Inside Nevada’s Brothels: The Untold Truths That Shattered My Perceptions and Transformed My Life Forever

I had no clue how to land my first client — and no, it wasn’t at some flashy networking event or fancy cocktail hour. It was a random Friday night at Sheri’s Ranch, Nevada’s legal brothel, during karaoke. Picture this: me, someone who doesn’t sing, stuck watching pro singers take their turns while I nervously nibbled on snacks with the other newbie. The first shift flopped hard, so there I was at my second, feeling anything but confident. Then, out of nowhere, Jules—a stunning brunette with a no-nonsense attitude—dragged me onto the stage to duet “Cheri Cheri Lady.” I was awful, but being seen mattered more than perfection. Minutes later, a hostess discreetly pointed out a man interested in me. “Paloma,” she said—a name I’d chosen to cloak my real self, imagining a breezy, carefree persona. That night, in a pink-lit room scattered with quirky knickknacks, I faced my first client: nervous, tentative, and unknowingly embarking on an encounter far more complex than just a transaction. Ever wonder what it’s really like stepping into a world where sex is a business, masked by neon lights and whispered negotiations? Here, behind the gaze of strangers and the musty scent of old make-out music, I began unraveling truths about intimacy, identity, and the unexpected humanity found in the desert’s shadow. LEARN MORE.

I had no idea how to land my first client. It was a random April Friday, karaoke night at Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada. I don’t sing. Four of the ladies who worked there were professional singers, so I watched them take turns and picked at food with the other new girl. It was already my second shift. The first had been a bust.

One of the other ladies, Jules, a statuesque, voluptuous brunette, asked me to sing with her. I told her this would be only the third time I’d ever done karaoke. She didn’t care. She wanted to show me that being seen was the first step to attracting a client. We duetted on “Cheri Cheri Lady,” by Modern Talking. I was awful, but sure enough, within minutes of my being on display, one of the hostesses pulled me aside. She discreetly pointed across the spacious, dimly lit bar. Some elderly regulars hunched over drinks—Larry, who comes almost daily and never buys anything but an O’Doul’s, is in his mid-eighties—and a few groups of younger patrons sat on large banquettes and couches. It took me a second to spot the guy she was singling out. “Paloma,” she said. “That gentleman would like to speak to you.”

It startled me to hear my new name uttered so intentionally. Paloma Karr, a name I’d just chosen for this job, a woman I’d imagined breezy, unbothered, and carefree.

person sitting near a decorative fountain in a scenic outdoor location

Danielle Levitt

The author outside of Sheri’s Ranch. Located in the desert mere miles from the California border, the brothel attracts high-dollar clients from Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

It had taken real work to will Paloma into existence. I had thought I’d arrive at Sheri’s to martini glasses and Champagne flutes and garter belts and silk bedsheets and wads of cash. Instead, my first day was piles of paperwork, blurry photocopies I had to fill out with a dying pen under the buzz and flutter of fluorescent lighting. A contract with the ranch, rules, suggested prices, a model release for the website, background-check forms. (The application, on the other hand, was basically just height, weight, measurements, and recent photos.) I had to do my first weekly medical exam to check for sexually transmitted diseases: a blood draw and cervical swab, performed in a back room with the bizarre added touch of outdated make-out music blasting in the background. Then off to the county sheriff’s office to finish the background check and get my brothel work permit.

Now there he was, my first client: a handsome, thirty-something Indian guy in pleated pants and a generic polo shirt, sipping on what looked like a rum and Coke. I was nervous, but because he had requested me, I could skip the flirting and simply excuse us from the bar, lead him down the long corridor, past other ladies’ rooms, and into the bedroom where I would live during my time at the brothel, the only place I was allowed to talk pricing. I had it lit to a hot-pink glow. Atop the chest of drawers against one wall, I’d scattered sex-themed tchotchkes, pinups and teddy bears, sex toys and a bowl of Flintts Mints, which stimulate the production of saliva.

