The Best American Crime Writing (33 page)

On the counter is a row of egg timers, each with a girl’s name. Angel’s has a license for five girls but employs eight, so they work in shifts. Angel, out of compassion and pity, has been known to take on men that the other girls refuse, and for less money. The dining room doubles as the madam’s office, with phones, a copier, and a status board on the wall. The board says in green Magic Marker that Coco, Cajun, Dizyre, and Mia are “off property.” A joke traffic sign by the door says, “Parking for L
vers Only, All Others Will Be Towed.” On the wall between the TV room and dining room is an authentic Old West wood placard:

Mack lets me know that they pray before meals. He takes my hand, and I take Shanda’s, to my left. During his prayer, Mack caresses my hand with his thumb, not in a kinky way but in the same way my mother does during her blessing over Thanksgiving dinner, describing the same rosette with her thumb. Unlike most Nevada whorehouses, Angel’s Ladies does not have a bar. Mack does not drink or smoke or gamble. He and Angel are born-again, and Angel’s is the closest thing anyone is going to get to a Christian brothel. They like to say that they “live the example.” Why not? The ancients lived happily for millennia with the paradox of temple prostitution. A timer goes off and we are presently joined by Nikki, wearing a peignoir, looking freshly showered. Wanda asks if her “guy” doesn’t want to join us, and she murmurs that no, he does not. The other women look her over and then pass the casserole.

Because we are allegedly across the street from Area 51, I broach the subject of UFOs. Instant hit. Everyone at the table, except Mack, has had a sighting. Twice since she’s been here, Wanda has seen lights above the ridge over Area 51. The second time was with a trick. He’d just buzzed and she was opening the front door. It was a brilliant yellow flare, almost gold. Clint, who worked for the government, has seen stuff, too. Diane has had the most sightings. She is writing a book, she says, called
The Hooker and the Aliens
. Mack gets irritated with the bunkum and pulls the dessert, a pan of chocolate-frosted cake, his way. He cuts two bricks and serves me one. He takes a bite and then asks, sternly, “You like yella cake?” I say that yeah, I like yella cake. “Me too,” he says. Then there’s a buzz and the girls scurry. Mack excuses himself.

The girls keep out of sight till called to the front parlor for the lineup. Peeking around the corner, I can’t see much more than the
visitor’s shoes on the pink carpet. When we overhear the trick tell Mack that on his way over tonight he saw eight cop cars outside the Exchange Club, one of the three casino hotels in town, Wanda looks shaken. Mack sits on the couch, ankle crossed over his knee, wooing the man in his warm, unforced voice, telling him what a fine selection of ladies he has to choose from, how this place is different from other brothels: The others will rush you, the others are just in it for the money, the others aren’t Christian, but here there’s free pop and free coffee and seventy-seven acres to take a moonlight stroll or take a girl for a skinny-dip in the natural spring-fed pool. Hell, one former girl, Jennifer—“she had these great big natural titties”—ended up
marrying
a trick; that’s right, dreams do come true. Hell, Mack had the honor of giving her away at the chapel in Reno, and after you’ve gruntled yourself with sex every which way you ever wanted, if you’re hungry, why, feel free to join us for supper, there’s still some on the table now.

During the lineup, Wanda clears dishes and I flick crumbs, lulled by the mechanical sips of Clint’s oxygen. Wanda joins me with a cup of tea. She wears green satin pajamas. She is not a glamorous or gaudy madam. The Townses went to the Beatty Community Church until the pastor, Reverend Jeff Taguchi—also the owner of the one-hour Photostop and, ironically, a county commissioner on the brothel licensing board—exhorted the couple one Sunday after their arrests to “go forth and sin no more.” Wanda holds her husband’s hand on the table. She is terrified that Clint, who’s dying of the same thing that Shanda claims is taking the kittens, could go to jail. They’re holding their breath till the trial; it’s been postponed twice already. She never sent a girl on an outcall before that night, she says. They only did it because the detective lied and said he was in a wheelchair. Her son, actually both her children, are wheelchair bound. She gets up and brings me a picture: a kid with long greasy hair, in a wheelchair. Diane enters the room, naked but for a black gauzy body stocking that smooshes her
nipples. She drops $600 on the table and says the guy wants two and a half hours. While Wanda “books” the cash, Diane tells me that if I want, later, she’ll let me read a chapter from her book. Then Wanda sets a timer, and Diane leaves.

