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Post by Pat on May 26, 2019 18:03:46 GMT -8
Pat's Brothel tour
Salt Wells
Note from Admin: This is the only information I have from the original Brothel Tour in 2003. The rest of my report of Salt Wells will be just What I have been able to accumulate from the internet.
The Brothel is located on Highway 50 about 12 miles South of Fallon. It will have a sign out front with Go Go dancers.
This is another Brothel I have very little information on. They have been closed down due to some legal problems. Last I heard they were re-opening. If you are in the area stop by. You may or may not find it open.
All quiet at the cathouse / Way out in the desert, time passes slowly between customers
2002-07-21 04:00:00 PDT Fallon, Nev. --
We're blowing fast through the desert 15 miles outside Fallon heading toward the east end of Nevada when this little outpost rises up in the moonscape flatness with a sign at the roadside reading "Girls Girls Girls." There's a storm fence around the place, mostly topped with razor wire, and the light bulbs are turned off on the multi-humped archway over the doorway. Photographer Deanne Fitzmaurice and I are out here chatting up folks for a story, so she pulls the car over. Maybe it's the razor wire and the absolute desolation of the desert combining to say "keep on moving" that draws us to it, out of pure contrariness. Or perhaps it's because we know it's a whorehouse and if you're going to be talking to just-folks in Nevada, you should probably include the only legal working girls in the country, too. We don't stop to analyze it. It's 1 p.m. and we have some road time. So we bang on the fence and what looks like the madam comes out, a white-haired woman with reading glasses hanging by a strap around her neck onto her neat red sweater. She looks at me and Deanne, and her camera, looks at us as if we're cops, and when we say howdy she replies evenly and slowly, "You know you can't come in here." "Hey, we'd just like to talk, maybe see your brothel and hang out for a bit, " I say. "Well, you can come in, but she can't unless she wants to work. State law," says the madam, who we later learn isn't really a madam but who runs the place anyway. "You get an $85 doctor's certificate saying you're clean, and a $100 license from the state health department, and we'll talk."
Deanne says if that's what it takes to get in, sure she'll do it, and the woman softens a tad. She looks around at the empty road we pulled off, listens to the desert wind rasping across the sand in dusty swirls, then punches open the locked gate. "Oh, I suppose you can sit on the porch for a moment," she says with a sigh. "But you can't go anywhere near the inside."
This is the Salt Wells Ranch, dubbed "the best brothel in Nevada" two years ago by GQ Magazine, and Ruth Card, the 59-year-old supposed madam (actually "manager" because she's never prostituted herself, a prerequisite for the title of madam), has some time on her hands, too. Only one hooker, Ricki, is on duty until night falls, and there hasn't been a customer for hours. So after a bit of hemming and hawing, and checking us out to make sure we are sincerely just interested in seeing the place, Ruth invites us to the door, then to the front entry -- and finally all the way inside.
What we see are not cabaret parties, though those do happen here. Not the house's six women lined up like barn animals waiting for men to take their pick, though that happens, too. Not hungry-eyed young guys nervously perched at the bar, eyeing the hookers. Not the couples disappearing down the red- lighted hallway into rooms emanating the sounds of groans and creaking beds. What we do see, instead, is a rare, frozen-in-time moment: respite time at a cat house, that odd calm between rushes of customers when the women who work on their backs get to pretend that their lives are what other folks call normal.
'NORMAL' TIME
Even hookers have to eat, sleep alone sometime, swap tales and techniques away from customers, go shopping and spend a few hours just hearing the sound of their own thoughts. Society's fascinated revulsion of hookers may keep them separate from everyday people doing jobs they can't do, for some reason, and maybe never will, but that doesn't mean they don't need "normal" time -- like now. Ricki, the lone "girl" on duty, strolls in the front door with two bags of Arby's sandwiches; it was slow, so she'd been in town for her weekly hooker doctor checkup. "Hey, sweetie," Ruth calls out, and Ricki lays the sandwiches down on the bar, one for her and one for Ruth, and gives a huge smile.
Ricki's wearing denim shorts, a modest sleeveless sweater and sandals, and her short black hair is neatly trimmed. Ruth's beauty parlor-tidy nest of white hair and demure manner make her come off like somebody's mom. There's nothing about them, at the moment, that says "whorehouse." In fact, except for the pole-dance stage -- which is so dark with the lights off you can hardly tell it's there -- just about nothing else in here says that. We stand in the center of the room and see this: a bar, a living room full of overstuffed couches, a kitchen off to the side giving out coffee smells, and a hallway leading off somewhere.
