Authors: Alexa Albert
Intimidation was nothing new to the brothels. Stories abounded about the old days, when women poured bleach on other women’s clothing or threw blanket parties, in which a sleeping woman was covered in a blanket so she couldn’t see who was beating her. More frequently, cattiness manifested
itself in verbal attacks, name-calling (e.g., “slut”), bad-mouthing, physical fights, snitching, and ostracism. It wasn’t unusual for brothel newcomers to quit under the pressure. Those who persevered earned their colleagues’ grudging respect.
One day not long after the Nair shampoo incident, I wandered into the bar at Mustang #1 and caught several of the older women perched on bar stools, engrossed in a discussion about Heather, who had finally headed back to Houston for a weeklong vacation. “Not only was she cocky,” said one of the women, “but did you see the way she tried to seduce the men in lineup?” According to these women, Heather had been targeted not because of jealousy over her popularity with customers but because she had been “dirty” hustling, drawing attention to herself at the expense of the other women. The other prostitutes considered dirty hustling the lowest of lows, a brothel crime. It merited serious retaliation, especially if committed during lineup, when women were expected to stand and speak their names demurely in accordance with long-established house rules. Heather was accused of batting her long lashes and mouthing her name seductively.
Over the course of my stay at Mustang, I often saw women overpromoting themselves or spoiling their co-workers’ prospects with customers. How many times had I seen women call undue attention to themselves by rushing dramatically into lineup late or “accidentally” flashing their breasts and buttocks in the bar? A few women even rubbed men’s crotches through their pants or whispered lewdly to them on the couches. Some women monopolized clients who showed no interest in them,
simply to prevent their colleagues from snagging them. Still others intruded upon their peers while they were in the middle of a hustle.
It wasn’t just that dirty hustling was an unethical, aggressive tactic, said many of the women. Dirty hustling could hurt everyone’s business by offending and repelling customers. Equally reprehensible were those women who engaged in prohibited sex acts (e.g., kissing, anal sex, not using a condom) in order to snare a customer. When women broke these rules—which had been established primarily out of deference to the women’s wishes—men stopped believing that they were ever in effect, and that undermined other prostitutes’ ability to uphold them.
In an attempt to prevent dirty hustling, brothel management paired up all new working girls with more experienced prostitutes who were expected to teach newcomers the house’s rules of etiquette, along with how to negotiate, what prices to charge, and how to examine a customer’s genitals for disease. Almost half of Mustang’s working girls were considered experienced, having worked as brothel prostitutes for at least three years, and 14 percent of the women were decade-long veterans. Unfortunately, not all of them liked training new prostitutes, claiming their time and effort were wasted on un-appreciative amateurs. “Nine times out of ten, you’re not going to find anyone who’ll use or care about your advice,” said Tanya, a thirteen-year Mustang vet. “I don’t mind helping a girl with a good head on her shoulders, who doesn’t have a problem going in and making sure the man’s happy. But I resent being asked to leave the floor to go back to a new girl’s
room to supervise her and potentially miss a lineup if the girl’s only going to ignore me.”
Tanya was a forty-one-year-old brunette with a fashionable shag haircut whose petite but sturdy frame commanded attention. And so did her abrupt remarks. She’d been the one on my first visit to brusquely tell me she didn’t break condoms. Tanya was tough and at times could sound like a sailor with her crude expletives. A house elder, with a wealth of experience and knowledge about Mustang Ranch, she kept close company with another Mustang veteran, Linda, the prostitute who had expressed considerable disdain for any colleague who enjoyed sex with customers. They hung together in a small clique with two other women of about the same age and seniority. Whether crocheting afghans in the parlor during shift or dining together in the kitchen promptly at six-thirty every night, these women stuck together. They shared a strong sense of common history, and could spend hours chain-smoking and reminiscing about the old days working for Joe and Sally Conforte.
