(Paris Envy) – Legal prostitution was always in my life.
I grew up in northern Nevada, just down the road from several of the state’s best known bordellos. My aunt worked at The Sagebrush Ranch, and some of my earliest memories are of riding with my grandmother to go pick her up from work.
She would call ahead from the car when we were about 10 minutes away, and the back gate would be opened up so we could pull up to the rear of the building. We would go in through the kitchen, and all of the “working girls” would be covered up in their robes, always excited to see me.
While we were waiting for my aunt to gather her things, I would sit on a stool at the kitchen counter and drink a Shirley Temple while I dangled my legs that had not yet grown long enough to touch the ground from a chair.
The ladies would put cartoons on the television for me, and just like that, I would be a happy kid having a normal childhood experience in the back room of a brothel (paging Richard Pryor).
The girls would give me dollar bills and I felt rich. That is the first time that I remember having a sense of the value of money, and that sense would serve me well once I returned to the brothels as an adult.
As I grew into my teens, I was seduced by HBO’s slate of late night adult programming. Too young to watch by most parents’ standards (including my own), I had to wait until my parents had gone to sleep and sneak back in to the living room to tune in to the forbidden land of late night cable television.
Back in those days, HBO aired entire blocks of adult oriented shows, including “Real Sex”, “Taxi Cab Confessions”, and “Cathouse” (the reality show based around the business at Dennis Hof’s Bunny Ranch legal brothel).
While the other two shows were set in different parts of the country and seemed to a girl from Yerington, Nevada as though they might as well have taken place in other countries or on other planets, “Cathouse” was filmed just down the road from me, and I was fascinated with the idea that television magic was being created right in my own back yard.
I liked the girls on the show, and I especially liked Dennis, who was the central figure that the whole business seemed to revolve around.
Lots of people follow relatives into family businesses, and I guess you could say that I’m no different. Where the difference lies, however, is that my family’s history of prostitution has been a legal one. It’s always been safe, clean, and profitable. Most importantly, it’s been fun.
I actually enjoy my job, and one thing that interacting with a variety of clients has taught me is that that is rarely the case for most other professionals. The overwhelming majority of people work at their jobs so that they can enjoy life once they get off work. I go to work so that I can enjoy getting off while I’m earning that living at the same time.
Do the math, and you’ll see that I’m living twice the life I would be otherwise, were I in a job that I hated, or at best tolerated. Life is too short to spend time doing things you don’t like.
Paris is a legal sex worker at the Love Ranch-Vegas brothel in southern Nevada