The price for an hour of my time was up to me, priced at my discretion based on what he wanted to do. The man offered $700, far below what I would accept. I was proud that in my very first negotiation I talked him up to nearly double, $1,300, before taking him to the office to pay. Afterward, we returned to my room and called in another lady to supervise the health inspection, known as the “dick check”—a mandatory step all new ladies must do with the assistance of a veteran for their first three clients. Luckily, it was Jules, someone I knew. She ordered the man to drop his pants and briefs while we put on gloves and grabbed alcohol swabs. Jules had told me getting on your knees could make this otherwise clinical gesture more like foreplay, but she was mostly business: She looked over his penis, pushed back his foreskin, examined his balls. We worried primarily about open sores, but my personal worst nightmare is dick cheese, a foul buildup of dead skin and oil and who knows what unhygienic god-awfulness, which I’ve yet to see. He passed the DC, and Jules left.

reflections of two individuals in a bathroom setting with makeup items

Danielle Levitt

The author received advice on starting in brothel work from ranch veterans like Jupiter Jetson, right, who is a top earner and a popular creator of brothel content on TikTok.

It was just me and the man.

He knew he was my first, and he got excited. He paid for an hour but lasted less than ten minutes.

I told him he could stay his full time, but he said he had a long way to drive to get back to his job at a cell-phone provider. I made a few flimsy jokes about the terrible phone service at the ranch, and he left. I realized later I never even got his name, one of the few clients where I ever did that.

Jules (a pseudonym; I’ve changed names and identifying details throughout to protect privacy) returned to debrief me. I celebrated with a tequila soda. I was officially a cathouse working girl, a bona fide hooker—or the official term for us brothel workers: a courtesan.

Sheri’s is one of nineteen legal brothels in Nevada—the only state in America where you can have sex for money and it’s 100 percent not against the law. Most are up north near Reno, but Sheri’s and the Chicken Ranch, literally next door, are located in Pahrump, an hour west of Las Vegas. Nearby is the Alien Cathouse, right at Area 51, where the working girls are called “cosmic kittens.” That was the first brothel that offered to hire me.

How did I end up here? The short answer is that I had a tough breakup in the dead of winter, when I was in my mid-forties, that stuck me with the full monthly rent for a one-bedroom in Manhattan, where I live. In my civilian life, I’m a novelist, and I was working on a new novel with characters who did sex work, which I dabbled in during my twenties and thirties, from spicy modeling to being a sugar baby. In New York City, being a sugar baby was amazing. One client paid me thousands of dollars just to watch marathons of The Great British Baking Show, cozied up like a real girlfriend. After the breakup, I dropped back into it, for research and to try to make rent, but I became increasingly paranoid that it could veer into illegal escort work. So I thought about Nevada. A cathouse thousands of miles away would be legal and easy enough to keep from interfering with my civilian identity. (I spend tons of time at writers’ residencies, so I knew I could just tell people I was away developing a project.) It seemed crazy, far-fetched, bizarre, and like the most prudent, most logical, safest move I could make.

I nearly wound up a cosmic kitten, but then Sheri’s, known as the classiest of the Nevada cathouses, offered me a spot. I accepted.

My first night, before I could even see clients, one of the veteran working girls, Chynna, invited me into her room and told me I could ask her any questions I had. She was packing up after finishing one of the two-week shifts we call “tours.” It was past midnight, but she waved off my worries about the hour. Time doesn’t exist in a brothel.

That was my first real education on the place, especially the economics of it. Chynna explained how everyone tries to harmonize on high prices, because one lady undercutting the others brings all the prices down. She told me an hour with her is $4,000 and that she made more than $75,000 in her first three weeks. She correctly predicted that wouldn’t happen for me yet, that the economy had tanked—something I’ve learned, by talking to finance friends, that sex workers see coming nearly as well as traders.

Danielle Levitt

Unique among Nevada brothels, Sheri’s has a full bar and restaurant, allowing courtesans to mingle with clients and pick them up in a fashion more closely approximating a bar pickup in civilian life. (Except when they’re wearing lingerie.)

