Free Brothel by Alexa Albert

she said, was a cartoonthat showed a prostitute being called to the rescue of a man found unconscious on a beach with an erect penis. She watched my face for a reaction. I smiled cautiously, unable to read her own attitude toward the cartoon and not wanting to offend. I must not have, because from that moment on, she and I exchanged pleasantries whenever I visited Mustang #1.
    Donna and I frequently ate dinner at the same time, and the night she confided in me, she and I were sitting alone in Mustang’s kitchen. Over lasagna and garlic bread, we bantered about the weather, nearby Reno, the casinos. Then, apropos of nothing, she mentioned that her husband couldn’t get a job, “because it’s hard for someone his age.” He was forty-two years old, she said, playing nervously with her wedding band. I wondered where the conversation was headed.
    Donna went on to confess, almost apologetically, that she’d never planned to become a prostitute. “One day he came into the kitchen where I was preparing dinner,” she said softly. “He said he thought I should start working to support our family. We had all this debt, plus house payments.”
    At twenty-three, Donna had a five-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl. Aside from baby-sitting as a teenager, the only job she had ever held was as a receptionist in a Reno insurance agency.
    “But then he told me he wanted me to work at Mustang Ranch,” she said. “He knew several guys whose girlfriends worked there from time to time and earned good money. Of course, I knew what Mustang Ranch was—I’ve lived in this area my whole life.” She couldn’t conceal a fleeting grimace.
    She said she cried for a week and asked her husband overand over whether he really wanted her to become a prostitute. He explained the moral and ethical issues as he saw them: he knew she loved him, and he believed that she wouldn’t be attracted to the clientele, so it was fine with him. Tearfully, she said she would do whatever he wanted. “Deep down, I didn’t think he’d really make me go through with it.” She let out a disheartened sigh before recovering her shy smile.
    When I met her, Donna had been working at Mustang for one and a half years. She lived at the brothel for a couple of weeks at a time, always returning home with a good deal of money in her purse. Cash was no longer a problem for her family. To go home to her kids and husband, she needed to earn at least $4,000, to cover the monthly bills. Her husband had been incrementally increasing her quota by a couple of hundred dollars over the past several months. I would come to see this vicious cycle frequently, of prostitutes increasing their cost of living with every dollar earned. Consequently, women who had planned to prostitute only briefly found themselves trapped in the business even though they had surpassed their original financial goals.
    Until then, out of deference to the women, I had been careful not to pry or try to get too personal. So I was surprised when of her own volition Donna felt compelled to answer the question that was most on my mind: How did you get here? Judging from the questions asked prostitute guests on talk show programs and of me by family members, it was also the question that most preoccupied mainstream America. It was a variant of the “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place likethis?” cliché, asked of any woman who resists the social restrictions that govern most of us and who is involved in types of behavior we normally classify as “taboo.” It’s as if knowing the answer, we can reassure ourselves that we’ll never walk in their shoes.
    Prostitutes have been cast as victimizers and victims, as dead to the pleasure of sex and as too alive to it. Whatever else, they have always been Other, sufficiently unlike the rest of us as to evoke sympathy, not empathy. Usually with the best of intentions, psychologists pathologize prostitutes by suggesting sweeping causative associations