After a trick chooses which girl he wants from the lineup, the price negotiation is done privately in the girl’s room. (Each girl’s room is supposed to have a panic button.) Wanda listens in over an intercom hidden in the spice cabinet. Each woman is an independent contractor who sets her own price, generally $200 to $400 an hour; 45 percent goes to the house. Each sex act is negotiated and priced separately—done piecework, a la carte. Or, as Lora Shaner, a former madam, puts it in her book,
Madam: Chronicles of a Nevada Cathouse
, “You want to play with my tits? That’s an extra fifty. Suck my nipples? Seventy-five more. Nibble my toes? Forty bucks ….” Funeral expenses, as mandated by the Federal Trade Commission funeral rule, are similarly itemized.

Mack has given me a key to the Fantasy Bungalow, a dismal trailer set a hundred yards behind the main compound. Mack accused his last madam of burning down the first Fantasy Bungalow. Its charred remains are scattered at the bottom of the hill. The one where I get to sleep is perched on cement blocks, snuggled against a steep crag that bears a giant white A, like an aleph of shame. To get there I rely largely on instinct, stepping over cats tensed like fists in the dark. A few stars make an effort in the sky.

The decor of the Fantasy Bungalow is meant to be homey, as the Angel’s Ladies website put it recently, for “playing house or something different!” Angel oversaw the decorating, just as she did for their Oregon funeral parlors. The curtains are quaint and the wallpaper quainter. Mirrors in the bungalow apprise me of my whereabouts at all times, including one that surely registers my expression when I open the refrigerator and find, alone on the second shelf, a
jumbo-sized box of chilled latex gloves. The video library is sparse:
Hung and Hard, Bang’Er 17 Times
, and
SEASLUTS
, Volume 2. In the back, past a beaded curtain, is my bedroom, furnished with more mirrors, and a vanity, where I leave my car keys by a Virgen de Guadalupe candle with a hornet entombed in the wax. Two lurid lamps with red bulbs clinch the mood. I try to call my wife, but I’m beyond cellular range. Mindful of a story that Shaner tells about a moll who once forced a trick to his knees at knifepoint to persuade him to accept Jesus as his personal savior, I look everywhere but find no panic button, only an unplugged Radio Shack intercom, and beneath the nightstand a five-quart stainless-steel bowl with a dozen Liquid Tight Hygienic Disposal System Safe-T-Bags. To my dismay, the smoke detector is missing its battery.

I pick up
Bang’Er 17 Times
, left in the VCR, in medias res, while I fix myself a cup of Lemon Zinger from the complimentary tea sampler. The actors look lonely and bored, insincere, like the professional mourners in Greece who wail and writhe and tear out their hair for a fee; it’s easy to sift out the truly bereaved from the faker, like pointing out the professional laugher in the studio audience, just as it’s easy to tell that this porn actress is only miming lust. There is no precipice behind her eyes; she is too sober, she looks up at the camera, her audience, hungry only for ratings; she is a busker, a drone. Although the video is a bit proctologic for my tastes, I watch while listening to snippets of tape of Mack in the car.