Their eyes sparkled with nostalgia as they described the dress code Sally enforced through the 1980s, which required women to wear long evening gowns covered with rhinestones and sequins and matching gold or silver heels. “And Sally hated black,” recalled Linda. “It reminded her of a funeral. Only one girl per shift could wear black.” Tanya and Linda laughed as they retold the story of the time Sally came home unexpectedly early from vacation and found a lineup full of black dresses. After chastising the floor maid and women in the middle of the parlor for a good ten minutes, she ordered
all the women to strip down and do their lineups for the rest of the night in the nude. Always terrified of Sally, the women complied. “Let this be a lesson to you hos,” Sally snapped. “You don’t come out here in black.”
Old-timers who had worked at Mustang under Sally Conforte reminisced wistfully, not resentfully, about the days when she ruled the roost. Many women believed that Sally’s aesthetic standards enhanced their business. “The place had an aura of glamour,” said Linda. “The long evening gowns were feminine, and the shiny, glittery rhinestones Hollywood-like. Men felt compelled to spend more money.”
The dress code had relaxed considerably since Sally Conforte’s day, partly because of the changing of the guard and partly because of changing times. Whereas men and women once dressed up to visit Reno and Vegas’s casinos and showrooms, now shorts and T-shirts were ubiquitous. Mustang had relaxed its rules to keep step, and now defined proper dress as “nothing tacky.” Specifically, women were to wear underwear at all times, and exposure of nipples or pubic hair was grounds for firing.
Tanya and her friends weren’t only nostalgic about brothel attire. They reminisced about the handful of times they had to evacuate the brothel when the nearby Truckee River flooded, and about getting drunk at the Confortes’ annual holiday parties, where Joe and Sally gave all the women matching luggage or expensive perfume. But the story they liked to tell best was of being awakened one warm afternoon in 1990 before their shifts started and being told by Joe that the IRS was coming to seize Mustang Ranch for $13 million in unpaid back taxes.
Prostitutes and staff scurried around the brothel, gathering their belongings, like chickens with their heads cut off. When Joe told the women to take anything they could get their hands on, Tanya and Linda frantically began gathering up appliances and pieces of furniture and even filled garbage bags full of frozen meat and vegetables out of the walk-in freezers. In spite of their efforts, most of the brothel’s furnishings were confiscated by the IRS and sold in a bankruptcy sale. When Mustang reopened several months later in 1991, the women returned with whatever they rescued from the IRS and proceeded to rebuild the brothel one trick at a time. “The first $50 trick went toward a microwave, and later that night we had enough money to buy towels and groceries,” said Linda. “It was a daily thing: ‘Come on, girls, we need a toaster!’ ”
Mustang’s newest prostitutes studied Tanya and Linda’s clique from a distance, too intimidated to approach any of the women directly. These younger prostitutes said they experienced Tanya and Linda as hostile and dismissive. Unapologetic, Tanya and Linda admitted to standing in judgment of the new breed of prostitutes coming to work at Mustang Ranch. “Us working girls from the old school understand the value of repeat business,” said Linda. “We strive to please the guy and make him like us enough to come back to see us again or to tell a buddy about us. We get to know him, ask about his job, his family, and his granddaughter’s school project. But with gals starting today, they’re just looking at that man as a one-time-only customer and could care less if he comes back. They act like robots in the room, just going through the motions, hurrying to get him out.”
The change in women’s attitudes over the years had had a negative impact on the business, they contended. “Guys who used to be decent customers and spent decent amounts of money are now becoming cheaper,” said Tanya, “because they realize they’re not getting a three-hundred-dollar party with a lot of the girls. They’re getting the same as if they spent a hundred bucks. It doesn’t matter if they spent a hundred bucks or a thousand; those girls have got them out the door in twenty minutes.” The telltale sign of a woman’s professionalism, Tanya said, was how the man acted when he emerged from her bedroom. “If he comes out walking real fast, twenty feet in front of her, nine times out of ten, he really didn’t enjoy himself, and will probably never come back again.”
Linda took a slow drag on her cigarette before adding, “But these new girls don’t care; they figure they’re young and there’s always gonna be somebody walking through that door. They think their pussies are lined with platinum! If they only bothered to listen to what us girls who’ve been in the business a long time have told them—that eventually they’re gonna be our age sitting where I am, with one customer while the new girl gets ten. They’re going to be thankful for that one customer. We aren’t trying to be mean or vindictive. We’re just trying to make sure there’s guys coming back. If there ain’t business coming in, there’s no need for any of us to be here.” With that, she stubbed out her Salem Light into a plastic red ashtray and lit up another.
