The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (35 page)

Business was down fifty percent, but I wouldn’t let that affect my spirits or theirs. The fact is, business was worse at all of the other ranches and I saw this as an opportunity. I ended up paying $800,000 for the Cherry Patch, a ranch that less than a decade earlier had sold for $2.5 million. Then I bought the Sagebrush, which had sold some years prior for $6 million. I offered the owner $2.5 million in cash, but he turned me down, only to call six months later to say he had changed his mind. But so had I, I told him. My original offer was no longer on the table. I said I would give him $2 million, half up front, in cash, and that the second million would be paid from the profits that his former working girls would now be generating on my behalf. He took the deal.

BROOKE, MEANWHILE,
continued to work at the BunnyRanch and we kept it friendly — sometimes too friendly — but we both knew there was no going back. I missed her, though. And I hated being single.

As luck would have it, I got contacted through the message board by a girl in Michigan, Krissy Summers. She had written to tell me that she’d been watching
Cathouse
since she was sixteen, that she was a huge fan, and that she’d heard that Brooke and I had broken up. I called her and introduced myself. She sounded hot. “I’ve watched you on
Cathouse
,” she said. “I’ve watched every interview you’ve ever given, and I think you’re the greatest. I want to go out with you.”

“How old are you?” I asked. “Nineteen,” she said.

I asked her to send me some pictures, took one look at them, and immediately called Judy, my assistant. I had her send Krissy a first-class airline ticket to Los Angeles and made arrangements to take her to a party at the Playboy Mansion. She never showed up in Los Angeles and she never called to explain why, and I was pissed. I don’t like being single and now I was single and on my way to the Playboy Mansion without a date. I called Judy. “Take that fucking girl’s phone number and e-mail address out of our database,” I snarled.

Judy could see I was pretty upset and tried to make excuses for her. “Maybe something happened,” she said.

“I don’t give a shit,” I said. “If something happened, she should have had the decency to call. I never want to hear her name again.”

I went to the Playboy Mansion by myself and the first thing I saw were two Playmates dancing on the stage. One of them saw me too, and waved me over. I couldn’t resist. When I reached her side, she stopped dancing, shook my hand, and told me she was a huge fan. “Who are you here with?” she asked.

“You,” I said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

I ended up fucking her on top of the clothes dryer in the basement of the Playboy Mansion’s laundry room and I came so hard my legs buckled. All I could think was,
Thank you, Krissy
!

THE NEXT DAY,
Ron and I went to Koreatown for a foot massage. I still missed Brooke, I was pissed at Krissy, and Ron could see I was in a bad place. “You want me to get you laid tonight?” he asked.

“Ron,” I said. “I own a brothel. I don’t need your help getting laid.” Then I got a call. I reached for my cell phone, and it slipped
out of my hands and fell into the tub of water, plop! — right next to my soaking feet. I was really pissed, and all my pain and frustration suddenly found an outlet: “FUCK!” I shouted at the top of my voice, and everyone in the place turned around to look at me.

On the drive back to my hotel, Ron kept needling me. “I know how upsetting it is to lose a cell phone. You put your heart and soul into it. You tell it your deepest, darkest secrets. There’s nothing your cell phone doesn’t know about you, including the things you won’t tell all the girlfriends you won’t marry. Then one day, without warning, your phone jumps out of your hands and drowns itself just to get away from you. That must hurt.”

“I’m not in the mood for this,” I said.

“I hope you’re in a better mood tomorrow,” he said.

THE NEXT DAY
Ron and I had a lunch meeting with some TV executives. They thought we had an interesting relationship and they wanted to try to build a show around us. We were like
The Odd Couple
, they said, but way better because we were surrounded by pussy.

I had a morning appointment, so Ron and I decided to meet the executives at a restaurant of their choice. I got there before Ron did, and shook hands with everyone. One of the executives was inconsiderate enough to say he’d read about my breakup with Brooke on the TMZ website. “Oh, I’m over it,” I said. “When one of my relationships ends, I fuck two or three girls a day for the next five days and I’m done. I’m a new man.” They all thought this was wonderful, and they wished they had my life, but I felt like shit. I was just catering to them, selling them a version of me that they (and everybody else) wanted to believe. Dennis was too cool to care. Dennis got more pussy than anyone on the planet. Dennis was The Man.

Just then Ron showed up. There was another round of handshakes, and then Ron turned to me with a big smile. “I bought you something,” he said. He pulled a brand-new cell phone out of his pocket and reached across the table to hand it to me, but it slipped through his fingers and fell into his water glass. Plop! I was in shock until Ron started laughing. The cell phone was a fake and Ron had pulled that little stunt to fuck with me. The executives thought this was very funny. “You see,” one of them said. “That’s what we mean. You guys have a unique and very special relationship.”

We ordered lunch — Ron
over
-ordered, as usual — and then got down to business. “One of our ideas is to have Ron run for mayor of a town somewhere, for real, and for you, Dennis, to be his campaign manager. You are a truly gifted salesman and we thought it would be very entertaining to see you trying to sell Ron, a porn star, to the local population.”