Having finished the movie, now filled with a lonely, hollow pubescent guilt, I go outside. I stand in the blowing dark. Looking down at the brothel, I wonder which of the five whores will share their master’s bed tonight while his bereaved wife sleeps alone 120 miles away. Mostly, I’m disappointed that this man, who panders to those most human conundrums, grief and lust—the very antipodes of the carnal spectrum—a man who possesses a meat-and-potatoes soul if ever there was one, finds the subject of sex and death to be just that, meat and potatoes. When I go to bed I read the grief self-help book I brought. I couldn’t help but notice that the death and dying section is coterminous with the human sexuality section at my Barnes & Noble. This book recommends getting a puppy.

In the morning, after I shower with the heart-shaped soap that I found on the back of the toilet, Shanda cooks me eggs. She is wearing her bowler, and her slippered toes peekaboo like miniature marshmallows. Diane sits at the table smoking and flipping through cookie recipes. It’s going to be a slow day. Almost everyone in the industry refers to prostitutes as girls. But, as it happens, Shanda just became a grandma and Diane has two kids in college. Mack would have you think that Angel’s ladies are the demimonde, but the women I’ve met are worn and mournful. They have the wan charm of (I imagine) the whores of ancient Rome, the
bustuariae
, sexual servants of the gods of the dead, who made their assignations in cemetery groves. Angel herself, just a few years younger than Mack, is the most weathered. I have yet to spend any time with Angel, but I have gotten to know her, a little, from the photo album in the parlor of her and Mack copulating. It is a plain album, the sort in which you would expect to find vacation photos. A number of pictures include another man having sex with Angel while Mack, pouchy and removed, looks on. In one snapshot, her contorted face looks carved out of grief, but it could be the strain of ecstasy turning
her inside out. When Mack comes in with his newspaper, Shanda runs off to dress for a Halloween Fantasy Fetish Ball in Vegas. There are Halloween parties everywhere in Nevada this weekend. Mack will not participate. He is staying in to put the finishing touches on a forty-page missive of gripes, ammunition for his lawyer. Since Mack has work to do, he can’t join me at the Burro Races, the highlight of Beatty Days, this weekend’s celebration of Nevada’s anniversary of statehood (Halloween 1864), but he encourages me to go anyway, saying he’s heard that they’re “sort of funny.” I ask Diane if she wants to go, but Mack answers for her. Of course she can’t. Someone has to be here when the fornicators ring the bell.

High noon finds a crowd around the burro pit, an arena the size of a ballfield, behind the Burro Inn and Casino. Stranded in the center is a rusty oil drum. There are aisles of pickups and spectators roosting on car hoods. We are under a bleak hill painted with a giant white B. Back in the fifties, when Beatty was the closest town to the aboveground nuclear tests, residents gathered at this same spot behind the Burro Inn, nee Atomic Club, in the early morning with lawn chairs and coolers to watch the apocalyptic fireballs light up over the hills. Fortunately, Beatty lies upwind of the Nevada Test Site, and residents have been spared the tragedy that has befallen many downwinders, though, according to the Department of Energy, which tests the town for radionuclides weekly—as often as the girls at Angel’s Ladies are tested for sexually transmitted diseases—the town runs a little hot. In the semi-shade of the announcer’s box, a tin-roofed platform on stilts, are three docile burros tied to the fence. The animals are cute, almost toy-sized, except for their distractingly big genitalia.

Since the species originated in North Africa, the burro adapted quickly to Nevada’s desert climate and made the perfect pack animal for the nomadic prospector. The beasts were thought to be
preternaturally “tuned” to precious metals. In fact, the prospector who filed the first claim in Rhyolite was allegedly led to the gold by his own pack of ungulate dowsers.

I grab a spot close to the fence, between a perambulator and a collegiate-looking guy with a camera. There must be two hundred people now, maybe more. A burro wails, just as mournful as Eeyore. There are a number of leathery-armed folk wearing visors that span the visor spectrum from monogrammed cotton to blue sparkle plastic, but more wear cowboy hats. A scruffy-looking guy dressed in suspenders and a sand-dusted crushed hat climbs up onto a tin box and hollers the rules: