The Call of the Weird (12 page)

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Wednesday night, and in the saloon of the Wild Horse Resort and Spa, Nevada’s newest legal brothel, the working girls sat perched on barstools like mermaids or lounged on comfy chairs and chatted among themselves. Men came in, singly or in pairs, looking around shiftily. They had a beer at the bar. One of the women might go over and make conversation, offer them a tour of the premises. Then they’d pass through a green door at the back of the saloon into the main brothel.

A year earlier, I’d spent several weeks getting to know the women who work here in the run-up to the brothel’s grand reopening in lavish new premises. On coming back, I’d expected the
place to be buzzing, but it was quiet. Windowless, dark, with a small stage in one corner, a pole for pole dancing, a buffet down one side, the atmosphere was somewhere between honky-tonk and a doctor’s waiting room: You found yourself looking round wondering what the other men were there to have done. But then, my experience of legal brothels was that they could be busy without feeling busy. Men might be entering through the side door, bypassing the saloon, going straight into the parlor for a “line-up”— a beauty-pageant-style parade of the available ladies, in which they filed out from the wings and said their names.

I’d been back a few hours, looking round the house. The old interviewee of mine that I was hoping to see again, a working girl called Hayley, was long gone. She’d taken off one night amid a swirl of rumors. But I’d come, figuring one of the other women or the management might know something. And I was curious about the progress of the establishment, having seen it open with such fanfare and high hopes on my first visit.

There were several new faces. Cicely, a twenty-three-year-old black woman who was studying criminal psychology at a state university she didn’t want named. She’d been a part-time prostitute for two years. Her parents thought she was working at the Mac counter at Macy’s in Las Vegas. Jane, forties, an Englishwoman from West London—she’d seen my documentary and flown out. She couldn’t get used to being in the desert. “It’s like being on Mars, innit,” she said. “The Yanks don’t get my sense of humor. They’re not on the same mental level.” Debbie, also twenty-three, with dark hair, who’d grown up in North Dakota with an abusive father. “When I’m here I just switch my brain off,” she said. “I make myself stupid . . . Honestly, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but I don’t really regard men as human.”

In the parlor I chatted to Kris, who works in the cashier’s cage, handing out clean sheets and condoms, listening in on the
negotia tions over the intercom. Since the working girls are all, technically, independent contractors, they set their own prices, which they negotiate with the customers in one of the three negotiation rooms. The house takes a 50 percent cut; the cashier eavesdrops on the bargaining to prevent the girls from skimming. After the negotiation, the women check the men’s penises for signs of disease. Then they grab some clean sheets—a “set-up” as it’s called—and escort the clients back to their rooms.

The cage was better stocked than I remembered: sheets stacked behind the fax machine, boxes of condoms, bottles of lotion, massage cream, gargle, toothpaste, shampoo, furry cuffs, dildos called “Big Tool” and “Wild Stallion,” a strap-on called “Purple Delight.” Monique, a tall black woman in a blonde wig, forty or so, came past with an older guy she’d been chatting up in the bar. He was swigging a beer, dressed in a T-shirt, ball cap, and baggy shorts. Her overalls had a smiley face badge and one strap was off the shoulder. They entered a negotiation room and came out a minute later. Then she took her sheets, told Kris to put the timer on half an hour, and said to the guy: “Okay, hon, follow my butt.”

The Wild Horse was the brainchild of a couple called Susan Austin and Lance Gilman. Susan, the madam, is a former working girl herself, having “turned out” (as the expression has it), aged fortynine, after a divorce. Before that, she was a successful rep for a jewelry company, and she still has the polished manner of a saleswoman. Lance, the owner, is a high-powered real-estate developer and local business leader of some celebrity. They met as courtesan and customer, when Susan was working out of another Nevada brothel in Moundhouse, near Carson City.

