Free Brothel by Alexa Albert Page B

covered the nipples, and matching “tulip” shorts, cut to expose bothbuttocks cheeks, Brittany stuck with knee-length cocktail dresses. I couldn’t get over how much she resembled an old high school friend of mine. Brittany kept her distance from me for a couple of days, then approached me one afternoon in the Mustang bar. To break the ice, I asked her how the brothels had changed over the eleven years she had worked in them. She mentioned how the previously obligatory three weeks on/one week off work schedule had been relaxed, and how the house minimums had gone up from $30 when she started to $100. And of course, she said, the brothels used to require women to have pimps. Startled, I asked her to repeat herself. I had assumed one of the benefits of legalized prostitution was the elimination of pimps.
    Realizing that no one had yet let me in on this well-kept dirty secret, Brittany reiterated that the brothels used to require women to have pimps before they were hired. The rationale was simple. The involvement of pimps enabled brothel owners to leave discipline to men who wouldn’t hesitate to keep their women in line. Brittany said it wasn’t unusual for an owner like Joe Conforte to collect all the pimps’ phone numbers, and call them whenever a girl misbehaved to come “straighten her out real quick.” All too frequently, Brittany said, “straightening out” involved brute force. Owners also benefited from the pimps’ relentless demands that the women earn more and more money.
    Meanwhile, pimps found much appeal in placing their prostitutes in Nevada’s brothels, despite having to relinquish half of the women’s earnings to owners. For one, the pimpscould be assured their prostitutes would be supervised and attended to. Once extricated from the burdens inherent to managing working girls illegally, these men were free to seduce other women into the trade. A pimp could keep track of his prostitute’s business simply by calling the brothel and speaking with the cashier or a manager, who freely disclosed the women’s earnings. He frequently kept abreast of his prostitutes’ daily conduct by putting all his working girls together in the same brothel and encouraging them to snitch on one another.
    Even though the brothels no longer required women to have pimps, many of Mustang’s working girls still did, confided Brittany in a hushed tone. How many women? I asked, incredulous. Brittany glanced quickly around the room and let out a sigh before replying that almost all the girls did, in her opinion. Those without pimps, she said, included herself, Baby, Dinah, and a few others. With disbelief, I briefly surveyed the room. Why on earth would these legal prostitutes need pimps? Off the unsafe streets, they surely didn’t need a pimp’s protection. Weren’t the women already giving up a significant portion of their money to the house? The brothels functioned as stand-in pimps. Most of the women had portrayed themselves as tough and independent-minded women who viewed prostitution simply as a job, a way to earn a living. I hadn’t detected any signs of coercion. And I had never heard any of the other women talking about pimps.
    Brittany wasn’t surprised to learn this. None of the women would’ve wanted to admit aloud to being exploited, to givingup their hard-earned money to a man when the brothel already extracted half their earnings. Moreover, Brittany said, most of these women denied that their pimps
were
pimps, considering them “boyfriends” and “friends.” She had reason to know, she said; she’d once had a pimp herself. “God forbid if you ever called him a pimp. It wasn’t even in your vocabulary. It was like a bad word,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, if you’re sending your money to a man who wouldn’t be with you if you weren’t sending him money, then he’s not your boyfriend, he’s your pimp. Still, it took me a year after I left Bobby to be able to call him my