The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (17 page)

I honestly believed every word of that. I wanted Krystyn to know who I was and to disabuse her of the notion that I was going to change. It’s a myth that people change. They spend tens of thousands of dollars on therapy trying to address their issues, but I know very few people who have ever made any significant changes. You are who you are. You can bemoan it, you can try to become a different person, or you can celebrate yourself. I choose to do the latter.

I also don’t kid myself about the people around me. They are who they are and I can’t expect them to be something they’re not. I have to accept that, too, especially when it comes to the women in my life. And if I can’t accept who they are, why am I with them?

The flip side is that they have to accept me. The problem I ran into with Stacy, and with Krystyn, and with every other woman — before and after — is that they
say
they’re okay with me fucking other women, but in their hearts that’s not the case. They’ll be thinking,
If he loved me, I would be enough
. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t fuck other women because I
need
to fuck them; I fuck them because I
want
to fuck them. I love fucking and I hope to die in bed — but not too soon! — fucking someone. Preferably someone I love.

Instead of accepting that, they continue to obsess, and sooner or later, they all express a variation of the same sentiment. “You don’t care about me. If you cared about me, I’d be the only one.” Well, that only happens in fairy tales. Or in the movies. I’m talking about Real Life, and real life is messy.

The irony is, I really thought Krystyn was the one. Stacy had been a civilian, but Krystyn was a working girl. She fucked other guys, I fucked other girls. How could it fail? Plus as I told Krystyn, “I’m with you and I want to be emotionally involved only with you. Nobody else, just you. I don’t have room in my emotional life for anyone but you.”

Krystyn and I had this talk very early in our relationship, that very first month, if I remember correctly, and I felt good about it. If she was jealous, she certainly didn’t show it. But a few weeks later, we had another problem. Krystyn was pregnant. It wasn’t my kid, but I wanted to help, so I told her not to worry — that I’d be there for her. I actually enjoyed watching her get big because I hadn’t banged a pregnant woman since the 1960s, and I’d never forgotten how much fun it was.

As Krystyn’s due date got closer, I learned that Suzette was selling her house in Carson City, which was much closer to the ranch than my own condo in Tahoe, so I ended up buying the place from
her and that became home for me and Krystyn. After Krystyn had the baby, I had someone come in to help out when she went to work, and that was pretty much the schedule for three weeks of every month. The fourth week she would spend in Oregon with her family, and she would, of course, take the baby with her.

Krystyn was a popular girl and made good money, and I helped her make more by teaching her how to close the sale. Grooming, confidence, charisma. It’s about getting the buyer to a place where he can’t back out, or more specifically, where he doesn’t want to back out. You’ve got him in your little room, you’ve got easy-listening music playing, and you’ve said all the right things. Why would he even think about negotiating with any of the other girls?

The money made her feel good about herself. Right or wrong, that’s how society tends to measure success. She was putting plenty away for her baby and felt good about that, too. Nobody had ever given her anything, and she was determined to change that — to provide for her own child, to give him the things she’d never had. It made her proud and it made her strong and it made her happy, and when my woman is happy, I’m happy.

Now, it’s funny, because people always ask me the same question:
Didn’t it bother you, that the woman you loved would climb out of your bed in the morning, give you a great fuck, then go off to fuck other guys for money?
And I always say the same thing:
No, it didn’t.
I’m bulletproof. And the reason I’m bulletproof is because I know the difference between sex and love. Sex is sex, but love is sharing, caring, and respect. If you can have both together, great sex and real love, then you’ve got magic. And that’s what I had with Krystyn — magic.

The other element is that this was Krystyn’s chosen profession. I didn’t tell her to become a working girl. I didn’t recruit her for the business. She came to the BunnyRanch of her own volition, to
make money, and she was making more than she’d ever dreamed possible. She was a little girl from a modest background who’d never had any money, but the BunnyRanch changed that. What right did I have to tell her to give it up? On the other hand, if Krystyn had come to me and said, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” I would have told her to stop. I loved her. If she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, that would have been fine with me, too, even if I had reservations about the idea.

