A 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 signature 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.”
After the massage, something changed between Hayley and me. Perhaps I no longer held any challenge for her. She was distant. She became unruly around the house. A few weeks later, she was thrown out. Several offenses were mentioned. The saloon in the new premises had recently opened and she’d been binge drinking. She’d been rude to one of the other women and made her cry. She’d got one of the security guards fired, tricking him into bringing her drinks in her room by pretending she was partying with a high-rolling customer. She’d also sassed a client in the saloon, a dark-skinned man from Fiji who was rude to one of the other women—she’d shouted out “Bye, Bin Laden!” as he left.
But Hayley was back a few weeks later, having promised to keep her drinking under control. “This place is going to make lots of money,” she said, as I helped her unpack her things and move back into her room.
A year later, when I was back in America meeting up with my old subjects, I called the Wild Horse from Las Vegas, and wasn’t terribly surprised to learn that Hayley had been thrown out again. “This time I don’t think she’s coming back,” Kris the office manager told me, with an air of finality. I drove eight hours through hundreds of miles of empty desert and arrived back at the brothel early one evening, in time for a dinner date with Lance and Susan and some business friends of theirs.
A table had been laid, banquet-style, in the saloon. Above us, an extra-large TV showed soft-core pornography, frolicking nude models in artistic locations (desert gas station, old-fashioned corner store), which made it difficult to focus on what anyone was saying. I felt as though I were dining in a film by Luis Buñuel. The genteel accoutrements of the meal, the napkins, the arsenal of silverware, the discreet waiters in black suits, all of it seemed rather surreal as around us the sirens of the Wild Horse waited for business— Onyx in her see-through body stocking; Monique in her platinum-blonde wig and cocktail dress; Cicely in her fishnet top and lace choker . . .
The next few days I spent loitering at the Wild Horse. As before, I felt oddly vulnerable speaking to the women. Unlike other worlds I’ve spent time in, populated by evangelists and pitchmen and people looking to make a name, here the women stood to gain nothing from publicity. The only possible benefit I could offer them was if I booked a party. Knowing this, I sometimes sensed that idea hovering unspoken, which added to the complications of my being there. I found that with no camera present, only my notebook, I began to doubt my own good faith. I felt fraudulent, sitting around in the brothel kitchen all day or propping up the bar, jotting down notes. “Do you want some more cock?” the Hispanic bartender would ask. What exactly was I doing there? Did they believe me when I said I was writing a book? Did I believe myself? I worried I was becoming a “PT”—a “professional trick.”
I never knew exactly where I stood with the women. One of the new courtesans was called Scarlett. She was thirty-two, tall, slender, with long red hair, brown eyes—she was also a registered nurse. She’d got in after watching a documentary about prostitution with her husband, Mike. “I don’t remember if it was his idea or my idea. It just came out, ‘Well, that looks like fun!’ On my own I’d thought about it, because I was interested in the money . . . So when I figured out it was legal and it wouldn’t affect my nursing, I just thought, ‘Go for it!’ It’s a kick-in-the-pants job. I can’t think of a better one.
“Mike is awesome. Very open-minded and not caught up in that jealousy . . . And he likes that I get to explore my sexuality. I’ll be like, ‘Honey, I got a new position for you!’ He has a field day!” She shrugged and added, “Everybody has their quirk for sex. Mine is I like sex with strangers. I don’t like dating. I don’t like playing hard to get. So this keeps me out of trouble.” But the next day, killing time at the bar, I chatted to Scarlett some more, and this time she said she didn’t enjoy the sex that much, that for her the appeal of the work was that it was like nursing, answering people’s emotional needs.
I’d been hoping that if I stayed long enough I might learn where Hayley was. Certainly, there was no shortage of stories about her behavior, which everyone agreed had been obnoxious: She’d been drinking heavily; she had a boyfriend who’d supposedly got her mixed up with drugs; she’d insulted Susan’s masseuse, who had a leg brace from a motorcycle injury, calling him either a “fucking cripple” or a “handicapped fuck.” In another account, Hayley had been drinking so much and getting so little sleep that she began to think she was having an attack of some kind.
“She got worse and worse,” Susan said. “I’d let her go. Then she’d promise to be good. She’d come back. But it would happen again. Before, even when she was bad, there used to be a little part of her that I could reach. But that went.”
On the third day, I bumped into a working girl called Ricky, who I knew to be talkative and indiscreet. According to her, Hay-ley had been strung out on “crank”—the street name for crystal meth—“talking all this Bible stuff . . . how she thinks she’s figured it all out.” She also said Hayley had had sex in one of the negotiating rooms.
