The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (41 page)

These are the types of things Dennis did to stir the pot and quell his insecurities. He would continue these types of things — on a far grander scale — over the course of the next few years, relishing in the pain and turmoil he caused.

He spoke so disparagingly of his ex in an attempt to win me over, but it made no difference to me. If anything, it put me off. He was giving me the rundown of their entire relationship and every awful thing she ever did while painting himself as the nice guy done wrong. Of course, I believed him. And from what I had observed, she was exactly as described: a miserable shadow of a woman with a constant scowl. I didn’t know then that he made her that way, one of Dr. Hofenstein’s monsters. But at the time, he told me that she had always been that way.

He told me that she hated me and was jealous of me. But why? Well, apparently she didn’t even know he’d left her!
I even remember one night after we’d been spending an enormous amount of time together he told me that he and I were going out to dinner with Suzette. (Suzette has nobody in her life except Dennis and the dog he gave her, so she was constantly tagging along, dreaming of a love that will never be. She was always there.) Of course, he also told me that his “ex-girlfriend” might join us, but not to worry about it. It would be fine. They were fine. No big deal. Thank God she refused his invitation. Because I was his pawn, a tool to humiliate and hurt her. He wanted to shove me in her face, fawning all over me for the simple purpose of driving the knife deeper into her heart. That is the type of manipulative and vindictive being he is. I can’t even say “person” or “human” when telling this part of the story because that’s so soulless. No wonder she hated me. I would hate me, too.

But all of this was happening around me and I had no idea. I was twenty-two and I was falling in love. Even when Dennis starting “fixing me” I thought it was for my own good. After all, in two weeks we would travel to New York City to appear on
The Howard Stern Show
. And he wouldn’t want Howard to have anything negative to say about me. He has this tricky, pimpy way of getting ladies to work their butts off at publicly promoting and representing his business free of charge by convincing them it’s a big treat for them to do him such fun favors. Like being an indentured Bunny-promo-slave is a real privilege! Maybe that’s why he likes his girls so young. Young and dumb.

He wanted to get someone to “teach me” how to do my makeup. This confused me because I grew up in the beauty industry. My hair and makeup was, is, and will forever remain consistently flawless. But sure. So he took me to MAC
makeup and the ladies went right to work on me. “Don’t worry,” they said. “We know what Dennis likes.” When they got through with me and held up a mirror I gasped. He had them paint my face exactly like his ex used to wear her makeup when they were together. Exactly. It was totally disturbing and sick. He took me to a dentist to fix a gap I had in my side teeth (to the tune of $3,500). I was grateful. I thought he was taking care of me. But I was a willing blank canvas upon which he could paint and build whatever image suited him best.

Even when he told me I should lose ten pounds and consider getting a breast augmentation, I believed he was telling me for my own good (I was 5'4", 107 pounds, with A-cup breasts, but he would forever tell me to lose weight, even when I was 96 pounds with DD’s, which eventually led to a very serious — and nearly deadly — eating disorder). Because he cared so much. And as soon as someone would tell me I was too skinny, Dennis would pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, and say, “That’s not because of me! I’m always telling her to gain weight!” But everyone knows Dennis likes skinny, tiny, little-girl bodies.

We agreed that when we returned to New York City for the media tour he’d arranged to promote his “greatest-ever bunny,” we would pack up my apartment, grab my cat, and I would say goodbye to my life in New York City forever, returning to Nevada to live with him and be queen bee of his ranch. If not for him, I would have never returned to the BunnyRanch. I hated the place, I hated the girls, but I was starting to love him. And like he said when he begged me to stay every day and every night, he needed me.

And I needed to be needed.

• • •

When we returned from New York, I was happy for several months. Although he had convinced me to leave my previous life, I wasn’t yet at “the point of no return.” We had fun. We traveled. We went to parties and met all kinds of people. I felt special and I was falling for him more and more. The girls were as bad as ever — and getting worse — but at that point Dennis and Suzette were putting substantial effort into protecting me from them. They were still pretending to care.

But then everything changed. I was working hard and saving my money, finally accruing enough to afford the breast augmentation Dennis recommended. (YES, EVERYBODY. I PAID FOR MY OWN AUGMENTATION.) I was going to the best plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. After, I would stay in Los Angeles for a week at a hotel with my favorite housekeeper, and then go home to recover for a month and return to the ranch. But I returned to basically the beginning of the worst time in my life.

That was when some girl I’d never met decided to show me all of Dennis’s text messages to her. And here is the problem: Dennis is a compulsive liar. I always said to him, “I don’t care what you do, just don’t lie to me.” But he would lie to me anyways. And while it’s true that he never claimed to be sexually monogamous, the point of an open relationship is honesty and communication. And it’s not just sex. It was him telling every new girl that came into the house, “You’re going to be my new girlfriend! I don’t give a shit about Cami!” Add to this him literally telling girls, “Cami
hates you, she’s so jealous of you!” I would have girls I never laid eyes on asking, “Why do you hate me?” It’s important to pimps that their women be isolated from others so it’s easier to maintain control over them. He loves to hurt and confuse women.

He even bragged about sleeping with a girl one minute after her legal birthday, then putting her right to work, as if this is something real men brag about. He would even tell me that at twenty-three (he was sixty-five) I was too old for him, since girls over twenty-one are no good anymore anyways. But he would generously make an exception for me because I took such good care of him. I literally had a complex about being old at twenty-three.

• • •

Right around the time when I started thinking I was ready to leave, Dennis got sick. Being that I’m a compassionate person, I knew I couldn’t leave when he needed me most. Even though he was so evil and had me in tears every day, I still loved him and needed to take care of him.

