Over the next few days, it was sometimes hard to remember that where he was working as a bartender was totally legal, as was what went on around him.

Really, it wasn’t hard work, and Danny was rarely frantically busy. He normally came to work at eight in the morning, when the last dog hangers from the night before were hanging it up. Usually, there’d be an all-nighter or two having breakfast with his girl, usually with both of them pretty tired. Sometimes the night-shift girls would have breakfast or a drink or two before they headed back to their rooms to sleep, but they were usually wrapping it up by the time he came on duty, too.

By nine, though, things were as quiet as they’d be all day. By then, the girls who had worked overnight were sawing logs, and there were usually only a couple up front; as often as not, they’d be lingering over coffee, or shooting the bull with the handful of locals in just for breakfast. Sometimes, it got so slow along about nine or ten that the on-duty girls, Danny, Sarah, and maybe a local or two who had shown up for breakfast would plop down at the big table in the dining room for a little friendly gin rummy or cribbage. But mostly, they just sat around, drank coffee, and talked.

What made it truly fascinating for Danny was that he was an insider, "with it," rather than an outsider – almost one of the girls in a way, even though he was often the only guy on the premises, at least working. Some of the stories he heard about the things that had gone on last night or last week or long before were fascinating, and had the ring of truth to them.

The same two girls never drew the morning duty two days in a row, so before long, Danny got to know many of them – and found them interesting. Before coming to Antelope Valley, Danny had never known a prostitute but had on occasion met women who acted like what he thought prostitutes should be like, including his sister-in-law the last few years. Had he been asked to describe a prostitute, he would have come up with words like dumb, slut, immoral, lesbian; he’d have thought that most of them didn’t really care much about sex, and figured that most had a drug problem, and were prostitutes because they couldn’t manage anything better. That couldn’t be further from the truth, he was to learn – at least not at the Redlite Ranch.

In fact, most of them were fairly decent women, sometimes darned intelligent and well educated. There were several college graduates; one of the girls who headlined on the weekends was a trial lawyer, and Frenchy had a master’s in psychology. Learjet Jenn – who, he learned early on, preferred to be called by her real name, Jennlynn Swift – proved to have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Caltech as well as an airline transport rating. She was a multi-millionaire on her own hook, having earned every penny of it, and some but not the majority of it at the Redlite Ranch; she also was vice-president of an R&D company in Phoenix. She owned a Cessna 310 in addition to the Lear, and chartered them both out much of the time, with a retired Air Force general as her chief pilot!

The ladies of the Redlite Ranch were all individuals, and each had their own stories, their own motivations. If there was any common denominator among the ladies, it was that they all in fact liked sex – none of them were exactly forced into what they were doing, although some had had more pressure than others. Most admitted they earned more money relatively part-time at the Redlite than they would have full time at a regular job. As far as the lesbian part went, some but not all went both ways, with both men and women, mostly because they enjoyed it both ways.

There were no drunks, no druggies; George and the shift leaders kept a close eye on them, and would fire anyone with those problems on the spot. In fact, many didn’t drink at all while on the job. Oh, they’d have a drink on the job with a client – the term "John" was never used – but Danny soon learned that a "Taiwan Mai-Tai" and a couple of other drinks were made with a bottle of colored water. The girls were not in the business of getting the customers to buy them expensive drinks – maybe someone needed a drink or two to loosen up, and, just like the food, the drinks at the Redlite were cheaper than at the inn across the road.

The bottom line was that the women knew what they were doing, and they went into it with their heads up and with few illusions. Many of them took some degree of pride in it, and most took some pride in their independence. "No man is telling me how to use my body," one girl told Danny one morning. "Everybody sells their body to do something. You do it tending bar. I prefer to do it my way. It’s more fun, if nothing else."

When he thought about it – and he did that a lot – he realized that virtually all the prostitutes at the Redlite Ranch were more honest with themselves than Marsha had ever been with him, or with herself, at least as far as he knew. There were some interesting women there, most who realized that their job at the Redlite Ranch was to make men happy.

