Brothel (13 page)

Undressed now down to a lacy black bra and a matching G-string beneath the strap-on, Baby spread open Jack’s legs and let his knees hang off the bed before she began to penetrate
him slowly from her standing position, her thighs pressed firmly against the bed. Jack winced as Baby forced the dry, condom-covered dildo into him, meeting significant resistance. (He had requested painful penetration.) Meanwhile, Farrah sat naked at the head of the bed, where Jack used his outstretched hands to play with her nipples while she occasionally slapped him across the hands. She looked uncomfortable in the twisted position necessary to give Jack access to her breasts and allow her simultaneously to observe what Baby was doing. With a better sense of Jack’s tolerance for pain now, Baby began thrusting deeper into him, with the force of all her body weight.

“You like this don’t you, bitch?” she roared, spanking him on the buttocks with an open hand. “You whore. You slut.”

Intermittently, Baby took hold of Jack’s testicles and squeezed them, making him yelp. Then she grabbed a tuft of his hair and yanked his head backward with a deliberate measure of control. She had achieved a perfect balance between violation and restraint—a controlled dominance, if you will—in which Jack felt safe enough to submit to the abuse willingly.

I noticed Jack’s gaze in the reflection in the mirror. His self-conscious, goofy grin had evolved into a grimace that conveyed both his physical pain and psychological ecstasy. His wild eyes revealed his wonder at finally having his sexual fantasy realized in such a public way.

“Look at you beaming,” Baby said contemptuously. “You like her watching, don’t you? You think you’re a little princess,
don’t you? You exhibitionist.” While Baby said she saw him beaming, I saw him bursting with an electrified agony.

After almost ten minutes, Baby flipped Jack onto his back like a helpless animal. As she started thrusting into him again, this time with his legs draped over her shoulders, she began brusquely rubbing his very erect penis with a free hand. Baby was a master choreographer, acutely sensitive to the exact degree and extent of dominance called for. Jack was now panting like a dog and it took only a few strokes before he let out a howl and ejaculated all over his torso. (Condoms were not always used for hand jobs.)

The room was still for several minutes. Jack lay motionless, with his eyes closed. Silently, Baby and Farrah began moving about, putting the room back in order. Finally, Baby roused Jack with a gentle tap on his shoulder and told him he could get dressed. When Jack stood up, he smiled sheepishly at the three of us. “Thank you, thank you,” he said. “I never thought I’d have the courage to ask a woman to fuck me.” I guess I must have looked appalled by what I had just seen, because he turned to me and said, “You look as if you need to lie down.”

He was probably right. The experience was so intense and surreal, I was reeling. How would I ever explain this experience to my husband? I thanked Jack for allowing me to watch and excused myself, leaving the three of them to chat about his life in Los Angeles. No one saw me leave Farrah’s room, and I sneaked back into the parlor. I tried to act nonchalant and normal with the other women, but it was a struggle. What I had witnessed was like seeing a human being splayed out on a bed
with his guts exposed. It would take some time for me to assimilate the whole experience.

News that Baby had let me watch one of her parties spread in no time among the women. Somehow, luckily, staff and management managed to stay in the dark. Although some of the women thought Baby had been reckless—management might have caught her—others were fascinated. What did I think? Did it arouse me? Did it disgust me? When Donna heard that I had seen a dominance party, she squealed in horror. She had been mortified the time she walked into Baby’s room and saw a client hog-tied to her shower head with one dildo in his anus and one in his mouth. Donna refused to perform fantasy sessions, preferring instead straight, simple intercourse. Even in her personal life, she was sexually conservative, and wouldn’t perform blow jobs on her husband. For the next several weeks, whenever Donna and I passed each other, she blushed and smiled uneasily.

Brittany had an entirely different reaction. When she learned that I had watched one of Baby’s parties, she seemed crestfallen. I saw in her face hurt and disappointment. “I would’ve let you watch one of
my
parties,” she said. Over the last several weeks, I had been aware of a strange competitive tension developing between her and Baby for my attention.

Brittany tried to hide her competitive feelings behind criticism: “Baby and Farrah should have paid you something. You should have made some money, because the customer liked you being there. They could have negotiated for more.” Jack had paid $500, the women splitting their cut 50–50. I told her that I wouldn’t have dreamed of accepting money and that
Baby had done me a favor. She had shown me what happened in the bedroom during paid sex so I could better understand the work of a prostitute.

