Free The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money by Dennis Hof

150-year-old church in Virginia City. And they love my girls there. They look forward to seeing them — especially the men. So while my relationship with God is personal, I can assure you that the BunnyRanch’s relationship with God is very good.”
    After the show I joked with Geraldo, saying I wanted an apology for that God comment, and he laughed it off. Then I told him that my girls would get naked if he apologized.
    When I got back to the time-share in San Diego, the management team called me on the carpet. They had seen my interview on Geraldo and they weren’t happy. They knew I owned a brothel, but they were worried that talking about it on national television was going to be bad for business. I had been worried about the same thing, but I’dlistened to the advice of two knowledgeable friends and had made my own decision. If I was going to blame anyone, it would be myself.
    That day we got three times the usual crowd. Many of them had seen the show and they were there to meet me. I sold more time-shares in one day than I had in the whole previous week. Publicity — I fucking loved it. God bless Al Goldstein! God bless Larry Flynt! They paved the way and I stumbled along, learning the rest.
    You’ve got to be available. You’ve got to be interesting, outrageous, and fun . You need to think about the angles because every reporter wants a fresh take on a story, but he’d rather not do the work himself. So it’s up to you to come up with those ideas. Here’s the message, and here’s how we’re going to get it across .
    The press isn’t interested in doing you any favors. You want exposure and they need content, and they’re not going to come to you. You have to sell yourself to them (it’s always about selling!) and controversy always sells. Goldstein and Flynt were masters of the game. They knew how to be outrageous, make noise, and get people talking.
    Back in those days, I relied on the media 100 percent. As I said, I couldn’t advertise, so I had to find ways to get myself noticed. Now, of course, we’ve got Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and web sites and message boards, but in those days even the expression “social media” didn’t exist, so you had to work real hard to get people to pay attention, and that’s exactly what I did. Sometimes opportunities dropped magically into my lap. The trick was to recognize them.
    One such opportunity involved John Wayne Bobbitt, whose wife, Lorena, had approached him in his sleep years earlier and severed his penis with a knife. Bobbitt wasn’t even on my radar until Ron Jeremy did a movie with him, John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut .(Bobbitt had had his penis reattached, and they were able to shoot it up with stuff to make it work for the film.) Shortly after the movie finished, I got a call from Ron. “You should hire John Bobbitt,” he said. “He’s a nice guy. You’d be helping him out.” Ron wasn’t even thinking of the publicity; for him it was a humanitarian gesture.
    So I flew Bobbitt to Nevada and let the press know about it. Three camera crews showed up on the very night he arrived. It was quite a story: A guy who’d had his penis cut off, hanging out in a brothel, surrounded by hot pussy. The first interviewer asked him how he was feeling, and Bobbitt got choked up and said, “I really want to get back with Lorena.” He went on about how much he still loved her and how the whole thing had been a terrible misunderstanding. As the interview drew to a close, he asked the reporter if he wanted to see his reattached dick. He then whipped it out and made sure the guy saw it from every possible angle.
    I wasn’t happy about this. When the reporter finally left, I took Bobbitt into the office and reamed him out. “Listen to me closely, John. Number one, this isn’t about poor John wanting to get back with his wife. This is about John getting some great pussy. BunnyRanch pussy. You understand what I’m telling you? This is a game, John, a