The more I learned, the more I realized it would really matter when I scheduled my tours. I decided to book every holiday I could. I thought I would probably see more money in it. It also appealed to the writer in me. I was curious what kind of characters patronize such places on those days. More importantly, my breakup marked the low point of a long slide in my opinion of men. I’m predictably left leaning, not just a novelist but a journalist, occasional professor, and longtime activist. A refugee from Iran who wears my identity proudly. Like most of my peers, my feelings about men dimmed the further we got into the 2000s. The #MeToo movement allowed me to reckon with my own experiences of bad, degrading, sometimes dangerous sex. I’m bisexual, and while I didn’t become a misandrist, I did start to wonder if I should just give up on straight men. But I’d become tired of “toxic masculinity”—the actual phenomenon when genuinely exhibited, but also the reductive way the concept trained me to see men. In a brothel, where sex was a commodity, I thought I might get a clearer view of men’s relationship to sex, unclouded by the fact of it being sex with me. I might be able to understand how an act I find deeply meaningful—despite what you may expect—could be at the root of many of men’s problems.

I landed the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s Eve, with a few tours in between. Then I made a deal with myself: On January 1, I’d decide whether life at a brothel was worth it.

Before I left Chynna’s room, she gave me one of the two pieces of advice from that first tour that haven’t left me, because both were at best half-truths. “There’s a lot of potential to thrive here,” she said about the money I could make. “Or else, like, why?”

FOURTH OF JULY

Classy is relative. The Sheri’s premises have a campy appeal, Old West meets eighties and nineties kitsch. The walls are plastered with faux-fancy font choices and faded press clippings boasting soft-celled blondes with feathered hair and gummy pageant smiles. The outside of the resort features a glimmering neon sign announcing “Girls Girls Girls” without a hint of irony. But for class, there is the full bar and restaurant, which serves the best burger in Pahrump and lets girls mingle with potential clients, picking them up like it’s a regular encounter in the outside world. That is far better than the other two ways to meet clients, which are the only ways at other brothels: by appointment, arranged via a brothel’s web-based messaging system—not an option for new girls who’ve yet to gain traction on their online profiles—or through a lineup, the very cowboy-flick, saloon-feeling process in which all ladies on shift are called to the parlor to literally line up and introduce themselves to a prospect on a couch.

Honestly, there’s something beautiful about the place, just eight miles from the California border, ringed by mountains and adjacent to the Death Valley basin. On my first tour, another veteran, whose working name is Jupiter Jetson, took us new girls outside for the brothel’s good-luck ritual. On a particularly quiet night, under clear moonlight, we peed in the grass outside the VIP bungalows, the high-dollar rooms for whale clients. Good money vibes, she told us, and then we all walked up a hill to her van and watched a thunderstorm roll over the low mountains to the west.

It goes without saying that Sheri’s feels very American. A place at the edge of the frontier where we get all types, from all places. When the Fourth of July weekend arrived, late in my second tour, I was weirdly pumped for a holiday I’ve never much cared about.

Babak came from Iran, like me.

Of course I picked up on another Iranian right away. But it’s strange. I’ve noticed that I’ve started to identify everyone by their ethnicity. I could give you the crudest, simplest description of so many of my clients. My first man on the Fourth was half Chinese, half Japanese. Before I started at the ranch, I would never have participated in profiling like that, which easily tips into casual racism, but when your livelihood requires quickly assessing who is worth your time, it’s the easiest way to triage every possible encounter. Tech bros—usually Asian—have money but don’t want to spend it. Some women dread Europeans because they’re used to cheap, legal brothels back home and are dicks about paying American prices.

Even the most taciturn men won’t shut up at the brothel. They want to front-load every excuse for poor performance.

The ladies say people from the Middle East are cheap and misogynistic. Babak looked to be about twenty-five and told me he was in private equity and lived in West Hollywood. UCLA fuckboy vibes, to deploy another stereotype. I tried to convince another new lady to talk to him. He came straight to me. “I know you’re Iranian too,” he said.

The men who come here also classify, categorize, profile, stereotype, you name it. Half the job is trying to predict it, but it’s unpredictable. I have a nondescript ethnic look that I expected to play up, giving white men a serving of the exotic. I found pretty quickly they were more interested in the smart—but approachable—big-city girl from the East Coast. I thought they would say fuck that girl, but they want to fuck that girl. Meanwhile, the brothel’s non-white clients often wanted me to be Persian, Arabic, Latina, even Italian. Maybe they need a reminder of who they are.

I took Babak to my room. In a brothel, pillow talk becomes foreplay. The conversations civilians have after sex, in newfound, postcoital intimacy, we have before, in an attempt to build rapport—and get a better price. Babak and I started talking about Iran.

As we reminisced, he unexpectedly switched to Farsi. “You are the perfect Iranian woman,” he told me.

