Brothel (9 page)

Then there was Ivy, whose mother-in-law had packed up her bags and loaded them in the car before announcing that she had freeloaded off her husband’s family long enough—her mother-in-law was taking her to Mustang Ranch to get a job.

It wasn’t always families that the women subsidized; all too frequently, pimp boyfriends had manipulated them. The women didn’t admit this to me readily, however. In fact, the subject of pimps didn’t come up until I met Brittany, a thirty-one-year-old with a sweet, wholesome face devoid of any makeup, and a pageboy haircut. Instead of the standard brothel “eye patch” bikini top, which barely covered the nipples, and matching “tulip” shorts, cut to expose both
buttocks cheeks, Brittany stuck with knee-length cocktail dresses. I couldn’t get over how much she resembled an old high school friend of mine. Brittany kept her distance from me for a couple of days, then approached me one afternoon in the Mustang bar. To break the ice, I asked her how the brothels had changed over the eleven years she had worked in them. She mentioned how the previously obligatory three weeks on/one week off work schedule had been relaxed, and how the house minimums had gone up from $30 when she started to $100. And of course, she said, the brothels used to require women to have pimps. Startled, I asked her to repeat herself. I had assumed one of the benefits of legalized prostitution was the elimination of pimps.

Realizing that no one had yet let me in on this well-kept dirty secret, Brittany reiterated that the brothels used to require women to have pimps before they were hired. The rationale was simple. The involvement of pimps enabled brothel owners to leave discipline to men who wouldn’t hesitate to keep their women in line. Brittany said it wasn’t unusual for an owner like Joe Conforte to collect all the pimps’ phone numbers, and call them whenever a girl misbehaved to come “straighten her out real quick.” All too frequently, Brittany said, “straightening out” involved brute force. Owners also benefited from the pimps’ relentless demands that the women earn more and more money.

Meanwhile, pimps found much appeal in placing their prostitutes in Nevada’s brothels, despite having to relinquish half of the women’s earnings to owners. For one, the pimps
could be assured their prostitutes would be supervised and attended to. Once extricated from the burdens inherent to managing working girls illegally, these men were free to seduce other women into the trade. A pimp could keep track of his prostitute’s business simply by calling the brothel and speaking with the cashier or a manager, who freely disclosed the women’s earnings. He frequently kept abreast of his prostitutes’ daily conduct by putting all his working girls together in the same brothel and encouraging them to snitch on one another.

Even though the brothels no longer required women to have pimps, many of Mustang’s working girls still did, confided Brittany in a hushed tone. How many women? I asked, incredulous. Brittany glanced quickly around the room and let out a sigh before replying that almost all the girls did, in her opinion. Those without pimps, she said, included herself, Baby, Dinah, and a few others. With disbelief, I briefly surveyed the room. Why on earth would these legal prostitutes need pimps? Off the unsafe streets, they surely didn’t need a pimp’s protection. Weren’t the women already giving up a significant portion of their money to the house? The brothels functioned as stand-in pimps. Most of the women had portrayed themselves as tough and independent-minded women who viewed prostitution simply as a job, a way to earn a living. I hadn’t detected any signs of coercion. And I had never heard any of the other women talking about pimps.

Brittany wasn’t surprised to learn this. None of the women would’ve wanted to admit aloud to being exploited, to giving
up their hard-earned money to a man when the brothel already extracted half their earnings. Moreover, Brittany said, most of these women denied that their pimps
were
pimps, considering them “boyfriends” and “friends.” She had reason to know, she said; she’d once had a pimp herself. “God forbid if you ever called him a pimp. It wasn’t even in your vocabulary. It was like a bad word,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, if you’re sending your money to a man who wouldn’t be with you if you weren’t sending him money, then he’s not your boyfriend, he’s your pimp. Still, it took me a year after I left Bobby to be able to call him my pimp.”

