The prostitute who kept sex statistics (and other stories from Las Vegas, Sin City)

In her five years in Las Vegas , Artha had generated the following statistics. She had had 1,203 sexual encounters with 1,076 different clients. On 97 occasions, the client had been unable to achieve an erection, and on 214 occasions, he had come before penetration. She had performed anal intercourse 88 times and performed fellatio 863 times. She had had thirteen professional and three informal lesbian encounters, and had been hired 54 times for "multiple" assignments, i.e., group sex . She had been professionally spanked eleven times and, in turn, had flogged clients with a belt twenty-three times and once with a whip. Typically, the masochists preferred her to spank them on the genitals, and the sadists preferred spanking her on the buttocks. One client had paid her three hundred dollars to shave off his pubic hair, which she then stored in a mason jar; She hadn't seen him again. They had defecated on her six times and urinated on her thirteen times; she had defecated on twelve clients and urinated on twenty-two. Her vagina had been successfully penetrated by penises, dildos, bottles, bananas, frankfurters, candles, and vibrators, and unsuccessfully by a soda can.

He had studied accounting at his Milwaukee high school and kept these statistics in a three-ring binder . There was a check mark for each act, with its date, and at the end of each column the totals were added up. He said he kept these records the way other people keep diaries, and he made all his entries in green ink and an antique Parker 51 fountain pen. The statistics were neatly transcribed on ledger paper he bought at a stationery store in the Maryland Parkway mall, while the binder had dividers with headings like "Blowjobs" and "Spanking." He didn't know the meaning of either "fellatio" or "cunnilingus," and when I defined the words for him, he said he found them "cute."

Artha was running late. From the bedroom window of her apartment near the Ice Palace, she could see the clock-thermometer in the Sahara Hotel tower: first the time—8:17—and then the temperature, which was already reaching 31 degrees. The air conditioner in her bedroom wasn't working . Four nights earlier, a sixty-three-year-old appliance salesman from Kansas City had thrown Artha's portable hair dryer against the device after ejaculating prematurely in the bathroom while she was washing his penis with soap and hot water. The dryer was bent and broken beyond repair. Artha had tried to return it to the Montgomery Ward store in the Sunrise Mall where she had purchased it, but the accessories department manager had told her that the manufacturer would not honor the warranty since the damage clearly appeared to be due to negligence on the part of the owner. Artha had called the manager a "dyke," and when a store police officer arrived at her request, Artha called him a "cock-sucking, fucking nigger." Despite these warnings, Montgomery Ward still refused to replace her hairdryer. And then the appliance salesman, who had stayed at Artha's house for two days, had disappeared while taking her underwear to a laundromat in Vegas Village. He had left his suitcase at Artha's apartment, and when it became clear he wasn't coming back , she had thrown it away after searching its contents and finding nothing but clean shirts, two back issues of Cavalier magazine, and the Kelvinator convention flyer with the schedule of events.

The Sahara clock read 8:22. The air-conditioning technician was supposed to come at twelve. Artha would have to skip her 11:30 class at Manhattan Beauty College to let him into the apartment. She kept her school clothes in a separate closet from her street and work clothes. She chose a long-sleeved cotton paisley dress and flat beige sandals. No boots at school. She also didn't wear a bra to Manhattan Beauty College. She only wore it at night to enhance her cleavage. The course at Manhattan Beauty College cost $1,365 and lasted 1,800 hours spread over 47 weeks. Artha had decided to take the cosmetology course so she would have a backup plan when she retired from prostitution. Even so, after she finished the course, she intended to continue combining work with being a prostitute . He liked to say he would fix a woman's hair during the day and suck her husband's cock at night. He thought it was a funny joke.

Artha chose a bob wig from her wig closet. She had twenty-one different ones in her wardrobe, all brunette. She liked to say she was a natural brunette, although one St. Patrick's Day, when she was nineteen and working with another girl in a cabin at the logging camp in Antigo, Wisconsin, she had dyed her pubic hair green. 8:26. Time to read another poem . Three years ago, a waitress in the cafeteria of the Frontier Hotel on the Strip had given her a copy of the complete poetry of Sara Teasdale . The waitress had been in love with her, and now every morning Artha read at least one poem before leaving the apartment. She compared it to people who read their Bibles every day. She said it gave her a sense of peace. In her spare time, Artha also wrote poetry, often in the Teasdale manner. Sometimes, while in some casino waiting for a late-night date, she would scribble a poem on the back of a bingo card.

Light of a star, moon so beautiful, who will save this poor maiden? At dawn I ask myself a devilish question:

was I born for nothing?