“Is that such a big deal, having sex in the negotiating room?” I asked.
“No condoms? No money? Yeah!”
Hayley had either retired, started dancing in Sacramento, or was working out of another brothel. It was evidence of the loose attachments this business fostered that no one seemed too sure where she was or what she was doing.
Even knowing the strange, alternate existence of brothel life, with its assumed identities, I’d thought there would be enough professional camaraderie between the women that one of them would have an email address or a way of leaving a message. It was a testament to the shame that was still so deeply embedded in the business of sex, I reflected. Everything at the Wild Horse was sequestered: the relationships between the working girls and customers; friendships between the women. No one even seemed to know Hayley’s real last name, or perhaps they were wary of giving it to me. I hesitated to ask Susan, sensing I might be crossing a line by poking my nose into their non-brothel lives.
In one of my last conversations with Susan she mentioned she thought Hayley might be working out of a brothel in Elko. I knew Elko only as a name on the map—a town in the east of Nevada, toward Utah, out in the middle of nowhere. I called round a few of the bordellos listed in the phone book, and two said they recognized the name: a man at Sharon’s, who sounded drunk, and a woman at Sue’s Fantasy Club, who said: “She won’t be working here again.” If nothing else, I figured it would be a chance to see some of the old-style cathouses.
The road was straight highway for 280 miles, through a landscape of distant suede-brown hills and flat, treeless semi-desert.
Twenty miles from Elko, I hit Carlin. Sharon’s lies a few miles out of town, within sight of the interstate—a weathered old double-wide trailer, its eaves strung with Christmas lights, white walls, and bright red trim, with neon beer signs in the window. It’s set down on a rumpled blanket of bare brown hills with no other buildings in sight.
The sky was broad and blue with wisps of cloud as I pulled up on the gravel parking lot. The owner and manager, Charlie, came to the door. Late forties, he had a moustache and a faintly camp manner and was dressed as though for athletics in a white T-shirt, a pair of sweat shorts, and sneakers. He was smoking a cigarette, and his voice was dark brown and boozy-sounding, even though it wasn’t yet lunchtime.
Inside the front room was a small bar, the walls pasted with dollar bills signed in magic marker by truckers with their CB handles— Poker, Deuce, Snoopy—many of them old and peeling off. “Mother says it looks tacky,” Charlie said. “Tacky it may be, but I’ll never have to paint it again!” A row of workmen’s helmets, also signed, hung on the wall. A ceiling fan spun slowly. A Rockola jukebox stood silent. An old woman—not Charlie’s mother, who was away for the day—sat knitting in the corner.
Charlie took me on a tour, down the narrow, low-ceilinged corridors, past the bedrooms. “I have seen a hundred and thirty-two women in sixteen years,” he said. “The shortest one worked for fifteen minutes, the longest for seven years.” there were stuffed bunny decorations on the bedroom doors, little signs saying “Welcome.” “This is one of the girls’ rooms,” he said, slurring so that “girls” sounded like “girlziziz.” I peeked inside. The room was homey, furnished with lots of cushions on the beds and chintzy oddments, bits of needlework, teddy bears, a TV, a VCR, mirrors on the walls and cheap wood paneling.
“I have two on the floor right now,” Charlie said, “Crystal and Suzanne.” In a back room, a conservatory, Crystal was giving directions to a trucker on a CB radio. “I love movies,” she was saying. “Ask for Baby Doll when you get here.”
Back at the bar, Charlie poured me a Coke.
I asked about Hayley. “I remember her but I do not know where she’s at. I do not know what working name she’s under, because the girls will change their working names, and that’s the reason some of’em rotate around from place to place. They get tired of seeing the same customers day after day. Mother will say to these girls, if you don’t get a marriage proposal a day, there’s something wrong. So that wears on them, hearing that week after week. If they wanted to get married, they’d go out and get married. They wouldn’t be in here working.”
Something in Charlie’s manner made me suspect that Hayley had never worked at Sharon’s—maybe he’d claimed to know her on the phone just to get me down there, to generate some business or for publicity. But I asked if I could leave a message for her anyway. Then, thinking about what he’d just said and my own experience of the women, I said, “They’re not looking for love?”
“I don’t think so. But, in our sixteen years we have married five girls out of here and two of’em are still married. I don’t consider that bad,’cause the national average is fifty percent divorce rate.”
“Lance at the Wild Horse said some of the working girls come from abusive backgrounds,” I said.
“I used to have a sign that said, ‘Six o’clock—the psychiatric hour is over.’ They want to hear a sad story? I’ll give them a sad story if I have to make it up!” Suddenly, from nowhere, Charlie sounded annoyed. “I don’t want to hear their sad stories! They’re supposed to be here to laugh and joke around!”
