The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (9 page)

Charlene took me back to the parlor and Mary saw the haunted look on my face and laughed. “You got to get yourself one of these girls,” she said. “Good money in this business. You have fun, too.”

Then another customer came in and Charlene went off to tend to him. She told me to hang around, that she’d be back in an hour, and I didn’t like that much. I knew Charlene was fucking other guys, but I didn’t want it in my face. Then Mary pointed out one of the other working girls, a little blonde. “See that? That’s Linda. She can’t take her eyes off you. Why don’t you put some money on the books and take her down the hall?” So I did.

When I came out, Charlene was waiting for me in the parlor, steamed as hell. “What the fuck are you doing?” she said.

“Well, you keep telling me what a square I am and I wanted to see if you were right.”

“You fuck her?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We weren’t playing Monopoly.”

Turned out Charlene wasn’t really all that angry. Two weeks
later, on the first day of her week long break, she brought Linda back to my place for a threesome, my first. It was as wonderful as I’d imagined. I felt like I was the star of my very own porn movie. If you haven’t tried it, you should — and pronto.

CHARLENE AND I KEPT SEEING
each other, and from time to time we’d add a new girl to the mix. It never got boring. One morning the doorbell woke me early. I climbed over Charlene and her friend, a little brunette, and went to see who was at the door at that ungodly hour. A middle-aged woman was standing outside, looking hopeful. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but I understand that this is a Frank Lloyd Wright house.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is. I’m from Phoenix, and I appreciate the man’s architectural sensibilities.” Or something like that, anyway. She said she wanted to buy the place and I told her it wasn’t for sale, but a few days later she was back with her husband, a doctor. He knew I’d paid $75,000 for the house and offered me $125,000, cash. That made for a tidy profit, so I took it.

I bought a two-bedroom condominium in Reno, overlooking the river — it had two master suites, at opposite ends, so it was perfect for me and my father — and I used the rest of the money to buy a second gas station in Tahoe.

I kept seeing Charlene and we kept having threesomes, but I never took a dime of her money. She’d show up at the condo with thousands of dollars spilling out of her purse and it never occurred to me to ask her to pay for anything. I was happy. I loved fucking her. And she had wonderfully uninhibited friends who were always ready to teach me new tricks.

Then she got pregnant and I told her I didn’t want the kid. I said I loved my daughters and that I had no regrets, but that I wasn’t going
down that road again. She didn’t make a scene. Didn’t argue. Said nothing, in fact. She had an abortion and a few weeks later she was gone. I don’t know what happened exactly. If she was mad at me, she didn’t show it. If she was upset about the baby, she didn’t show that, either.

I was single again and I kept going back to the Moonlite. One night the comedian Andy Kaufman showed up with his sidekick, Bob Zmuda, with whom he shared that crazy alter ego, Tony Clifton — a broken-down, chain-smoking, wildly hostile ’60s-style nightclub singer, unrecognizable under a big nose, big hair, and dark sunglasses. They would take turns playing the Clifton character and offending unsuspecting audiences. To my great delight, they both turned out to be immensely entertaining guys. Andy was just the nicest, sweetest Jewish gentleman I had ever met. When the girls lined up, he seemed genuinely torn. Zmuda kept telling him to pick one, but Andy was having a very hard time. “All these wonderful girls and I can’t make a decision!” he said. “I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.” He reviewed the lineup once more and threw his hands up in mock despair. “I like all of you, and I want to party with all of you. And if I have to come back morning, noon, and night for the next two weeks, well — that’s exactly what I’ll do.” And that’s exactly what he did. He
loved
those girls. He thought working girls were the Second Coming.

As he got increasingly comfortable with the girls, he became more revealing about his sexual predilections, and it became clear that Andy had some unresolved issues related to wrestling. Maybe he never made the wrestling team in high school — I don’t know because I didn’t want to pry — but watching two girls wrestle was a real turn-on for him.