"Are you really ready if a guy walks in right now?" I ask somewhat incredulously as they casually munch their lunch and chitchat away. "I mean, this place doesn't exactly look ready for action." Ruth and Ricki laugh. "The rush isn't exactly on until tonight," Ruth says. "This time is just for us." She tunes us out as if we aren't there and turns to Ricki. "What do you hear?" "I just talked to my daughter at (college), and she's doing so good," Ricki tells Ruth, and the conversation drifts into the sort you'd hear among moms watching tots swing in the local park. They go over the kid's grades, the kid's classes, the kid's boyfriends, and after 20 minutes they get to the kid's advice. "She tells me, 'Mom, you got to eliminate the negative in your life,' and so I tell her I'm doing my best," Ricki says. She stares at her shoes. "She's smart, you know. I listen," she says, then looks up to us and remembers there are reporters in the room. "Oh, God, please don't tell anyone who she is, because she'd catch all kinds of hell if her friends knew what I did out here," Ricki says. "I mean, she's OK with it, but people . . . you know." We smile and say fine.
It's an old conversation, one that happens when a hooker's kid is forging a straight life away from Mom's profession and wants the mom to do the same, and Ruth's heard it a million times. Each time, it has hope, she says later, and sometimes it works. But not often. Ruth laughs, pats Ricki on the back. "One day at a time, honey. Your life comes together one day at a time."
MESSY LIVES
Ricki, who was born in Oakland and once worked as a medical assistant in Concord, has turned tricks for 12 years, and now at 42 years old is on the latest of several drug rehab programs. It's the usual story. The women here -- as at any brothel, legal or not -- have lives riddled with messes that could keep a therapist working overtime: lousy childhoods, abusive ex-husbands, drug and booze problems, cash hassles they can't erase with a time-card job, self- esteem in the toilet. You name it. But here, right now, with no sound but the breeze, and no one clutching at their time and bodies, all those worries are somewhere else. For these few hours while Ruth and Ricki lounge around the cathouse sipping coffee, reading paperbacks, putting together a puzzle -- just hanging out -- they can believe that the rest of their lives are not happening. They feed the house dog, Sunny, and give it aspirin for its earache. They clear cobwebs from around the bird's nest just over the front door, and check to see if the eggs had hatched -- not just yet.
"It's a hell of a hard business, but you get your bills paid," Ricki says as she pads back to her "crib," the term for each hooker's personal room -- which she actually lives in half the time. "When I came back here I was in debt and now I've got three months' rent paid in advance, I put down $2,500 on my truck, and I put up an electric fence around my place to keep the dogs in the yard. "For me, it's all about trying to keep an upbeat attitude," she says, not a trace of sadness in her brown eyes. "I'm here now, but that doesn't mean I'll be here forever." Ricki grabs towels off the "trick bed," as it's called, and flings them into a hamper. The tiny room, one of eight along the brothel's hallway, is an odd study in almost asexual tidiness: A curtain with a stylish moon and sun pattern flaps at the open window, an oak chifforobe dominates one wall, and the bed is a simple affair with a faux white canopy hanging from the ceiling. "Hell, I have to spend a lot of time here, I don't want it looking like a whorehouse all the time, now do I?" Rick grins.
'LIFE'S GOOD'
Her afternoon plan is to write in her 2-inch-thick journal, make yet another read-through of "The Magic of Thinking Big," a self-help book waiting on her bed, and then check out the latest exercises in her new issue of Muscle and Fitness magazine. A workout session at the gym might be next but lounging around is probably more like it. "So far, today's been great -- I took my dogs out hiking along the lake where I also live, I watched the sunrise come up and it was purple like a pastel painting," Ricki says. "Life's good." The house kitten, a gray tabby, jumps up on the bed and Ricki screws her face up into a clownish imitation of a streetwalker come-on leer: "Hey, look, it's a cathouse!" she guffaws.
