The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (23 page)

But why leave? A girl can make two thousand a week without breaking a sweat. She works a little harder, she’ll double that. And if she comes to understand that it’s largely about a
satisfied, repeat customer,
she is going to make ten to twenty thousand a week. The real superstars, like Brooke Taylor, work three or four days a month and make a healthy six-figure income. She sees her regulars, works the message board, and creates her own schedule — and all of that is by
design
. Brooke has been at the BunnyRanch for close to nine years and I don’t see her leaving anytime soon.

I am often asked, “Is prostitution work or exploitation?” And my answer has never changed: “I’m sure there’s plenty of exploitation in prostitution, but not at any of my establishments.” My girls are independent contractors. They are here to work. If they can have fun while they’re here — and most of them do — all the better. But they shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this is a job, and that they are here to make money. I always tell the girls, “I may not be the smartest guy in the world, but I’ve always worked harder than the next guy and that’s why I’m successful.”

I ask them, “How much money do you want to make? A quarter million? I’m going to tell you what you have to do to make that. Want to make a half a million? I’m going to tell you how to take it to the next level. If you just want to make a quick fifty thousand to pay off your college loans, that’s fine, too — and I’ll show you how to make it in the shortest possible time. That way, you can make your money and go home to your old life.”

I ask the girls, “Do you think this is a good job?” I answer the question myself. “No, it’s not a good job. A good job is working at the bank for forty hours a week. You’ve got a regular schedule, all sorts of guaranteed benefits, and you know you’re going to have time for your friends and family. You’re probably going to be scrambling to make ends meet every month, and you might have to put that vacation on hold for a third straight year, but it’s a good job.”

BunnyRanch is a different animal. You’re in charge. You can stay for a month, then go home and buy a new car to replace the one that died, or you can stay for six months and pay off your mortgage. But you can also play for bigger stakes. You can work the BunnyRanch chat room, for example, reach out to potential clients, and even post videos of yourself. Before long, you’re a known entity. Clients come in looking for
you
. Word gets out. Three, four, five years later, you have a million dollars in the bank, you invest it, and at five percent interest, you never have to work again. If you buckle down, use my sales techniques, and get motivated, you can spend the rest of your life on a beach in Hawaii. Not every girl reaches that level of success, of course, but plenty do. Two or three a year. And those are pretty good odds, be it in a brothel or in the civilian world.

So no, it’s not a good job. But you can make a lot of money in a short period of time and you can use that money to pursue music, or your acting career, or to start a dance school or a riding academy, or whatever moves you, and many of my girls have done those things and more. Or you can do nothing. I ask the girls, “Why do you work?” I answer my own question: “You work so you don’t have to work anymore. You work so that some day soon you can work at something you might like more than working at a brothel. So never lose sight of the goal. The goal is to be free.”

The fact is, prostitution is just like the time-share business. You’re not selling a condo on the beach. You’re selling your body — albeit briefly — so it’s even more important to believe in yourself. Like I said,
If you believe, they will believe.
That’s the message I used to drum into my sales team and it’s the message I share with my girls every single day.

I do it in my own life, too. I get out of bed in the morning and I think,
It’s good to be alive. It’s good to be me. Let’s grab today by the balls
.

Selling is largely about being positive. People are attracted to energy. That’s what they want to connect to — that energy — and that’s what’s going to make the sale. With the time-shares, as I said, I would urge my team not to say a single word about the property until they had made that connection. With the girls, I say pretty much the same thing. “Don’t start talking about money until his dick is hard.” You want a chance to get him hard? Well, the lineup is your chance. Make that guy believe you were put on this earth to take his sex life to a whole new level. And how do you do that? By believing it yourself. Conceive = Achieve.

Of course, I try to make it fun. “Okay, ladies. I want each one of you to think about your monthly budget. How many hand jobs is it going to take to cover your utilities? Two? Three? What about your car payments? How many blow jobs are going to cover those hot new wheels? Lots of you have mortgages. Monique here just took out a jumbo loan — that’s an anal for sure.”