There were a lot of stories going around about Jennlynn, and Danny heard several of them in the days before his first weekend. When Friday afternoon rolled around, he was curious to see just how true the stories were, and just as the early winter evening light was getting low, there was the roar of jet engines taxiing up outside. Danny looked out of the window in the kitchen, and saw a white Learjet roll up to the tie downs. From the window he saw the door of the Lear open; a woman got out and spent a little time walking around the jet, setting the tie downs, and making sure the plane was set for the weekend. After several minutes, she came in the back door and into the dining room, and Danny had his first up-close look at her. She was tall, raven-haired, and even dressed in what probably were her everyday work clothes, she seemed gorgeous.

Shirley was still on duty, and she greeted Jennlynn as an old friend, which she probably was, and introduced her around the room, including to Danny. She was an awesome woman to look at, a nice smile, but Danny could see a fire in her eye, and his initial reaction was that this would be a hard woman to get to really know.

Danny had already learned that Jennlynn rarely was in the lineup, since she usually had a list of appointments, but girls like Patty and Melissa had told him that this headliner didn’t put on airs like some of the other weekend headliners did, causing some jealousy; she could be a lot of fun, and if she didn’t have an appointment, she’d be right out there in the lineup with the rest of them. But, there was no doubt about who she was and what she was doing, and from what little he could tell by watching, she took some pride in what she was doing and in doing it right. That first Friday evening, though, he had little time to get to know this raven-haired sex goddess; time was tight, and her first appointment was waiting, although still a ways off, so she gave Danny her supper order, headed back to her room to change into a spectacular silk pantsuit that left little to the imagination, had dinner with her appointment, then took him to her room in the back.

Friday night, Danny learned, was one of the busier times of the week. As before, he was only scheduled to work until eight, but the place was busy then, and Mike was having trouble keeping up, so Danny just stayed on after he clocked out, trying to help Mike out, if for no more reason than to try and get the flavor of the busy times. Finally, around midnight, he was starting to fade badly, and Mike told him to get on out of there.

Saturday morning was fairly busy, compared to most mornings, and Danny had about all he wanted to do with both waiting tables and servicing the bar. Jennlynn did show up about mid-day, had lunch, and sat around for a while, talking with some of the customers and girls trying to get themselves organized for the busiest night of the week.

The joint was jumping Saturday night, there was no doubt about that – even with the extra weekend girls on duty, there were hardly enough girls to go around and things got busy indeed. Again, Danny stuck it out until about midnight, although this time George told him to stay on clock. The partying was still rolling on when he headed back across the highway to the Sagebrush and collapsed in exhaustion after fifteen straight hours on the job – and at that he was taking it easy, for Patty told him afterward she’d gone eighteen hours straight, but netted close to $3000 in that time.

Sunday was significantly slower, although things were still going at a steady pace when Danny arrived back on the job, and he was steadily busy all morning and into the afternoon. Only late Sunday afternoon did things settle down much, and late in the day, even Jennlynn seemed a little on the tired side as she came out for the last time, dressed in a simple shirt and pair of tight fitting jeans, and ordered a good dinner. The light was starting to get low again when she went out and fired up the Learjet. In a few minutes, there was a roar as it raced down the runway and then turned toward Phoenix.

"Just as well she got out of here," George commented, watching her go. "I really wish we had a lighted runway here, and maybe I’ll have to come up with the money for it someday. But at least it gives her the time to get back home and get a few hours good sleep before she has to go to her day job."

"Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea of what kind of weekend she had?" Danny asked.

"Not bad, not spectacular," George said. "How’d you do on tips?"

"Got some," Danny said. "I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to count it. I’ve just been sticking it in a cash bag. I can count it up later." When he did, it was easily the biggest tipping weekend he’d ever had in the years he’d been bartending part time off and on – and considering that he was only bartending and waiting tables, not partying, he had little reason to complain. He’d already told George that he’d work straight through, as needed, and not worry about days off – there was nothing in particular to do on an off day, and this was a lot more interesting than going back to War and Peace.

