Part I-The Way it Was
  1   A Night in a Brothel  
  2   How Long Has This Been Going On?  
  3   Come Into My Parlor  
  4   Ladies of the House  
  5   Happy Hookers  
  6   Nut Cases  
  7   Little Sister  
  8   Marlene  
  9   Susan  
10   Alice  
11   Ellen, Ruth, Ed, and Lester  
12   The Men  
13   The "Other" Men  
14   Invasion of the Wireheads 
15   A Slo-Mo Day
16   They Also Serve: The Support Team
17   Winding Down and Summing Up

Part II—The Way It Is
18   The Resort  
19   The New Regime  
20   "How To"—A Brothel Primer for Newbies  
Appendix  
   What Do The Neighbors Say?
   Brothels Hardly Cause a Stir in Pahrump Valley
   When It Comes to Prostitution
   Prostitution Ban Fails
   No to Juvenile Prostitution

Turn Outs

Mini
     A tiny girl with long straight hair reaching past he r waist arrived at the Ranch directly from the County Health Department where she'd undergone her exam and blood work. She'd called from Maine several weeks before and after obtaining her vital statistics (height, weight, age, measurements, etc.) by phone and a fuzzy photo by fax, P.J., the office manager, hired her on a trial basis. She was a "turn out" (TO), new to prostitution and, especially, to the brothel scene. She'd have to serve a probationary period to see if it worked out for her and the house. Alice talked to her, got her story, and reported that this one was hard to call. The girl was alone and broke, her mother had recently died, she needed a place to go, and she was scared to death.
     The girl's real name was longer than she was tall so we immediately gave her the floor name "Mini." She was so raw and naive that when asked what experience she'd had in the sex industry, she blushingly admitted that she'd "done it" several times with her high school boyfriend in the back seat of his dad's car. Then, when she went to work clerking in a hardware store after graduation, she and her married supervisor, with whom she was hopelessly in love, "did it" in the back room after the store closed and everyone else went home.
     (P.J. didn't even look up before jotting down "No experience" on the data sheet she was filling out on Mini's background.)
     For three years, Mini and her boss copulated on top of cardboard boxes before word of the affair reached his wife; when it did, he not only dumped Mini, he fired her. She plunged into despair. Her mother, her only support system, had died a few months before. She began to drink heavily.
One night, very drunk, she staggered to her boss's house, stopping a couple of times along the way to vomit. By the time she reached her destination and rang the doorbell, her face was ravaged, vomitus drying on her lips and chin, running down the front of her coat, and clinging to clumps of her long tangled hair.
     The boss stared at her in disgust, his wife peering wide-eyed over his shoulder, a hand clamped to her mouth.
"Get the hell off my porch, you fuckin' bitch!" he screamed at Mini. "Why don't you go to a Nevada whorehouse now that you're looking your very best?" Then he slammed the door in her face.
     Mini took him seriously. She went to the library in her hometown and looked up "Brothels" in the Yellow Pages of the Las Vegas and Reno phone books. There were no listings for brothels, so she called the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce and a pleasant woman there advised Mini to call the 702 area code directory assistance and ask for the name and number of a brothel in Pahrump. It was that simple.
     Word spread quickly that there was a TO in the house. Most brothel veterans ignored TOs. The inexperienced first-timers might as well have been from a different planet, the way they stammered and blushed and stared at the floor in line-ups.
     "Turn-outs are a pain in the ass," the brothel owner told me shortly after I'd begun working at the ranch. "They come here with some naive notion that all they have to do is lie on their backs and count the money that rolls in as a result," she said, shaking her head sadly. "They think the johns are just grown-up, clean, polite versions of the boys they've bonked back home; that they smell of mouthwash and cologne and say, 'Thank you, ma'am,' when they climb off.
     "Then reality sets in and these kids are tested in ways they never imagined." She wrinkled her forehead and sighed. "Those who can stick it out make it. They're okay. They get strong. The others ..."
     I waited for her to finish her sentence, but she was silent.
     "What about the others?" I prompted.
     "They leave."
     "Where do they go? What happens to them?" I asked.
     She shrugged. "Who knows?"
     Still, there was something about a young TO's discomfiture and tremulous attempts to fit into a foreign and frightening world that stirred the maternal instincts of the older women. Alice gathered Mini to her bosom and offered to train her.
     I began to worry about Mini the moment I saw her. Except for the roundness of her breasts, she looked fourteen. A Lolita. She would appeal to the pedophiles, to the men who have incest fantasies about their adolescent daughters or granddaughters, men who would paw her with hot sweaty hands and drool and slobber on her fresh pale skin.
I dreaded the first time Mini was picked from a line-up. I didn't know if she could handle it. Two days later, I found out.
     Mini had arrived with one suitcase and a cardboard box. The clothes they contained were everyday Kmart nondescript. What she would wear at her new job never occurred to her and when she'd called from Maine, it never occurred to P.J. that Mini didn't have a clue.
     A purveyor of hooker clothes brings in a truckload to the brothel every other week and wheels several long racks into the family quarters. Clothes day is exciting at the Ranch. Like women everywhere, the girls try on dresses and tiny bikinis and frilly lingerie. They twirl and pose for each other amid squeals of delight and admiration. The madam stays busy getting the girls' personal-money envelopes out of the lock box and counting out payment for their purchases.
     It's a certainty that for the next line-up, every girl in the house will be wearing something new.
     But when Mini arrived, she had nothing suitable to wear and it would be another ten days before the clothes man returned. Some of the other girls each lent her an outfit until she could get her own. Their difference in height and weight didn't matter; most of the clothes were Spandex one-size-fits-all.
