Brothel (16 page)

I stayed in touch with Alice. For several years, she and Bruce remained together. But then, as Linda and others had predicted, in the middle of a heated argument the past resurfaced: despite Bruce’s original good intentions, he reminded Alice where he had found her. Several weeks later, the couple broke up. Alice managed to defy Linda’s stereotype and never returned to her brothel career. She quickly married another man who knew nothing about her past. “Our hobbies include tennis, golf, and cocktail hours,” she wrote to me of her new life in one holiday letter. It sounded as if her new husband would have had an aneurysm had he known about her brief career.

Few women working at Mustang were willing to admit falling for customers. Over time, as they got to know me, more did begin to confess—but in strict confidence. One night, Brittany revealed that Jon, her husband, was a former trick. Like
Linda, Brittany had been trained by her pimp not to trust her tricks. “I learned early on not to cross that professional boundary,” she said. “It’s like violating the doctor-patient line.” But when she met Jon, she fell in love in spite of herself and everything she had learned.

Three and a half years earlier, Jon had paid his first visit to the Reno brothels. He was with a group of friends. “I fell in love when I turned around and saw her the first time,” he said. “I didn’t want her sexually or anything. I just felt a warm attraction to her.” Brittany admitted she had felt something similar and found herself surprisingly excited when Jon and his friends decided to take her and a few other working girls on an outdate ($1,000 per woman). Jon said he and his friends proposed this just so Jon and Brittany could be together outside the brothel.

In town, they went dancing and gambling in the casinos before heading to the hotel bedrooms. Although Brittany and Jon fooled around, Jon couldn’t have intercourse. “I didn’t want vaginal sex because I knew I felt something for her. I didn’t know what at the time. I just wanted to talk to her.” At the end of the night, Brittany shocked herself when she gave him a peck on the lips, something she had never before done with a customer. “It just seemed so natural,” she recalled. “Like we already knew each other.”

After silencing the voices of doubt in her head, Brittany decided to take the initiative and call Jon in his Reno hotel before he drove back home to Santa Rosa. “I knew if he ever called me at the Ranch, he would become fixed as a trick in my mind. I had to call him to establish a connection outside the
brothel.” Because of Jon’s fear that Brittany was simply out to develop business on the side, she had to tell him directly that she had no interest in a professional relationship.

Slowly, the couple began dating long distance, with frequent telephone calls and trips back and forth between Reno and Santa Rosa. Although both had their doubts about pursuing the relationship, Brittany was the one to become insecure, to lose all the sexual confidence she had gained as a prostitute. “I didn’t know how to handle the sex part. All of a sudden I’m totally naïve, like a teenager who doesn’t know how to have sex.” It was Jon who took the lead and gently guided the couple’s physical relationship.

Six months later, Brittany and Jon moved in. They lived together for a year and a half before deciding to marry. Even after three years of marriage, Brittany remained cautious, anticipating the day Jon might become like all the other horror-story tricks and tell her she was nothing but a whore. Meanwhile, Jon feared that Brittany might fall in love with another customer.

I understood why Brittany kept this secret from her peers, especially after seeing how judgmental Linda and the others could be. But I would realize later that the women’s harshness about dating tricks only hinted at how catty and vicious the women could really be.

6 .. SISTERHOOD

A
round noon one day a new woman named Heather approached me while I was eating lunch in the kitchen at Mustang #1. At first, she pretended to be making casual conversation, but she was clearly unnerved. She asked how my day was going, and before I could answer, she said, “
I’ve
sure had one hell of a morning.”

She sniffed and winced. “I was taking a shower. I reached for my shampoo. It had a strange odor, it smelled like perfume mixed with rotten eggs. Fumes filled up my nose and the back of my throat. The shower steamed up, and I felt almost claustrophobic. Then my scalp began to tingle, then burn. That’s when I knew. Someone had put Nair in my shampoo.”

Heather had been a victim of terrorism brothel-style, an attempt by colleagues to intimidate her, perhaps even chase her
out, as they did frequently to new girls who threatened their business.

As she spoke, her body language—stooped shoulders, nervous hands, pain-lined face—spoke of her need for reassurance. Like other new arrivals at Mustang Ranch, she had no allies in place to protect or defend her. I wondered if she realized how little influence I, an outsider, had.

Heather and I had gotten acquainted a week earlier, as we found ourselves headed through the brothel gate together for a jog one morning. We were almost the only women who left the compound to exercise—the brothel strongly discouraged it and ordered us to stay on Mustang property—and we agreed to become running mates. During our runs, we talked, and I came to know her well.

This was Heather’s first trip to one of Nevada’s legal brothels. For more than four years, she had worked full-time in illegal brothels in Houston’s business district, until a recent crackdown by the city’s vice squad forced her to temporarily relocate out of state. Previous professional success had made her quite confident. “I’m big-time in Houston. I make easy money,” she told me on one run. “I didn’t think it would be like that here too, but it is.” She snickered.

Still, the move to Reno had been daunting. “I was really scared when I came to Mustang,” she said. “I knew what it would be like when I got here. I knew what the prostitute life was about—competing. You know nobody’s going to like you. You know it’ll be really cold and unfriendly.”

