After my brief bathroom stop at Bordertown, which is not a town at all but a tacky first taste – last gasp casino just over the Nevada state line I’m driving past Cold Springs. It took only a few minutes of strolling around the Bordertown casino for the stink of a stale ashtray to cling to my clothes.
Traveling this stretch of 395, Cold Springs is the first real town you hit when you enter Nevada. A glance at the sun exploding on White Lake sears the eyes. It’s still about a twenty minute ride until 395 turns into a metro freeway in Reno proper. Twenty minutes through the rolling high desert hills, past the warehouses and fullfillment centers that colonized the hard dry ground seemingly overnight.
After the quickie divorce business petered out, and most of the glitzy resort trade shifted four hundred miles south to Las Vegas, the local chamber of commerce realized that the next big boom would be in these broad, multi-acre, squat, flat top buildings perforated along one or two sides by a row of loading bay doors.
Vast acres of sterile, gray, concrete and steel fulfillment centers sit on the edge of the Great Basin Desert, a region that stretches from the Sierra Nevada to the Wasatch Range of Utah. Big rigs towing sets of doubles, and in some case triples (they’re legal here) flow in and out of the fullfillment centers. The rigs regurgitate and feed, and then depart the Reno metro area towards all points of the compass.
Just east of Reno is Sparks and east of Sparks are more farms of fulfillment centers and then farther east is little Fernley, Nevada. Beyond that, the Great Basin Desert becomes an arid land of desolate beauty. Out there, the towns are small, and few and far between. As a child my parents took me on the drive across the Great Basin to visit the aunts and uncles in Salt Lake City. I didn’t appreciate the panorama then. I do now. I’m also aware that the rugged, parched beauty is shrinking.
On the rough rocky blank strips between fulfillment centers, or on one of the parking lots, one can spot the incongruity of a few wild horses. These beautiful beasts are living history, the ancestors of horses abandoned by ranchers, Native Americans and pioneers. There are lineages that go back to the Spaniards who explored present-day Nevada in the late 18th century. The ages have steeled these horses against the harsh, cold, high desert winters and the blazing summers. But as hardened as the mustangs have become to the severity of nature, there’s nothing in their ancient genes to shield them from human progress. And so they get pushed further and further east.
At the outskirts of Reno it all starts to look familiar as Highway 395 is transformed from a rugged scenic highway into a metropolitan freeway. The peace of the high desert is behind me and I’ve merged into the urban chaos of on ramps, off ramps, honking horns, aggressive drivers, and billboards hawking casinos, adult novelty shops, and local ambulance chasers.
Reno.
It hasn’t changed much since the last time I was here, which was pre-COVID. We arrived at about the same time that the Burning Man Festival had cleared out and some of the local parking lots were packed with denizens that made the place look like a scene out of Mad Max.
Cruising Virginia Street, past the Circus-Circus, the Silver Legacy, the Eldorado, souvenir shops, pawn shops, and far too many vacant lots. The Cal-Neva is still here, a shadow of what it was when my parents used to stay there. Bless its venerable heart, Cal-Neva is still advertising bargain basement steak and egg breakfasts, and steak and lobster or prime rib dinners.
Reno seems like a town looking for an identity after it was all ripped away by California’s Indian gaming casinos and the unrelenting gravitational pull of Vegas.
When I arrive, there’s enough sharpness in the air to realize that it’s October. A month ago, it would have been stifling. By the end of this month there might be a dusting of snow, certainly by Thanksgiving. Today is kind of a tweener.
The sidewalks are desolate if you don’t count the down and outers and the out of towners. The former, scruffy souls, wear long hair, beards to match, and Western wear (it is Reno after all). Their skin is worn to sunbeaten hides, and as you walk past them they look at you, even the younger ones, with eyes that are old, orbs that have seen lives that most of us would rather remain blind to. In fact most of us choose to remain blind to these very people, as most of the time we don’t deign to meet their gaze. They could be any random bit of refuse on the street. They carry their lives in dirty, worn backpacks.
The latter, the visitors, don’t dawdle on the sidewalk. They’re drifting between casinos. They’re wearing Bermuda shorts or Chicago Bulls basketball shorts, even though the only thing they’ve dunked within distant memory is a Krispy Kreme into the morning coffee. They wear shirts that range from alohas to tees bearing classy slogans like “Morning Wood Campgrounds” or “The Cake Isn’t The Only Thing That’s Moist.”