When they opened the Wild Horse in 2002 it was the first new brothel in Nevada in eighteen years and one of the most ambitious in state history. For a year it operated out of a small prefab house at the back of the property, while Lance and Susan built and furnished its eventual home, splashing out four million dollars of Lance’s money on twenty-nine bedrooms, each with its own en suite bathroom (one with wheelchair access), three themed VIP suites (the Marilyn Monroe suite, the Retro Suite, and the Jungle Suite), a small gym for the women, a Jacuzzi room, a swimming pool, and a Hemingway-esque parlor appointed with the heads of African wildlife.

A few weeks before they were due to reopen in their new premises, Lance and Susan took me on a tour. As I trailed after her, Susan, elegant, petite, her blonde hair nicely coiffed, spoke about her ambition of providing “a quality experience” for their clientele, “Something that they can take back in their memory banks and replay over and over again.” Lance, who is tall, late fifties, used the well-thumbed phrases of his business life. The women would follow “proven success procedures,” he said, adding, of Susan: “She has the compassionate knowledge to interface with people who do a very difficult job.”

They spoke about wanting to make a healthy environment for the women who worked there. “I had all boys,” Susan said, meaning her four sons. “I have a house full of girls now. I’ve finally got the opportunity to guide a few ladies and get them to a better place in life.” She arranged regular appointments with a financial adviser to help the women manage their money; she ran a program agreeing to pay half the tuition fees of anyone who attended college locally. The high standards of the premises were part of this vision, too: Unlike most other houses, here the bedrooms would be furnished for the women—“like a lovely hotel,” as Lance put it.

Lance’s and Susan’s enthusiasm was clear, as too was their affection for each other—the new premises were in part a testament to their autumn romance, and their finding each other in such circumstances seemed a good omen for the house. Ultimately, the sig
nature of the house would be the quality of the “parties” the women provided. “We’ve coined a phrase here,” Lance said. “And it’s called the ‘boyfriend experience.’ I mean, you would enter the world yourself looking to meet someone who would treat you with respect and kindness and love as a boyfriend. And our customers who come here to the Wild Horse—we expect them to get a boyfriend experience.”

“Knowing that he may never see the lady again,” said Susan, “and she may never see him again. But while he is here he has those same feelings of warmth, of companionship, of not being rushed, that it’s not just a sexual game, that he matters. That’s the type of party I’d like to see the ladies give.”

For several weeks, while filming my documentary, I’d lived in Reno and visited the Wild Horse every day. There were twenty or so women working at that time; each had a different story. Some were brand new to the business, others were veterans of ten or fifteen years’ standing. Some saved their money, some spent it. Their ages ran from twenty to fifty. Many worked straight jobs too, or they attended college and did shifts at the Wild Horse in their spare time. Some stayed at the brothel for months on end. Others came for a few days and then disappeared. Some were married, to husbands who they said didn’t mind, others said they couldn’t see combining their jobs with relationships. One thing they did have in common: They were doing it for the money. In some cases, this might be upward of $3,000 a night.

It reminded me, in some ways, of being part of a theatrical troupe. When the girls got ready for work, putting on their skimpy outfits and their make-up, it was as though they were about to take the stage. The areas where the clients weren’t allowed unattended— the kitchen, the corridors, and bedrooms—I came to think of as “backstage.” The “front of house” was the saloon and the parlor, where the women acted for the customers—hustled them at the bar, or faced the audience in the line-ups, playing the roles they thought the clients wanted them to play.

Not knowing much about brothels before I came to the Wild Horse, to begin with I viewed the line-up as a kind of paradigm of the commercial nature of the relationship between the women and their customers. I assumed the brothel was like porn in three dimensions— emotionless and voyeuristic. But the relationships between the working girls and their customers could be surprisingly human and well-rounded. They liked many of the men who visited them. Occasionally they would get crushes. As I stayed longer, it was the naturalness that existed between the women and the customers that struck me. Many of the women had “regulars” who they might continue seeing for many years. Rather than libertines or satyrs, the men were mostly people who for various reasons— because they were shy, or ugly, or disabled, or because they didn’t want commitment—had difficulty finding girlfriends in the outside world.