I also hoped that now that I was doing every single thing for him — that he literally needed me to function — he might find some compassion in his heart and finally appreciate me. But he ended up treating me worse than ever.

Dennis hurt his knee and couldn’t even walk without leaning on me. He told people that he hurt his knee when a girl jumped on him at the Playboy Mansion. But that was another lie. The truth was more banal: He was over three hundred pounds and hurt his knee by being too big for the knee to support his weight. At that point I wasn’t even working or seeing my friends because I was at home with Dennis
all the time. He couldn’t even walk from his desk to the bathroom without my help.

The more I did for him, the worse he treated me. He would do things like give me a little doll from American Girl or a stuffed rabbit and tell me it was our child and I should bring it everywhere. Then he would turn around and tell everyone that I was carrying a doll because I was crazy.

I think my breaking point was when I went to visit my mother for Mother’s Day before we were supposed to go to England for Dennis’s speech at Oxford University. When we got back, some girl I’d never seen came up to me and said, “You’re Cami! Dennis said I’m his new girlfriend but he’s just waiting for you to leave! When are you leaving?”

I’m leaving right now
. I told Dennis I was leaving that morning.

As I was packing my things, he called Suzette to come to our house and dance around singing “Another One Bites the Dust.” It was so laughably pathetic, but she was thrilled. She had always been jealous of me. Several times she literally screamed in my face so close that her spit landed on me and I could smell the McDonald’s on her breath.

I swore up and down he would never see or hear from me again. He never believed me, but I meant it. But he wasn’t going to let me go that easily. For several months, he harassed me via Twitter, text, and e-mail. Dennis has mentioned my name constantly in the media in the three years since I’ve left and is still doing so today. I had to shame him into removing my photos from his website.

I feel like even after all these years later I’m still trying to escape him. I didn’t want to write this piece for his book
because I really want nothing to do with him. But after the fifth person contacted me on his behalf, I relented. They really wanted the truth about Dennis Hof and what happened to me. Well here’s a very long story made short: Dennis Hof is a liar. Every single word that comes out of his mouth is bullshit. All that fake bravado, all that nonsense about how the BunnyRanch is so wonderful and everybody’s so happy there. It’s all a lie.

But that’s what pimps do. And he’s a pimp. I’m not sure what else you would expect.

A NOTE TO READERS FROM DENNIS:
Can you believe I put up with that craziness for so long? But I finally grabbed my dog, walked out of the front door, and left. Never looked back, either. Never saw or said a word to her since.

THE FOLLOWING WEEK,
I finally came to terms with the fact that my knee wasn’t improving. Suzette ended up taking me to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and I was given a knee replacement by Dr. Robert Trousdale, the best orthopedic surgeon in the world.

When I got back, I was tempted to return to my house, but my knee needed time to heal, so it made more sense to stay in the bungalow. The girls would come over between shifts, fuck me, and keep me company. It was nice and it was fun, and it helped me not think about Cami, but my heart still ached. I’m an incorrigible romantic. I kept telling myself that at any moment now the right girl would come along and this time I would get it right.

One afternoon Suzette told me a girl was trying to reach me on
the message board. She was working at a ranch in southern Nevada and wanted to leave. “My name is Krissy,” she wrote. “I’m in Pussy Prison. I’m beautiful, I’m educated, and I want to work for you.”

I gave her my number and she called a short time later. The reception was bad because they had cell-blockers at her ranch. They wanted the girls to work, not to spend their days gabbing on the phone. That was the least of it, though. Krissy had only just arrived at the ranch and was waiting for the doctor to clear her, so she hadn’t even partied with her first client, but she wanted to leave before she had even started. Unfortunately, she had made a commitment to the ranch. And this particular ranch was rough. Under the terms of Krissy’s contract, she couldn’t simply walk out.

I told her that Suzette did the hiring, and that we’d have to see some pictures, and because she didn’t have e-mail access, she gave me her Facebook address and her password. I liked what I saw. She was twenty-three and a former cheerleader at the University of Michigan. Something about her seemed familiar, though, so I took a closer look at her name. Christ! I knew this girl.

I called her back and kept calling until I got through. The reception was still bad, but she heard me fine. I’m sure she also heard the edge in my voice.

“You’re Krissy?”

“Yeah.”

“And you live in Michigan?”

“Yeah.”

“And I talked to you when you were nineteen, maybe three, four years ago?”

“Yeah.”

“And you wanted to meet me and date me and for me to be your boyfriend, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I set it up with my secretary, Judy. You remember that?”

“Yeah.”

“We bought you a thousand-dollar airline ticket to Los Angeles, remember? And sent a limo to pick you up.”

“Yeah.”

“And you were going to come and stay with me and we were going to go to the Playboy Mansion party?”

“I remember.”

“Well, guess what? You owe me an explanation. You didn’t show up.”

“Dennis, I was scared.”

“Scared?”

“Yes. One of your ex-girlfriends sent me a really nasty e-mail. She must have logged into your account because she knew we’d been talking and she knew we were going to meet in Los Angeles. She said, ‘This is my boyfriend, bitch, and you better stay away from him.’ ”

Okay. Definitely sounded possible. And why would Krissy make that up? But I was still mad. “Let me tell you what happened that night,” I said. “I went to the Playboy Mansion alone, and I fucked a superhot bunny in the laundry room. Later that night I fucked her again — and her friend, too. So thank you!”

She started crying on the phone and I felt badly, so I told her I’d come to Pahrump the next day to pick her up. I told her to meet me at the Nugget Hotel and to make sure she signed herself out. “Tell them you’re going shopping for some nice clothes or something,” I said. “Otherwise they might get suspicious.”