He paused and said, “Some people go in bars to say the world’s shit upon them. Usually they’ve shit upon themselves.”
I tried Sue’s Fantasy Club in Elko. A little old cattle and mining town, Elko has a grid of streets slung like a net between the interstate and the railroad. Unusually for Nevada, instead of lying outside the city, the brothels are downtown, four of them in a small cluster on Third Street where it ends at the train tracks. Sue’s is a nondescript two-storey building, with an L-shaped bar in one corner, and a sofa and comfy chairs in another. If the bar were a reception desk, you could imagine the layout as the lobby of a budget motel, with a corridor of rooms leading off, where the women do their entertaining.
The place was quiet when I arrived. A corkboard behind the bar said “Meet Our Ladies.” On three-by-four index cards were the names Frenchy, Dee, and Marie. Dee was at the bar, smoking a cigarette. She was fifty or so, with short red hair, wearing a figure-hugging stretch black-lace outfit. Like some other prostitutes I’d met, she’d got into the business via swinging. Before that, she’d worked in “medical management” on the East Coast; she didn’t care to be specific. She was well spoken and educated. She’d been the editor of various newsletters, and had two sons, who didn’t know what she was doing. One was graduating from college in a few weeks.
“How have you been finding it so far?” I asked
“Tedious at times. Frustrating at times,” Dee said. “I actually had more sex at home with a close circle of friends. And unfortunately so many of the guys who come for sex at the brothel are very basic. They don’t tend to play. And then you get the guys who come in like guys at the fish market, looking at you. Occasionally it can be hard on the ego. A lot of them are in the brothels because they have difficulty in relationships.”
I asked about Hayley. Dee said she wasn’t sure—she’d only been at Sue’s a week. Before that she’d been working at a brothel in Wells, an even more remote town an hour east. “There was a $100 minimum there, but business was getting so bad we were doing $60 truckers’ specials.”
She took me on a tour. A computer sat in the corner. Internet access had been cut off because the bill hadn’t been paid. there was a Jacuzzi room with wood paneling and decking for clients paying $500 and above. Dee’s bedroom was small, with painted brick walls—a little like a prison cell, I couldn’t help thinking. She’d thrown a scarf over the lamp, put some pictures on the walls. there was a bookshelf with ten or fifteen books: literary novels by Isabel Allende, James Carroll, two books about Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, including her memoir, Personal History.
We sat on her bed. I thought about booking a party—a massage or just giving her some money to talk. I felt bad for her—this intelligent, seemingly kind woman who was spending her golden years giving “truckers’ specials” in desert brothels on two-month shifts.
On the way back out, we passed a bedroom where a tall woman with a big mane of dark brown hair was lounging on her bed in a Chinese gown, watching TV.
“That’s Marie. She’s the manager,” Dee said.
I said hello. I mentioned I’d called a few days earlier asking about Hayley.
“Yeah, Hayley left about a week and a half ago.”
She came out to the bar, sipping a glass of wine, smoking a cigarette. “She said she was getting out of the business,” Marie said. “But I don’t think she really is. I think she might be working at Sheri’s—a brothel an hour out of Vegas, in Pahrump. She had a lot of bills. She supports her whole family. I know she needs money, so I bet she’s working in one of the houses.”
With nothing better to do, I sat at the bar until late in the evening. No customers came in. “Wednesday is no-hump day,” Marie said. A TV in the corner of the bar was showing a cable channel—an eighties thriller with actors I half recognized. It was muted but from time to time as we sat there at the bar our eyes flicked over at it. The quiet, almost mausolean atmosphere; the gloomy decorations. I couldn’t work out if it was depressing or cozy, a little outpost of humanity or one of the most desolate places I’d been in my life.
Back in Vegas, I called Sheri’s and a couple of the other big brothels in Pahrump, asking for Hayley. No luck. I thought about driving up there, but I’d already spent longer than I intended creeping around brothels, and I was keen to move on to other stories. I called Marie in Elko a few times to see if she’d managed to leave a message for Hayley, but I assumed it was the end of the line.
And then, in mid-August, she called.
She was at Sheri’s—she’d got my message from Marie. “I can’t believe you went all the way to Elko,” she said, sounding a little drunk. “What did they say about me at the Wild Horse?” I wasn’t sure whether to tell her about the rumors of her throwing fits and taking crank. Then she asked if I believed in God. I said no. “You’re going to have real hot feet one day,” she said. “What about the connection with the infinite?”
