Brothel (2 page)

Flint went on to say, “It’s not going to be like breezing in and counting tomatoes or comparing prices in a grocery store. The working ladies are very private people. They don’t trust outsiders. You’re in for a real education, honey.” Suddenly, the study I’d written off was a reality, and my mind began to race. Absent any more information, nightmare scenarios multiplied. Who were these women who allowed themselves to be locked behind gates? Were they all drug addicts and survivors of heinous sexual abuse, like so many street prostitutes? Were they chained to beds, as prostitutes allegedly were in Thailand?
Would they even agree to speak with me? Above all, did I have it in me to do this? Yes, I decided. I bought a plane ticket.

My family didn’t help. They were even more uncomfortable than I was. As long as I wasn’t allowed inside, my interest in the project had been entertaining. But now I was headed to Nevada, and suddenly my parents wondered why I was so interested in an underworld teeming with criminals and degenerates. My future in-laws were even more confused. Let us get this straight: You’re choosing to leave our son for an entire month to conduct research in a
brothel
? Do you secretly desire to become a prostitute? What are we going to tell our friends? Andy, my husband-to-be, had his own worries, my physical safety not the least among them.

In the end, apprehension and all, I made that flight to Reno. Awaiting me at the Reno airport was a man named Marty who had been sent to pick me up and deliver me to Flint at a place called Chapel of the Bells. Flint was not only executive director of the Nevada Brothel Association, I learned, but a (retired) ordained minister as well. In fact, he owned one of Reno’s twelve wedding chapel businesses—and arguably the nicest, or at least the only freestanding one. (The others were storefronts.) With its whitewashed façade, faux stained-glass windows, and prominent cupola, Flint’s Chapel of the Bells looked more like Disney’s version of the gingerbread house in “Hansel and Gretel” than a wedding chapel.

In the lobby, white lace-print paper lined the walls and a pattern of miniature flowers decorated the ceiling moldings like frosting on a wedding cake. An assortment of bridal
bouquets, boutonnières, garter belts, and champagne flutes was showcased for newlyweds who wanted such traditional wedding frills. On the walls hung sobering certificates and plaques that authenticated George Flint’s maternal ancestors, the Treats, as descendants of the founders of New Jersey and Connecticut. Flint would later tell me that he could trace his family’s lineage all the way back to Charlemagne.

While I waited for my audience with Flint, I watched a live feed on a closed-circuit television of a wedding in progress. A female minister was presiding over the marriage of a middle-aged Frenchman to a diminutive and considerably younger-looking Vietnamese bride who clearly spoke much less English than he did, which is to say, almost none.

Finally Flint appeared. For nearly four years, I’d wondered what the brothel industry’s gatekeeper looked like. A flashy, gum-smacking, middle-aged street hustler with a cockeyed hairpiece and several heavy gold necklaces buried in dark chest hair is what I had expected. Instead, I saw a man in his early sixties, of ample proportions and intense civility. He wore tinted eyeglasses, and several expensive—but not gaudy—rings flashed from thick fingers. He wobbled a little as he walked, because of a serious leg injury. He looked safer, friendlier, and more polished than I’d imagined. I couldn’t help but see in my mind’s eye a smiling Midwestern televangelist wooing an admiring and loving audience.

As he led me down to his basement office, he peppered me with unexpected questions about my family. Did I know my ancestry, he asked? Did I have any interest in genealogy? I admitted I hadn’t given it much thought—certainly not as much
as he had. He told me about each of the family portraits hanging on the basement walls. His father had been a professional photographer and Flint confessed that he had inherited his passion for photography from his dad. In fact, George—he insisted I call him George rather than Mr. Flint or Reverend Flint—admitted to many passions, from travel and antiques to Napoleon and the embalming practices of morticians. I found myself nodding pleasantly and in half-disbelief as his stories rolled over me, delivered in the soothing cadences of a professional preacher.

Suddenly, George changed the subject. “Why is it that women who were sexually aggressive before marriage, never want to give a guy oral sex after they’re married?” Did he expect me to answer that? George didn’t need an answer. The problem, he explained, lay in our society’s inability to communicate about sex. Men fundamentally wanted to be monogamous, he contended, but resorted to having affairs or going to brothels when they felt uncomfortable discussing their sexual fantasies with their wives. Then, warming to his other job as brothel lobbyist, he began to tick off a litany of reasons for legalizing prostitution.