But Brittany wouldn’t hear it. If Baby had really wanted me to appreciate her work, Brittany argued, then she wouldn’t have had me watch a dominance party. Dominance was easy for prostitutes, she said. It was a release to get to beat a customer and be verbally cruel, all for pay. Far harder, she said, was faking intimacy, acting lustful and passionate with every customer.

Brittany didn’t drop the subject. The next weekend, when Norman, one of her regular customers, came in, she made a point of introducing him to me. After a brief exchange, I stood up to leave them in privacy; Norman said he hadn’t seen Brittany for several weeks. But Brittany asked me to stay, saying that Norman didn’t mind. Her eyes fixed on mine with steely insistence. The next thing I knew, she was ordering drinks for us both, compliments of Norman.

Norman was a heavyset man in his mid-fifties with Coke-bottle glasses. Whenever he spoke, his eyelids fluttered closed. He spoke very slowly and haltingly, as if constantly struggling for the right words. He looked like a big sheepdog, with a sheep’s obedient, passive nature. Brittany later told me that she had been seeing Norman for over a year, since soon after her move to Mustang Ranch from neighboring Old Bridge Ranch, where she had worked for several years. Devastated by the retirement of the prostitute he previously frequented, Norman had quickly become one of Brittany’s regulars, visiting
her nearly every month. Never married and still living at home with his mother, he had seen a succession of brothel prostitutes since his first visit to Nevada’s brothels many years earlier with his father, since deceased.

After we had chatted at the bar for about thirty minutes, Norman became noticeably restless and obviously ready to go to Brittany’s room. She led him away. In about five minutes, she returned in a silk bathrobe, alone, to book Norman’s money with the cashier. On the way back to her room, she called me over to the hallway leading down to her bedroom. She had asked Norman if I could watch them “make love,” she told me, and, ever accommodating, he had agreed.

I was taken aback. This awkward, bumbling man was willing to let me watch him have sex? I was flabbergasted, and quite ambivalent. My experience with Baby and the architect had been so intense, I wasn’t at all sure I was up to watching again. But if I really wanted to understand this place, how could I turn down the opportunity? Blanche was working as floor maid that night instead of Shelley, and I had little fear of getting caught. I gave Brittany a smile of assent and followed her down the hallway.

Before we arrived at her room, Brittany told me that Norman knew to tip me and that I should accept. When I tried to explain that I didn’t want his money, she pooh-poohed me.

As she opened the door, I saw Norman lying naked on the bed like a beached whale. With his glasses off, he looked disoriented and confused. I couldn’t fathom how Brittany could ever pretend to be attracted to this man. She was right: this
had to be the hardest job of all. Brittany instructed me to make myself comfortable on a nearby chair, where Norman’s royal blue golf shirt and matching polyester pants lay neatly folded. After dimming the overhead lights to a warm glow, she removed her robe while Norman gazed spellbound at her fleshy body. Brittany slinked over to where Norman lay supine, the top of his head grazing the headboard. She had already checked and washed his genitals, and she only had to put on the condom.

I watched as Brittany put a condom in her mouth before kneeling down on the bed to place it on the head of Norman’s semi-erect penis. She began sucking slowly, concentrating on rolling down the rubber with her mouth, careful not to tear it with her teeth. Brittany could take Norman’s entire penis in her mouth, and this enabled her to push the rim of the condom down to the base with her lips. Simultaneously, her left hand stroked and gently manipulated his engorged testes to further arouse him. “Oh, Norman, you are so big, so beautiful,” she murmured intermittently.

In one awkward moment, Brittany stopped sucking and slipped out of her role to offer me a pointer on condoms. “One of the fallacies is that you shouldn’t put a condom on when the penis isn’t hard. But we do that all the time without a problem. You just have to remember to hold on to it until the penis gets more erect,” she instructed with the conscientiousness of my junior high English teacher. I felt self-conscious and terribly out of place, afraid my presence was distracting her from her work, ruining the experience for Norman,
and putting her job in jeopardy. But when I glanced over at Norman, who lay silent and immobile, defenseless and delirious under her touch, I realized he hadn’t even noticed the pause.