Monday morning things were thankfully back to the normal slow, and it gave him a chance to rest up a little and try to put what he’d seen into perspective. He did have some idea of what things were like around a bar, and that angle of it was familiar – but it was certainly a different experience at the Redlite Ranch. There was no denying that it was interesting. It was pretty obvious that what made it different were the women and the atmosphere – very interesting women who gave him a much different viewpoint than he’d ever had before. He hadn’t had much experience with getting to know women since high school, and what little he did have was really pretty primitive, he had come to realize long before he’d wound up in Antelope Valley, or even Florida. Now, here he was, with a lot of good-looking women around him – the average was pretty high, higher than he’d ever experienced before, and the majority couldn’t be called much less than serious babes.

He remembered back to days in college, when he had been only loosely affiliated with Marsha. He’d often checked out some good looking girl, wondered if she might be interested in going out, might be interested in sex. Here, with a few exceptions like Sarah the cook, there was no question – any of these women would party at the drop of a credit card. The place was like a singles bar full of sure things, and you didn’t even have to pretend with the illusion of a dinner, a drink, a movie. Danny remembered several of his college roommates spending hundreds, even thousands of dollars on their girlfriends before they might or might not wind up in bed. As far as that went, he’d spent a lot of time and money with Marsha before the first time came around, considerably more time and money after the first time – and then, only rarely had she seemed interested in it, let alone eager. That made this place a new world for him, one that was a little hard to comprehend.

Danny’s years with Marsha, and trying to put them behind him ate at him a lot, especially in the first days. They’d eaten at him for years, and it only got worse when he drove out of Ft. Pierce for the last time. They were still eating at him pretty bad over at the Sagebrush before he went to work at the Redlite Ranch. There had been a lot of agony there, a lot of bad temper, bad feelings, and it ended up in a spectacular outburst on his part after years of nagging pain. He was a little ashamed about that – it wasn’t the kind of thing that he thought he could do, but the constant, ongoing pain from Marsha had driven him to going well beyond what he would have expected himself capable of.

Now that he looked back at it, though, he’d amazed himself at how much he’d bent who he was and what he had done to try and accommodate Marsha. Now, much of what he’d done seemed inane and not worth the effort to him, from enduring her vegetarian cooking to her ideas about feminism, her bad temper and her trying to break him off from his family. And, in the end, it had proved to not be worth the effort, and that bugged him, too. Now, he could compare her memory to the interesting, beautiful women around him, and it only made him realize what a fool he’d been in putting up with her, especially for as long as he had.

Not unexpectedly, several of the women at the Ranch had histories of tough relationships with significant others, and he wasn’t the only one with bad, sometimes brutal stories to tell, not that he’d told anyone his own story. But, the subject of Danny’s soon-to-be-ex frequently came up in those discussions in the dining room on those quiet mornings. Usually, he just tried to make the point that he was pretty disgusted with her and change the subject as soon as possible. But the discussions around the table were pretty heavily oriented toward sex, for obvious reasons, and Danny had never, ever, been around women who were as forward and detailed at talking about sex as they were here.

Perhaps with the exhaustion of the weekend taking the edge off things, Monday morning got more personal. Shirley, Frenchy, and Peppermint Patty were sitting around drinking coffee with him while most of the building was asleep and recovering from the weekend. "Back the first morning we met you," Frenchy said, more or less in a conversational tone of voice, "you said you were pretty disgusted with women. I take it that you meant that you were pretty disgusted with your wife."

"Well, yeah," Danny said. "Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy hanging out with you girls, but I’m afraid Marsha went a long way toward putting me off sex altogether."

"Didn’t you enjoy partying with your wife?" Patty asked.

"Not particularly," Danny told the slender artificial blonde with the cute, young-looking face. "Oh, it was fun back when we were first going together, even when we were first married, but the last few years, partying with a sack of flour would have been more fun because a sack of flour doesn’t bitch at you every step of the way. The last couple years, I didn’t even try."

"Oh, Danny," Frenchy shook her head full of long blonde hair, with a sad expression on her face. "That’s a shame. I mean, I see a lot of guys who like to be dominated, but I can see you’re not one of them. You haven’t partied with anyone here, have you?"