“I’m really not,” I darted back in Farsi, laughing.

“I bet you even cook amazing Persian food,” he said. “I love ghormeh sabzi . . .”

The aromatic stew of beans and herbs and greens is the one dish I cook well, I admitted. This was a layer of intimacy I hadn’t expected.

When we finally got down to business, Babak was worried about coming too soon, then not enough. He was neurotic. The sex was not great.

I didn’t mind at all.

The next day, in the afterglow of the unexpected connection with Babak, I felt determined to speak to the brown-skinned man who sat at the bar silently, seeming unwilling to talk to anyone. Maybe Native American, maybe Latino, he was a big man—heavyset, not fat—but somehow he sat there nearly invisible.

His name was Glenn. I convinced him to go with me on a tour. My tour includes a little backstory on Sheri’s, and I point out the courtyard and the pool and the VIP bungalows in the back. I talk through the sex menu. Guys can order blowjobs, sex, threesomes, bubble-bath parties, even something called Nuru massage, a notorious Japanese style of intimate massage that requires its own special room—the holy of holies, as far as I was concerned—that I found myself becoming obsessed with because, at the time, I knew nothing about it.

Glenn never once made eye contact.

In my room, I started in on the pillow talk. Guys are usually incredibly chatty. Even the most taciturn in other situations won’t shut up here. They want to front-load every excuse for deficiencies in their performance. “Just so you know, I’ve been drinking a lot,” is probably the most common, but everything comes out—physical ailments, emotional problems, trauma. Men mention wives, partly to excuse poor performance and partly to try to lowball us, saying withdrawing more cash or using credit would be noticed. I’d say 80 percent of the men who come to Sheri’s need therapy, and I suspect pre-negotiation is the closest most of them get to the couch.

Not Glenn. Still no eye contact.

Finally, he stopped me.

“Well, I have to tell you . . . I am a virgin,” he said. “And that’s been a problem for me.”

I can’t pretend I didn’t find that exciting. All the ladies rave about virgins, how appreciative they are and how willing to take instruction. How well they pay. I hadn’t been with one yet. I tried to keep my composure, though, because Glenn still seemed somehow off.

“Tonight’s plan was come to a brothel and lose my virginity or . . . you know.”

I told him I don’t know.

“Off myself,” he said.

It took me a moment to absorb what he was saying. I had thought he might be depressed, but this was so much more extreme than I expected.

The moment of incomprehension rose into a panic. I wasn’t sure what I should do. Did he need to go to a hospital? To call someone? I took a deep breath and decided the first thing to do was to tell him he’d made the right decision, and to tell him something about me. Something true.

“I know that feeling,” I said.

He immediately softened up and actually looked me in the eye. For the first and only time, I decided to tell a client about a non-Paloma part of my life. We talked about suicidal thoughts, a conversation I won’t divulge.

two women walking towards a neon sign at night

Danielle Levitt

Courtesans live at the ranch full-time while on tour. To leave would risk missing potential clients, who can show up literally any time of day.

Once he was relaxed, he told me what was motivating him. There was a girl. The perfect girl. She worked at his local Starbucks. He’d been in love with her for years. He wanted to finally ask her out, but he didn’t think he could as a virgin.

So we did our thing. Like all the virgins I’ve since been with, he was better than he thought. When we finished, I could tell he was still nervous about the girl. We spent the last half hour of our session devising a detailed plan for him to ask her out.

As we walked to the parlor, I told him he should go to a crisis center or talk to a therapist, if he had one. I don’t know if he did. I think he believed, like a lot of men do, that now that he had lost his virginity he was a different being.

We were surprised to see the desert sky beginning its fade from orange to pink to yellow to the lightest blue. We both stared at the sun starting to rise and watched the palm trees that surrounded the pool shudder in the fresh morning breeze. “Thank you,” he said as we hugged goodbye.

I’ve been conflicted about money a lot in this job. I’ve wondered whether I was a bit too tempted to take on drunk clients because I wanted to get paid, or if I accepted BDSM play that tipped into something more aggressive than I was comfortable with because of the price. I wondered then, and have wondered since, if I decided not to get Glenn straight to a hospital because there was money in it for me. But I think a lot about something the ladies here have told me, which is that we get paid for our time, not for the service. A lot of women say that as a way to avoid legal jeopardy, but I actually think it’s true. Glenn got more from the last half hour of that session than the first three. I’m not someone big on the idea that sex transforms virgins, but I do believe intimacy changes people.