They used to walk around with paperboard buckets filled with quarters to feed the slot machines. Those days are long gone and now the slots have a name; TITO – ticket in-ticket out. The clinking-clanking sound of coins being dumped into a hopper is ersatz now. Coins have been replaced by thermal paper vouchers with a barcode that represents the player’s money. Once the gambler is done the machine spits out a ticket. Or if it’s been a bad day at the slots it spits out – nothing.
My first order of business is to go to Barnes and Noble and buy a highway map of Nevada. I carry maps because I do not subscribe to the motto, ‘In Google we trust.’ I put only slightly more trust in Google than I would a United States Senator.
After my one night in Reno I’m veering off of 395 and going south on a long, desolate drive to the old mining town of Tonopah which is way the hell out and gone in the Nevada desert; where GPS might be a bigger gamble than a tight slot machine. Truth be told, after having checked out the drive on a map, I’m having a few second thoughts about this pilgrimage. I only know the name Tonopah from a Little Feat song called “Willin”. Until I saw it on a map I wasn’t sure the place existed outside of the songwriter’s head. But it’s there, just a bit southwest of dead center Nevada – and pretty fucking far from anything.
It’s still too early to check in so I’m going to grab lunch. I’m headed east past Sparks to a place one usually doesn’t equate with eating . . .
food.
As a preface to this section, let me assure the reader (especially my wife) that not one of the Ten Commandments was violated during the course of this adventure.
Mustang Ranch is about 20 miles outside of Reno, and it’s a hard place to find. I found it quite easily years ago, and it was strictly by accident. I was looking for opportunities to photograph some of the area’s many bands of wild horses – you know, mustangs.
When I read an exit sign on Highway 80 that said Mustang, I naturally figured that, hell, this must be the place. Well, it was a place. The road dead ended at Mustang Ranch. There are no horses there.
It’s a brothel.
Some time ago I’d read an article about the Mustang Ranch lounge that described it as a restaurant “geared toward a mainstream audience, a place trying to mix comfort food, a few culinary trends and moments of fine dining.” The article described a menu “that runs to more than 60 dishes, from biscuits and gravy to burgers with ghost chili accents to horseradish-spiked halibut with spring asparagus.” Okay, so it’s not Le Bernardin (by a long shot), but neither is it Olive Garden.
Why?
Before taking this particular road trip, I had covered over 15,000 miles through the Southwest, the Midwest, the Mountain States and the Pacific Northwest looking for America. Not tourist America, but that vast and varied America of real life and inflated legend. I visited old cemeteries, picnicked under a tacky statue of a Native American woman in a town called Pocohontas, chatted with a couple old boys at a corn festival in Nebraska, drove around a covered bridge festival in Indiana, stopped at towns named Nimrod, Ten Strike, and New Harmony (just for their names), and stopped in at the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota. So this stop at the Mustang Ranch is just another piece of Americana.
I decided to have lunch at a Nevada brothel for the same reason that I shared breakfast in an Iowa diner with a dapper guy named Patrick who told me about his life’s dream of building a city park in his deceased wife’s honor. It’s the same reason that I went to Milan (pronounced My-lan), a little blip on the map of Indiana, and talked to the woman who works in the little museum dedicated to that town’s high school basketball team that became the inspiration for Hoosiers, my favorite sports movie. It’s why I sat in a hotel bar in Omaha and listened to a terminally ill former Marine tell me about his story while I bought him shots of Crown Royal.
So – why not?
Mustang Ranch has long been a place of repute; either ill, or as a curiosity, or as a bucket list item. In the early 1980s one of my retail coworkers was going to get married. Joe, one of the warehouse guys, arranged for a bachelor party at the ranch. Joe, a jolly rotund guy, whose side business was loaning cash (at high interest rates) to strapped coworkers was a bucket list guy, and this was the big opportunity that he wouldn’t allow to pass by. I was just recently married and to my shock, Cora gave me permission to go. Maybe she didn’t know what the Mustang Ranch was. In any event, I declined. Joe returned as satisfied and boastful as Julius Caesar after having laid waste to Gaul.
This time trying to find the ranch is like trying to navigate to Point Nemo, a place described as the pole of inaccessibility. A road meanders for miles until I turn a corner and nearly run into a gate in front of business. The locked barrier bears an angry sign that says, Stop. This is NOT Mustang Ranch. The sign goes on to tell a tale of indignation about how Google Maps is incorrect.
I suppose the exasperation in the tone of the sign is understandable. At some point, the people just trying to get through the workday got sick and tired of opening the doors to horny long haul drivers in search of an hour of whiskey and women.
