Getting Screwed (19 page)

Dallas's wisdom helped Joi deal with the daily stress of the lineup. When the bell rang to announce the arrival of a customer, all the women on shift at the time — between ten and twenty — would stand in a lineup for the customer's inspection. The women could introduce themselves — their names and a quick “Hi” — but they weren't allowed to say or do much else. The customer would pick a lady solely on the basis of looks and what he was in the mood for that day. Customers who were too nervous or couldn't make up their minds could go to the bar and have a drink. At that point, the women could go up and engage them in conversation. Joi was good at conversation, so she usually did better at the bar than in the lineup. Sometimes the women worked the bar in pairs; Joi would go up and talk to the customer, see what he wanted, did he like black or white girls, and then if the answer was a white girl, she would send in her friend. “We were just trying to get him to spend his money,” she says.

Once the man made his choice, the two might take a tour of the facilities — to see the hot tub, the dungeon, and other specialty attractions the brothel offered. Then they would go to the woman's room,
where they negotiated the sexual activities desired and the rate. Once there was agreement on the rate, the customer paid up — cash or credit, please — and the girls took the money or card to the front desk. The brothel managers made a practice of listening in on the negotiations, according to Joi, so they knew exactly what was agreed to, and while managers insisted they then turned off the intercom, Joi says she wouldn't put it past them to continue listening in.

“[The managers] seem all friendly — we're here for you and all that — but as soon as you do something wrong, drinking on duty or drugs, they're mean,” she says. “ ‘You got to go, you fucking whore, you're not clean.' ”

Joi says drug use was rampant at Old Bridge while she was working there. “There was a heavy biker influence in Reno,” she says. “They had the Hell's Angels; they ran a lot of drugs and women through there.”

Joi says she herself didn't use drugs while working in Nevada. “That's just not my thing,” she says. The only child of a black preacher's son and a white woman of French ancestry, Joi grew up in Sacramento watching her parents get drunk and smoke crack, and she vowed to do things differently. “My dad used to beat on my mom,” she says. “They were always fighting and he was an abusive guy.” She says her father never laid a finger on her — he took it all out on her mother. “She left him when I was five, but then they got back together for my sake,” she says.

When Joi was in sixth grade, she came home from school to find her mother bruised and bleeding from yet another beating. Her father had disappeared — “probably down to the liquor store,” she says, so Joi took her mother by the hand, and together they crawled through an overgrown field near her house to a pay phone, which Joi used to call the police. The police took them both to a battered women's shelter in Sacramento. A few months later, Joi went back to live with her father because, as she says, “I didn't like it [at the shelter]; I was on the dance and baton team at school and I missed that. So I went back to my dad. I mean, in my neighborhood, everyone's dad was a drunk. It wasn't something to be ashamed of.”

When she was fourteen or fifteen, Joi says, her mother's father would French-kiss her and try to fondle her. “He tried to make out like it was his French background,” she says with disdain. Joi herself started having sex with older men when she was fourteen. “I was a wild child,” she says. “No one forced me to do it. But I think it's abusive for twenty-two-year-old men to have sex with fourteen-year-old girls.”

After her childhood, Joi found life working in the brothels pretty tame. For each of the two months she spent at the Chicken Ranch, she cleared $14,000. She didn't enjoy sharing her earnings with management, but she did like the feeling that she was safe inside the brothel walls. “I knew I wasn't going to be harassed,” she says.

Joi, who is now an independent sex worker running her own escort service, says there is still drug use among women working in and outside the brothels in Nevada. “I still keep up with things, and from what I'm seeing, they have a heroin problem really bad in Reno. Heroin and meth are kind of taking over,” she says.

At Sheri's Ranch, however, management says it has zero tolerance for illegal drugs. “The girls know that drugs are totally illegal at the ranch; their luggage is subject to be searched when they come to the ranch,” owner Chuck Lee says. “And we check the entire premises with trained dogs,” including the women's private rooms. Their alcohol intake is also restricted. According to Anna, she and the other ladies are allowed six drinks a day, one per hour. And that's fine with her. “That helps keep us sharp and not make silly decisions while we're negotiating,” she says.