I went back inside and waved goodnight to the hostess at the front desk, who by then knew I viewed dawn as bedtime. Then I paused and turned to watch the new sunlight one more time through the parlor windows. I started crying, the hardest I had in ages.

THANKSGIVING

Madam Dena, who runs Sheri’s, does a family dinner every year. She has her own family celebration at home, but she always sticks around for the staff and the ladies at the brothel first. One was particularly special, either her first or second year. The tables had been gathered in the kitchen, and Dena created a table setting that by all accounts was very beautiful. The kitchen staff prepared a Thanksgiving buffet, and some of the girls had baked pies. Dena was sitting there, and everyone was eating, and then one of the girls just said, “You know what I’m thankful for?” This was a woman who had been through a lot, Dena told me. And she looked at Dena and she said, “You know what? I’m thankful for you.” It’s a shit job sometimes, Dena’s job. Trying to keep everyone happy, hearing all the complaints. Hearing the rumors about you, the woman who runs a place like this. Dena had never even been a courtesan; she was just a damn good businesswoman. So when the girl said that, it made Dena cry. And then the other girls picked it up. They were thankful for their families. They were thankful for the food and the kitchen staff at the ranch. Every single person at the table was thankful.

I thought about that, flying in for my Thanksgiving tour. My fifth tour. Gratitude.

My third tour had been my worst two weeks at Sheri’s. I was sure I had a whale coming my way, someone I wagered could pay upwards of $25,000 per hour. Dani had been writing me on the brothel’s messaging system for two months before scheduling an appointment. Dani, a woman whale, the most desirable being in a brothel, where the predominantly bisexual courtesans are starved for the chance to indulge another side of themselves. She sent gifts: Erewhon gift certificates for when I visit my family in Los Angeles, Aesop bath products, and huge bouquets of flowers. But when she showed up, she pitted me against a lady she had seen before, a top earner with the best plastic surgery I have ever seen. In the end, she canceled her appointment with me. Dani was a cheater. My entire civilian life before working at Sheri’s, I had hated cheaters.

“She wanted lesbian drama,” Jupiter told me. “There will be other whales, don’t worry.”

But then there was the fourth tour. On that tour I nearly fell in love. David was an appointment too. Something about him reminded me of Sex and the City’s Big, an elegant dresser with an easy, confident smile. He was retired, lived in Ann Arbor, but was a native New Yorker with the deepest Long Island accent I’d ever heard. Almost seventy years old, he looked much younger and was great in bed.

David seemed genuinely happy in a way that most guys who come here aren’t. I found him irresistible, and it was mutual. After our session, we had real pillow talk. He told me how much he liked me. He confessed to me that he’d been to the ranch before, with another girl, as if that was a violation of our time together. Then he said something painful.

“I think—I think you’d like my wife.”

I didn’t want to hear about her, but we’d very rapidly developed a relationship of honesty, so I listened. She sounded perfect. I could tell that David loved her very deeply. He also told me she’d had some health problems when she reached menopause, that it had destroyed their sex life.

Porn influenced most encounters at the ranch. It could be useful—or create unrealistic expectations.

I’m realistic. I know that most of my clients are cheating on someone. The older men, at least—it’s definitely true that the older men view infidelity as something almost expected, in a way that younger men don’t. Which is infuriating. But I have to admit that my time with David, and other men I’ve met at the brothel, has caused me to start to view cheating differently. Some men come here to satisfy a need they can’t satisfy with their partner, and they do it because they love the relationship they have with that person. They abandon physical fidelity to maintain their emotional fidelity. Which I suppose could be noble if their partner had a say in the matter. Often, they don’t.

I’ve sometimes found myself hoping David’s wife is cheating
on him, though I’m almost certain that she isn’t. I think if she knew the truth, it would destroy her. The only reason I know enough to say that is that David and I still message frequently. He updates me on his life; he’s told me how much happier he is at home since finding a way to satisfy his sexual needs. I think sleeping with me probably saved David’s marriage.

