The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (27 page)

From time to time, I’d invite a reporter in to watch the filming and to talk to the girls, and I remember one day in particular. My friend Erich “Mancow” Muller, the Chicago shock-jock, flew in to do a story about the TV series. He was worried, though. “Dennis, I’m married now,” he said. “I can’t do anything. I don’t know if I can handle the temptation.” And I said, “You can handle it. You don’t have to do anything. Just come out. It’ll be a good time.” So he flew out and we put him in one of our VIP suites and he was walking around, watching the girls at work, and found himself at the bar, chatting with two of my hot girls and a transgender guy. And I don’t know what the hell happened, but suddenly he ran out of the place, never to be seen again. I think he went straight back to Chicago and walked into his house and hugged his wife and told her he loved her.

We had a good laugh about it later. To this day he calls me the Devil. “You can’t tempt me, Dennis,” he always tells me. “I will not go down that road.” I kept trying to tempt him, though. From time to time I would send him pictures of my hot girls, but he would not be seduced. The guy must really love his wife.

Meanwhile, sometime around the end of that first season, Showtime aired a TV movie called
The Ranch
. It was obviously based on the BunnyRanch, or on their interpretation of the ranch, and it really wasn’t very good. They had gone ahead with their idea for a scripted series and ended up with one cliché after another. Everything they thought they knew about prostitutes they had learned by watching movies or television, so of course they got it all wrong. They hadn’t dug deep enough to produce a truly compelling or realistic show. But how could they? They knew nothing about the business.

I thought about all the great stories they had left out. Just a week earlier, Ron Jeremy had come to the ranch with a group of Hollywood producers. When the girls lined up, one of the producers went into shock. “What the fuck are you doing here?!” he shouted. To everyone’s great surprise, one of the girls was his daughter. They went out by the pool and had it out, and when the shouting ended, they made a deal:
You don’t tell Mom, I won’t tell Mom
. It reminded me of that long ago deal I had made with my own father.

I could have shared plenty of other similarly touching family stories. Another girl was in the lineup when her uncle showed up with the family friend that had been around to watch her grow up — her very favorite person in the whole wide world. Turns out he had been wanting to fuck that little girl forever and that night his dream came true. Not a pretty story, no — but not all of them are. I could have also told them about the guy who showed up to find his stepsister working at the ranch. They were both in shock. Their two
families had merged when she was still in diapers and here they were, twenty years later, not believing this crazy coincidence. That story had a better ending, though. She packed her bags and left with her stepbrother and last I heard they were married and happy.

I had another story so good I knew it would have made the show’s final cut. I got a call one day from a trusted aide to a powerful, influential politician. The politician had some “needs,” and the aide walked me through them. Two weeks later, I found myself in the middle of a cloak-and-dagger operation. I had to send a limo to the airport to pick up the politician, who was in disguise. I had to let him into the BunnyRanch through the private entrance reserved for men like him. And then I had to personally escort him to one of the VIP suites, which had been modified to meet his requirements. There was a closet in the room that had been turned into a prison cell. Two girls were waiting and they cuffed and gagged him and put him in the cell and taunted him from across the room while they had sex. When he got too hot and bothered, they would pause and douse him with buckets of cold water. And when he begged for mercy, they let him out, still cuffed, and took turns fucking him in the ass with a giant dildo. This is a guy you see on national television every week, going on about family values, and he had more than his fair share of unresolved issues. Maybe when you wield as much power as he did, you need to be brought down a peg or two once in a while. My girls did that and more, and two months later he was back for an encore.

Some weeks passed and I ran into one of the Showtime executives at a party at the Playboy Mansion. “Remember me?”

I said, “Yeah, I remember you,” he said. “And please don’t say ‘I told you so,’ because I’ve been hearing that from my staff every day since
Cathouse
started airing.”

Lex Staley & Terry Jaymes

LEX: Our relationship goes back more than a dozen years, to the release of the first
Cathouse
. Dennis is basically the P. T. Barnum of Sex, a master of promotion, and we were a good fit from the start. Dennis has the ability to make sex fascinating. He’ll tell you everything you want to know and more. He’ll tell you stuff you don’t want to know. Most people are very careful about their brand, but Dennis doesn’t believe in boundaries. He’ll find a thirty-year-old guy who has never had sex, and who has been told he will never get laid, and Dennis will make it happen. And when it’s over, the two of them will come on the show and talk about that “magical” experience, in great detail. Ninety-eight percent of Dennis’s business is for regular guys, but out of the goodness of his heart Dennis also runs a small charity for the sexually challenged.

TERRY: We’ve actually sent callers to the BunnyRanch. We do a regular bit on the show called “Who’s More Pathetic?”
It’s basically “simple people answering simple questions,” and we had one guy who’d had a stroke and had an odd speech impediment but was actually very, very funny. When we found out he hadn’t been with a girl for a long time, we sent him to the BunnyRanch, and Dennis’s girls took care of him. He didn’t come out of the room looking and sounding like James Bond, but I’m told he was grinning and very happy.