When I asked gingerly whether either woman felt envious of the younger girls, Linda defensively rejected the idea. “I
don’t trip out on how often a younger girl gets picked versus me. I can’t compare myself to youth, to an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old. There’s no way. I’m satisfied with what I’m making and whatever she’s banking is her business.” She quickly added, “What she makes is what I used to make!”
Tanya was more forthright about her demons. “I think I’m going through a phase right now, a little insecurity about my age and the younger girls in here. I think anybody over thirty goes through it, especially as vain as women are. But then I turn around and sometimes make off one date what takes the younger girls ten dates. So, it all evens out.”
It wasn’t just the new, younger prostitutes who felt excluded and ignored by Tanya and Linda. Older, seasoned Mustang workers, like Baby, who shared the women’s same history also found themselves left out of their clique. Baby’s crowd consisted principally of night-shift workers, who tended to have wilder, more outgoing personalities. There was Daisy, an in-your-face prankster who liked to entertain her peers with parodies. One night she passed around homemade ballots so that everyone could vote on recipients of various farcical awards. Categories included “Whore You Don’t Even Know Has a Job Here (Because She’s Never on the Floor),” and “Whore That Is Banned from the Jukebox for Life (Because She Only Plays Crap).” Then there was Baby’s friend Selena, who couldn’t keep anyone’s name straight, only their astrological sign. She greeted me each evening with “Hello, Aquarius.”
Drugs also connected many of these night girls. Although brothel rules prohibited illegal substances, use of marijuana,
crank, cocaine, and crack did occur. Management tried to control the influx of drugs by having floor maids randomly search women’s belongings when they first arrived and then when they returned from vacation. They also required prostitutes to turn over all prescription medications, which were locked in the cashier’s office to prevent theft. While the house threatened dismissal of any woman caught in possession of drugs, I came to see that managers rarely enforced that rule. As for alcohol, the official Mustang rules stated: “In this house, it is a privilege to drink, act accordingly. If the bartender or the floor maid feels that you have had enough to drink, don’t argue!”
Nevertheless, drinking and drugging often helped some of Mustang’s women cope with anxiety, boredom, and long work hours. Initially, women tried to hide their use of drugs from me, but as they grew more comfortable, they began letting down their guard and started getting stoned and cutting up their crank in front of me. One night, I had a talk with Mercedes, the woman who had a strange relationship with her regular named Gary. We sat at the bar, where I usually watched her overspend on drinks each night, and she ranted about the evils of alcohol, or “the devil in disguise” as she called it, and how Mustang shouldn’t allow women like herself—those with little self-control—to drink at all. “It’s the fear of being rejected that makes you drink in here. And the fear of sitting here quietly trying to look at the four walls that drives you to drink in here. You know if you bring out your book they [management] are gonna tell you to close it, so you come over here to the bar and drink instead.”
Regardless of its prevalence among a subset of the working girls, drug use was far more controlled than what I had seen among the juvenile prostitutes of Times Square. Still, while some of these women had come to the brothels already addicted, quite a few, sadly, embarked on their drug and alcohol habits while at Mustang.
Many of the working girls didn’t fit into any particular social group. One such woman was Dinah, Mustang’s oldest prostitute (sixty-three), who preferred to keep to herself. Reticent about her outside life, Dinah found Tanya and Linda’s group too chatty and Baby’s clique too unruly. Described by her colleagues as “Mustang’s straightest prostitute,” Dinah abstained from not only alcohol and drugs, but also caffeine, and limited her intake of processed sugar. Dinah even paid her taxes. “When I first got hired, I went to my accountant and told him I was a hooker,” Dinah explained to me once. “I said I didn’t know how to go about doing my taxes. I heard everyone else say not to bother.” Inexperienced in such matters, her accountant called the IRS, who counseled him to declare her a “registered professional entertainer.” Last year, Dinah got back $1,100. “Imagine me, a hooker, getting money back from the government,” she said, chuckling.