The Boys and the Brothel

The Kid is barely 20, and on Saturday, just after dark, he walked into the first-ever bar of his life here in a rural stretch of Nevada.

An hour later, he stepped inside his first brothel.

It was partially my fault, really.

I was the driver, the handler, the fixer, the so-called adult, the translator of sleaze.

The Madam was hesitant; not knowing whether to let us in.

The Kid looks, well, like a kid.

I told her I was his father. That helped seal the deal.

But it’s not what you think.

The Kid’s name is Noah, but I’m gonna call him the kid because, well, just because.

His father is my best friend. We’d met in college in Buffalo in the 1970s and, before our running days were over, we’d gotten into a rap-sheet-long list of trouble, a recounting I will forego in order to protect the innocent.

Well, OK, maybe one story.

One summer in Buffalo, we ran a painting business and stole all our equipment — brushes towels, even paint — as a way to keep our overhead low and keep the profits for ourselves. You see, we were going to Europe in the fall, and we’d stolen tour guides for each country in our itinerary.

Up to not good; that was our game plan.

Then I broke my Achilles tendon. Laid up for months, I cried crocodile tears as my best buddy went all by himself for the adventure of a lifetime.

Fast forward forty years. I get a call from The Kid.

He has his own running buddy, a college mate I’ll call The Pal. His real name is Jacob.

The two have hatched a plan and wanted to know if I could help.

I listened.

“What a terrible idea,” I said. “What time?”

Just kidding. I’ve seen that schtick on a T-shirt and love, love, love the line.

Actually, The Kid’s idea wasn’t terrible; it was genius.

He and The Pal want to be filmmakers. And they’re working on their first project, one they want to both write and direct.

It involves the seamy world of Nevada brothels.

I’ve covered Nevada as a reporter and writer for three decades. I’ve been to brothels on a professional basis, interviewed the hookers and their madams, and the money men behind them, characters like Dennis Hof.

I’d become jaded to the whole scene. In fact, a brothel-related story was involved in my decision to leave the Big City newspaper where I’d worked for 26 years.

I had taken a few days off, and the night before my return, basketball player Lamar Odom had overdosed in a brothel in the little shit-ass community of Crystal, on the outskirts of another shit-ass town called Pahrump.

I was the Vegas bureau chief for the newspaper and the calls for a followup story began at 6 am, but I’d turned off my phone because our plane had been late and my wife and I had only gotten to be d at 4 am.

When I woke at nine, ready to return to work, I had 50 voice mails and text messages from my panicked desk.

One was from the national editor.

“You need to surface ASAP.”

That was it; if I had waffled on taking a buyout in the days and weeks before, I didn’t now. I was done doing to bidding of hall monitors.

Not long ago, I’d offered The Kid a place to stay if he came to Nevada, and he was ready to take me up on my offer.

But here was the catch:

Neither The Kid nor The Pal are old enough to rent a car.

Neither has their driver’s license.

That meant I would play the role of the Chauffeur of Sleaze.

As I said, it was a terrible idea, so what time?

I picked them up at the Vegas airport on a Friday night. They’d flown in from the East Coast and were anxious to get started.

They’d done their homework. They had a list of brothels they were going to visit in Nye County, ninety minutes outside Vegas, and then were flying to Reno to visit another and do some more interviews, including one with George Flint, the former brothel lobbyist and a man I had profiled for a Big City newspaper.

They’d cajoled one brothel outside Reno to pick them up at the airport in a limousine.

Like I said, they’d done their homework.

But there was one fail, and it turned out to be a big one.

In Nye County, you need to be 21 to set foot inside a brothel. You can go to war and die for your country at age 18, but you can’t legally pay for sex until you’re 21.

God Bless America.

They thought they’d had it covered: they’d ordered fake IDs, which were supposed to arrive the day they left. But the package was confiscated at U.S. Customs, so they were shit out of luck. And out of a way to get where they wanted to go.

And let me say this: I like the kid. He reminds me of this father at his age. The way he talks, makes such questionable food decisions as eating spicy potato chips for breakfast. And he looks just like the old man used to at his age, only he’s a brunette and not a red-head.

And I like The Pal as well; that is, as soon as I’d made one thing understood.