I thought that sounded mildly interesting, but Ron didn’t like it. “Why can’t we just be us?” he said. “The cameras would just follow us around while we do what we always do. Go to parties, eat, go to clubs, eat, get some pussy, eat.”

“That’s interesting,” one executive said, but you could see he didn’t mean it.

“I think people would love it,” Ron said. “Dennis and I are the happiest couple we know.”

WHEN I GOT BACK TO
the ranch after that disastrous visit, a funny thing happened. There was a guy who had been a customer at the BunnyRanch since I’d first remodeled the place; let’s call him Fred. He was a prison guard and a little on the quiet side. The girls all knew him and liked him well enough, and treated him like family. He wasn’t a big spender, but he wasn’t cheap either. Every time
he partied with a girl, he would tell her the same thing: “I want to marry you and take you home with me. I want to give you a good life.” All the girls humored him, knowing better than to take him seriously, but one day one of the girls came to me and said, “I think I’m going to marry Fred.”

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I think I’m going to marry Fred,” she repeated. “For the past fifteen years, his fantasy has been to marry a working girl.”

So I told her, “Honey, it’s just a
fantasy
. We’ve been entertaining that same fantasy for fifteen years, and that’s all it is, a fantasy.”

But the girl had her own fantasy. “Nobody’s ever asked me to marry him,” she said. “I think I want to do it.”

And I said, “Well, how do you know he’s going to be a good provider? The guy comes in here and spends five hundred dollars a pop, which is fine, but I don’t want you running off with a man who isn’t going to be able to provide for you. Tell him he’s going to have to show you that he really means it.”

She told him and the following week he booked a four-thousand-dollar party. They went out to dinner and a movie, and he spent the night with her at the ranch. I told the girl to keep the party going for a week or two, to make sure this was what she really wanted, but she said no and two days later they ran off. I never heard from either of them again.

Love, it makes you do crazy things.

That reminds me of another story. We had a guy who would come in every two months, like clockwork, to visit one of the girls. He was divorced and he would drop around twenty thousand every time he visited, but the last thing on his mind was sex. He always showed up with candy or flowers or little presents, like he was returning home after a long trip, and she’d give him a warm, wifely
welcome. After the party, he’d go home and a few days later he would text her to check in and say hello, and sometimes they’d talk on the phone like an old, married couple. He really enjoyed that relationship; he liked knowing she was in the world and that they were somehow connected.

One day, he came in looking a little sad, and he told her that he wanted this to be their best party ever because it was going to be their last one. He was running out of cash, he said, and at that point the only thing he had left was the house he lived in and a small rental property. And the girl said, “Well, that’s okay, honey. We can take one of your houses.” He had never considered the possibility — mostly because the real estate market was depressed — but suddenly he was excited. If he could get rid of the second home without having to deal with realtors and whatnot, he could keep the party going.

After the girl told me about it, I had my chief financial officer look into the possibility. It was a modest little tract home with three bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms, so we bought the house for sixty thousand dollars. The girl said, “How do we get our money out of it?”

And I said, “We’re going to have to put about five thousand into it for new carpeting, paint, and some minor repairs, and then we’ll rent it out and split the profits.” The girl didn’t want to wait, so I bought her out, and for the next three years I rented the house out for a thousand dollars a month. Then I sold it for $165,000.

Do I feel any guilt? Of course not. This is a business. I’m here to make a living and to take care of my dog, Domino, and make sure he’s eating good. If a guy wants to give me his house, who am I to say no?

If you think I should feel guilty about that situation, let me balance it out by telling you a
nice
story. A guy came in from San
Francisco for a bachelor party. He was about forty and it was his second marriage. His friends were all about his age, but they partied with the energy of men in their early twenties. In the middle of the party, the guy’s fiancée showed up and the shit hit the fan. “You fucking asshole! You piece of shit! I fucking hate you!” Long story short, they didn’t get married.

A week later, the guy calls me. “I want to thank you,” he said. “You helped me see my ex-fiancée for who she really was, and I am indebted to you for saving me from what would have been a disastrous marriage.”

And I said, “I kind of wish you
had
married her, because five years from now I would have been giving you a divorce party, and our divorce parties are legendary.”

That guy has since become a regular at the BunnyRanch. One night he told me that he no longer even looks at “regular” girls; he’s only interested in pros. “I love the lack of complication,” he said. “I walk into that parlor and I’m just a Big Dick.”

“That’s an interesting way of putting it,” I said.

“You know what I mean. I don’t have to act all interested. I don’t have to ask about her job or her ex-husband or what her childhood was like. I don’t want a relationship. I’m here to fuck.”

For some reason, that brief conversation really bothered me.

I fuck all the time. I was tired of being a Big Dick. I wanted a relationship.

A
BOUT A MONTH AFTER THAT
TV meeting in Los Angeles, Suzette called me into her office. “I got an interesting e-mail today,” she said. It was from a girl who was clearly suffering the ill effects of the bad economy, because she was in school and wanted to stay in school, and had come up with a great plan to pay for her education and save herself from financial ruin: She was hoping to sell her virginity to the highest bidder.