May 31–June 7, 2001

books

Mustang Sallies

Brothel goes inside the Mustang Ranch — and, unfortunately, inside its author’s head as well.

by Frank Halperin

Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women

By Alexa Albert
Random House, 271 p., $24.95

One of the most inspired "Weekend Update" riffs during Saturday Night Live ’s halcyon debut season went like this: "The Post Office announced today that it is going to issue a stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States. It’s a ten cent stamp, but if you want to lick it, it’s a quarter."

Readers who crave a titillating as well as insightful page-lick may be somewhat disappointed by Alexa Albert’s Brothel . To be sure, it’s a diligent commemoration of prostitution, specifically the infamous Mustang Ranch in Nevada, the now-defunct pleasuredrome that set a high-lubricant mark in the state’s legalized skin trade. Yet the author’s ad nauseam reliance on staid statistical references, combined with chronic personal musings, seriously undermines the genuine intrigue that’s at the core of the book: namely, the character sketches of Mustang’s working girls, their clientele and the potpourri of denizens — including Mustang bartenders, floor maids and outside clothing vendors — who operated on its sensual periphery.

Albert, a Harvard medical school graduate who was allowed admittance inside the Mustang Ranch as a student in the early 1990s to conduct a study on condom usage, and who parlayed her subsequent visits into a sociological odyssey spanning six years, can’t be entirely faulted for the often clinical aftertaste of her narrative. Erica Jong she isn’t, and while it’s understood that she’s not intending to be a literary siren, her penchant for detractive contrivances like first-person interior monologues — "Who were these women who allowed themselves to be locked behind gates? Were they all drug addicts and survivors of heinous sexual abuse, like so many street prostitutes? Were they chained to beds, as prostitutes allegedly were in Thailand? Would they even agree to speak with me?" — dramatically sap the book’s stamina.

There are instances when Albert’s impressions are quite captivating. The reflections of her initial arrival at the Mustang ranch, and her heady experiences as a reluctant spectator of bootknocking (one which involved a dominatrix ménage-a-trois) recalls a detached sexual creepiness comparable to Richard Brooks’ film adaptation of Looking for Mr. Goodbar . She also demonstrates her proficiency at examining the history of Nevada’s legalization of brothels and its social/political ramifications, recording the milestones with a graceful flair.

It’s when Albert turns down the volume on her solipsistic journalspeak and focuses on Mustang’s employees that Brothel reaches a heightened state of arousal. When the sweet-painted ladies speak of their respective backgrounds, along with the mercurial relationships with their colleagues and customers, the book hits a strikingly visceral chord. From cathouse cattiness (switching a call girl’s shampoo with Nair) to ya-ya sisterhood (no-holds-barred birthday parties), the various glimpses into these women’s lives — in addition to the assortment of johns who populate this terrain of lace and latex — give the book a revealing and compassionate depth.

In one of Brothel ’s most telling and poignant scenes, Albert describes an encounter between a hooker named Jasmine, dressed in electric-pink hot pants, with her mother and Jasmine’s two young sons outside Mustang Ranch. Another prostitute engages the kids in a game of tag while a bystander offers Popsicles to them. Upon their farewell, there’s a tearful exchange between mother and her children; the grandmother promises the kids McDonald’s Happy Meals if they would just "get in the fucking car." Episodes such as this sustain the book’s momentum, achieving a cinematic immediacy of expression. (Imagine what Paul Thomas Anderson could do with this material.) It’s too bad that the author deemed it necessary to mire these resonant tales in a flatulent morass of self-indulgent pontifications and monotonous Kinsey Report-esque recitations of annotated data. Ultimately, it’s her reliance on verbose commentary that makes Brothel , to paraphrase the late humorist Michael O’Donoghue, about as thrilling as looking at pictures of naked women just after having had an orgasm.