8:32. The diner waitress had swerved in a Pontiac GTO between Baker and Barstow at a speed the California Highway Patrol had estimated at 112 miles per hour. She had been thrown from the car, her neck snapping like a toothpick; otherwise, the accident had left few marks, save for the fact that her left thumb had been severed from the rest of her hand. They had never been able to find that thumb in the alkaline desert dust. It was this missing piece that had upset Artha, even more than the death of her friend. She believed the highway patrol should have spent more time searching the desert for it. It seemed wrong to bury a person incomplete.

8:40. Artha grabbed her bag and textbook and walked to the apartment building's parking lot, where she kept her Dodge Dart. She only had three payments left on the Dart, and then she intended to trade it in for an AMC Gremlin. She'd tried driving a Fiat once, but she thought driving a Fiat was like fucking an Italian , or "spaghetti," as Martha called all Italians: it promised more than it delivered . Now the thermometer in Sahara Tower read 32 degrees. The drive from her apartment to downtown, where Manhattan Beauty College was located, was fifteen minutes. Artha knew she'd be late for class, but that morning's exam wasn't due to start until nine. The teacher, Mr. Luigi , always turned a blind eye to latecomers. The exam was on facial massage theory.

Artha didn't know Buster Mano , but Buster Mano did know Artha. Buster was a man in his late forties, a burly, self-confident man, quite well-read for a private detective and especially knowledgeable about the works of Martin Luther . Buster had become interested in Luther after discovering that the Wittenberg monk had suffered from constipation. Constipation was a subject Buster Mano was always on his mind. He claimed to have a blocked colon, but he had never had it corrected because, he said, he was afraid of a scalpel. Once he became comfortable with someone, Buster would abandon all restraint about his constipation and take to farting openly and frequently, lifting his buttocks for comfort and efficiency. "Popcorn farts," he would say. "They make a noise, but they don't smell."

"Buster resigned from the department, took his $412.97 monthly pension, and moved to Las Vegas, where he opened a detective agency."

Buster had spent twenty-two years in a medium-sized police department in a medium-sized Midwestern city, where he'd owned a townhouse, a mortgage, and two cars , both used and both paid off. His wife had gone through menopause at thirty-two, and his daughter had married at fifteen. What puzzled Buster about his daughter's wedding was that she hadn't even been pregnant. He suspected the wedding had had something to do with his wife taking her to a gynecologist to see if her hymen was still intact. He'd met her husband a week later at an amusement park where he was handing out sample packs of Philip Morris, the kind with five cigarettes in a pack. The last Buster had heard, the husband was still handing out sample packs at county fairs and salesmen's meetings in West Virginia and Tennessee, but he'd switched to the menthol-filtered Kents. His wife had been praying a daily novena since their daughter had left home, offering plenary indulgences for her safe return, but she had never been seen again . Buster had lost his faith in God at fourteen, but he found it useful to foster his wife's infatuation with certain saints, since such flirtations kept him from having to pay too much attention to her. He found it amusing that his wife showed such familiarity with her current saint. "As I was saying to Jack this morning," he would say; Jack was Saint John Bosco, and Frank was Saint Francis de Sales. His current litanies were directed to "the baby," which was his nickname for the Infant Jesus of Prague.

Buster had arrived in Las Vegas nine years ago, in the aftermath of a federal corruption investigation into his police department. He'd told his superiors that if he were stealing, they wouldn't find him living in a neighborhood where property was worth less now than it had been when he'd bought his house, and that he could also afford a new car with a radio, heater, and automatic transmission, instead of the two used ones he owned, one with 60,000 miles and the other with 85,000. If they wanted to put someone in jail, Buster told his superiors, there was a third-class detective in the Narcotics Squad who drove around in a 3-liter BMW. When his superiors insisted that he testify anyway, Buster resigned from the department , took his $412.97 monthly lieutenant's pension plus the $7,000 he had in his savings account, and moved to Las Vegas, where he opened a private detective agency. "If someone had bought me," he said, "I would have had over seven thousand bucks in my savings account, that's for sure. And I wouldn't be living with some crazy woman who spends her time chatting to Saint Martin of Tours."

But Buster was essentially a man without a grudge . He admired professionalism above all other virtues, and he admired it equally on both sides of the law. "He disappeared five years ago without a trace," he would say of a missing person. "Like a professional." Buster had met Artha on a case involving a disappearance. A man had traveled to Las Vegas for a Kelvinator convention and hadn't returned home . His wife had located Buster in the Yellow Pages and liked the sound of his name. She had told him that her husband's disappearances were becoming a regular occurrence: he had vanished two years earlier, following the Miami convention, and also five years earlier, at the Honolulu convention. His wife no longer bothered to report his disappearance to the police in the cities where conventions were held. Buster would charge her two hundred dollars to find her husband and send him back to Kansas City, but the fact that he did it discreetly was worth the price to her. In both Miami and Honolulu , the trouble had started with girls , so when it came time to search for her missing husband, Buster worked with the same hypothesis. The guy's name was Al Fogelson, and he and the rest of the Kelvinator group had been staying at the Stardust. On the last night of the convention, Al Fogelson had joined Artha at the Stardust. Artha's number wasn't listed in the book, but Buster got her address from a blackjack dealer named Fran McGraw , who was working the graveyard shift at the Stardust. In cases like this, there was always a lot left unsaid. The hotel didn't want any trouble, and Fran McGraw didn't want to lose her job.