By now, Brittany had settled into the bar stool next to me, completely absorbed in recounting her story, raising her voice occasionally to be heard over Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” blasting from the jukebox. Whenever the doorbell rang, Brittany ducked her head below the counter of the bar so as not to be caught skipping lineup by Blanche, the floor maid. Brittany’s behavior further substantiated my sense that management didn’t actually respect women’s status as independent contractors. I also wondered if brothel management would be angry with Brittany for revealing that owners once collaborated with pimps and fostered prostitutes’ dependence upon them. Frankly, Brittany’s candidness surprised me, especially if, as she said, having a pimp bore such a social stigma. It was as if Brittany wanted to get this secret off her chest and had picked me to bear witness.

Hers was the classic story of being caught by a pimp, she said. At the age of eighteen, shortly after graduating from a
Catholic high school, she met Bobby while working as a bank teller. He spent three months actively pursuing her, wining and dining her and lavishing her with bouquets and gifts, always acting the gentleman to win her affection. Brittany was flattered by all this attention from a thirty-year-old, and soon he had seduced her. Then one night over dinner, Bobby announced he needed some money—he had started running out—especially because of all he had spent wooing her. To maintain their standard of living, Brittany began charging their expenses and soon accrued a credit card bill of $20,000.

When she told Bobby of her debt, his response was a cold-blooded “How are you going to pay that off?” Then, for the first time, he mentioned prostitution. Specifically, he told her she should consider going to Nevada to work in a legal brothel. At first, Brittany adamantly refused. She had been raised in a religious family and could never sell her body. But over time, as her debt accumulated and Bobby kept encouraging her to prostitute, she began to waver. She didn’t give in until he finally issued an ultimatum: either she start prostituting or he would leave her. “Why should I be with you if you’re not doing anything for me?” he asked her. Afraid of losing him, Brittany finally submitted.

Using both guilt and the pretense of love, pimps baited and coaxed women to turn out, Brittany said. Sadly, they rarely reciprocated women’s love in any genuine way. Brittany explained that pimps like Bobby typically used insincere promises of fidelity to placate their prostitutes while continuing to philander in attempts to catch and turn out additional women.
Most pimps strove to establish a stable of women off whom they could profit. By arranging for his prostitutes to work staggered three-week schedules in the brothels, so that only one would be home at any given time, a man could fool each woman into believing she was his one and only. Prostitutes who were aware of the existence of others competed ferociously to win their pimp’s favor. Many pimps exacerbated the women’s rivalry, pitting them against one another with the prospect that one prostitute would eventually win out and the two of them together would reap the benefits of all the other girls’ work. There was even an expression for this coveted position: “bottom bitch.”

But Brittany knew only one woman who had claimed victory and ended up with her pimp: her friend April, who had retired off the floor, or quit prostituting, thirteen years earlier and now worked as a night floor maid at Mustang Ranch. One night April opened up to me and confessed that even though she’d prevailed and had been married for over eighteen years to her former pimp, the road had been tough. “I was bitter about my experience,” she said. “I couldn’t forget those early years. It had been very difficult to share my man with other women. Even after we’d been out of the business and out of the life for a while, he was always looking to catch one girl and to keep her for a couple of months to make some quick money. I had a big problem with that because I didn’t want to share him anymore.”

More typically, relationships between prostitutes and pimps ended the way Brittany’s had. After almost three years of
financial exploitation and some physical abuse, Brittany finally admitted to herself that Bobby was using her. But when she announced her intention to part ways, Bobby said she would have to leave all her possessions behind, regardless of the fact that she had helped him amass eight cars, several homes, and jewelry. In the end, she said, she barely got out of their house with the clothes on her back. With nowhere else to go, nothing to show for her years of work, and not enough confidence to try anything else, Brittany returned to Nevada’s brothels, only this time as an “outlaw,” a prostitute without a pimp. She had been working independently now for nearly eight years.

Although the brothel industry no longer worked in collusion with pimps, Brittany felt outraged that owners and management didn’t do more to rid the business of pimps altogether. Instead, the brothels maintained a hands-off policy, perhaps not wanting to deprive themselves of the constant supply of prostitutes still furnished by pimps. Law enforcement officials in Oregon, where for some reason many of today’s West Coast pimps allegedly originate, estimate that pimps in the Eugene-Springfield area have over forty women working in Nevada’s brothels who regularly send tens of thousands of dollars back home. When I asked George about this, the next time he drove out to Mustang to check on me, he downplayed it. Rather perfunctorily, he said it was a shame that the women had pimps, and it was nothing the brothel industry was proud of. He could no more understand why the women would give up their money to pimps, he said, than he
could understand why the women tended to date ex-cons. (His question
was
a good one—why were some women emotionally vulnerable to such men and other women not?)

