by Alexa Albert
The next thing I knew, Heather started blowing off our daily runs. The first time it happened, she said she had gone running earlier in the morning with Sheba, the brothel dog. The next morning, when I went to scratch at her door (the women preferred scratching to knocking), she didn’t answer. When I asked Blanche, the floor maid, if she knew where Heather was, she said Heather had already left to go running. At first, I was perplexed. We had been running with such regularity; why would she suddenly snub me? But all became clear when I confronted her and she said that instead of running the paved road past the neighboring Peri brothers’ farm, she had been running up the dirt road behind the brothel, “past Jeffrey’s trailer.” (A number of brothel staff members rented trailers from the brothel and lived on this dirt road.) So Heather was sneaking over to Jeffrey’s place each morning. I wondered how her boyfriend, who was back home in Texas minding her two daughters, would feel about this.
A few days later, Heather wanted to recommence our morning jog. I asked her if anything was going on between her and Jeffrey. She blushed and said they were just friends. She did volunteer that she went up regularly to Jeffrey’s trailer to visit, but nothing physical had happened. I volunteered, in kind, that I thought Jeffrey was hot. Guiltily, she blushed again.
Jeffrey wasn’t the only staff member to defy brothel rules and get involved with the women. Most other men got burned in the process, however. Sally Conforte used to warn her employees to save themselves the heartache and “not fuck her girls.” For some men, pain came from watching their love interests seduce countless other men. Others were disappointed when their illusions of the women as ideal mates were shattered by reality. “You can’t help but get jaded,” Brian said. “When people ask me if I like working in a brothel, I say, ‘Sure, if you like working around fifty-four girls with multiple personalities who are all on the rag at the same time.’ ”
In truth, working for the women of Mustang Ranch was tough, but the employees generally appreciated how demanding the women’s work was, and knew the women relied on them for protection. The staff’s stewardship did not go unrecognized. Once employees were considered dependable and trustworthy, women acknowledged their efforts with extra tips. On their birthdays, they got cards signed by the working girls, who also contributed cash. And when catastrophe befell an employee, the brothel community rallied in a show of support. When a fire left a Mustang kitchen assistant named Kent, his wife, and their three children homeless, the women took up a collection that amounted to several thousand dollars. A Mustang employee for less than two years, Kent wept when he opened the envelope.
For many employees, Mustang was a home away from home. Although they did not live on the premises, many of them seemed as if they did. Mark, a parlor helper, told me, “I basically live at Mustang. I don’t need to go anywhere else. I get my three square meals here and even after work I hang out in the bar because I love the people.” Forty-five-year-old Miyuki had been a Mustang laundry maid for over eighteen years but confessed that she was still embarrassed whenever she overheard the working girls discussing their parties with customers. She tried to avoid coming face-to-face with clients, instead staying in the laundry room where a colossal washer and dryer churned away all day and night. But Miyuki’s discomfort did not make her feel less a member of the community. Her husband, a Mustang security guard, had died twelve years earlier in a traffic accident, and Mustang was all she had. “My family all in Japan, so I don’t have nobody in America,” said Miyuki. “The people here—the girls, the employees, the management—help me keep going. That’s why I make it. Here it’s like home to me. On my week off, I stop by just to visit, just to say hi.”
Even the suppliers who came out to Mustang became part of the community; most of them found a role for themselves beyond peddling their goods and services. At first, I had been surprised to learn that an entire industry existed to capitalize on these women. On my first visit I had wondered where the women purchased their dizzying array of bodysuits, slip dresses, and lingerie, all in a rainbow of vivid colors—fuchsia, cherry-red, turquoise, neon green, jet-black, and virginal white. Were these mail-order clothes, or did women shop for them openly in the outside world? Neither, I soon learned; the women were serviced by specialty clothing vendors.