If management does find drugs in the workers' rooms or luggage, they are asked to leave, says the madam at Sheri's Ranch, a plump, maternal-looking woman in her forties who wished to be identified by her first name only: Dena. “Some brothels are more tolerant,” Dena says. “I know we lose certain girls because we are so strict about it. But we don't want them here anyway.”

Dena first came to Sheri's Ranch on a tour with her then mother-in-law, who was a member of a senior women's group called the Red Hats. Dena had been working in the Las Vegas casinos and was a stay-at-home
mother at the time. But she seemed so curious about life at the brothel that the general manager asked if she would like to work there part-time as a hostess.

“It eventually evolved into a full-time job,” Dena says. The job of a hostess is to chat up the customers who walk in the door and see what they'd like. Some have already been corresponding by email with a specific woman (the women's work emails are posted with their profiles on the Sheri's Ranch website), so they will ask for her directly. Other customers might venture into the dimly lit bar, where they can sit and drink with several of the ladies and make their choice that way. And still others prefer the old-fashioned ritual of the lineup.

The day I was at Sheri's Ranch, a twenty-something couple dressed casually in jeans and T-shirts strolled in, the woman hanging nervously onto her partner's arm. Dena greeted them in the bar and later told me they asked for a lineup. “Threesomes are one of our specialties. Usually, there's a lot of correspondence between couples and a particular woman, but this is a very young couple and they may not have known they could do that,” she says. “They wanted to base their decision off visuals. They've done this before; they're from Iceland.”

The lineup takes place in the main lounge at Sheri's Ranch, a large, elegant room with high ceilings, ornate light-yellow couches, and a wall of windows open to the pool and waterfall in the backyard. Several large paintings of Rubenesque nudes adorn the walls, and a black baby grand piano sits in one corner of the lounge, right next to a mounted poster explaining the services that Sheri's offers, everything from a “straight lay” to a drag party and a ménage à trois.

The lineup for the Icelanders occurred while I was having lunch with Dena and two other staff members in a red-leather booth in the bar. Several of the scantily dressed ladies who had been sitting in the bar began strolling out into the main lounge, although I didn't really take note until the music was turned off and the bar grew very quiet. When I asked if I could take a peek at the lineup, Jeremy Lemur, the spokesman for Sheri's Ranch, who had arranged my visit, said it was fine. But when I approached the curtain, a tanned security guard playfully barred my
way. Dena shook her head and put a finger to her lips. She later explained why she didn't want me peeking: “It's a couple, and they were nervous.”

During lineups, the bar music is routinely turned off so customers can hear each woman introduce herself. Just as they did in Joi's days at Old Bridge and the Chicken Ranch, the women in the lineup step forward and are permitted only to say “Hi” and give their names before returning to the line; they have to rely on eye contact and smiles to convey the rest. According to Lemur, Sheri's Ranch usually has twenty women in the house each day, and all of them have to come to the lineup, unless they are already with a customer. “But today it's a small lineup — only eleven women,” he said and shrugged. “A lot of the ladies are on vacation.”

Several times during lunch, Dena was approached by a tall, model-gorgeous woman with platinum blond hair and a short black dress that showed off her cleavage to advantage. The woman looked very young and seemed upset by something. Dena excused herself for a few minutes, and when she came back, she said, “You become their mom, their confidante, everyone goes through bouts of insecurity and depression. Having a good support system is very important.”

Dena, who has six of her own children, the youngest age three at the time, did not want to discuss the private problems that the girls bring to her every day. But she did say that she had one newly arrived woman who had never done sex work before. “I will connect her with individual girls who can help her along,” she says.