She was now going by her real name, Tammy. She lived in Marysville, northern California, a small agricultural town a few hours east of San Francisco and west of Reno. She had a boyfriend, Walter, who was twenty-five and a mechanic. They met as roommates in Sacramento. She was happy to meet up, but circumstances were such that it was October before I was anywhere close. One afternoon, having made an arrangement to see her, I drove up from Los Angeles and booked into a cheap motel patronized by Hispanic field laborers who slept seven or eight to a room.
I called her at around seven. Walter answered. He sounded friendly enough, though Tammy had told me he’d watched the documentary and been a little bothered by the massage scene. He had a slow voice—Tammy had said he was a hippie and I imagined a sleepy, bearded dude with long hair. I could hear her in the background, saying in an English accent: “Is that Louis? Is he getting cold feet?” She was on her way out, Walter said, then put the phone down.
I called back but got no response. I tried not to worry too much about it. I went into town, got something to eat, and an hour or two later, I was writing my notes at the motel when there was a knock. I peered through the window. It was Tammy. Her hair was tied up in a ponytail. She was wearing make-up and a skimpy top. “You look bushed,” she said. “Why are you staying here? This place is a fleapit!”
“I’m trying to save money,” I said.
She said she’d been on her way to a strip club when I called, as a last-minute thing to make money. “Girls are supposed to book, but usually I can just show up because I’m the hottest one there and they’ll let me dance. But tonight they had eleven girls there and would’ve had to bump one, and they didn’t want to do that.”
I asked about Walter disconnecting me.
“No, no, he’s fine. I mean, yeah, he’s a little threatened. He’s never lived outside this little town. I think he meant to put you on hold and he disconnected you by accident. But I said to him, ‘He’s a BBC journalist, for God’s sake! Why would he be interested in someone like me?’ This place is a dive.”
I looked around, seeing it through her eyes. I had my notebook on the table and a glass of red wine in a little plastic cup. It looked a little depressing. Lonely journalist on the road. Sad empty little life. I felt unmasked. She reached for my cup of wine. I remembered her problems with alcohol and became nervous that she was going to drink it. She brought it over to me.
“Do you want to go out to the strip club?” she asked. I said I wasn’t keen. The truth is, I didn’t want to go out at all very much:
I wanted to sip my wine and watch TV and recover from the long drive. But I thought I’d better seize my chance with Tammy.
We went instead to a diner called Lyon’s, just outside the town center. As we waited in line to be seated, I asked how she’d wound up in Elko.
“I was kind of enjoying mixing with the dregs. Maybe part of it was self-abuse. I wanted to hit rock bottom so I could see that this was what my life could be.”
Our waitress seated us in a booth. I asked about Hayley’s new life. She said that she danced occasionally, waited tables, and volunteered at an animal sanctuary. Then she said, “I might go back into it but I don’t know. Especially with my commitment to God. I just wish I’d saved more money. I think how lucky I am. There’s not too many people in the world who have the option of making $3,000 in one night.”
“So that’s still there as an option for you?”
“No, I shouldn’t have said that. It doesn’t exist. No. Because I made a commitment to God.”
God had come into her life not long after I left the year before. She was back in Marysville, “feeling low, emotionally bankrupt, not fulfilled.” She went to the New Life Assembly Church. “I had an experience, and it felt right, and I prayed, and that motivated me to go to church.” She asked what I’d been doing, and I told her about meeting the porn people and the UFO believers, and my plans to meet up with a pimp in Mississippi and a self-help guru.
“You want to be careful with all that negativity. I couldn’t do that. You must either be really strong mentally or else you’re just very cold and you view it in a voyeuristic way.”
This surprised me. I don’t think of the stories I cover as particularly dark or negative. But later, I wondered if she might be right, and whether I was a little detached. It suggested sensitivity on her part that she picked up on it—the sixth sense she’d claimed she possessed. And at the same time, how strange, I thought, that she would regard doing stories on subjects like prostitution as requiring more mental strength than actually being a prostitute.
“Do I seem weird to you?” she asked a little later.
“No, not really,” I said. “Maybe a little chaotic. I guess you like to party too much. But you probably knew that.”
We took a drive round downtown. It looked like a lot of old town centers in the West, with a few blocks of red-brick buildings, some posh little businesses, a store selling musical instruments, a craft shop, a barber’s. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” she said. “Before, I hated it. But since I straightened out, all the things I didn’t like, I like now: how quaint it is, and little, and old.”
On the way back to my motel, I told her what they were saying about her at the Wild Horse, being on drugs, having sex in the negotiating room, calling one of the staff a cripple.