Door-to-door salespeople were a long-standing tradition in Nevada’s legal houses of prostitution. The market was ideal: women living in confinement, making considerable cash daily with no place to spend it. As a brothel clothing vendor named Leo put it, “What we have here is a captive audience, a very captive audience. I like a captive audience.” And so he should. George Flint estimated that brothel prostitutes statewide spent a minimum of $350,000 annually on vendors’ merchandise. At Mustang Ranch alone, women bought approximately $150,000 worth of goods each year.
Leo was sixty-nine and had been selling clothing in Nevada’s legal brothels for over twenty years. Before being allowed inside and being accepted as a member of the vendor corps, however, Leo had had to earn his customers’ trust. “For years, brothel prostitutes from the Chicken Ranch came into my Vegas boutique,” Leo said. “Vegas only had conventional, wholesome dress shops. Mine was the only boutique that sold long, slinky dresses, clothes a hooker could wear. They got to know me and to trust me. Only then did they finally persuade Walter [the former owner of the Chicken Ranch] to let me inside the brothel. It was easier for me to go out to them than for them to come seventy miles to me.”
Leo eventually sold his shop and renovated a retired Greyhound bus into a traveling boutique, with hundreds of garments hanging from clothing racks on both sides of the aisle and a dressing room in back. Leo visited more than twenty brothels a month; his Greyhound had over 500,000 miles on it. Every Saturday morning, he came out to Mustang and set up temporary shop in the kitchen, where he hung his goods on portable racks. The clothes came mostly from the manufacturers that supplied mail-order companies with names like Steamed Heat International and International Dancing. Leo cut the labels out of all his outfits in order to keep his five main competitors—up from two or three when he first started selling at Mustang—from muscling in on his turf and selling the same merchandise.
As brothel minimums had risen over the years, so had Leo’s prices. Twenty years ago, when the house minimum was $20, his dresses sold for $35 apiece. Now dress prices ran between $80 and $150. “A girl who spends money makes money,” Leo always lectured to the women as they looked over his clothes. “If you look like a two-thousand-dollar hooker, men will pay you two thousand dollars. If you look like a sixty-dollar whore, you’ll only make sixty dollars.”
Leo missed the days of old, when management forced women to invest in their wardrobes, buying evening gowns, furs, and precious stones. “Sally Conforte was very smart,” Leo soliloquized. “She was a nut for the glitzy and shiny. Sally built an empire on this image. When Sally walked around, girls shook and shivered. God forbid they didn’t have a sequin on their dress. With Sally no longer in the picture, girls today don’t spend money on clothes. And let me tell you, it’s reflected in the money they make—five hundred, six hundred a day now as opposed to a thousand to two thousand a day in the past.”
The first time I met Leo, he was muttering about Reno’s upcoming Rodeo Days, the one week of the year when Mustang prostitutes were permitted to dress down in sloppy denim jeans, T-shirts, cowboy boots, and hats. In his opinion, however, rodeo cowboys didn’t want to see women unkempt. Filthy from lassoing broncos all afternoon, these men wanted to see spruced-up women in sexy attire. But no one seemed to pay Leo much mind. The next week, the women gleefully swapped their mini-dresses and lingerie for Levi’s and men’s white cotton T-shirts.
Luckily for Leo, the women displaced a lot of their anxieties and insecurities about work onto their clothes, blaming their outfits when customers failed to pick them. If they were having a bad night, women often changed their clothes repeatedly, sometimes fifteen times.
Over time, I would learn that even thoug
h Leo liked to lecture and give the women an earful, he felt very protective of them. Over the years, he had become a fixture at Mustang, which, more than any other brothel, he considered a surrogate home. Leo even lived, like much of the staff, in the Mustang-owned Lockwood Mobile Home Park, and he frequently dropped in during the week to visit with friends. His fourth wife (of five) was a brothel prostitute to whom he’d sold merchandise.
When I saw the vendors’ clothing racks from a distance, I couldn’t help imagining myself in various risqué outfits. I had always been intrigued by lingerie, even if my own drawers were full of cotton briefs and sports bras. But I’d certainly never seen outfits the likes of which I saw at Mustang Ranch.