The ranch is a whole other place in the colder months. The desert cools. The mountains all around Pahrump are suddenly snowcapped, and down at the valley floor the temperatures hover in the 50s.

On this fifth tour, I had no idea what to expect. I’ve spent most of my life in Los Angeles. The desert has always been hot. One thing I knew had changed for sure: I was less worried about money. On my fourth tour, I’d hit Chynna’s benchmark of $4,000 per hour. But also, I’d found that as long as I was secure, helping men satisfy their needs—and not just sexually—could mean more than the money.

a posed figure in a classroom setting wearing a striped outfit

Danielle Levitt

Sheri’s offers themed bungalows, like a classroom, a corproate office, and a locker room, where clients can role-play their fantasies.

On Thanksgiving Day, only twelve girls were working, half the usual load. I tried to look festive by wearing a red Calvin Klein dress another lady, Cassie, thrifted from a Goodwill in Texas.

It wasn’t even noon and there they were, my Thanksgiving Day: two drunk white guys from Aspen. Not just any duo, but a dad and his son, and not just any occasion, but the mission was—the dad told us loudly and proudly—to get rid of his son’s virginity.

The father was a ladies’ man. He exuded charisma, attracting the attention of all the girls the minute he walked in the door, which is rare. The son looked very young, too young for his virginity to be a concern, we all thought. Jake’s twenty-one, the dad told us, as if to say he was a late bloomer. He looked more like fourteen, a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby.

Everyone at the ranch knew by this point that twenty-somethings loved me. Contrary to what I’d expected, Dena had assured me before I started that I’d do well because of my age, reminding me that “MILF” is one of the top searches on porn sites. A few tours in, most of my clients were indeed in their twenties. So I was nudged toward Jake. I heard myself half-heartedly offering a tour, and of course he took me up on it.

“I had a feeling it would be you,” Jake said, smiling at me.

“You did?” I said, a cartoon gulp, trying hard to hide my concern.

When we made it to my room, I tried to give him one last out. I told him twenty-one really isn’t that young to still be a virgin. We all know Gen Z barely has sex. He told me he knew plenty of people who’d had sex already. And besides, “My dad was a lot younger when he lost it,” he said. I realized this whole day was about not his anxiety, but his dad’s.

We talked prices. He tried texting his dad, but when he got no answer, we looked at the screen in my room, the one every room has that allows the courtesans to monitor the bar for prospects. His dad had left the bar for his own party.

In the office, Jake pulled out his dad’s very shiny credit card and then, at the last minute, had a moment of doubt.

He quickly brushed it off.

“I think he wants me to do this and he trusts me for whatever amount!” he announced. He picked the Roman-themed VIP bungalow, which started at several thousand dollars, and sprinted to the part of the paperwork that included the food menu. Bungalow bookings come with a meal and a bottle of Champagne, and Jake ordered literally everything—steak, shrimp, lobster, pasta, a charcuterie board, salad. In the bungalow, we drank Champagne and feasted on all the many plates, having a remarkably wholesome conversation about Jake, the all-American kid: what life was like in college, his friends, what he missed from his exploits as a high school jock. Finally, it was time to turn to the large king bed.

He was very eager. I was relieved that he was a great kisser, but it also made me doubt his self-professed inexperience. I used a canned line I would eventually lean on, because if men lose confidence, the ship sinks. “Are you sure you’re a virgin?” I asked.

“I’m just watching the right porn,” he told me.

I nodded. Of course. Porn rattled under most encounters at the ranch, especially with the less experienced guys. It could be useful, like it was with Jake, giving them an idea of what they might be comfortable trying. But it also created expectations with no tether to reality. In the brothel, it was on balance helpful. My experience in civilian life is the opposite.

The party with Jake turned into a multi-hour event. He wanted to try every position, a lengthy blowjob, and he wanted to go down on me.

“This is just so so so great!” he said. “God, I love you!”

I pretended like I didn’t hear it. Sometimes it just slips out. But he kept telling me he loved me, over and over.

“You love this, Jake,” I finally had to course-correct. “You love, you know, sex. That’s what you love.”

But no: “I love you, Paloma!”

When we finished up, I asked him what he and his father’s plans were for the holiday, assuming it was just the two of them, that they only had each other, no family, certainly no mother to go home to.

“Oh no, she’s there,” he said. His mom was at home.

