it’s funny and guys will unzip and have fun, but I find it creepy and vile.

I’m a healthy guy, sure. As lustful as the next man. I will look at the girl and I might even find her attractive. But does that mean I should give in to temptation? No. I don’t believe so. Because for me, when I look at a girl like that, my first thought is, “Where’s her daddy? How did this happen? How did she lose her dignity and humanity? Who turned this poor girl into an object?”

Instead of lust, I feel sadness. I have talked to many of these girls and they all have tragedy in their background. Dennis will say, “That’s not true! They’re just like regular girls, only richer!” But they’re not. Every single one of them has a story. Mom’s new boyfriend abused her while Mom went to the store; the friendly next-door neighbor got a little too friendly; her best friend’s dad snuck into the bedroom during a sleepover when she was only thirteen. There is always something tragic in their background that led them into this type of work. Always.

Dennis has his own sad story, whether he acknowledges it or not. He didn’t like his mother. And, even worse, his father didn’t like his mother, and he made no secret of it. You know that affected the way Dennis relates to women.

Again, I love the guy. But there’s a lot of self-delusion there. He’ll tell you it’s about having fun, and about showing the world a good time, but to me it’s just very, very sad.

And it’s strange, because I have a bad-boy image: Mancow, the Chicago shock-jock. But I am also a father with twin girls, age eight. I always find myself wondering what Dennis’s
girls were like at that age and it kills me. “Where was your daddy when you needed him?” I want to ask. But I already know the answer: Nowhere to be found.

THE OTHER THING I ASKED
Rebecca Mead was to please talk to me after she was done with her research. If there was anything about the ranch that gave her pause, no matter how insignificant, I wanted to know about it. “I will take immediate steps to fix it,” I said. “Maybe I can fix everything before you give your story to the
New Yorker
.”

Rebecca was more than amenable and she got to work. She spent ten days with us and even joined us on a Boob Cruise, part of a porn industry awards show. We also made a brief stop in Los Angeles and she had an opportunity to talk to my friend Larry Flynt.

When the article finally appeared, I was delighted. It was intelligent, well balanced, very funny in parts, and entertaining as hell. She didn’t attack me for making money off the women, she didn’t take issue with my efforts to legalize prostitution, and she didn’t make my girls look like desperate women who were reduced to working in a brothel because their hardscrabble lives had left them without options. On the contrary, the article gave me and my girls credibility. And it put us on an international map. As Air Force Amy put it, the article told it like it was: “You took the business from guilt and shame to glamour and fame.”

I loved many of the details. She wrote that I wasn’t trying to sell the public-service aspect of prostitution, like some of my competitors, because for me it was primarily about recreation. She quoted me as saying, “I want to make the ranch fun for guys who don’t even want sex. In another two years, it will be an adult Disneyland.”
That was dead-on. She also captured the way I coached girls on the business end of the business. “You have got to learn to box them and close them. It is really no different than a time-share sales team. Some girls are doing things for a hundred dollars that other girls are doing for a thousand. It is all about being able to create the value and get the money out of them, and still have satisfied customers. You are not trying to overcharge them; you are trying to upscale them.”

She also said that I mixed business with pleasure, which was true, and claimed that in the space of one afternoon I had sex with five different girls. I can’t say I remember that, but far be it from me to deny it.

She also quoted the girls, and she did it honestly. Air Force Amy told her, “My brother sold me for half a pack of cigarettes when I was only ten and it was on from there. I left home at an early age and I started doing blow jobs in truck stops just to get around. Then I joined the military and that made me realize that I could do anything I wanted to.” And what did Air Force Amy want to do? She wanted to come back to the BunnyRanch.

My favorite line came from Suzette. “The only person who’s seeing my snatch is the gynecologist.”