The first time we’d had a three-way conversation by phone to discuss logistics, he’d called me “Mr. Glionna,” in what I’d taken as an insincere, Eddie Haskel kind of way.

It was like “Leave It To Beaver,” that 1950s TV show, where young Eddie would brown-nose Wally’s parents before heading up to his friend’s room to plan things no-good.

Good Morning, Mr. Cleaver. Good Morning, Mrs. Cleaver.”

But that wasn’t it.

The Pal just had manners. He was calling an adult stranger old enough to be his own father. That’s where the Mr. came from.

He’d learn soon enough he wasn’t dealing with a man who deserved the title “Mr.”

“Dude,” I said. “Call me John.”

At 2 p.m., we headed out toward Pahrump and its small galaxy of brothels. We’d rented a car at a place near my house. On the way, we discussed how the pair would schmooze their way inside the brothels.

They didn’t plan on paying for sex. For one, they couldn’t afford it. Two, they just wanted to talk to, and not handle, the merchandize.

Many brothels, as a lame PR gesture, offer tours of the joint and allow visitors to witness a lineup of the girls-for-sale.

A few miles from the first brothel, the infamous Chicken Ranch, The Kid asked me to pull over: He and to piss. The boys both jumped out and I sat on the side of the road with the rental car’s engine running, waiting.

I idly looked at my smart phone.

Fifteen messages.

It was the woman from the car rental place: she’d forgotten to give me the key to the vehicle, which had a push-button ignition.

It was way too far to go back. So there was this wrinkle: We couldn’t turn the car off.

A few moments later, we stood outside the Chicken Ranch.

The filmmakers were ready to go in, but not quite. They had no IDs and no real plan about what do if they were asked for one.

“I’m a little scared,” The Kid said. “Are you scared?”

“Yeah,” The Pal said. “A little.”

Finally, the Pal turned to me.

“Um, John,” he began. “Do you think you could tell them that you’re our father and, you know, like vouch for us?”

So, it had come to this: asked to play the adult; a role I hated.

“Sure, I said.

We rang the bell and the Madam came to the door.

“Ahhhhh!” she said joyfully. “We got a couple of young ones here!”

The she asked how old the boys were.

They stammered.

“Um, 20,” they said.

She shut the door.

So, we headed north, toward a place called the Alien Brothel in the far-flung Amargosa Valley. On the way, we stopped by the now-closed Love Ranch South, where Dennis Hof had died a few weeks before.

We took a few pictures and then rolled over to a nearby bar I’d always wanted to see.

The place was open and we ordered three beers. It was empty in a lonely-loser kind of way, just a man named Hank at the bar.

The proprietress, a woman named Kathy, who’s known for her homemade meat-loaf, served us three IPAs.

“Wait,” she paused. “Are you two 21?”

“Sure we are!” the filmmakers said in unison.

She turned to me, the so-called adult.

“Can you vouch for them!”

Easy peasy; we gulped down a few beers and headed toward the Alien Brothel.

We stood at the door, ready to ring the bell. I had an eye on the parked car, idling a few feet way.

The Madam answered.

She asked if the boys were 21.

This time, they had their shit together.

Yes, they were. They had university ID’s but n driver’s licenses, since they didn’t drive. I was their father. Nobody said this, but the point was clear: Would a real father ever bring his underage sons to a brothel?

Good thing I never had kids, I thought.

She looked at The Pal.

“What year were you born?”

And to The Kid.

“And you?”

They rattled off dates, and the Madam seemed to buy it.

But The Kid added: “We were born a day apart.”

Which, as much as I know about childbirth, doesn’t seem very plausible.

“Yes, I said. “At 11: 59 p.m. and 12:01 a.m.:

To our surprise, she stepped aside and let us all in.

“Well, I doubt you could ever make up such an unlikely story,” she said.

So the boys got their interviews.

They eye-balled a lineup of hookers that looked like a “Usual Suspects” collection of broken lives and bad choices.

The screenwriters were in research heaven.

It all made sense: Earlier, when I’d witnessed first-hand just how close they were, I told The Kid that me and his father were about his age when we first hooked up as inseparable pals. If our relationship was any guide, I told them, you two are going to be friends for the rest of your lives.

But as far as misadventures go, I figured, they had a lot of catching up to do.

Then we left for the brothel.