     The day Mini's medical tests were completed and she'd been cleared for work, Alice and Gwen prepared her for her first line-up. The two older girls preceded Mini to the office for my inspection. They stood on each side of the door and said, in unison, "We take great pleasure in introducing Miss Scarlett O'Hara."
     Mini stood framed in the doorway, looking for all the world like the red-clad Scarlett standing alone at the entrance to her beloved Ashley's ballroom in all her unforgettable, bare-shouldered, chin-held-high glory.
     The transformation of the down-in-the-mouth caterpillar into this magnificent butterfly was breathtaking. She was the texture of satin from head to toe: hair, eyes, skin, dress, shoes—everything about her glowed.
     The burgundy dress clung to her naturally firm high breasts, obviously not sculpted into globular upended soup bowls by a plastic surgeon's knife. The rest of her body was tiny but not bony and her waistline was a mere wisp.
     Mini's long silky hair was coiled on top of her head with one tendril falling just below her cheek, barely touching the clear porcelain skin she'd inherited from her Scandinavian mother. Her starling large eyes were the color of burnished pewter. Mini was a knockout.
     The customer barely glanced at the other girls in the line-up. His stare was fixed on Mini and my heart sank. He was grossly fat and smelled bad. He waddled toward the chair when I invited him to sit. His pants stretched tightly across monstrous thighs that rubbed against each other from groin to kneecap as he thrust his bulk forward, first to the left side, then to the right, crabbing like an airplane into a crosswind. He farted involuntarily when he dropped his bulk into the armchair. Seven girls had been in the line-up that evening. They all looked away the moment they caught a glimpse of the fat man, but he spotted Mini, pointed at her, and grunted.
     A story Page had told about an obese customer sprang to mind and my throat constricted in fear for Mini.
     "I had a fat trick one time," Page had said, "whose stomach hung so low over his dick that I couldn't find it. I had to push all that flesh up with my forearms and when I finally found his dick it was about the size of a pencil eraser. I made the guy hang on to his stomach with both hands so I could get a condom on him but the fat kept bubbling out from between his hands and covering his tiny dick. I had a hell of a time. Finally, I sat on his thighs and bent over double so that I could push against the middle of his belly with my head while he held back the sides with his hands.
     "But I was all bent in half with my head holding up his blubber. My neck was about to break. I had to raise my head to get the pressure off. When I did, that ton of fat came bursting through his hands and knocked me clean off him and backward off the bed into my closet. Thank God the closet door was open. My clothes broke my fall. I coulda broke my neck!"
     All of the girls who'd been in the game for a while had been through horrible experiences with obese men. And now, this one wanted Mini.
     She went through the preliminary motions automatically, expressionless, emotionless. She escorted the man into her room (after I'd pulled on his arm while he pushed his bulk out of the deep chair). She negotiated a price just as Alice had taught her. She explained, gently, that it would be necessary to check his 'private parts' and, because she was a novice, one of the more experienced girls would have to be present to ensure that Mini was performing the inspection correctly. He agreed.
     She'd summoned Alice to witness the inspection and, it turned out, help lift the fat and expose his genitals to the halogen lamp in her bathroom. She then thanked and dismissed Alice politely and invited the customer to undress.
     When Mini brought the money to me—four hundred dollars—she looked paler than usual and her mouth was set in a tight straight line. I knew she was in trouble.
     "Do you want me to get you out of this, Mini?" I asked. She shook her head no and returned to her room.
     During the next forty-five minutes, I walked by Mini's bedroom door several times listening for anything alarming. There was nothing except the usual sex noises. I was even tempted to push the intercom button and listen in for a minute, but I couldn't do it. Being fat doesn't deprive people of their right to privacy. But, oh God, I wished she would finish and come out of there!
     When Mini emerged, she called me to let her customer out of the building. When I reached the parlor, Mini's customer stood waiting, but she was nowhere in sight. I sent him on his way and went to Mini's door. It was open a crack in conformance with the rules. When a girl's door was fully closed it meant she had a customer with her.          
     Sometimes, when the house was jammed, the position of the door was the only way we could tell who was busy.
     Mini's room was dark. I could only see a tiny figure sitting on the side of the bed, but I could hear her sobs clearly.
     "May I come in?" I asked. She sobbed consent.
     I wanted to gather her into my arms and soothe her, but I didn't dare. Mini hadn't been in the business long enough to distinguish between a loving non-sexual touch, a paid-for sexual touch, and a violation of her private person. I sat next to her on the edge of the bed. Her face was in her hands and, by the sliver of light coming in from the hall, I could see tears running through her fingers and splashing onto the floor. My heart ached for her.
     Then Mini wound her arms around my neck and buried her wet make-up-smeared face in my beige silk blouse and I didn't care. I held her and rocked back and forth, murmuring, "It's all right, baby, it's all right," over and over again.
     Mini wept until her chest convulsed in great spasms, then slowly quieted.
     We sat there, two women from different worlds, spanning the breadth of a continent and three generations, come together in the darkened room of a brothel, holding each other in silence now, rocking through the inexpressible pain.
     Mini didn't make it. She left within the month and vanished off the face of the Earth.
     Only the memory of Mini lingers and rises up to constrict my throat every time I welcome a new TO to the house. Well, almost every time.