Anna says she was given the same tutelage when she arrived with no experience in the trade. “You're set up with a Big Sister, and she teaches you the ropes,” she says. “I was very nervous about my first party. I felt like I was fumbling through the negotiation process. But then it was fine, and I felt much better afterwards.”

At every brothel, it's up to the woman to set the price for her services. After she has given the customer a tour of the facilities (which gives her a chance to find out where the man is from, what he's looking for, and what his financial situation is), she takes him back to her room to negotiate. “When I get a gentleman in my room, I ask what he's interested in doing today, how long he is interested in doing that, and what budget
he is working with,” Anna says. The customer's occupation and income don't always factor into what he's willing to pay. “One customer might be a doctor and drive a Corvette and then he offers you below house minimum,” she says.

Anna says she and her client come to an agreement over price and services 75 percent of the time. The other 25 percent of the time, she lets the hostess know they couldn't come to an agreement. “If he's way off [in terms of price], the hostess will explain to him that it isn't going to work,” Anna says. “But if he's not that far off, she'll find somebody who is more in his price range than I am. And if he wants something that I don't do, she'll find someone who will do that.” Anna, for instance, says she doesn't do anal sex, domination parties, or foot fetishes. “That's not my personality,” she says. “But we have girls here who are trained in domination [they are known as dominatrix] and they have their own whips and paddles.”

Like Sheri's Ranch, most of the brothels prominently display posters with a menu of all the possible services customers can buy (without the prices listed, of course), and some of the women create their own menus, which are parodies of restaurant menus, with appetizers, entrées, and dessert. These individualized menus often have prices on them, but there is usually room for negotiation. A $1,000 party, for instance, might include friendly conversation, a tour of the facilities, drinks, a strip tease or sexy lap dance, and/or a romantic bubble bath, some foreplay (with a sensual massage), oral sex, and then intercourse with one ejaculation — all within an hour. Also included are the condoms, lubricant, oils, and various sex toys. Unlimited orgasms can be negotiated for an additional price, as can extended parties, which last for more than an hour or even overnight.
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After the price has been negotiated, Anna says she will take the customer's money down to the office (and if the customer doesn't want to part with his credit card, he can come along too). Finally, she performs a “dick check” to make sure the customer has no visible disease. (If he does, he is asked to leave.) Then the party begins.

At Sheri's Ranch and the Chicken Ranch, extended parties often take
place in private bungalows set back from the main building. During our tour, Anna, who is wearing black stiletto sandals that add at least three inches to her 5'4" height, gestures out the windows toward a cluster of cabins in the rear of the large fenced-in yard. “Those are themed bungalows, and they come with a steak and lobster dinner,” she says. A series of photos mounted on the wall show off the interior of these bungalows.

“There's the King Arthur room [replete with a statue of a knight in armor], the safari room, where you can take a walk on the wild side,” Anna says with a straight face. “We also have a Roman room, a room with the theme of Arabian nights, and a '60s room.”

A 1960s room?

“You know, it comes with a shag rug, lava lamp, we call it our Austin Powers room,” she says, with a hint of a smile.

Walking down a hallway with sun-lit windows lining the back wall, Anna shows me the “bubble bath room” and then a second room, which also features a hot tub and is lathered with signs promoting Anheuser-Busch's Landshark Lager. “We're the only brothel that has a corporate sponsor,” she says proudly.

Next up is the favorite room on the tour: the dungeon. The dungeon has black padded walls, on which chains and an assortment of other painful-looking equipment are mounted. In one corner stands a large black leather chair that Anna calls the “fem-dom worship chair for naughty girls”; in another corner is the “forced orgasm chair,” where customers can be tied up and dominated. “It's a form of pleasurable torture for the client,” Anna explains. A large black leather couch squats in the center of the room in front of a small stage with a single shiny pole for pole dancing. “[Customers] have to sign our waiver that we're not responsible if someone gets hurt,” Anna says. “You can also book this room for bachelor parties.”