“That’s a lie. I hate drugs. I’m totally opposed to drugs. And that guy, I never called him a cripple. And I challenged Susan to find that on the security camera where I said that, and they didn’t even look for it. I didn’t have a fit. I’d been drinking lemon drops and B-52s, and my eyes were going in and out of focus. The person at the hospital said, ‘It looks like you’re having a stroke.’ She had me panicking. It’s because I’m borderline diabetic.”
The next day, we met at a little alternative coffee shop with bare brick walls. It was hot out, in the nineties. I’d been hoping to meet Walter, but that didn’t seem to be in the cards. We had lunch at an upscale eatery of her choosing in the neighboring town of Yuba City. By now, some of the air had gone out of my attempts to interview her, and our time together was starting to feel uncomfortably close to a date.
At three or so, we headed back to the coffee shop. I bought her an expensive novelty coffee and we read out Trivial Pursuit questions. “Was the first note broadcast by Sputnik 1 a B flat, C flat, or D flat?” “Who was the first U.S. president to visit all fifty states while in office?” An attractive young woman, Bohemian-looking in a long skirt, mid-twenties, came in with a little boy. “That’s Natalie,” Tammy said. “Walter had sex with her when I was in Vegas. I wanted to come and see if he was meeting up with her.”
I knew “When I was in Vegas” meant “When I was working as a prostitute at Sheri’s.” An act of revenge on Walter’s part, presumably. Either way, it was time to go. We walked out back, where a Volkswagen camper van pulled up. “There he is, that fuck!” Tammy shouted, and flung a handful of Trivial Pursuit cards through the driver’s window. “I can’t fucking believe you!”
I’d been expecting a long-haired dude, but he was short-haired and skinny. He looked a little like a student—mid-twenties, in a western-wear shirt of a kind I sometimes wear. Though we hadn’t exchanged a word, I immediately felt I liked him. He seemed perfectly friendly, and I wondered if Tammy had exaggerated the sensitivities of my meeting him, and if so, why? To keep us apart, to make him more insecure?
“Hi, Walter,” I said.
“Hi, Louis,” he said.
But Tammy’s sudden rage was embarrassing, and I didn’t want to watch an argument unfold. So I drove off.
That evening, the phone rang. “I just wanted to make sure you got what you needed with the interview,” Tammy said. She and Walter had talked it through. She’d apologized to him. Apparently he’d only stopped off because he’d thought we might be there, and he wanted to meet me. Nothing to do with Natalie. “I have a number of issues I have to work on. My big one is trust.”
“What was it that got you out? Was it meeting Walter? Was it quitting drinking? Was it finding God?” I asked.
She said she wouldn’t be dancing tonight. “I can’t do that anymore. It’s one of the things we agreed.”
It had been a strange encounter, revealing in some ways, in other ways a non-event. She had wanted to keep it on terms she understood—sexual—and I had wanted to keep it on terms I understood— journalistic. Two professional manipulators, I thought, trying to manipulate each other. Several stories I was chasing dealt with deceivers and con artists, but only in this one was the con difficult to see through, and only in this one did my own inquiries feel like grappling with air. But perhaps this said less about Tammy’s subtlety than it did about the more persuasive forms of influence peddled by working women, where the sales job was a facsimile of affection, and, from time to time, the real thing.
On the last night of my return visit to the Wild Horse, Susan had told me, “Once you’ve stayed in this business a few years, you don’t get out.” This fatalism was surprising coming from the person who’d planned to help women get an education and move on. But she seemed a little chastened by her first year of business in the new premises. In general, Susan’s ambitions for the women to change their lives hadn’t borne much fruit. The house pledge to pay half the college tuition of the women had found few takers. “I still offer the same program to everybody, but I have to be realistic that most of them won’t take it,” she said. “I have had some success stories. It’s just that they’re few and far between.”
Still, business was great, she had said. “I always said, to run the house we’d need a pool of three hundred ladies. Right now we’re at two hundred.” And they were expanding. A clump of new pink buildings, the carcass of the long-closed Mustang Ranch, a historic Nevada brothel, had been helicoptered onto the property. Lance had bought it on eBay. They would be using it as the premises of a brothel museum and adding another thirty rooms.
When I left that night, the working women were in the saloon killing time between customers by taking turns at karaoke. There was something touching about how uncomfortable they were in the spotlight. It spoke of a modesty, a decorousness that, not knowing better, one might hesitate to ascribe to the profession. Shyly shuffling on the spot, giggling, singing softly and out of tune, they took turns at the microphone. “Private Dancer.” “Natural Woman.” A country song about an angel flying with a broken wing. All songs of romance and heartbreak, I thought. All love songs.