“Your dad is still married?”

He nodded, almost proudly.

“So you guys just left on Thanksgiving to go to a brothel to—” I stopped myself.

“Yeah!” He laughed. He suddenly seemed much tipsier.

We returned to the bar, where his father was making drunken declarations about his son’s special day to the entire bar. He was a braggart. He was loud about his past experiences at brothels. There are two kinds of men who come here. One kind find what they need and stop coming. The other kind get addicted. I hoped I hadn’t started Jake toward becoming like his father.

After they left, I realized it had gotten late. I dashed to the dining area. The tables and chairs were still arranged, but the Thanksgiving dinner had been cleaned up, excepting a side table with a few scraps of dessert.

My Thanksgiving dinner was two slices of pie, apple and pumpkin. I picked at it, congealed and cold, with dozens of empty chairs around me. I pictured a wife and mother sitting alone at her Thanksgiving table. It scandalized me more than anything else that has happened at the ranch.

NEW YEAR’S EVE

I arrived for my next tour on December 31. It was raining. Nevada is the driest state in the U. S.—ten inches of precipitation annually, which puts it at less than a third of the national average—and yet when it rains, it really rains. The summer’s monsoon season can cause the roads to shut down. Simple sprinkles can mean days of zero clientele.

It was slow and the day felt loaded to me, the day I had set for, potentially, my last day in the life.

two individuals relaxing in a hot tub area

Danielle Levitt

Courtesans support one another, sharing clothing, advice, and a sense that they all have a shot at landing their big money dreams.

I thought back to my first night with a client. “I’ve been here before,” he told me on his way out, I suppose thinking that because it was my first time, there would be some shame in it not being his first time. “The person I saw,” he added, “was the woman who came in to help. Jules.” We burst out laughing, picturing her all business during the dick check. I brought it up to her during our debrief.

“Honestly, I had no idea, Paloma,” she said. And then she gave me the second piece of advice I remember from those early days. “Look,” she said, “in this job, after a while, you’ll rarely remember anyone.”

And yet I did remember these men. Maybe not all, but most. I remembered them enough—liked them enough—to write about them.

The sweet young guy in the “I ❤️ Hot Moms” T-shirt.

The old construction worker who suffers from erectile dysfunction and promises he will only be five minutes in order to get me to go below my standard rate. He is right.

The large, bearded man from Dubai who loves my lips because it’s so rare to find a non-filler lip in Dubai. He boasts about money but pays below my rate. He wins me over when he tells me that when he was a student in America, someone asked him where his camel was, and he showed them a picture of his dad’s Bentley.

The old rocker who shows up at 3:00 a.m. to loiter in the bar. He’s shocked that I know the bands—very famous bands, in my opinion—he used to play in. I like that he knows I will never tell.

My beloved regular, George, a chemical engineer, who drives in from Utah, whom I message with most days. His wife died nine years ago. He tells me the ranch gave him back something he thought lost. I have a feeling that we’ll be friends for life.

I live in New York City surrounded by 8.5 million people, but only in the empty expanse of Nevada could I come to understand the deep well of need in the men who surround me. The ladies at Sheri’s negotiate for car payments, to provide for kids, to afford health care. I negotiate to pay my rent. We round up on some men and round down on others. The men who show up here are negotiating for a kind of connection—a physical need, a hunger or thirst—they can’t seem to find in civilian life. Somehow, they have been shaken loose, and sex with one of us helps them grab hold of themselves again.

I started to realize that I wanted to stay in this life.

Still, I decided I wanted to keep to myself for the day. I made the effort of putting on a good New Year’s Eve outfit—thigh-high white leather boots, short white lace skirt, furry pink crop coat—but between the rain and the existential funk, I had low expectations. I ordered fried rice before the kitchen closed and started to think I could end the night before midnight.

Just as I finished my last bites, I heard my name on the intercom. The hostess was wondering if I was around for a two-girl.

At the hostess stand I met Hana, probably the only Sheri’s lady I had not crossed paths with even once. It was clear she was in the midst of a long day with a client, disheveled in that way we get disheveled—raccoon-eyed with running makeup, her silk robe matted with sweat and hanging precariously. She told me the man she was with was a first-time client who’d spent hours with her in the bungalows and after a little while longer wanted to invite another lady in. She told me it was unlikely to be sexual. More like emotional support. “Are you good at that?” she asked.