One Saturday morning near the end of one of my visits, Leo had just unloaded his Greyhound bus and was arranging his merchandise for display. Heather, my running mate, was aimlessly sifting through a rack of new dresses. I walked over to her and peered over her shoulder. When Leo spotted me hovering, he sidled up to the two of us. “I only have stuff for working girls,” he said. Before either Heather or I could respond, Tanya, the Mustang veteran, sitting at a nearby table, interjected, “When she’s here with us, she’s just like a working girl.” Leo didn’t say anything, but he let it alone and walked away.
I began looking over Leo’s clothes. Leo interrupted to ask, with the cool disdain of a salesclerk on Rodeo Drive, how he could help me. “I’m thinking of buying an outfit to take home with me, for my husband,” I said, surprising myself. Apparently he didn’t believe me, for he shook his head and mumbled something about my needing to buy some nice lingerie in town.
Heather squealed and held up a red Lycra peignoir trimmed with lush marabou feathers. There was one lone hook to fasten between the breasts. “Oooooh,” she crooned, “try this one on. It’s so sexy.” I had to admit it was. Heather asked Leo if I could try on the peignoir. He nodded, but grunted that he doubted it would fit me properly.
I followed Heather back to the Jacuzzi room with its walls of full-length mirrors, and stripped down. While I had no trouble slipping into the red robe, I thought I had my panties on wrong. Why were my buttocks hanging out? I wasn’t that big, was I? Heather noticed my difficulty and gave the panties a yank. They settled into place. “There,” she said. “Much better.”
“Ohhhh. It’s a G-string,” I said sheepishly.
By now, a few other working girls had come back to watch the show, including Brittany. “I’m liking the red,” she said. The rest of the women nodded in agreement. I looked in the mirror: Huh, not half-bad. It was easy to lose perspective about standards of physical beauty in a brothel, surrounded by women who’d made major investments in cosmetic surgery from breast augmentations and tummy tucks to face-lifts and liposuction. Baby had spent over $20,000 on body improvements, including breast implants, rhinoplasty, lip implants, dental bonding, tattoos, and piercing of her right nipple. Women often debated how much cosmetic surgery actually improved a prostitute’s business. The women insisted I buy the peignoir to give my husband a thrill. Heather suggested I offer Leo $75 (it was tagged at $95). He accepted. “You’ve got fine taste in fashion,” he said obsequiously.
Another vendor who’d earned a special place in the hearts of the women of Mustang Ranch was Chau, the manicurist. A Vietnamese woman in her forties, Chau had been coming out to Mustang for almost five years and took her responsibilities very seriously. “She builds her schedule around ours,” said an appreciative prostitute named Autumn as Chau finished applying a second coat of burgundy acrylic to her nails. We were in Mustang’s makeshift beauty shop, which was equipped with a shampoo sink, overhead dryer, stylist chair, and manicure station. Photographs of “with it” hairdos dating back to the early 1980s decorated the walls.
Chau visited Mustang every Sunday morning and frequently stuck around until the small hours of Monday to make sure prostitutes on all shifts had the chance to get their nails done. Her decision to provide services to brothel prostitutes had not come easily. When Chau’s community first learned of her plans to sell manicures at Mustang Ranch, she faced serious pressure to give up the idea. “At first I was scared, because my people—my Vietnamese people—say how terrible it is here, how mean the people are,” said Chau in a soft voice. “My people say if they [brothel management] don’t have enough girls, they make me work, too.”
Chau quickly discovered the women weren’t monsters and made the decision to extend herself beyond the usual responsibilities of a manicurist. “Nail lady very important lady because you have to talk with your customers,” Chau explained. “Everybody sometimes needs to talk, even these girls. I give them my home phone number and tell them to call even after midnight.” In addition, Chau offered to provide an alibi: “The girls tell me how hard it is when their family wants to know where they work or their kids want to come visit,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. “I let them use my address and phone number. I take the messages and I tell them to call home.”