"I’ve thought about it," he admitted. "But, I have to admit, not very hard. I’m supposed to keep my hands off you anyway, at least while I’m on duty, and Marsha made it easy. It doesn’t matter; I guess I’m a lousy lover anyway."

"What makes you think you’re a lousy lover?" Shirley frowned. The woman with the short gray hair was pushing seventy. She was sort of the housemother to everybody – and even to him, in a way. But, no housemother at any college dorm in existence had the experience or interest in sex that she did – she had seriously been there and done that for over fifty years, and she wasn’t shy about admitting it.

"I must be," Danny said with a headshake. "I sure wasn’t good enough to keep her interest."

"Danny," Frenchy said gently, seeing that there was a lot more there than he’d let on before, "What really happened?"

"I stopped off at home one afternoon," Danny explained, not really wanting to admit it but feeling the need to let it out. "I found her in bed with this black chick she knows, Sheena. They were really going to it, having a ball. They were getting it on so hard that they never even noticed I was standing there watching. I stood there for maybe five minutes, trying to make up my mind whether to kill both of them, or just leave."

"So that makes you think you’re a lousy lover?" Shirley shook her head. "You think you’re not good enough to even get her interest, right?"

"Yeah," Danny admitted glumly. "I guess I’ve come to realize that she’s been a lesbian for a long time, and just put up with me because she wanted my paycheck and wanted me to front for her, even though she was going a long way out of her way to drive me out."

"Danny," Shirley shook her head and said in a voice full of understanding, "There’s a lot of women here who take pride in their capability to turn men on. But if a really gay guy should happen to come in here, none of the girls are going to make it to first base and they all know it."

"Yeah," Patty nodded, with a serious look on her face. "I had that happen, just a few days ago. It was one of the damnedest things I ever saw. This mother brought her son in. Really nice looking guy, about my age, but he wasn’t interested. I mean, not a bit, but she wanted to prove to him that he wasn’t gay. She picked me out, told me to do my best. We got back in back, and he told me that he knew he was gay but his mother wouldn’t believe him. I offered to just sit and shoot the shit with him and we’d go back up and lie to his mother, or we could try to make it work. He thought we better try, just on general principles. Didn’t work. I couldn’t even get him hard enough to get a rubber on him. So I had to go back up and tell her that she could try any other girl on the place but it was a lost cause, and she might as well accept it."

"She didn’t take it real well," Shirley smiled. "I mean, she had about three fast ones in the bar while she was waiting on Patty and him, and three faster ones after Patty brought the bad news. The tears were just rolling down her face. The point is, Danny, you can be just as good a man as the best of the girls around here are girls, and if you didn’t ring her bell, it ain’t gonna ring, and probably not with any guy."

"Sounds good when you say it," Danny said glumly. "But I have to live with it."

"Oh, shit," Frenchy said, getting to her feet. "Shirley, clock him out and I’ll do this as a freebie, that’ll keep it legit with George. Danny, let’s head out back and party. You need your head straightened out, and I can’t think of a better way to do it."

"But, Frenchy . . . " Danny protested.

"Don’t ‘But, Frenchy’ me," she snorted, grabbing his hand and pulling. "Who’s the one here with a master’s in psychology? You can’t be as bad as you think you are. Let’s find out."

"Well, all right," Danny sighed as he got up, figuring it was not going to be worth the effort, but it would at least get things off that depressing topic.

Danny had been in her room before – the first morning he was there, she and Shirley had taken him there on a tour of the place, to explain how things worked. "Frenchy," he protested again, as she led him into the room, "you don’t have to do this."

"But I want to do it, Danny," she said. "You’re a nice guy, but you’ve let your ex fuck your head up too much. Let’s at least give it a fair try."

"All right," he sighed again. "Look, Frenchy, I do have one little hangup I ought to tell you about. Nothing major, but it’s something you might not expect."

"What?" Frenchy smiled "You really are gay, or something?"

"No," he smiled. "Neither of us can be naked."

"Huh?" Frenchy frowned. "That’s a little different."