He would be in the parlor, sizing up the girls and asking questions. “You
look pretty strong. You wrestle much? You think you could beat me? You have any brothers? You ever wrestle them?” Then he’d pick one and they’d go off to her room and he’d come back an hour or two later, looking tired and sated and happy. Over time, the fantasy got a little more complex. Andy would get
two
girls, take them into a room, and have them wrestle each other. He liked them to wear leotards and paint their nails red, and he’d walk around the bed in his underwear with a whistle around his neck, egging them on without taking sides. If they fouled each other, he’d give the whistle a blast.

When the match was over, he’d wrestle the winner (without his underwear and without the leotard), so the girl got paid to party twice. Andy loved that aspect of it; he felt it really motivated the girls and he loved aggressive women. Sometimes, in his stage act, he would challenge women from stage, almost taunting them. “Any woman out there think she can take me, come on up! I’m serious! I will wrestle you here and now!” He was the Bobby Riggs of Fake Wrestling, but the funny part is that it wasn’t entirely an act. I bet his dick was hard during that part of the act.

Andy’s friend Zmuda had his own issues. When he was just himself, he was a sweet, amusing guy, but when he showed up in character as Tony Clifton, he was unpredictable. One night he singled out one of the black girls and started telling her ugly, racist jokes — all of them so crass I wouldn’t dare repeat them here. The girl laughed, but only because it was Tony Clifton, and she thought — or
hoped
 — that it was just an act. He then decided he would party with her because, as he put it, “I’ve never had chocolate before” — and behind closed doors he kept the tasteless charade going, whipping her ass good and calling her his slave. It was pretty sick, and the poor girl was confused, but she didn’t appear to have suffered any lasting harm.

A few weeks later, Zmuda returned to the ranch as Zmuda, and the same black girl was there. I told her that Zmuda
managed
Tony Clifton and refreshed her memory. “You remember Tony Clifton, don’t you? That crazy racist.”

Zmuda was suddenly the picture of concern. “I am so, so sorry!” he told the girl, practically falling to his knees. “Tony can be a real asshole. Please let me make it up to you.”

The girl kept telling Zmuda that it hadn’t been that bad, just
different
, and Zmuda was so impressed with her kindness that he booked her for a couple of hours. He gave her a very generous tip to make up for Clifton’s unforgivably bad behavior, but my favorite part of the story is what she told me after he was gone: “Tony Clifton was a better fuck.”

You can see why I enjoyed both Bob and Andy. We spent a lot of time together at the ranch, in a private room in back that was reserved for regular customers. It had a couple of worn couches, and there was liquor, on the house, and it was a privilege to be there. In those days, brothels were all about volume: Get the guys in, fuck ’em, get them out. But not if you were family. And we were family.

One night, Andy and I found ourselves wondering what we would do differently if we actually owned the place. We thought it would be great if
all
the customers were treated as well as we were. They could come in, have a drink, relax, and not even party if they weren’t feeling particularly flush that night. We also agreed that we would abolish fixed prices. If a customer was treated like a king, there was a good chance he’d
pay
like a king, so why not let the girls negotiate their own prices? Andy thought the idea was a bit
Darwinian
, as he put it, but he felt it was a good thing. “Survival of the fittest benefits everyone. Within a generation, only the really hot girls will be left.”

I had also noticed that the girls didn’t have any say when it came to
the clients. If some creepy guy picked them, they couldn’t say no, and in fact any girl who refused could be fined by the house and put on notice. I thought that was unfair; I thought the girls should have a choice. You could always turn a guy down politely, without hurting his feelings (“I’m so sorry, I don’t do anal”), and there’d always be another girl happy to take the business.

We were full of ideas, Andy and I. It was just talk, of course. But it was also a hugely entertaining fantasy.

The sex was no fantasy, however, and there was lots of it. I was partial to Tammy, a hot blonde (thanks again, Marilyn!) who would come to see me at the condo from time to time. Sometimes she’d have her teenage daughter, Bonita, with her, a real cutie, and I’d give Bonita money and send her off to get ice cream for an hour or two.