As he went on, passionately endorsing the sex trade from inside his wedding chapel, I couldn’t help but wonder how he reconciled the two professions. Maybe he didn’t need to; clearly he was a man comfortable with life’s contradictions. With a wink or a sneer, he would proffer a story about the way the world worked, and about the weakness to which the flesh is heir. There was the one about the state senator who fell in love with a brothel prostitute after one night of passion and
refused to let her leave the room. “Georgie, can’t I keep her?” the senator had whined over the phone in the wee hours of the morning, according to George.

His utter candor, his vocal, affable openness, and his basically charming disposition were disarming, even endearing. And while his self-righteous rationalizations of the brothel trade were hardly unimpeachable, it was obvious that he had a genuine affection for the women—“the girls,” as he called them.

The sun was setting as George and I finally drove out in his white Cadillac to Mustang Ranch. It was Nevada’s largest, best-known, and most profitable brothel, accounting for nearly half of the $50 million in revenue produced by the state’s licensed brothels each year. It was about twelve miles east of Reno, across the Washoe County line in Storey County. As we drove along Interstate 80, strip malls and neon lights fell away, replaced by a desert landscape painted in time-marked layers of reds, pinks, and browns. Near the exit for the brothel, we spotted a herd of wild horses, some of the mustangs for which the brothel was named. Exit 23 twisted down past a junkyard and under the Southern Pacific railroad tracks, then crossed the Truckee River on a one-lane bridge. There, on the fifty acres the locals called Happy Valley, or the Valley of the Dolls, out of sight of the highway, surrounded by low hills and scrub brush, was the Mustang Ranch.

I suppose I envisioned the sort of mid-Victorian New Orleans whorehouse I’d seen in movies like
Pretty Baby
, but Mustang Ranch was nothing of the sort. It consisted of two nondescript buildings a hundred yards apart, separated by a
parking lot big enough to hold a hundred cars and a dozen eighteen-wheelers. Spanish-style wrought-iron gates enclosed each building, with its little plot of grass in front. I was reminded of a pitch-and-putt miniature-golf castle. Mustang #1 faced the road head on: a pink stucco building with a red tile roof. A huge illuminated pink sign with the Mustang logo—an illustration of a woman’s face—hung over the gate. Behind the building stood a twenty-four-foot lookout tower, a relic of a time when Mustang’s founder, Joe Conforte, had erected a pair of them to defend his enterprise. I would later learn that after the murder of a heavyweight boxer named Oscar Bonavena at Mustang, the tower by the parking lot, from which some say the bullet was fired, was torn down. The remaining tower, behind the brothel, stood ominous and unused.

George drove past Mustang #1 and pulled up in front of Mustang #2, a smaller building whose dark-stained exterior blended more inconspicuously into the desert background. We were buzzed in through the electric gate and greeted coldly at the front door by the “floor maid,” or hostess. “George, you know you can’t bring ladies in here,” she snapped. George explained wearily that I was here as an invited guest of the Nevada Brothel Association to conduct some research. The woman’s gaze softened slightly. Nothing personal, George later told me: the industry had adopted a firm no-woman policy to put a stop to the domestic disputes that broke out, disrupting business, when wives and girlfriends came looking for their partners.

I tried to glance nonchalantly around the room, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary for me to be in a brothel. A
jukebox blared out the Foreigner song “Hot Blooded” from the center of the room, in front of a partition that divided the parlor area from the bar behind. Against the walls sat several black velvet sofas and a cigarette machine. Neon beer signs and an assortment of Mustang Ranch T-shirts and windbreakers for sale decorated the walls above the bar. The lights were kept dim, and the room felt like a seedy biker bar, minus only a pool table and a pinball machine. On my left, a young black woman with seductive but disengaged eyes sprawled across one of the couches. Another woman strode across the parlor in spiked heels, smoking a cigarette. An Asian man in a 49ers sweatshirt chatted quietly with a redhead on another sofa.