Brittany continued to give Norman oral sex for several more minutes before lifting her head. Then, moving together synchronously like longtime dance partners, the twosome changed positions in silence, with Brittany ending up on her back and Norman prepared to enter her. At this point, Brittany caught my eye and told me to move closer. Obediently I pulled my chair alongside the bed, although I had the distinct sensation of being too close, as if in the first row of a movie theater. I watched as Brittany wrapped her legs around Norman’s broad body to draw him deeper as he thrust his pelvis against her. His grunts encouraged her to whisper provocatively, “Oh, Norman. You make me so wet. You’re such a man.” She knew exactly what he needed to feel virile. She glanced over at me once or twice to make sure I was watching.

Brittany turned her attention back to Norman and urged him on with sweet talk in between nibbles on his ear. He thrust for about five minutes, then rolled off her with a sigh, a look of defeat darkening his face. Brittany patted him consolingly on his chest. “Gee, you haven’t been in to see me for some time. Don’t worry, you’ll come.” Norman frequently had trouble. I said I hoped it wasn’t my intrusive presence that had made orgasm difficult for him, to which Brittany responded emphatically, “It wasn’t you. He just has trouble sometimes. He gets too excited—don’t you, Norman?” The backup plan
for Norman was to take him to the Jacuzzi to relax him a bit before returning to try again. The second attempt usually resulted in success.

Brittany used this break to go to the bathroom, leaving me alone, face-to-face, with her naked customer. I asked if he was sure he didn’t mind my being there. I suspected that he would never admit it in front of Brittany. “Whatever Brittany wants,” said Norman. “It seemed really important to her to let you watch, so I said it was okay. I only want to make her happy. My only reason for coming here is to give Brittany pleasure.” To give Brittany
pleasure?
I kept a straight face, but I did wonder how a brothel customer could ever allow himself to think that that was what this was all about.

At this point, Norman stood up and reached for his pants. “I’d like to tip you,” he said. Brittany had put him up to this. For the briefest of seconds, I thought to myself how easy it would be to take this gullible man’s money. Like the women said, A trick is to be tricked. But I just couldn’t bring myself to accept. It felt too exploitative, especially in light of the fact this man was smitten with Brittany and willing to do almost anything she asked. What would it have said about me to take advantage of his vulnerability? I thanked him for the offer but told him not to worry about it. Seeming relieved, he quickly slid his wallet back into his pants pocket.

As soon as Brittany emerged from the toilet, I thanked them both and quickly excused myself. I breathed a huge sigh of relief as I walked back to the parlor. I’d felt more uncomfortable watching Brittany than I had watching Baby. Brittany’s
time with Norman felt profoundly more intimate than Baby’s party with the architect, in which I had felt like an onlooker at a circus sideshow. With Norman and Brittany I was an intruder.

As soon as Norman left, Brittany tracked me down to make sure he had paid me. At first I lied, so as not to upset her. Then she asked me how much—he had told her $40—and I realized I was just going to get caught. She didn’t really think I had accepted Norman’s money. I admitted that while he had offered a tip, I hadn’t accepted it. I asked her not to be angry with Norman; he was only trying to make her happy.

In fact, she was furious with
me
. It was weak and foolish of me to want to protect Norman. Didn’t I understand that I was working against her, not with her, when I refused his money? Taking his money wasn’t exploitative but rather fair trade, she said, a service in kind, an arrangement established long ago between the first prostitute and her customer. To turn down Norman’s money was paramount to telling him that payment wasn’t always necessary. Prostitution worked solely on the assumption that men paid for a woman’s services—her time, personal attention, or sexual prowess—all of which were valuable. A customer’s payment acknowledged the pains the prostitute took to meet his needs. Taking money from Norman was important, Brittany explained, softening some now, so he wouldn’t forget he was just a customer.

I started to understand her point. While a good prostitute was able to get a man to forget he was a paying customer during sex, afterward he needed to remember it was merely a
business exchange and not mistake it for a real relationship. But sometimes the women were too good at what they did, and the men came to believe in the fantasies they were paying for—like Norman, who started to believe in Brittany’s illusion of intimacy and to feel that he was special. Whenever this happened—whenever a man forgot he was a customer—the prostitute’s relationship with him grew complicated.