Life went on like that for a year or two and my bed was never empty. Business was good, too. By 1980, I had five gas stations — four in Reno, one in Tahoe — and with real estate booming I went out and took the real estate exam and got myself licensed. I discovered I had a real knack for sales, but I also learned that I couldn’t sell anything I didn’t believe in. If someone wanted to unload a piece of property that was too close to the airport, for example, I couldn’t do it. But when I believed in a piece of property, there was no stopping me.

If I had to sum up this period in three words, it would be simple.
Life is good
.

BY 1980, I WAS LIVING
large. I was making so much money selling real estate that I started investing in properties of my own. I bought everything from office buildings to gorgeous waterfront lots right on Lake Tahoe. Some mornings I’d wake up and couldn’t
believe my life. I was a kid who’d started with zero and I’d become a millionaire. On
paper
, anyway.

In 1981, the bottom fell out of the market. Unfortunately, I was highly leveraged, and when you’re leveraged there’s not much room for error. It looked like I was going to lose everything.

I talked to a couple of lawyers, both of whom urged me to file for bankruptcy, but I didn’t see that as an option. I have never understood Chapter 11. You’re broke, you owe people a shitload of money, you throw up your hands and say, “I can’t pay,” and six months later you’re back in business, debt-free. And fuck everyone you owe. Does that seem right? I didn’t think so.

Some of my cronies in the real estate business were urging me to take advantage of the savings and loans associations, since they were offering loans to any idiot who walked in off the street. That didn’t seem right, either — no matter how you did the math, the numbers didn’t jibe — and my father had always taught me to trust my gut, so I missed that (very corrupt) gravy train.

I also got approached about dealing drugs — Lake Tahoe is one of the most beautiful places on the planet and back in those days a lot of drug money bought a lot of prime real estate there — but that wasn’t my thing, either. I wasn’t going to break the law to save my ass.

To compound matters, I had a falling out with my father. He had met a girl young enough to be his daughter, a real ditz, and she was pretty much living in the condo. I didn’t like the girl. She was always underfoot. She was messy. She seemed unclean. One night she walked into my room and woke me up — I don’t think she wanted anything, she was just being stupid — and I lit into her: “Get the hell out of my room! If you’re going to live in my home, at least have the courtesy to let me have my own space!”

The next morning, my father and I had words, and that night I came home to find him and the girl gone. I tried to reach him, but I was never able to get through, and I was at a real loss. This was my
father
, for Christ’s sake. How could some little girl waltz into our lives and take him away from me? But that’s exactly what happened.

THAT SAME MONTH,
I met a guy who had a hotel time-share project right there in Lake Tahoe, the Americana Resort, a business I knew nothing about. I sat down with him and asked him to teach me the business from the ground up, and I paid close attention. Time-shares are tricky. The profit can be huge, but you only see it on the back end, so you’ve got to feed the pipeline. And in fact, one of the ironies of the business is that every time you make a sale you’re going backward. The buyer is getting something for peanuts, and he’s not going to be making any real payments for years to come. Still, it made sense to me. As
a salesman, I would make commissions on every sale, with the real payoff down the line, when the notes came due. There were only two questions I had to ask myself: Was the Americana a viable project, and would it be around for the next few years? I answered yes to both questions. Within a month, I had turned into the best salesman this guy had ever hired.

While I was still working there, I got a call from a developer who had a troubled project in Palm Springs, the Palm Springs Tennis Club. He’d heard about the way I’d turned things around for the Americana, and asked if I would do the same for him. Before I’d even wrapped the Tahoe job, I went to Palm Springs and put together a crack sales team and had the place rolling in green. The developer said he had never met anyone with such a gift for salesmanship, but to me it was second nature.

A salesman first of all has to present himself properly. He has to look nice. He has to dress nice. He has to have clean fingernails and a convincing smile. He’s got to exude charm and charisma. And it all has to happen right away,
immediately
, because the cliché holds true: You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.

Another thing: Leave your problems at home. I would tell the sales team, “We all have shit to deal with, but when you come to work I need you to put that shit in a box and leave it in the trunk of your car. I don’t want you taking phone calls from your wife, or from your ex, or from that guy who hit on you last night at the bar. When you’re at work, you don’t have a personal life. Deal with that shit on your own time. You are here to sell.”