The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (21 page)

Air Force Amy

When I was in grade school, I sold peekaboos for money, so I guess that’s how I got started in the business. For many years, though, there was another story making the rounds — something about my brother having sold me at a truck stop for half a pack of cigarettes. I kept telling reporters that it wasn’t true, but the press prints what it wants, so to this day they still tell it.

The actual story is that I did get half a pack of cigarettes, but it was from a neighborhood teen, for a blow job. I was ten at the time. My parents found out about it, and there were major repercussions for him. But I don’t look back at that episode as particularly appalling. Maybe it was fate.

Some years later, I ran away from home, and hitchhiked across the country. I often found myself at truck stops, resorting to prostitution as a matter of necessity. At eighteen, I joined the United States Air Force, partly to escape the rigors of life on the streets. When I left the Air Force, I went back to prostitution. So I moved to Nevada, where it was legal.

After many years in a number of different brothels, I went to work at the BunnyRanch in 2000. I’d heard good things about Dennis. I knew a number of porn stars had gone to work at the BunnyRanch and that some of them were booking parties for $5,000 an hour. The most I’d ever been paid for an hour was $2,500, and I thought I was as good as any porn star, if not better.

In no time at all I was making more money than any of the other girls, including the porn stars. I was all about sales and customer satisfaction. But because the porn stars always got top billing, I convinced Ron Jeremy to put me in a porn film he was directing,
Lesbian Ho’Down at the BunnyRanch
. Ron agreed, and he asked me to come up with a porn star name. I told him “Air Force Amy” and the name stuck. And yeah, doing that one porn film really boosted sales for me.

The scariest party I ever booked was also the most profitable. A guy came in with an entourage, grabbed two girls, and put $20,000 on the books to start. When he was done, he picked another three girls — including me — put $100,000 more on the books, and took us to Vegas. The guy was a crazy drunk and mean. I think he was with one of the big drug cartels. We spent three weeks with him at $10,000 a day — each. And it was the hardest money I’d ever earned. He made us do each other, he did us together and separately, he once had us do the room-service kid, and he’d scream bloody hell if we fell asleep. I don’t know what kept him going, but I was operating on Red Bull for the duration. It was exhausting, sort of like the porn version of
Survivor
. “Five girls locked in a room with a drug kingpin. Will they get out alive?”
By the end of the three weeks, one of the men in his entourage found out that he had dropped $1.75 million and went crazy. The five of us locked ourselves in the hotel room, terrified, and we could hear them out there, cursing in Spanish and banging on the door and telling us to come the fuck out, but we didn’t move. We sat there, hardly breathing, until security showed up.

• • •

I’ve had my share of clients that were a little different. One guy showed up at the BunnyRanch and negotiated a modest party. I was doing my best to satisfy him but nothing was happening. Absolutely nothing. We tried a bunch of different positions — every trick, everything I knew — and still nothing. So he said, “Do you want me to go out to my car and get my pool toy?” I wasn’t sure what he meant or whether I’d even heard right, but by this time I was willing to try anything, It was a little yellow dinosaur — a floatie — that you see little kids wearing in the pool. I figured he wanted me to wear it, so I put it around my waist and bent over.

We went at it again, but still nothing was happening. He said, “Do you want me to show you how I do it?” So he put his little yellow dinosaur on the floor and started humping it and came almost immediately. I asked him, “So what’s the story with the dinosaur?” He said he’d been a long-distance truck driver and that he used to use latex sex dolls but they were too cumbersome, so he started using the pool toy because it was more convenient.

• • •

I had another guy who showed up with his own butt-plug with a horsetail on it. I got him a bridle and put a bit in his
mouth and rode him around the ranch. And then Dennis said, “We ought to get that guy a pony cart.” The following week he was pulling me up and down the street in front of the BunnyRanch in a shiny new pony cart.

One guy would come in with three bicycle horns that all made different sounds. He wanted me to give him a hand job while I was honking the horns. But once his dick got hard, I needed two hands to get him off, so I had to use my feet to honk the horns. That was pretty challenging.

• • •

I learned from many of these experiences — and was making twenty, thirty, forty thousand a month doing it. But don’t get me wrong. It’s not all beautiful. Girls don’t show up at the BunnyRanch because their life is rosy. They’re knocking on that door because they’re in debt or because something else is wrong and they’re looking for a quick, easy fix. There is no easy fix, though. You end up staying. You get used to the money, to the lifestyle. For lots of girls it’s just easier to be at the BunnyRanch than it is to deal with the real world.

Some of these girls are really needy. They live for the next pat on the head from Dennis. “Attagirl! Good job!” When they don’t get it, it kills them.

“What did I do wrong, Dennis? Help me, Dennis! What can I do different to generate more sales? Will that make you love me more?” It’s really about being acknowledged. It’s about Daddy telling you he loves you. It has nothing to do with love, though. It’s all about money. We all know that, but somehow we still get sucked into that crazy cycle, month after month. And when someone else is top booker, you feel like shit.

I’m guilty of it, too. The exact same thing. Or I was. Lately I’ve been getting out into the real world more. I’m seeing a therapist. I go to group therapy. I’m trying to be stronger. I’m always working on myself.