The customer rush from Fallon and the nearby Naval Air Station is still about seven hours away, so Ricki tries out a potential dress for later, a cut- to-there black sheath with open sides ("We buy these from a company called 'Ho Clothes,' " Ricki says with a giggle). Then she steps out back to check on her bedding, drying in the desert wind. "Dang, the wind took 'em," she murmurs as she hunts down the sheet and pillowcase in the alkaline sand. "Hope there are no scorpions in this," she says to no one in particular as she shakes off the pillowcase. Ruth heads inside to the kitchen, where a puzzle of bears and mountain lions waits half done, the midday sun bathing it in hot white light. The TV quietly purrs with CNN in a little sitting area alongside the stove, and several needlepoint stitching projects sit folded on the coffee table. Deanne and I walk back to front rooms, and the faint clinking sound of Ruth washing dishes follows us before the door closes. Deanne and I sit at the bar and close our eyes a moment to hear the near dead silence. With both women out of the room, the only sound is the breathing of Sunny the dog napping on the couch, which almost blends into the faint whir of that ceaseless wind whirling across the roof. At night, the strip-dance pole on the tiny stage in front of the bar is draped with guys and gals alike, tanking down beers and eyeing each other with the intent of either relief or cash; now it barely registers in our minds as we head back to the kitchen. "The girls here -- and we call them girls or ladies, not whores, mind you -- do have their problems, but when they're in this house that stuff doesn't come with them or they're out of a job," Ruth says, wiping off a few dishes from the strainer and putting them away in the tidy cupboard. "It's bad business. "There aren't many kids that ever worked here that I didn't just love," she adds. We point out, somewhat gently, that with the troubles these women come with they can't be models of stability -- but she's heard it all before. "I don't care what they look like on the outside, they're beautiful inside, and I mean that," Ruth says, who in that bizarre Nevada way of things also works in town as a real estate agent. "My girls aren't dirty or slutty, they're working girls trying to make money and get their lives in order. And some people may think a place like this is just about sex, but a lot of times it's just about guys wanting company." She and Ricki haul out an armful of photo albums and point to the highlights like relatives showing off a trip to Hawaii. Except for the shots of frat-boy-looking guys mooning the camera or wearing bras for a laugh, or the shots of topless hookers with negligees pulled down, the scenes are surprisingly benign. They look like your typical bar snaps, everyone laughing with beers in hand. "The nasty stuff happens in the rooms, not out here in the front," Ricki says. "And most of our guys here are sweet, especially from the Navy base." The two -- and the other women in the house, later, when Deanne and I come back for chats -- have plenty of tales to fill in the blanks. There was the guy who came in and paid several hundred dollars to just sleep with one of the women. "He snored something awful all night, didn't want any sex, and the next morning he gave us all hugs and said it was the first night he'd been able to sleep since his wife died seven years before," Ruth says.
BIG SPENDER
And there was the guy who a few weeks ago paid $6,100 for two women to paint his body all night, rig him up in bondage leather gear, spank him and talk dirty to him. He had sex once, Ricki says -- "in the morning, almost as an afterthought. He was on some kind of medication and just wanted to try all the sorts of things he never thought he could." More stories follow of spankings, bikers turning out to be gentle giants and some scary guys who want to do strangulation games or seem plain wacko. The house "menu" lists a cornucopia of activities starting at $100. "I take the attitude that coming in here doesn't make a guy a bad guy, and that's not just because I make money off him," Ruth says. "It makes him a safe guy. Going to a brothel is a heck of a lot better than just picking someone off the street -- you don't know what you'll catch, who might beat you up." Nobody's fooling themselves that prostitution is a breeze, she says even as she jokes with Deanne about how -- because she's "so nice" -- she has a standing job offer anytime at Salt Wells. With the stress of negotiating sex- for-pay, the taboo hassles in town and the life explosions that knock the women offline, it's a small miracle if anyone stays in place more than a few months, Ruth says. "Usually a girl comes into the business because they've gotten so far into debt they can't get out, or they'll say, 'I've got four kids and an ex-husband who won't pay, you've gotta help me out,' " Ruth says. "So they come here, they make a lot of money, then they leave." Ricki's been here two months. Maggie, the longest-lasting hooker in the place -- who came as a "turnout," or neophyte to the profession -- has been here only nine months. "I spent a lifetime trying to be good at something -- being a medical assistant, warehouse jobs, being a good mom, all those things -- and this is something I'm good at," Ricki says. "You've got to do what works for you. And this works for me." Deanne and I thank the ladies, head off for the far edge of Nevada for our other story, and then a few days later we swing back through. This time it's night and three men are sauntering out the door. "Hey, we just stopped in for some beers before we take our ATVs out in the sand," one who calls himself Dominick says with a big grin. "Nice place. Nice women, even just for conversation -- kind of amazing, when you think about how it's a cathouse and all. "That's a heck of a trick considering how everyone's nervous when you go into a place like that," he adds. "They put you right at ease, and I don't mean just to get you into bed, either." His buddy, Doug, nods. "Especially that Ricki -- she's got brains, and a lot of wit, too. I suppose you've got to have a quick wit to do this sort of thing, though, don't you? "But I guess we'll never know," Doug says, laughing. "We never see them without the guys."