"It’s a little goofy," Danny explained. "My whole family was brought up as nudists. Marsha’s too, it’s how we met, and we stayed active right up till close to the end. The thing is, I’ve been trained all my life to not see a naked woman as sexy. So long as you’ve got some clothes on, like a negligee or something, even if it’s up around your neck, and I leave on a T-shirt or something, it still works. But naked, well, it doesn’t. I just can’t get it up."

"And you’ve seen enough nude women to know," she smiled. "Yeah, you’re right, that’s goofy, but it’s not the goofiest thing I’ve run across. Let me slip into something a little more, well, appropriate, and let’s get started."

"Getting started," at least in a Nevada bordello, can be a little intimidating, but with good cause – the girls give a man’s penis a careful inspection, wearing rubber gloves, to look for any signs of lesions or disease, and condoms or other barriers are always used, by law. For that reason, there has never been a documented case of AIDS being passed along in one of them, a fact the operators and girls are rather proud of, and one of the biggest arguments in favor of their legalization, anyway. It is not, however, the sexiest thing imaginable.

Frenchy carried it off well; she was a pro, which in her case meant professional as well as prostitute. "I gotta say," she said, "that in terms of equipment, you sure ain’t hurting. If your ex didn’t like it at all, I’ll bet she really didn’t like it that big."

"I was always pretty careful about being lubricated with her," Danny told the blonde woman in the filmy negligee, "and she could still be pretty dry."

"And she bitched about it, yeah," Frenchy said. "I sure as hell ain’t going to bitch about it. Danny, did you ever party with anyone but her?"

"No," Danny shook his head. "Never."

"You’re pretty scared right now, aren’t you?" Frenchy asked.

"I don’t think I was this scared when I was a virgin," Danny admitted.

"Danny, there’s nothing to be scared of," she smiled, standing up and putting her arms around him. "Marsha may not have liked men, but I sure do."

Most of an hour later, they were both hot and tired and sweaty, lying on the sheets of Frenchy’s bed. It had been a most interesting hour; they’d done several things that Danny had only heard about, and never even contemplated asking Marsha for, mostly because he knew that she would never go for them. Frenchy did enjoy her work, and that was clear – the difference between her and Marsha was literally night and day. That meant, quite candidly, that it was the best hour he’d ever spent in bed with a woman in his life, better than he could have dreamed. Frenchy did indeed know what she was doing, and she passed along her passion.

"Danny," Frenchy said as they were starting to stir around. "Can you stand for a little comment or two that’s intended to be constructive?"

"After that, I think so," he admitted, with more confidence about himself as a man than he’d had in years. At the age of thirty, for the first time in his life he’d made good enough sex with a woman for her to have an orgasm – or at least appear to, although he didn’t think that Frenchy would fake it under the circumstances. Either way, it was a new and rewarding experience.

"Look, Danny," Frenchy told him. "As a lover, you’re not bad. You could be better. There’s nothing you’re doing wrong, but you do need some practice with a woman who enjoys what she’s doing, rather than you just fucking a sack of flour."

"Yeah, I can see that," Danny smiled.

"You’re in the best place you’re ever going to be to get that practice," Frenchy smiled. "It won’t hurt you to try out some of the other girls. I know you don’t have a lot of money, but it’s not right to do freebies, either. I’ll talk to a couple of other girls, maybe Patty, and I think we can work out a pretty good discount if we do it during a slow time. And, I know this is going to really sound weird, but you need to party with Shirley some."

"Shirley?" Danny frowned. "She’s got to be older than my mother, and she looks it."

"And she’s been doing this since she was a lot younger than Patty," Frenchy smiled. "The big secret around here is that she really is the best in the place, although she doesn’t party much anymore. There’s nothing she doesn’t know, and there’s nothing she doesn’t know how to teach you. She’ll be pleased that you asked, and when you leave here and find yourself another woman, your new girl won’t have any reason to complain."

"You know," Danny admitted. "I hadn’t thought that far ahead. All I’ve been thinking about the last few weeks is getting rid of the last one. I don’t know that I’m up for another one, at least just yet."

"That’s a different issue, and one you’re going to have to work out for yourself," Frenchy nodded. "It will take time, but when you work it out, you might as well have some idea about what the fuck you’re doing."

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.