Brothel Read Free

was called the night girls’ hallway. My neighbors all worked the shift from eleven P.M . to eleven A.M . Because of the brothel’s narrow hallways, no wider than four feet, and thin walls, prostitutes’ rooms were typically clustered by shifts so that off-duty women could sleep undisturbed. I could hear a woman’s moans through the rice-paper wall at the head of my bed. For a moment, I was alarmed: Was someone hurt? Then I reminded myself where I was, and tried to figure out whether these were sounds of genuine pleasure. I couldn’t tell. Every few minutes, her customer emitted a rough grunt and occasionally they both laughed. I couldn’t help but think that the sounds the man was making were deeply unarousing; I tried to imagine being forced to act pleasured by some man I didn’t know making guttural animal sounds, and I couldn’t. At least I felt relatively safe, though I did have fleeting fears of awakening in the middle of the night to find a drunken man groping at my nightgown. (Although I’d locked my door, I was sure the push-button lock was easy to pick.) I closed my eyes tight and let the thoughts pass. I had nowhere else to go.
    The next day, I began interviewing women, with the help of Irene, Mustang #2’s manager. Irene had been at Mustang for two years. Unlike most brothel managers, she hadn’t been a prostitute. She had come to Mustang as a “square,” as prostitutes called those outside the sex industry. She took a job as a cashier four months after her husband’s death. Three months later, she was promoted to manager. She was a short, squat woman in her late fifties. Her matronly physique contrastedwith a crass tongue and a gruff cigarette-scarred voice. She had seen her share of hard times, she told me, and believed it was just happenstance that she herself hadn’t become a working girl. An unwed teen mother in the 1950s, she had married a man she never loved to escape her mother’s house. During the 1960s, she worked at a racetrack in Philadelphia; there she had her first exposure to prostitutes and started a love affair with a married
Philadelphia Tribune
sportswriter. Eventually she married him and they lived happily together for twenty-two years, until his untimely death at the age of sixty-five.
    Her lack of experience in the sex industry had made her timid, even fearful, during her first months as cashier, Irene confided. Rather than mingle with the girls or customers, she kept to herself and stayed inside her cashier’s cage. But the loneliness of recent widowhood drove her to seek connections with the prostitutes, many of whom seemed as solitary and abandoned as she felt. Quickly, Irene became Mustang #2’s den mom, attending to the women’s needs and judiciously doling out hugs and discipline.
    Irene made it perfectly clear at the outset that she was the prostitutes’ advocate. She wanted the women to understand clearly the purpose of my study before they agreed to participate. To give the women some privacy, she allowed me to use her office for interviews. With her support, and the $40 cash I promised each woman upon the study’s completion, most of the prostitutes at #2 agreed to participate.
    My first subject was Star, a young black woman dressed in a turquoise spandex bodysuit. She had long, straightened hairand ebony skin that was smooth save for one small raised scar over her left breast, from a cigarette burn many years earlier. As she walked into the office, she immediately made her reservations known. “I can’t waste no time back here. I have to earn some money.” I proceeded tentatively, glancing her way anxiously whenever the doorbell rang to announce a customer. In spite of herself, however, Star seemed to enjoy the interview and actually looked surprised when we finished nearly forty-five minutes later. A look of consternation crossed her face as I explained the next phase of the study.
    “You want me to save the rubbers?” she asked, incredulous.
    When I tried