The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (43 page)

Krissy Summers

I’m a normal, all-American girl from Michigan. I come from a churchgoing family. When I was four, my parents split up. About a year later, my mother remarried. He was a nice guy and his son was on the high school basketball team and we looked like the perfect family, but later we found out that my stepfather had been molesting my older sister. He ended up going to prison for five years.

I was in high school then and the family was not in very good shape, but I studied hard and got a partial scholarship to the University of Michigan. Around that same time, I saw Dennis and his girlfriend Brooke Taylor on
The Tyra Banks Show
. I found him absolutely fascinating. He was so different from the men I’d grown up with. He seemed so protective of Brooke. He seemed like he took very good care of her. I was still a virgin at the time and I had a led a very sheltered life — no computer, no Internet, no Facebook. I started watching
Cathouse
. And Dennis seemed so normal; not like the kind of guy who ran a brothel. He seemed more like a father figure.

Freshman year at college, I reached out to Dennis on the BunnyRanch message board. We started talking and he ended up sending me a ticket to Los Angeles. He and Brooke had recently broken up, and he said he wanted me to be his guest at the American Music Awards. But Brooke found out we’d been texting and she told me to stay away from her man. It was pretty intimidating, so I got cold feet and never went to L.A. I felt bad about it, but I kept telling myself it was just as well. Dennis was forty years older than me. What was I thinking?

• • •

The following year I lost my virginity to a preacher’s son and it ended badly. I was shunned by the people I thought I could most count on: the people from my own church.

By my junior year at University of Michigan, I was in so much debt that I contacted Suzette about working at the BunnyRanch. I never told Dennis. I thought he might still be upset with me. A few weeks later I flew out to Reno and had my medical exam. Once I had my permit, I reported for work at the BunnyRanch.

I lasted only two days, and I didn’t party with anyone. The girls were awful to me, especially Cami. I’m from Michigan and everybody’s nice here, and I didn’t understand why the girls were so mean. On the morning of the third day, I packed my bag and went home to Michigan to complete my studies. I didn’t even meet Dennis, who was away on business.

• • •

After college, I began selling insurance, but by that time I was $45,000 in debt. I was desperate. I contacted Dennis
again and friended him on Facebook. He connected the dots and realized I was the girl who had stood him up. It had been two or three years and he was still angry. I don’t know what I expected from him, but he didn’t show any interest in me and I didn’t pursue it.

At that point, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t find a job and wasn’t even able to cover the interest on my loans. I thought about going back to Nevada to try to work just long enough to pay off my debt, and I really didn’t want to, but I felt I didn’t have a choice. Looking back, I know I had a choice, but I was desperate and told myself I was out of options. This time, with Dennis still mad at me, I didn’t even consider the BunnyRanch; instead I went to a different brothel.

It was awful. I’d been there one day and I felt like I was in prison. Management was watching my every move. They even went through my belongings to see what I’d brought with me. And the girls were even worse than the girls at the BunnyRanch. The next morning, desperate, I contacted Dennis. I guess he must have been curious about me because he said he would see what he could do to help.

I met him the next day in a room at a local hotel. I walked in and he said, “Hi, I’m Dennis Hof.”

And I remember thinking,
I know who you are.

And then he said, “Take off your pants.” That was it. “Take off your pants.”

I was absolutely terrified. I hadn’t partied with anyone at the BunnyRanch, and I hadn’t partied with anyone at Sheri’s Ranch, so Dennis was only the second man I’d ever been with. He could see I didn’t know what I was doing. Before I
went to Nevada I used to go to church and do youth ministry and all that stuff. I was the type of girl people looked up to. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. I felt like such a slut. I felt I would never hear from him again.

Instead, Dennis ended up taking me back to the BunnyRanch and rescuing me. I was this little Michigan girl without makeup, without any sense of style, and he helped transform me. He told me what to do with my hair and nails, showed me how to dress right, taught me how to look the customer in the eye and smile, then he sent me off to join the lineup.

Every time I was in the lineup I would pray not to be picked. It was crazy. I needed to make money, but I didn’t want to do what I had to do to make money. Then I got picked. I was so terrified I was shaking.

He wasn’t attractive at all. I would never have been with a guy like that in real life. So I closed my eyes and pretended he was Dennis, and that’s what I did with every guy that followed. And when that didn’t work, I pretended I was on vacation in Ireland, because I had always wanted to go there, or on a beach in Hawaii.

I spent a lot of time in bed with Dennis learning. But when we were done, he would send me off to work. That part made me sad. I had a big crush on him — I think maybe I was already in love with him — and I only wanted to be with him. I hated sleeping with other guys. But I did what he told me. I went to work.