I make it fun, but I also set goals for them. You don’t just come to work to work. You come to work for a reason. And it should be a very specific reason. A new car. A vacation in Bali. A present for your mother.
Freedom
. The average human being has a hard time getting motivated. Some people never get motivated. I don’t want any unmotivated girls on my sales team. I’m happy to give them a chance and I’m happy to give them direction, and I’m there for them if they need advice. But once I show them the way, they need to do the rest.

Fact is, some of them never get motivated. They get comfortable. They get lazy. They lose sight of the fact that they are here to work. But the ones that work hard are recognized for their contribution
every single week in front of the sales team. They outperformed all the other girls and they’re going to get a little something extra for their hard work. Daddy Dennis and Mommy Suzette have a present for them. Might be a Louis Vuitton bag, a new MacBook Air, a cell phone, or a portable TV. I tend to tailor it to what I know the girl has been dreaming about. They can all afford these things on their own, of course, but it’s always nice to get a gift — especially from Daddy — and it tends to motivate the entire crew. This happens every week. We celebrate success. We turn it into a ceremony. Sure, everyone is driven by money, but a pat on the back is nice, too. It makes us feel good about ourselves. The girls who have a positive mental attitude and positive self-expectations are the ones who succeed.

Air Force Amy is practically the
definition
of a hard worker. If I say, “The girl who is first to book $50,000 this month gets this bottle of water,” Amy will get the bottle of water. It’s all about winning with Amy, and that attitude is what has made her the probably the most successful working girl of all time. And she inspires the other girls with her attitude. That’s who you want on the team.

When the girls do well, we all do well. The shift manager gets a piece of the action. The bartender gets a piece. Suzette feels good because she’s done her job. And then of course there’s me, because I didn’t get into this business simply to get laid.

There’s an old saying: “All work is prostitution.” Well, unless you truly love your work, as I do, that’s pretty much true. I’m not asking my girls to love their work, but I do expect them to love their work while they’re working for me. The girls who can do that are unstoppable. The others — well, I can’t invest the time if they aren’t going to be true partners. I’m giving them an opportunity to make money at the best brothel in the world and I am happy to have them
here. But if they won’t work hard, if they aren’t happy, and if they can’t provide the kind of five-star service that we’ve become known for, they need to move aside and make room for a working girl that is ready to do all of that and more. Those are the girls I put my time and energy into, the hard workers. I tell them what it takes to succeed, even though I know that the first time we talk they’ll only retain about ten percent of what I’m trying to teach them. The second time, they get about thirty percent. And after four or five times, they get it completely. I make them listen. And the smart ones learn how to listen. Not the ones who drink too much, not the ones who have no energy, and not the ones who can’t break free of their abusive husbands and boyfriends. That’s the way it works in real life, too. The people who succeed are smart about their choices and aren’t afraid of hard work.

I get another question all the time, and it’s this: “What kind of girl becomes a prostitute?” Well, all sorts of girls. But if I’m going to be honest, some of them come from pretty fucked-up families. I’ve had plenty of girls who were abused. Air Force Amy will tell you about a guy in the neighborhood who tried to get her to fuck him for half a pack of cigarettes when she was barely ten. And Sunset was giving blow jobs and getting gang-banged and molested by her own brother before she had even reached puberty. I’ve had girls who send their money home to their abusive husbands, or worse, to pimps, or — even worse — to their
fathers.
I remember one girl who wanted to go to dental school but gave up her dream to support her mother’s crack habit and another girl, Natasha, a hot half-Russian chick who was married to a seriously crazy Colombian. One night Natasha was in their house in Cincinnati all by her lonesome, when she heard a noise and went down to investigate. She found three black guys in the kitchen who grabbed her and dragged her into
the family room and began to rip off her clothes. Natasha, terrified, begged for mercy, but the guys were really into it. “We know what you want, bitch. We know you’re a sick girl.” Then a cell phone rang and one of the guys answered and talked for a moment before handing the phone to Natasha. “It’s for you,” he said. The other two were still holding her down, but they let her take the call. It was her husband, the Colombian, who was out of town on business. “These guys are going to gang rape you and I’m going to listen,” he said. “This is one of my fantasies.”