I think a lot of relationships fall apart because they lack balance. One person is bringing home the bacon, usually the guy, and the little woman finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having to do as she’s told. There are demands and counterdemands and suddenly you’re locked in a horrible power struggle and life is filled with anger and pain and resentment and recrimination. But if a relationship has balance, if you’re both contributing, if you’re both standing on your own two feet, you have a much better chance at success. And Krystyn understood this. She didn’t want to quit and she never suggested it. Krystyn liked the money, liked seeing herself naked in magazines, and liked
winning
. If she had quit, she would have just been Dennis Hof’s girlfriend, and why settle for that when she could be that and so much more?

So, no. I don’t have a problem when my girlfriend gets out of bed and goes off to work at the ranch. Why should I? There’s no emotional component to the sex. It’s
work
. But it goes beyond that. As I said, work makes a woman independent, and I’m attracted to independent women. I like a woman who is with me because she wants to be with me, not because I’m taking care of her, not because I pay the bills, buy her pretty things, and dole out a weekly allowance. As a result, I have always worked hard at helping my girls succeed. I want them to know what it feels like to be able to
take care of themselves, to need no one.

Many men do the opposite. They control their women to keep them close, and they turn them into virtual prisoners. But I want a real partner. I’m not attracted to needy women. I’m attracted to powerful, independent women. That’s why I pour so much energy into empowering my girlfriends. There’s a thrill in winning, at being successful. The fact that a man will come to the BunnyRanch and pay a woman $10,000 to spend the night with her, well, that feels fucking good. It sends a message to that woman:
You are valuable. You are good at what you do. You are worth it.

AS KRYSTYN AND I
were settling in together, Sunset Thomas came to work for us. She was a big porn star and I guess she wanted to supplement the modest income she was making in front of the cameras, so she showed up at the BunnyRanch and said she was ready to get to work. This was good for me on a couple of fronts. One, I knew she would bring me a lot of free publicity. And two, I imagined a lot of men would fly a lot of miles for a chance to fuck the hot girl they’d seen on film and in magazines.

Sunset was from Missouri, had lived in Florida for a while, and had started out as a model at NASCAR races. But you know how it is: There’s a thin line between modeling and porn. (That was a joke, by the way.)

Anyway, I thought Sunset was very hot. And so did the clients. She booked $90,000 in parties on her very first week. Not a record, but not too shabby, either.

Sunset was married to a guy named Zach and I believe they lived mostly off her earnings, so he was tickled pink himself. And since she had just done a spread for
Penthouse
 — this was back in 1998 — we used that to push sales. We ended up building a whole
media campaign around her, with the basic idea reduced to the simplest possible terms:
Come to the BunnyRanch and you can fuck a genuine porn star
.

Interestingly enough, this rankled some of the other women in the porn industry. Women in porn like to put themselves on a pedestal, high above ordinary working girls, but in my opinion the only real difference is that girls in porn make a lot less money. And I didn’t much like that attitude.
We’re not hookers!
Really? You’re having sex for money, aren’t you? In front of a camera. How does that make you not a hooker?

The funny thing is, Ron Jeremy had told me it would never happen. Working girls and porn stars were from different worlds, he said, and he didn’t think that would ever change. In fact, he was so sure of himself that he promised to suck my cock if I ever lured a porn star to the BunnyRanch. I won that bet, obviously, but I never collected. Ron offered me another set of lips and they were attached to a very attractive woman and she really, truly wanted to suck my cock, so I settled the bet there and then.

Anyway, I thought Sunset was incredibly hot, but her husband was very much in the picture and I was seeing Krystyn, so the timing wasn’t right. One afternoon, though, Sunset and I were out by the pool, innocently chatting, when her cell phone rang. It was her husband, Zach, who had gone back to Texas with her daughter to visit his parents, and he was simply checking in. Sunset immediately told him that she was with me, having a drink by the pool, and Zach asked her to put me on the phone. “Hey, Zach,” I said. “How’s it going?”