Fran McGraw had arrived on the Strip after three years as a blackjack dealer downtown on Fremont Street. He had earned $21,738 the previous year, but when it came time to pay income taxes, he had only reported $10,738. The rest was stashed in his father's bank safe. Fran McGraw didn't have a checking account, and his savings account was tiny. He owned an old Volkswagen camper and lived west of the Strip in a two-bedroom apartment for which he paid $185 a month. There was no evidence that Fran was cheating the tax authorities , but his father's safe contained nearly $23,000 in fifties and hundreds. Fran's father had the key to the safe, and there was no way Fran was going to let his son touch the money because Fran was a gambler, and his father wanted him to have savings set aside. Fran McGraw wasn't a compulsive gambler who could blow through $23,000 in one fell swoop, but he was capable of spending it at a rate of three or four thousand at a time. He also did a bit of pimping , never for money, but to get free sex and in exchange for gambling chips from customers when he got them a girl. The customers were usually people who were winning at the casino and wanted to finish the night with a fuck, and sometimes Fran could count on getting a fifty-dollar chip or even a hundred. Artha occasionally worked at the casino at the Stardust , which was how Fran McGraw had met her. He'd never slept with her, though he kept promising himself he'd eventually get a free fuck from her, and occasionally he'd take her to the movies. He always asked her to give him a handjob at the movies, but Artha never wanted to.

Buster found it easy to find out all this stuff. He had a friend who was an IRS inspector, and whenever someone wouldn't cooperate, he'd always mention the inspector's name. Buster believed that everyone in Las Vegas cheated the IRS , and the mere mention of his friend's name was enough to jog anyone's memory. Al Fogelson had last been seen playing blackjack at Fran McGraw's table, and Fran McGraw sometimes made introductions. It was that simple.

As soon as Buster Mano found out Artha's address, he drove to her apartment and waited outside. He didn't go in. Going in would have caused a scene, and Buster hated scenes . He had a photograph of Al Fogelson and knew that sooner or later Al Fogelson would leave the house. When he finally came out loaded with dirty clothes, Buster followed him to the laundromat in Vegas Village. Al Fogelson was putting his dirty underwear in a washing machine when Buster materialized at his side and told him it was time to go home. Al Fogelson didn't seem surprised; he'd been through it in Miami and Honolulu. There were no threats or intimidation. Buster had only one mission, and that was to find her missing husband. He had found him, and there was nothing more he could do. If Al Fogelson decided to return home to Kansas City, that was his business. If not, Buster would continue to pursue him as long as Al Fogelson's wife wanted him to. It was a job: one hundred dollars a day plus expenses. The previous year, Buster had earned $18,000 gross. He didn't have $23,000 in his bank vault, so he wasn't afraid to put a little pressure on Fran McGraw. Al Fogelson wanted to go back to say goodbye to Artha , but Buster convinced him that since he had to go to Kansas City anyway, it might be better to drive straight to McCarran Airport. Experience told Buster that whores tend to raise hell when you take a client away from them, and he didn't like the idea that Sheriff Ralph Lamb's Department thought he was the typical private eye who gets into trouble. Buster Mano personally drove Al Fogelson to McCarran, and as soon as Fogelson was safely aboard his plane, Buster called his wife and told her that her husband would be arriving in Kansas City with a stopover in Denver on United Flight 683. There was still the matter of Al Fogelson's suitcase. Buster told the woman he could get her, but that it might cause a stir. She told him she wasn't going to make a fuss, that it was enough that her husband came back. Al Fogelson had shaken Buster's hand as he boarded the flight to Denver and Kansas City. "It was like I was the sales manager for his district," Buster Mano said.

Buster had found Al Fogelson before he'd even had a chance to deposit Mrs. Fogelson's two-hundred-dollar check into his bank account. Just to satisfy his curiosity, he called the Kelvinator district sales manager and learned that next year's convention was going to be in New Orleans . "And you know what?" Buster Mano said. "Your wife is going to let you go." He liked to say he was a student of human nature , which was very important in his profession. "It brings excitement to her life," Buster said. "And it gives him something to feel guilty about." It was easy to explain. "It's human nature," he said. "In this line of work, you have to be a student of human nature." He added that he hadn't had a bowel movement in two and a half days.