WE DID ANOTHER SHOW WITH
Howard that I’ll never forget. A Father’s Day special. It was pretty mean-spirited, but it was funny, too. We had adult children from all over the country write to tell us why they thought their father deserved a free night at the BunnyRanch, and Howard and his team boiled it down to three finalists. Two of the fathers were divorced and the kids wrote all sorts of moving letters about what great guys they were and how nice it would be to see them happy again. Real heartfelt stuff. But the third father was still married and his two daughters wrote in to say that they wanted him to get laid because they hated their mother. Guess who won?

Howard brought the girls and their father to New York and I was on the show with them, since I was going to be supplying the reward. It turned into really great theater. Howard just loved that angle: Two girls trying to get their old man laid on Father’s Day to spite their mother!

Ron Jeremy had tagged along and had come with me to the studio, but Howard wouldn’t let him on the show. I’m not sure Howard actually likes Ron Jeremy. Maybe he’s intimidated by the size of his dick. On air, Howard asked me, “Where’s your bitch?”

I said, “She’s in the green room, munching her way through the buffet. You know Ron, she can’t resist free food!”

Mostly, though, Howard talked to the two girls, who wouldn’t stop bad-mouthing their mother. Howard seemed genuinely
shocked by the fact that the parents weren’t divorced, weren’t even thinking about getting divorced, and that the girls had still plotted to get their father laid. Finally, it came time to take the father back to the DoubleTree hotel for his assignation. Howard sent a TV crew along and they followed the father to his first meeting with my BunnyRanch girl in the hotel lobby, shaking hands and making small talk. Ron was hungry for attention, so he got into the mix and told the father what he should do with the girl. “I want you to start by going down on her. Get her good and ready and then I want you to flip her over and spank her a little. And if she says you’re hurting her, spank her harder.” It made for very entertaining television.

Finally, the happy couple went upstairs and the camera crew followed them as far as the door before returning the lobby to wait for them. I guess the idea was to interview them when it was over, as if it had been a sporting event. “Well, you lost, but do you think you played your best game?” I was also waiting around, with Ron and the lucky winner’s two daughters. We had nothing to do and the girls suggested, in no uncertain terms, that they wanted to be entertained. So I booked two more rooms. I went off with one of them and Ron went off with her sister, and a good time was had by all.

The next day, we all went back to the show for the post-event analysis. (Except Ron; they left him in the green room with the buffet.) Howard called the man’s wife and reached her at home. “Hello, I’m Howard Stern. Your husband is here and your two girls are here and I’m calling to tell you that your daughters got your husband a great Father’s Day gift.”

The mother was a little nervous about being on live radio. “A gift? How nice! What did they get him?”

“They got him a beautiful girl from the BunnyRanch. A hooker.”

“A hooker?”

“Yes,” Howard said. “A hooker.”

I could hear the mother’s voice crack with emotion. “Why would you do that?” she asked.

And the girls said, “Because we hate you.”

As I said, the whole thing was pretty mean-spirited, but it was radio gold.

Lamont

LAMONT
and
TONELLI

Dennis and I go back about twenty years. I work at 107.7 The Bone in San Francisco and before that I worked at KSJO in San Jose, which is where I first met Dennis. One of my favorite Dennis stories involves a Father’s Day promotion, which was such a success he kept repeating it on other stations across the country. Listeners would call in to tell us why their father deserved to have sex with a BunnyRanch girl and we would narrow the pool down to three finalists. We would then have all three on the air and our listeners would vote for the winner.

The winner ended up being this guy Tom. His daughter called in and said, “I want my dad to have sex with a hooker because he raised me all by himself.” Turned out her father had a stroke when she was five years old, and her mother had walked out on them, leaving Tom to fend for himself and to take care of their little girl.

We invited Tom on the air, along with the other finalists,
and the first thing I asked him was how long it had been since he got laid. And he said, “Twenty-five years.” It was hard to understand him at first — the stroke had affected his speech. Then I asked him, “What’s the thing you most miss about being with a woman?”

And he took a beat and said, “Big tits!”

Tom ended up winning the contest by a landslide. We booked his trip to the BunnyRanch and decided to go with him to give listeners a blow-by-blow. A few days before we were scheduled to leave, however, our boss said he didn’t think it was a good idea. Only four days earlier, the FCC had handed us two $10,000 fines and he thought that a live show from a brothel was just asking for trouble. But me and my partner, Paul Tonelli, assured him that we would be extra careful and he let us go.

We got there on a Friday and met him and his daughter as they arrived at the BunnyRanch. Dennis was there to greet us. We went inside and Dennis turned to the daughter and said, “Look, you’re the one who nominated your father. Maybe you should have sex with one of the girls, too.”

And she said, “I’ve never been with a woman before.”

Dennis said, “Well, I bet you’ve thought about it, so it’s time to fulfill your fantasy.” Dennis had the girls line up and she looked them over and picked one of the porn stars. As you can imagine, this was a dream come true for the radio show. Only Dennis could have made something like that happen.

Now it was Tom’s turn. Dennis asked him which of the girls appealed to him and of course he picked the one with the biggest tits. We were doing running commentary
for the show, but at that point we gave Tom and his big-breasted bunny a little privacy. An hour later, they returned to the parlor, Tom wearing this huge grin. When Tonelli and I went back on the air and asked him what he had most enjoyed about the experience, we figured he’d yell “big tits” again. But instead — live, on air — he blurted out, “A wet cunt!” And the words come out clear as a bell.