Slow Monday night, George remarked. He walked away to speak with management about my visit, leaving me at the bar to take in the environment. The three women in the room stared at me for a few minutes, but their interest eventually dwindled and I was left alone. George reappeared after about twenty minutes and surprised me with an invitation to stay at the Ranch so as to be close to the subjects of my study.
Live
inside the brothel? I hesitated. I had planned to stay in a cheap Reno motel, never expecting an opportunity like this. My head spun. Sensing my ambivalence, George assured me he’d check in regularly. I took a deep breath. No half measures, Alexa. I moved in that evening.

That first night, I lay in bed listening to the doorbell ring continuously, announcing the arrival of male visitors. I had
been given a vacant room down Hallway B, what was called the night girls’ hallway. My neighbors all worked the shift from eleven
P.M
. to eleven
A.M
. Because of the brothel’s narrow hallways, no wider than four feet, and thin walls, prostitutes’ rooms were typically clustered by shifts so that off-duty women could sleep undisturbed. I could hear a woman’s moans through the rice-paper wall at the head of my bed. For a moment, I was alarmed: Was someone hurt? Then I reminded myself where I was, and tried to figure out whether these were sounds of genuine pleasure. I couldn’t tell. Every few minutes, her customer emitted a rough grunt and occasionally they both laughed. I couldn’t help but think that the sounds the man was making were deeply unarousing; I tried to imagine being forced to act pleasured by some man I didn’t know making guttural animal sounds, and I couldn’t. At least I felt relatively safe, though I did have fleeting fears of awakening in the middle of the night to find a drunken man groping at my nightgown. (Although I’d locked my door, I was sure the push-button lock was easy to pick.) I closed my eyes tight and let the thoughts pass. I had nowhere else to go.

The next day, I began interviewing women, with the help of Irene, Mustang #2’s manager. Irene had been at Mustang for two years. Unlike most brothel managers, she hadn’t been a prostitute. She had come to Mustang as a “square,” as prostitutes called those outside the sex industry. She took a job as a cashier four months after her husband’s death. Three months later, she was promoted to manager. She was a short, squat woman in her late fifties. Her matronly physique contrasted
with a crass tongue and a gruff cigarette-scarred voice. She had seen her share of hard times, she told me, and believed it was just happenstance that she herself hadn’t become a working girl. An unwed teen mother in the 1950s, she had married a man she never loved to escape her mother’s house. During the 1960s, she worked at a racetrack in Philadelphia; there she had her first exposure to prostitutes and started a love affair with a married
Philadelphia Tribune
sportswriter. Eventually she married him and they lived happily together for twenty-two years, until his untimely death at the age of sixty-five.

Her lack of experience in the sex industry had made her timid, even fearful, during her first months as cashier, Irene confided. Rather than mingle with the girls or customers, she kept to herself and stayed inside her cashier’s cage. But the loneliness of recent widowhood drove her to seek connections with the prostitutes, many of whom seemed as solitary and abandoned as she felt. Quickly, Irene became Mustang #2’s den mom, attending to the women’s needs and judiciously doling out hugs and discipline.

Irene made it perfectly clear at the outset that she was the prostitutes’ advocate. She wanted the women to understand clearly the purpose of my study before they agreed to participate. To give the women some privacy, she allowed me to use her office for interviews. With her support, and the $40 cash I promised each woman upon the study’s completion, most of the prostitutes at #2 agreed to participate.

My first subject was Star, a young black woman dressed in a turquoise spandex bodysuit. She had long, straightened hair
and ebony skin that was smooth save for one small raised scar over her left breast, from a cigarette burn many years earlier. As she walked into the office, she immediately made her reservations known. “I can’t waste no time back here. I have to earn some money.” I proceeded tentatively, glancing her way anxiously whenever the doorbell rang to announce a customer. In spite of herself, however, Star seemed to enjoy the interview and actually looked surprised when we finished nearly forty-five minutes later. A look of consternation crossed her face as I explained the next phase of the study.

“You want me to save the rubbers?” she asked, incredulous.

When I tried to explain that I needed to examine the condoms for breaks, her eyes glazed over and she cut me off. “Just so long as I get my forty bucks at the end.”