He said, with absolutely no preamble, “Sunset needs to be penetrated.”

“What?” I said.

“I know Sunset,” he said. “And she needs to be penetrated. Would you just please fuck her for me? I really want you to fuck her.”

I got off the phone and told Sunset, “Your old man wants me to fuck you.”

“Okay,” she said.

But I demurred. “I can’t do this. That’s your old man. I don’t want to screw up our business relationship.” Of course that was just talk. My dick was doing the thinking for me, so I drove her down to the Gold Dust, in Carson City, and booked us a suite.

We started fooling around, but she suddenly stopped me and said, “I need to call Zach.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “You don’t need to call anyone. You decided you wanted to be with me and you’re with me, so I say,
fuck Zach
.”

Then she said, “You don’t understand. Zach likes to listen. In fact, he likes to listen more than he likes to watch.” I felt like I was in the middle of a
Saturday Night Live
skit. I told her to go ahead and call him, and she dialed and told him she loved him and set the phone down on the night table, next to the bed. I thought that was pretty weird. She told her old man she loved him and she was getting ready to blow me.

“This is strange,” I said. “Even for me.”

Sunset put her finger to her lips and whispered, “Don’t talk. Zack doesn’t like it when people talk.” And then she proceeded to fuck me. It took me a little while to get my head around it — 
I’m fucking this guy’s wife to turn him on?
 — but I got over it. In fact, I decided I was going to put on a show for him by giving his wife the fuck of her life.

I don’t know how well I was doing or even if I was keeping her
entertained because every once in a while Sunset would glance over at the phone. At one point she stopped fucking me altogether. “Oh my God!” she said. “The phone went dead.”

“Leave the phone alone and come over here and keep fucking me,” I said. But she was in a panic. She went to look for her charger and plugged it in, but she’d lost the call and the phone wasn’t charging fast enough.

“What am I going to do?” she said.

“I’ll show you what you’re going to do,” I said, and I flipped her on her side and fucked her from a different angle.

Ten minutes later, there was a loud knock at the door, followed by a muffled voice. “Security. This is hotel security. Mr. Hof? Is there a Diane Fowler in here?” (That’s her real name; Sunset is her stage name.) I didn’t open the door, but I told him that yes, Diane Fowler was with me, and we were trying to enjoy ourselves. He said, “Miss Fowler needs to call her husband. There’s an emergency.” I told the guy to go away and I told Sunset she wasn’t calling anyone and we went back to fucking. This time she really got into it, really let go. About twenty minutes later, there was another insistent knock at the door and now it was the Carson City Sheriff’s Department. I had no choice but to get into my underwear and open the door. “Are you Sunset Thomas or Diane Fowler?” one of the cops asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Your husband called from Texas,” he said. “Your baby boy is hurt.”

Christ. Sunset tried to reach Zach, repeatedly, but the calls went straight to voice mail. She called his parents, same thing. Finally I drove her to the airport, paid a thousand bucks for a first-class ticket, and sent her to Texas. I was beside myself with worry and I couldn’t
even imagine what Sunset was going through sitting on that plane alone, thinking about her little boy. But hours later she called to tell me that the whole thing had been a lie, that nothing had happened to the baby. “It’s all about control,” she explained. “Zach needs to control me. He’s heard me fuck a lot of different guys and he likes that, but I was having too much fun with you and he couldn’t handle it.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said.

“No,” she said. “He’s funny that way.”

Funny that way
?! Guy needed
help
.

NOT LONG AFTER,
Krystyn and I were lying in bed back at the house in Carson City and I remember thinking how much I liked her and how right I’d been about her. She was a working girl; she understood that sex was just about sex and she didn’t need monogamy to be happy. My decision to never again look at a non-pro was a wise one; working girls simply understood. Krystyn was definitely the one. And believe it or not, at that very moment she turned to me and said, “I made a decision today.”