Mustang gave Chau a sense of purpose and filled a void in her life. “My parents got killed by the Communists when I was three and a half years old,” she said, her cheery veneer punctured as tears streamed down her cheeks. “All my life I look for family, for love. The girls out here, they’re family to me. When I have a bad time, have a hard day, they come and give me a hug. I come to work late, they call me at home and want to know if I’m okay. When I work late, they ask me if I want a room to sleep here. The girls say ‘Chau is family.’ That’s why I come out here to work. I need them.”
Even a few regular customers had managed to carve out a place for themselves within Mustang’s community. The most conspicuous was Frankie, a large thirty-three-year-old Samoan man with a stocky wrestler’s build who had been patronizing Nevada’s brothels for more than half his life. At fifteen, he rode his dirt bike to one of the Carson City brothels to lose his virginity. Since “becoming a man,” Frankie figured he had spent over $100,000, averaging three or four parties per week with brothel prostitutes. “It’s real hard for me to stay away for more than two or three days, unless I have something else to do on the outside,” he told me one day.
It was this compulsion that prompted him to dream up a job that enabled him to spend almost six days a week brothel-hopping. His business? A jukebox repair company that serviced the Reno and Carson City brothels exclusively. Now Frankie was no longer just another customer. He had earned a place in the women’s hearts, along with the affectionate nickname Jukebox Frankie. “The girls depend on me to keep the CDs up-to-date and sizzling,” he said, grinning from ear to ear. Frankie’s novel enterprise was also the perfect way to explain to his wife of fourteen years the inordinate amount of time he spent at the Ranches. Frankie even went so far as to write off his weekly “parties” as business expenses. “I put a lot of my money back into the house,” he said. “I believe it’s always good to do business with the people who do business with you.”
Among the women, Frankie had earned a title long before he started fixing jukeboxes. Frankie was considered a “professional trick.” Professional tricks differed from regular customers in that they prided themselves on having mastered the ropes of the business. Most were lonely single men with few sexual outlets. The brothels offered them more than sex; they gave them a community of which the men could feel a part. In fact, the brothels typically became these men’s primary social circles, with many befriending each other, making excursions to the brothels together, and spending countless hours talking about which women they had been with and how much time they’d received.
Fifty-year-old Stewart, an overweight computer salesman, was a case in point. Originally from Huntington Beach, California, Stewart made his first visit to Mustang Ranch back in 1978, when he “went crazy and did sixteen girls in four days.” Tickled pink, he pledged to visit the brothel every chance he got, sometimes “vacationing” alone there as many as six times a year despite his relatively new marriage. Finally, in 1984, Stewart divorced his wife and relocated to Re
no, solely to be closer to the brothels. Now he and his cronies, Roger and Tom, haunted the brothel, visiting an average of five times a week. Like yentas, these three men prattled on daily over the telephone and in person about their mutual obsession. Said Stewart, who habitually wore a gold chain necklace with a dollar-sign pendant, and a matching money pin on the breast pocket of his shirt, “We talk amongst ourselves all the time. If we get a real good one [prostitute], everybody’s gonna hear about it. If it’s a terrible one, everybody’s gonna hear about that too.”
All three men believed themselves to be special favorites with brothel insiders. A bachelor in his early forties, with curly salt-and-pepper hair down to his shoulders like an aging rock star, Roger saw Mustang “like a second home” over the course of his twelve-year patronage. “I walk in here and I’m well known. When I come in about eight o’clock, the bartender immediately sets me up, already knows what I like. The girls are accustomed to me; they say hello and all know my name. The girls aren’t really prostitutes to me anymore. They’re more like friends. It’s like walking into a local bar, like Cheers.”
In reality, however, most of the women had a love-hate relationship with professional tricks like Roger and Stewart. While they depended on such men for regular business, the working girls generally resented their cockiness and vocal knowledge of brothel protocol. One professional trick brought his own egg timer to make sure he got the time he’d paid for. Professional tricks were also notorious for trying to take advantage of the less knowledgeable, the new turn-outs, who could often be conned into giving customers top-of-the-line parties for a bargain rate.