July 31, 2007
The woman who owns Salt Wells Villa said Tuesday she is saddened by a fire that destroyed the property she hoped to reopen as a brothel before the end of the year.Tia Maria Torres said she wants to “create a mini paradise” on the Salt Wells property 15 miles east of Fallon.“I hope to have small exotic cats and tropical birds. It will be very relaxing and very simplistic,” Torres said about her plans to rebuild a brothel in Churchill County.
She bought the property last year after deciding that owning and operating a brothel would earn income to support her non-profit animal rescue foundation in Southern California. Salt Wells closed down in 2004 amid financial troubles and code violations.
“I want to continue on with its legacy but create a different flair,” the Agua Dulce, Calif., woman said. “I’m a small-town girl and I want to create a Garden of Eden-type atmosphere.”
Torres was notified of the Sunday morning fire that completely destroyed buildings which housed the bar, living quarters and rooms where the prostitutes took customers. “Now I know how people feel when they come home and find their house has been robbed,” she said about the news of the fire. “I feel so violated. It feels horrible. I’m devastated but am more devastated for the local people.”
Torres, 47, said now that the buildings have been reduced to charred rubble, she doesn’t know if that will make it easier or harder to gain county approval to open a brothel.“I’m at their mercy,” she said.Agua Dulce is smaller than Fallon, Torres said, and she fell in love with Churchill County on previous visits.“I love all the ranches. Nevada has always been the other state I wanted to live in. I’m a free-spirited person and Nevada is a free-spirited state,” said Torres.
She decided to get into the brothel business after seeing friends in the adult entertainment business continue to prosper despite national economic setbacks.“Sex sells. It’s the only industry that never fails in the economy. That’s when I got the idea to start a brothel and generate money for my non-profit,” she said.She plans to survey the damage next week.
“I’ll come out and sit on the dirt and cry,” Torres said.
As New Generation Moves In, Vote on a Ban Ignites Furor; Salt Wells' Sad History By GEORGE ANDERS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL October 20, 2004; Page A1
FALLON, Nev. -- Glenna Palludan smiled as she recalled this desert town nearly a half-century ago. Local stores sold saddles and spurs. Sick people visited a tiny hospital that has been replaced by a bigger, more modern successor. And right next to the old hospital was Sallie's house of prostitution.
"We were a wild place back then," the 67-year-old resident said. Town archives hold accounts of lusty fellows, mixed up about the address, who dashed into the hospital. One, it is said, even insisted on being admitted as a patient, thinking that naughty pleasures with "nurses" awaited him.
Now, Fallon has grown up. Sallie's is gone, having given way to a giant Wal-Mart and a community college. Retirees and young families keep streaming into town, drawn by affordable housing and a reasonable commute to Reno, 60 miles to the northwest. Fallon and surrounding Churchill County have a population of about 25,000, three times what it was in Ms. Palludan's high-school days.
A few miles east of town, though, a vestige of old Nevada lingers. Several flimsy trailers jut out of the desert. Above them, a tattered sign has three slinky women beckoning to motorists. This is the Salt Wells Villa Ranch, one of Nevada's 28 licensed brothels, down from a peak of 35 in the early '80s. Though Salt Wells halted operations a few months ago because of financial troubles, what will now become of it is the talk of the county.
Nevada is the only state in the U.S. where houses of ill repute are a legitimate business. Prostitutes are licensed. Owners pay property taxes, and county sheriffs nab customers who leave without paying. Las Vegas, by state law, is brothel-free, but in rural Nevada sin is alive if not thriving.
Many Churchill County residents think Salt Wells was a blight on their community and want to be sure that no brothel ever opens again in their roughly 5,000 square miles. On the county ballot Nov. 2 is a proposal to ban houses of prostitution, something no Nevada county has done since 1978. Activists on both sides think the ban has a chance of passing. All the same, a number of Nevadans, mostly older people, say that places such as Salt Wells ought to be saved.
"It's been 35 years since I've been in a brothel, so I don't have a personal stake in this," says Montie Pierce, a retired construction manager in Fallon. "But this is part of Nevada heritage. I'm tired of people who think they're in the Bible Belt telling the rest of us what to do."
Even more vociferous is Fredda Stevenson, owner of Old Middlegate Station, a desert bar and grill about 100 miles east of Reno. "Banning prostitution is a stupid idea," she declares. "Let it be. It's a service like anything else."
Nevada has a long history of men working in isolation in the desert, Ms. Stevenson explains. "Ranch hands, military pilots and cowboys -- they don't have any women nearby," she says. "With brothels, they can go in, get a little action and then go right back to work."
Such arguments carry no weight with Baptist minister Daniel Fitch, an erstwhile carpenter who moved to Fallon seven years ago. He and his wife, Mary, say they have seen how prostitution degrades women. Mr. Fitch in his sermons has been urging parishioners to vote for a prostitution ban and to help him mail fliers to voters. "It's time for a new generation of Churchill County residents to take action," he says.
