Brothel (14 page)

5 .. ENTANGLEMENTS

O
ne day Baby showed me a letter written on four pages of standard 8½-×-11-inch paper carefully torn along the perforated edge of a notebook. It was from one of her regulars, who, upon reflection at the time of his forty-first birthday, wanted to thank Baby for all she had done. In it, he said:
“With you for my sweet and special friend, I don’t feel like I’m alone in this world, it makes me feel wonderful and alive that you are the beautiful lady in my life.”
He closed the letter pledging to serve her every wish.

It was a Sunday morning postshift, and Baby had invited me down into her room. The letter was the latest in a string she had received from Philip, a local man who had been coming to Mustang Ranch to see her for seven years.

Baby was used to having admirers, customers who
showered her with cards and gifts ranging from flowers and perfume to jewelry and lingerie. These love tokens either arrived by mail or were brought in person whenever her regulars came to town. But Philip was probably Baby’s most devoted customer. True to his word, he catered to her every whim; it wasn’t unusual for him to run several errands a week for her, such as taking her compact disc player in for repair, or buying a card for her to send to her mom on Mother’s Day.

One weekend morning, Philip, a slight man with a dark, thick mustache, showed up at Mustang #1 at nine
A.M
. to help Roberto, the Mustang handyman, sand and stain pieces of redwood to use as bedposts for Baby’s room. Philip had bought the wood at a lumber store. Because of her seniority, Baby didn’t have to pack up her room when she left the brothel on vacation but was allowed to keep it intact, with the understanding that another woman would probably be assigned there temporarily in her absence. This privilege brought with it the freedom to personalize her room any way she wanted. When Baby expressed a desire to redecorate, Philip offered to foot the bill.

According to Baby, Philip epitomized the man who came out to the brothels looking for someone to fall in love with. He had met Baby at a particularly vulnerable time in his life. An alcoholic, he had hit rock bottom after his second drunk-driving charge, and he had shown up at Mustang Ranch in despair, desperate for a friend. For a fee of $300, Baby became the person he could, in his words, “reach out and grasp onto.” That first night, he promised her he would quit drinking. Indeed, he had maintained his sobriety since, and he credited
Baby with his transformation. “She brings out the best in me,” Philip would later tell me. “If it hadn’t been for Baby, I would have eventually been in prison or died. That’s why I like doing things for her, like bringing her gifts and doing her favors.”

Baby wasn’t surprised at Philip’s infatuation. “We prostitutes are paid to be the perfect partners. We’re agreeable to whatever the customer says or feels about life. Because we’re so understanding and supportive, sometimes the clients fall in love with us.” What Baby described didn’t sound that different from a patient finding unconditional acceptance from a therapist (also for a handsome fee) and mistaking their feelings of appreciation for feelings of love. Real relationships weren’t nearly as easy and demanded more compromises. It was no wonder that everyone else in Philip’s life disappointed him. In no time, Philip became one of Baby’s regulars.

Most Mustang prostitutes had a collection of regulars who visited them habitually and exclusively. Regular customers were the bread and butter of the business, enabling the women to get through the slow seasons when tourism tapered off. Baby was particularly talented at fostering regulars. Even the selection of her working name had been intentional. “I picked it so I would always be in their heads,” she said. “When they’re at home making love to their wives or girlfriends and say, ‘Ooh, Baby!’ they have to think of me at the same time.” Her results spoke for themselves. Baby serviced between seventy and eighty customers per week and she generated $300,000 worth of revenue for the brothel for seven months of work; her take of it was close to $150,000.

But regulars were as varied in their fantasies as the rest of
the brothel clientele. Baby knew that in order to sustain regular customers like Philip—men who wanted intimacy and the feeling of being special—she had to give them the illusion of mutuality. To that end, she gave Philip her pager number and her supposed real name and details about her outside life, to make it seem as if she had begun letting down her guard. According to Baby, the effect on Philip had been striking. Very quickly, he began visiting every week rather than just a few times a month. Believing Baby’s increased openness meant he was more than simply a customer, Philip started acting bolder in the bedroom and more confident in the parlor. Baby had taken pride in his development.

More recently, however, things had become difficult. Philip was coming out to Mustang ever more often, several times a week. He showed up promptly at nine
P.M
. on Friday and Saturday nights in the hopes of being Baby’s first customer of the evening. At first, Baby had found this level of devotion endearing, a flattering acknowledgment of the quality of her work. Over time, however, she found herself growing annoyed. “I don’t want him to be my first party every weekend,” she said. “I get excited dressing up and thinking about hitting the floor, and then there he is. It’s a drag to start a shift with Philip.”

Philip had no idea of the annoyance he was causing Baby. He thought he was her salvation each night. Baby sent over other women to hustle Philip in the hope that he might lose his intense interest in her, but he refused them, announcing loudly that he wouldn’t dream of hurting Baby’s feelings by being with anyone else.

I first laid eyes on Philip one night as Baby walked him
back to the parlor after his usual thirty minutes of cuddling and a half and half. I noticed that he loitered around the bar for several hours, trying to catch glimpses of Baby between customers. He followed her every move intently, once scowling when Baby flirtatiously raked her long, manicured fingernails across another man’s chest. When Baby spotted him staring, she didn’t even bother to act polite. No, she didn’t want a drink, she said coldly, and yes, she was still busy working. Despite raising her voice and sharpening her tone a number of times, Baby couldn’t shake him. Philip didn’t leave the brothel until almost four
A.M
.

Recently, Philip had decided that he wanted to be Baby’s white knight and take her away from the brothel life. He promised he would take care of her financially. Baby rejected his offers brusquely. He had become irritating, and she put too high a premium on her freedom. “I feel like I’m choking,” she told me later. Besides, she figured she earned more money working at Mustang than she could ever get out of Philip. But he was nothing if not persistent; I saw him waiting on Baby whenever I visited Mustang.

Sugar daddies—smitten men who offered women financial help if they would quit the business—were usually highly sought-after commodities. Women spent countless hours recounting tales of the various spoils they had obtained from their sugar daddies. One brothel worker told a wealthy Arizona rancher she would need $14,000 for her son to get a much needed ear operation and $100,000 to open her own business. In exchange, it was understood—either explicitly or implicitly—that the prostitute would become the
man’s girlfriend. For the woman, such an arrangement was merely business, not significantly different from prostituting in a brothel except that she had only one customer to deal with. The woman would keep secret her true feelings, as she would the existence of a boyfriend or husband.

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.