As Heather had anticipated, her reception at Mustang had
been chilly. Her arrival, in May, coincided with an unusual lull in business; sometimes three or four hours passed before a customer rang the doorbell. Meanwhile, Mustang #1 was nearly filled with women, with almost fifty ready to work each day of the typically busy season. With wigs and makeup in place, dressed in tight-fitting bodysuits and dresses, women sprawled on parlor couches, fretted about their financial obligations, and bickered relentlessly. Tension mounted, resentment boiled, hostility permeated the brothel. This was no time for the likes of Heather.

A chestnut-haired Bridget Fonda look-alike, Heather was a muscularly built woman with a provocative smile that revealed a small gap between her two front teeth. Her work attire alternated between two identical blue and pink skintight polka-dot dresses with teardrop-shaped cutouts to expose her firm midriff. Her looks didn’t go unnoticed; it wasn’t unusual for her to be chosen from lineup five out of six times.

From the beginning, she had experienced animosity from her colleagues. “The first day I came out to the parlor wearing a little white dress, high heels, and makeup, they said in snotty tones, ‘Oh, you look different.’ I knew what they meant. I’d heard it before. They were thinking, ‘Uh-oh, she’s pretty. She’s going to get picked over us.’ They don’t like me very much. In a way, I guess it’s a compliment. Then, in another way, it kind of gets on my nerves. I’m friendly, and I like other people to be friendly to me.” Behind Heather’s almost bratty defensiveness, I sensed true hurt feelings.

The other women constantly exchanged catty remarks
about Heather, usually when she was within earshot. “She just thinks she’s so beautiful.” “Aren’t you ready to go to bed yet?” “Why don’t you take that dress off?” “Aren’t you tired of fucking yet?” One woman told customers that Heather was a lesbian and hated men.

Strain between Heather and her colleagues culminated in the Nair incident. “I was pissed, I mean
pissed
. I went straight to Keri, my bathmate. I was like, ‘Keri, I don’t know if I’m crazy or not.’ I let her smell it. She said, ‘No, girl. That’s something nasty. That’s Nair, bleach, or something.’ I stormed into the parlor with my shampoo bottle in hand. I looked pissed, and some of the girls were like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said, ‘Somebody put fucking Nair in my shampoo.’ ”

There was no doubt that the attack was aimed at Heather. “My hair products were in
my
room. We don’t keep our stuff in the bathroom. At first, everybody wanted to accuse Keri, but she’s like me. When she first came here years ago, somebody poked holes in her condoms. She warned me to lock up my condoms. But I didn’t think about my shampoo. I just left it out.”

Keri urged Heather to complain to the management. Despite their usual hands-off policy regarding feuding women, the managers were furious that the other women would threaten a worker who was making considerable money for the house when business was in such a slump. The visiting beautician, who happened to be at the brothel for her weekly house call, was paid to wash and condition Heather’s hair using salon products and special pH treatments. Because all of Heather’s shampoos and conditioners had been tampered with, she was
given cash compensation. House rules required women to keep the doors to their rooms unlocked, but Heather was given a key and told to lock hers.

News of the attack spread quickly, the story being embellished as it was told and retold. Some women claimed the shampoo had been replaced with acid. Several believed that an older prostitute must have committed the act, because Nair was an ancient trick to run a prostitute out of a brothel. But Heather suspected a younger woman, someone directly losing business to her: “I’m not stealing the older girls’ money. It’s the other young brunettes whose business I’m hurting.”

Long before Heather’s Nair fiasco, I had wondered how the women really felt about one another. Competition was the name of the game at Mustang Ranch. During their twelve-hour shifts, women competed directly with each other. Unlike street prostitutes, they couldn’t roam to solicit business on their own. Confined to the brothel, they had to wait for the doorbell to ring. By the time a client stepped into the parlor, women were lined up shoulder to shoulder to be scrutinized. If the client opted to go to the bar, the race was on to see who could hustle him into a room.

Not being picked could result in hurt feelings. Women frequently internalized rejection, blaming themselves for gaining weight, growing old, needing a boob job, or losing their ambition. And sometimes, other women like Heather were made to blame.

So it was no surprise that feuds and catfights were common. I had already seen numerous scuffles break out over borrowed clothing that was returned damaged, and loaned money
that was never repaid. Until the Nair incident, though, I hadn’t realized how deep the undercurrent of competition ran and how vindictive the women could be.

Irene, Mustang #2’s manager, told me she warned all new women about the house pecking order. “It’s hard when a girl first comes into a brothel. The girls who are already there are all of a sudden senior and the new girl becomes their target. If she does well, the ones who’ve been here awhile who aren’t making any money, and are instead sitting back on the couches smoking cigarettes, get pissed at her. It’s totally misdirected anger; their anger should be at themselves, at their own lack of interest and blasé attitude about the job. But the new girls who are enthusiastic and come in with a fresh attitude are always going to make more money simply because they’re going to work harder.”

Irene believed that management needed to intervene more frequently and more effectively. “It’s about who’s in control of the house. If you let all this stuff happen, you’re going to keep your five or six clique-y girls, and they’re going to chase everybody else out. You can’t let that happen. You have to be aware that it’s going on and nip it in the bud. You also have to talk to the new girls and tell them there’s a possibility they’re going to piss some people off, but that they’re here to make money and need to keep their goals and objectives in mind.”