Natasha absolutely fell apart, screaming and sobbing. “You motherfucker! You piece of shit!” It kind of scared the guys. Suddenly they realized she hadn’t been acting, that her husband had lied to them. This craziness about being raped by three black guys was
his
fantasy, not hers. They apologized and took the fuck off. You know the saddest part of the story? I spent hours with Natasha, telling her she had to leave the son of a bitch, that it was going to end badly, and just when I thought I was getting through to her she went back to Cincinnati and they renewed their wedding vows.

These are all sad, sad stories, but you’re going to hear sad stories at Starbucks, too. And the boring truth is that a vast majority of the girls come from nice, normal, well-adjusted families. The big difference is trying to get the girls to understand that
we
are a family, and that within reason, we will do what we can to help.

Every Thursday, for example, we have a tea party at the BunnyRanch. The tea party is Suzette’s baby, but I love it and only miss it if I’m out of town. The girls get dressed up in fancy outfits, like regular ladies only wilder, and tea is served. Suzette opens the proceedings by asking the girls to air their grievances. The complaints tend to be pretty routine. This girl doesn’t like that girl for “x” reason. Another girl is accused of poaching clients. A third is a bitch from hell. And so on and so forth. Or it can be about something
else entirely. One of the girls isn’t getting enough weekend shifts. Another likes the meals we provide, but she doesn’t feel she’s getting enough fresh vegetables. So we talk it out openly, and keep it under control. Catfights are not tolerated at my cathouses and we do our best to keep the problems under control by giving everyone a voice. I think the tea party is critical to our success and I find it hard to believe that so few businesses in America give their employees a chance to be heard. If your people aren’t happy — if they’re not heard — your business is going to suffer. A happy employee is a productive employee. I know this firsthand because the happy girls are the girls doing the lion’s share of the business. And that makes everyone happy, especially them, and most especially Daddy.

Once everyone has had a chance to air their grievances and the tea party begins to wind down, we introduce the new girls and we do our best to make them feel welcome. Many of them are new to the business. They are understandably nervous — maybe even a little terrified — but the seasoned girls are generally very supportive, having been through that exact same experience themselves, whether a year ago, ten years ago, or, in Amy’s case, almost thirty years ago.

And there are learning bumps along the way. A girl’s first lineup tends to be nerve-racking. If she doesn’t get picked, she might panic a little or feel unattractive, and if it happens a second time and a third, she begins to take it personally. I always tell them to give it time. Sooner or later, they will get picked. Some guy is going to walk through that front door and think that she is the hottest, most beautiful woman he has ever seen and he will be the first of many.

Still, those first few days can be scary. Maybe there’s a girl in there who one Halloween, at age seven, ripped off her fairy princes costume, stomped on it, and screeched at her mother, “I don’t want to be a fairy princess again! This year I want to go as a hooker!” But
I doubt it.

That said, this is where these girls ended up and many of them are happy to be here.

The tea parties always end on a high note, with each of the girls taking a moment to say something positive about their week. That’s my favorite part because I’m a positive person. But the tea party is just a small part of life at the ranch. We have dinners out, we play board games, we go bowling, we have karaoke night, and Suzette’s even got a little knitting-circle going. (I own more than my share of lovingly hand-crafted “testicle warmers.”) We also celebrate each girl’s birthday by drinking champagne and bringing out the spanking bench, with everyone getting a shot at the birthday girl’s behind. We have costume parties — I came as Little Bo Peep once and took first prize — and we always have a blast on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I take both of those holidays very seriously because this is my family and many of the girls have no real families of their own, or they do have families but would prefer not to be with them, and I want to be here,
with
them, and
for
them.