The other thing Dennis liked was threesomes and that scared me. But I wanted to keep Dennis around so I agreed, and that became a regular part of my routine. I did it to please him.

Eventually, I became his girlfriend, but I still went off to work, and we still had threesomes. I really wanted it to be just me and Dennis, but I couldn’t tell him. I was so happy when I was with him — it was the happiest I’d ever been in my life — and I didn’t want to ruin things by complaining. It really affected me, though. There were moments when I felt so lost and lonely. Why was I doing this? It wasn’t me.

And Dennis slept with lots of the other girls. I wasn’t crazy jealous or anything, but it was still really hard. I had to pretend I was happy all the time, and mostly I pulled it off, but there were times when I was alone in my room and would completely fall apart. Nobody ever saw that side of me, though. Not Dennis, not the other girls.

When you’re with Dennis you always feel he’s going to replace you with one of the other girls. If you upset or disappoint him, one of them is going to take your place. And if you’re his Number One Girl, you don’t want to lose that. Part of it is that he buys you beautiful things and he lets you drive his Mercedes and takes you on trips with him, but mostly it’s how he makes you feel when you make him happy. When Dennis was happy with me, I was happy.

• • •

When I first met him, I was probably about average weight for my size, but I knew Dennis liked a thinner girl. So I worked out and ate well and I lost a lot of weight. Then I bleached out my hair and painted my nails red, because that’s what he likes. But when you keep trying to change things about yourself it can make you even more insecure. I wondered what was wrong with me that I had to keep “fixing” myself, but I did it anyway, and I didn’t complain. This was Dennis’s fantasy, and I was part of it and I didn’t want to mess that up.

I think all the girls are part of the fantasy. It’s part of the job. Most little girls grow up wanting to be a teacher or a doctor or something, so if they end up in a place like the BunnyRanch it’s obvious that their life took a wrong turn somewhere. Dennis knows that, he’s smart, but he chooses not to see it. He has to keep his own fantasy going. He takes care of his girls. Everything is great. He’s everybody’s Daddy.

He was my Daddy, too. When I was growing up, nobody said, “Krissy, you’re awesome. You’re the best.” I did well in high school and I got a scholarship and I graduated with honors and I was very proud of myself, but it would have been nice to know someone else was proud of me, too. That never happened. I think I had a lot of empty spaces in my life, and for a while, Dennis filled them.

• • •

Last year, I left Nevada. I was tired of being so dependent on Dennis. I couldn’t be honest with him about my feelings, and about not wanting to work there, and about hating being with other men, and I began to not like myself.

Back in Michigan, I tried to have a normal life. I got a job with a nonprofit organization that helps at-risk women and their children, but one of the girls was browsing the Internet and found pictures of me and Dennis. She told the manager, who called me into her office. “I like you, but I don’t like that part of your past,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.” Now I have another job, but I worry they’ll find out about me, too. I’m finding it very difficult to lead a normal life.

I’m proud that I broke free, but I’m sad, too. And I still have a lot of debt. I wouldn’t want to go back to Nevada, but I can’t honestly tell you it will never happen. Still, I’m not going to say that what I did was a mistake. It was my life at the time. I made a choice. That’s who I was for a short period. And maybe it seems strange, but I believe the experience made me a better person.

A
FTER THAT, IT WAS JUST
me and domino. I thought about moving back to my spread, but my knee was still giving me trouble, so I stayed within hobbling distance of my BunnyRanch family. Still, you’ve got to wonder: I have a three-million-dollar property on forty acres, and I was living next to my cathouse, in nine hundred square feet, with my dog.

Funny, though. Suzette has often told me that Domino is the real love of my life, and I don’t think she’s wrong. But I’ve loved every serious girlfriend I’ve ever had, and maybe I didn’t love them hard enough, or well enough, but I loved them in the best way I know. How can you fault a man for doing his best?

At around this time, to compound matters, Ron Jeremy went into the hospital for emergency surgery. Doctors discovered an aneurysm near his heart. This was in February 2013. His brother decided that nobody was going to get into the hospital to see him — even me — so
I had to wait until he was released from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. I flew down a few days later to visit him at the Hollywood hotel where he had gone to recuperate, and I ended up checking into a room just down the hall. When I walked into his room and saw my friend lying there, looking pale and haggard, all I could say was, “What the fuck?”

He said it back to me. “What the fuck?” And we kept repeating it until we both burst up laughing.

Still, it was hard to see Ron like that. As I said, I’m not the kind of guy who thinks about death much, but once you hit sixty you start coming to terms with the fact that you’re not young anymore. Maybe you’re not on your way out, but you’re definitely on the down escalator.

Ron had faced death and he’d been frightened, but he’d emerged only a little the worse for wear, and with a great appetite for life. “I can’t wait to start fucking again,” he said. “And eating.”