Again, like actors, the women’s roles leaked over into their real lives, even more so, since they were impersonating versions of themselves, working in a weird gray area between sincerity and insincerity. They were self-impersonators—paid to be the people their clients couldn’t find in life. Comfortable, poised, sometimes deceptive. For me, this brought its own set of challenges. They could be glib, their answers a little too ready. In my conversations with the women, I was aware that I, as a man, was in a small way being hustled, and in none more so than with Hayley.

She’d had no hesitation about being interviewed. This in itself was unusual. Most of the women avoided publicity. But Hayley liked it, even telling me her real name, which was Tammy.

She seemed to enjoy flouting the many conventions of brothel life. She said she sometimes kissed the guys in her parties, a big taboo for many of the women, and where the others made a point of separating the business from their outside emotional lives, Hayley talked about how “real” the job was. “Your masks come off when you’re asking for sex,” she said. “People see this as a very phony profession. It can get real emotional sometimes.” She said she loved her job, but it didn’t seem quite that simple.

Tall, athletic, faintly Native American–looking, she was in her late twenties. She’d grown up in northern California, a few hours west of Reno over the Sierra. She’d been working as a prostitute for four or five years, having made the transition from dancing in clubs.

One afternoon, as she got ready for the night’s work, I asked her why she became a prostitute. “I was very wild,” she said. “At first, I had a lot of issues. I felt, ‘Oh my God, I should have gone back to school.’ But now I’m lazy and I make great money and I’m not ready to do that. I may at some point in my life, if I meet someone that’s worth it, but now, no.”

She professed that working girls have a “sixth sense” that allows them to size up customers. I pressed her on this. I asked her to size me up. “But to be honest the only way that you would really be able to embrace that or understand that is if you were a customer and you’ve never been a customer. Would you ever be a customer? Would you ever be with a working girl? Would you ever pay someone for sex?”

“I like the idea that if I was with a woman that she wouldn’t have to be paid to enjoy my company,” I said, perhaps a little primly.

But this suggestion, which had been thrown out lightly, took root and in the subsequent days grew into a standing challenge: Hayley would only allow me to continue interviewing her if I booked a party.

I talked to Lance about it, mentioning that she’d set terms. “Oh, only for today,” he said. “Hayley is the essence of a manipulator. She plays, she grandstands, she titillates, and she’ll have a great deal of fun at your expense and mine, because she’s a very attractive, alluring, devilish little lady.”

But more days went by and Hayley didn’t back down. If anything, her behavior toward me grew more unpredictable. Some days she would be friendly and talk engagingly about brothel life; others she refused to answer questions, flashing her breasts if I didn’t stop. For my part, I began to see some merit in the idea of a massage. I hadn’t found it easy to meet clients of the brothel. If I’m honest, I was struggling a little for material for my documentary. By paying for a massage I could be the client myself and enact what happens during a party, albeit a chaste one. In other stories I’d done, I’d been a “participant reporter”; booking a party seemed a reasonable and possibly revealing way to enter into the spirit of life at a brothel.

We agreed on a price of $200. In her bedroom, I stripped down to my boxer shorts and lay face down with a towel round my waist. The massage itself was fairly embarrassing, which I suppose was half the point. She seemed to regard it as a coup to have snared me, the visiting reporter, into doing business with her. “I’m having a blast,” she said. Hoping to get my money’s worth, I peppered her with questions. Did she ever enjoy the physical side of it? Did she really kiss the guys? Did she tell guys she went out with in the “square world” what she did for a living?

She said she enjoyed the sex sometimes. “Yes. Of course! I’m human. You know, the body is alive. A feeling is a feeling. A sensation is a sensation. I would hope that I wasn’t totally shut off and I couldn’t feel any kind of thing. That wouldn’t be good, right?” As for kissing the guys: “Oh well, rarely. Only if they’re really good-looking. Like cowboys. I’m a sucker for a good-looking cowboy with a nice smile. And if he’s got a sense of humor, it’s a date.” She said she didn’t see many men outside work; that if she was in love, as she hoped to be one day, she wouldn’t be working in a brothel. And if the guy didn’t mind her working, “then I probably wouldn’t be with that guy.”