Brittany and the few others like her who had broken free of pimps tried to warn women who had them that they would eventually be left with nothing to show for their years of hard work. Occasionally, a woman took her colleagues’ words to heart and left her pimp, but usually the efforts were futile. Once, I witnessed a couple of women trying to encourage a working girl named Monica to leave her “old man.” He was one of two infamous twins from Oregon, Henry and Harold, black men in their late twenties or early thirties who “kept” thirteen or fourteen girls apiece, all almost identical. Monica typified the look with her tall, long-legged frame, blond hair, and fresh, cover-of
-Seventeen
-magazine face. The women shared something else: the twins had marked all of them with identical ankle tattoos.

The women tried to point out to Monica how cruel her pimp was; he forced her to work without a single day off for over five months. Didn’t Monica see how he was using her? Monica resisted; Henry had trained her well. He loved her dearly, she insisted, and only wanted her to work hard so they could be together sooner. The two had plans to run away to California and start a family. When the women asked why Henry never seemed to want to see her, never visited her or flew her home to Oregon but still expected her Western Unions to be timely and bountiful, Monica started crying. Inside, she had obviously wondered the same thing. But she wouldn’t dream of questioning Henry, she said, or she might lose him.
She didn’t know what she would do without him. Wasn’t it proof enough that he loved her, Monica asked hopefully, that he cried and begged her forgiveness after fights they had over the telephone? Deep down, she said, Henry needed her, and she didn’t want to disappoint him.

Brittany contended that husbands like Donna’s and men like Bobby and Henry and Harold were all pimps, period. Other women sharply disagreed; I found that whether or not their significant others should be regarded as pimps was a hotly contested topic among brothel prostitutes.

When Brittany had decided to get married, four years earlier, she was very careful. Even though her husband, Jon, unlike her former pimp, held a full-time job as an accounts manager for a manufacturing company, Brittany knew she could easily fall back into the same old role: “He says he’d never take advantage of me like that. But I tell him he wouldn’t have to. I’d let him do it, because I’ve been in that role before—of giving, giving, giving. It’s all I know how to do.” Brittany refused to combine their incomes and insisted on splitting all bills 50–50. “There’s no mooching. I don’t send him my money or come home and hand him my purse. My money goes directly into my checking account, and I can spend as much as I want. He doesn’t ask me about my money. I’m careful not to let him cross that line.”

My long discussion with Brittany at the bar ended abruptly when one of her regulars found her sitting with me and asked to go back to her bedroom to “talk,” the brothel euphemism for negotiating prices. As soon as Brittany walked away, I became aware of feeling empty. Knowing that so many of
these women had been manipulated by men they loved cast them in a new, more tragic light. I felt sickened by the thought of such controlling, self-serving men, using these women who had sincere hopes of creating a plentiful, secure future for their loved ones.

I suddenly missed my home, and my husband (my fiancé and I married in 1994). How would I have felt if he had suggested I increase our family’s income and give Mustang Ranch a try? I would have felt as if he’d sold me down the river. I suddenly felt desperate to call Andy. Wanting to stay immersed in the immediate experience, I hadn’t called home much, but now I found myself homesick. Then I remembered it was Saturday night, when phone use in the brothel was forbidden. From six
P.M
. Friday until six
A.M
. Sunday, Mustang’s phone room, a small room off the parlor with four pay phones—women’s sole means of communication with the outside world—was locked. When the prostitutes griped, old-timers, like Blanche the floor maid, waxed on about how much more restrictive the phone rules used to be: back in the 1970s, women were allowed two incoming and two outgoing phone calls per week, and no calls were permitted between four
P.M
. and nine
P.M
. Phone prohibitions had always been justified on the grounds that news from home frequently disrupted women’s ability to concentrate on the job.