Fallon dairy farmer Alan Perazzo complains that Salt Wells' property taxes haven't nearly covered its burden on county police services. "We're subsidizing prostitution, and I don't like that," he says. Over a steak-and-potatoes dinner, his wife, Carey, added in a whisper: "It's an eyesore. It's an embarrassment to our community. We have friends from out of state who didn't want to move here when they discovered prostitution was legal."
Nevada moralists have been denouncing prostitution since frontier days, and most of the time their protests have been to no avail. Nearly 20 years ago, a Reno wedding-chapel operator, George Flint, decided to help form the Nevada Brothel Owners Association. He is the NBOA's chief lobbyist and only full-time employee, with an annual budget from dues-paying brothels of about $100,000. Roughly half that money goes for political contributions.
Usually, Mr. Flint says, he can stymie church-led campaigns against prostitution by presenting brothels as good public citizens. He talks proudly about how the Sheri's Ranch brothel, in Pahrump, raised $7,000 for a senior center this past spring, ensuring that the elderly would keep getting Meals on Wheels. Over the years, he says, other brothels have bought firetrucks and rebuilt baseball diamonds for their tiny hometowns.
In Churchill County, Mr. Flint says, none of his usual arguments are carrying the day. Antiprostitution forces are well organized this time, he says, and Salt Wells' lack of community service makes it hard for him to reassure voters. When he tried to defend prostitution at a public hearing in Fallon this summer, "I was nearly run out of town," he says.
Churchill County, which legalized brothels 30 years ago, started with high hopes. It licensed Salt Wells and a short-lived rival, the Lazy B Ranch, treating their openings in 1975 as front-page news. An account in the Fallon Eagle included an owner's never-realized boast that he would build an airstrip near his brothel to attract more customers.
Nearly two years later, Salt Wells was firebombed one morning at 5:45, causing $1,200 in damage. Law-enforcement officials found traces of Molotov cocktails made of gasoline and Folger's coffee jars. Later in the day, they arrested the sheriff's wife, Mildred Banovich, who was charged with arson. Mrs. Banovich has since died; her son, Dave Banovich Jr., says she pleaded guilty and served a brief jail sentence.
In the 1980s, Salt Wells' longtime owner, Reina Fuchigami, also known as Gina Wilson, gave up control of the facility after being accused of hiring underage girls to work at the brothel. Ms. Fuchigami is now dead. The current minimum age is 21. Several subsequent owners couldn't make a financial success of the place. In 1996, the brothel was bought for $450,000 by James Kopulos, an Illinois resident who had been in the bowling-alley business for 30 years.
Some of Mr. Kopulos's best customers were Navy personnel at nearby Fallon Naval Air Station. He made it easy for them to pay with personal or military credit cards. Charges running to $150 or more were posted to "James Fine Dining." That fooled government auditors for a while, but then the General Accounting Office caught on.
In a lengthy report two years ago, the GAO blasted the Navy for travel-card abuses that included 50 cardholders who spent more than $13,000 for "prostitution services" at Salt Wells and other Nevada brothels. Belatedly mindful of the Navy's sensitivities, Salt Wells employees posted a sign at the bar, stating: "We are not an Essential Government Service. Do not accept military credit cards."
Last year, Salt Wells prostitute Maggie Holmes complained publicly that the brothel wasn't properly withholding taxes or paying for her medical exams. Mr. Kopulos says he didn't realize the intricacies of local laws, adding that the ensuing publicity hurt his image.
"Townspeople got angry at us," Mr. Kopulos says. "People started thinking we had a nonstop sex machine out there. The fact is, in the slow months we were lucky if we got 10 customers a week."
More problems followed. In September 2003, health inspectors ordered the brothel closed after finding a rodent infestation and a lack of acceptable drinking water. When Mr. Kopulos hired a repairman, county officials cited the owner for not getting necessary work clearances. Mr. Kopulos got the brothel briefly reopened earlier this year, but eventually he surrendered his license and turned over ownership to his main creditor, Reno insurance executive R. Scott Rottman. "I wish I'd never got into the brothel business," Mr. Kopulos says. "I lost a lot of money."
Salt Wells now is bolted shut. Its trailers sit idle behind barbed wire. Mr. Rottman didn't return calls seeking comment on his plans. He could apply for an operating license and try to reopen the bordello, but Mr. Flint, the brothel lobbyist, says that after talking with the new owner, he believes that's unlikely. "The state's character is changing with all these new people coming into Nevada," Mr. Flint says.
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