A Madam's-Eye View of a Legal Nevada Brothel

     Sex is for sale 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in Nevada's legal brothels. Former madam Lora Shaner takes you into the parlor—and bedroom—of Sheri's Ranch, in this compelling account of the sex-for-money culture.
     You'll read about Mary Clair, the nun turned prostitute; Ellen, the errant wife; Coral and Millie, the happy-hooker tag team; Alice, the pro with the heart of gold; and the turn outs, part-timers, sex addicts, adventure-seekers, and other ladies of the house.
     You'll also meet the cathouse clientele: Lester the rodeo rider, who liked to warm up by playing horsey; Mr. Yamamura, who paid thousands for three minutes of pleasure; and Golf Guy, who employed Sheri's girls to help him perfect his stroke; as well as the hunks, nerds, pimps, cheapos, professional athletes, and other customers who ring the brothel doorbell at all hours.
     Madam's piercing character studies and poignant sketches of day-to-day life in a legal brothel strip bare the myths about the world's oldest profession, revealing the hearts and souls of the women who sell sex—and the men who buy it.

Las Vegas City Life, Midwest Book Review, Wisconsin Bookwatch, News Journal, Gaming Today, Las Vegas Sun, Las Vegas Review Journal, Las Vegas Weekly, Woman's Own, Bikini, Penthouse

“… Riveting … Shaner is a confident writer … Madam is the next best thing to visiting a whorehouse.”
     —Penthouse

“… highly recommended reading …”
    —Midwest Book Review

“The most comprehensive work on the Nevada brothel industry, as well as the most entertaining.”
     —Las Vegas Weekly