LEX: That’s the other thing about Dennis. He knows men aren’t just cocks with no feelings. Most guys think they’re going to go to a brothel, put it inside a girl, come in two minutes, and get sent home. Then they meet one of Dennis’s girls and it’s not like that at all. These girls really are about giving the guy a memorable experience, and Dennis created that, which is genius. When a guy leaves one of Dennis’s brothels, he’s sated and happy. That’s what keeps them coming back, and that’s why Dennis and his girls make so much fucking money.

TERRY: I’m sure everybody’s talked to you about his generosity and his kind heart and everything else, but I’ll be honest with you: Dennis scares the living shit out of me. I consider myself a pretty good guy, but I know that if I ever spent too much time with Dennis I’d probably turn into a raging sex addict. Dennis is like a dark angel who wants you to fuck everybody, but he’s so lovable you don’t notice until it’s too late. Dennis would be a bad, bad influence.

LEX: What do they expect? He’s owns a whorehouse, for Christ’s sake. What do his girlfriends expect?

TERRY: I thought I had a cool life until I met Dennis. He’s one of the nicest, most generous guys I’ve ever met, but he still scares the shit out of me. If one of your friends is meeting Dennis for the first time, you want to warn him: “Please, whatever you do, don’t get in the car with Dennis. Don’t go anywhere with Dennis. No good can come of this.”

LEX: I actually want to spend more time with Dennis. I’ve never been to the BunnyRanch, but I recently got divorced and I’m seeing someone who is open to the idea of visiting the ranch. I think there are a number of things she’d like to try, like having one of those hot girls go down on her, and I’m certainly open to letting her enjoy new experiences.

TERRY: As long as you get to watch.

THERE WAS ANOTHER IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENT
during this period in my life. At the time, I had two sisters working at the BunnyRanch. They owned an actual ranch in Elko, Nevada, a cattle ranch, and they took turns running it. Each girl would spend two weeks at my ranch and then go back to the actual ranch, trading places. They loved their cattle ranch and needed the money to keep the place afloat. Anyway, they had a border collie that had just given birth and all except one of the puppies had been spoken for. I told them I wanted that puppy, but they put me through the third degree. They said border collies needed to be busy and they wanted to know how I intended to keep him busy, so I took them out to see my ranch in Washoe Valley and they loved the place. “Forty acres! This is exactly what he needs.” The next time they came down from
Elko, they brought the puppy and I fell in love with him the moment I saw him. He was black and white and reminded me of a domino, so that’s what I called him: Domino.

This was toward the end of 2001 while we were shooting
Cathouse,
and Domino had a few uncredited walk-ons. He was a natural and I fell madly in love with him.

It got to the point where I began to hate leaving town. Domino would get major separation anxiety. Sometimes I’d have the driver take him to the airport with me so we could spend a little extra time together, but that only made it worse. We’d be halfway there and Domino already knew what was coming, so he’d turn his face to the far window, away from me. I’d try to reach over and pet him and he’d pull away, pissed. And when we finally got to the airport and I opened the door to get out of the car, he’d turn and give me one last look, a very hostile look, as if to say,
Fuck you, motherfucker. How dare you leave me alone?

When I got back to town, I often asked the driver to bring Domino to the airport, and when I got in the car Domino would give me major attitude. Seriously, he wouldn’t even look at me. I’d sweet-talk him on the way back to the ranch, telling him what I’d been up to and how much I missed him, and at the halfway mark he usually softened and came close and nuzzled my hand. That would be his way of telling me I was forgiven; that we were friends again; that I was an asshole for leaving him but that he still loved me
.

BEFORE
CATHOUSE
AIRED,
a terrible thing happened that had nothing to do with the show. My friend Glen Heggstad, one of the toughest and best guys I know, decided to celebrate his upcoming fiftieth birthday by riding his motorcycle from Palm Springs to Tierra del Fuego, at the southernmost tip of South America. He made it through Mexico and Central America, but when he got to
Colombia he was taken hostage by guerrillas. Now, I love this guy. He’s one of the toughest sons of bitches you’ll ever meet — he’s a former Hells Angel and a quadruple black belt in judo and I don’t know what the hell else — and I didn’t think the Feds were doing enough to try to rescue him, so I began putting together a team of mercenaries to bring him back. The Feds weren’t exactly thrilled and they made it very clear. “We don’t condone ransom,” one of them told me.

“Really?” I said, getting riled. “I don’t give a fuck what you condone or don’t condone. I don’t care who we pay, and I don’t care who we kill, and I don’t give a fuck about you or about the government. Glen is one of my best friends and I want to see him again — 
alive
. Am I making myself clear, motherfucker?”

That exchange almost landed me in prison and to this day I get upset just thinking about the experience. In fact, I don’t want to think about it. I’m going to let Glen tell you the story.