On my sixth tour, I was able to honestly answer yes.

By the time I showed up at the Roman bungalow, a few hours later, the rain was heavily pouring. Joel turned out to be a sweet guy close to my age. I slowly got his full story: He had been a Mormon until the age of thirty. Hana was his first experience with a woman, and now I would be his second.

We cuddled with him on the big Roman bed, one of us on either side of him. At different points, Joel tried to explain his depression to us. It had been more than a decade since he’d left the church. The bottom had fallen out of his social life. He felt isolated. I saw flashes of Glenn, my Fourth of July date who so despaired at being a virgin that he considered suicide.

We assured him that we could make him feel better, that things could be different.

Hana told me she wanted to give Joel a Nuru massage and offered to let me watch. I couldn’t believe it. I’d begged other girls to teach me Nuru, but most of them just watched Nuru porn and winged it, which seemed cheap, if it was truly the deeply intimate, nearly spiritual experience we sold. I even considered working at an illegal Nuru parlor in Chinatown back home to learn, but Jupiter talked me out of it.

Hana, however, was Japanese and had actually trained in Nuru in Japan, so she said this would be the real deal. She positioned Joel gently on a black waterproof fitted sheet that went right over the bungalow mattress. She then boiled water to add to a bottle half filled with the Japanese Nuru gel—a clear water-based seaweed gel that is wildly slippery but not sticky or gooey. Hana coated Joel with coconut oil, then drizzled the gel over his body, massaging it in gently, like a normal massage. Then she poured some on herself—letting him watch—before laying flat atop him and letting her body glide over his. Her full-body motions were graceful, mesmerizing. Every inch of her met every inch of him, and nothing was sloppy or chaotic. The line between them thoroughly melted.

It was sensual, but somehow more than that: It was loving. I thought about Joel, thirty years in a religion that kept him from experiencing touch. I didn’t have sex with Joel; I just watched. What I was watching felt sacred. I could feel this incredible, primal need being addressed, in an almost mystical way. Joel was radiant.

I left the bungalow unsure of what to do with myself. I went back to the bar and sat with the leftover ladies. We made our usual small talk, we checked our phones. It all felt so natural. The hour approached, and when the clock struck midnight, we cheersed each other. I sent David and George “Happy New Year!” messages. I texted “Happy New Year!” to civilian friends. I was going to continue living Paloma’s life in Nevada. Some of them knew, and others did not.

In the morning, I woke up feeling better than I usually do on January 1. I’ve cut down my drinking considerably since I started at Sheri’s. I like being sharp when I’m at the helm of someone else’s romantic fantasy. Now I favor a Shirley Temple, a surprisingly sexy drink, cherry and all.

I had a 5:00 p.m. shift. I pulled on a slinky red dress and mermaid-scale fishnets and went to the bar. A man in a beautiful, almost iridescent suit was sitting there, sipping on wine, looking like a character from a David Lynch movie. We exchanged glances.

Like clockwork, I went over, introduced myself, and offered him a tour, which he accepted.

He let me give the tour, then said, “Yeah, I’ve been here before.”

Usually those clients don’t want tours. “A long time ago?”

He grinned. “Nope, consistently for the last ten years.”

We went to my room to talk.

“So what makes you come back here over and over?” I couldn’t help but ask him.

He paused. “I could ask you the same thing,” he said, ducking the question, another man not quite able to articulate what it was that was missing.

“Yesterday was supposed to be my last day,” I told him.

He seemed surprised at that. “Why?”

I demurred. Then I flashed the biggest smile I have and grabbed a sex menu from the dresser. I situated myself on the bed across from the couch he was sitting on, the way one of the veteran ladies had instructed me to do on my first tour: a sexy perch, legs crossed then uncrossed then crossed again, a little lean to the side so all the curves are on display, picture-perfect for the client to look you up and down and down and up, which this man was doing. Why? I didn’t much like men when I first got here, but I understood them better now. I felt for them. Without sex, the muscles they used to express themselves, to understand themselves, to relate to other people, had atrophied. So many who came here couldn’t say why they’d wandered in. But me, I could give them the question they could answer. “So, baby,” I said, “what can I do for you today?”