Maybe Google is trying to spare me from making a mistake I would immediately regret, or
maybe it’s just incompetent.
So I switch to Waze.
Which takes me to a few more dead ends and into the middle of a mobile home park before leading me to the guard shack at the Mustang Ranch.
The guard gives me a short, but stern spiel, “No photos, no cell phones, no recording, park anywhere, and have fun.” I briefly consider telling the man that I’m only there to have lunch but that would only result in peals of laughter followed by a sarcastic, “Yeah, that’s what all the married guys say.”
There are other house rules here; no smoking, no vaping, no weapons. No weapons!? This is fucking Nevada. It might be the only place in the whole MAGA state where you can’t be packing.
You could call the Mustang Lounge, with its gleaming bar, polished wood panelling, and embossed burgundy leather (ette?) club chairs, a refined dining establishment. You could, but you’d have to ignore the blazing red and screaming yellow neon Mustang Ranch sign over the bar and the brass pole off to the side of the dining room. My guess is that Gordon Ramsay does not have a brass pole in any of his restaurants.
Still the decor and the ambience is a few cuts above early American tawdry strip club.
The place is nearly empty when I enter, and pause a bit to let my eyes acclimate to the darkened room. The bar is short, four stools. A lanky guy in a cowboy hat and western boots is sitting on the far left. On his immediate right, a wispy blonde wearing a short, very short, red camisole. Men wearing cowboy shit, and scantily clad women in a brothel. Pure Nevada. A beer bottle is sitting on the bar in front of the empty fourth stool so I’m bound for the stool next to the blonde.
“Is anyone sitting here?”
“You are. Are you here for lunch, or?” The question hangs.
In the early afternoon, at most any other restaurant on the planet, it’s a ridiculous question. But this isn’t any other restaurant. “Lunch”, I respond, and then I ask her if there’s anything she would recommend. A question that, in this establishment, can be taken in any number of ways.
On her recommendation I order the Malibu chicken sandwich and fries. When I order a non-alcoholic beer the barkeep looks at me as if I’ve ordered a triple shot of hemlock. The woman tells the young man, who, I find out later, doubles as a bouncer, to serve me an O’Douls. His friendly smile, slight build and quiet demeanor belies his membership in the fraternity of bouncers.
The blonde woman introduces herself as Jennifer, though that might be her nom de rapports. I introduce myself and we shake hands. There are no hold over COVID customs here – it’s a cat house for chrissakes. When I notice the book in front of her that has more dog ears than an overcrowded pound, our conversation starts out about books. Turns out that Jennifer is a bibliophile. One could say that it wouldn’t be expected in such a place but I think that “one” would be judging a book by its cover. This seems like the perfect place for a book. From the looks of the sparse crowd the job appears to involve a lot of down time.
“What are you reading?” I ask.
“Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, by Depak Chopra,” she says, sliding the book in front of me so that I can read the title. Why do we do that? Announce the title of the book while revealing the cover. To prove that we aren’t lying?
Jennifer gives me a thumbnail review of the book. I’m not one who’s into that guru, metaphysical, and self-improvement shit and I have to admit that during her review my eyes may have glazed over. When she asks me what I’m reading I go straight to Blue Highways, the book that has inspired all of my road trips. Which turns the conversation to road trips. She’s taken some but during the course of our meeting, she’s more taken with the stories of my own trips.
My sandwich arrives and it turns out the reviews were correct. It’s not Michelin by any stretch but it beats Applebee’s and Denny’s. When I catch Jennifer looking at my plate I ask, “Want some fries? Go for it.”
“Thanks, I’m starving.”
I’m starving too and would like to eat the whole meal but I ask the bartender for a steak knife and after he delivers I cut my sandwich into quarters and invite Jennifer to help herself.
As we eat she begins her story. Raised in Virginia, she tried to follow her dream of teaching preschool after moving to Northern California. That was her first mistake. Not the teaching part, the part about teaching in California. She tells me that she loved the job but only to the point at which she discovered that a teaching career might not pay the bills.
Especially in California.
Well, no shit. Teaching can be a rewarding life if you can handle grading papers propped up on the steering wheel, dining on Cup O’ Noodles, and curling up in the back seat of your used Volvo for the night.
That’s not hyperbole, it’s the way America “honors” its educators. Pay them the bare minimum and then malign them as greedy, whiny, “woke”, liberal, atheist, union parasites who brainwash children and are only looking to skate through their careers until they can cash in on a pension.
Jennifer tells me that her dream is to go to grad school and take another run at teaching.
We’re early in the conversation when one of Jennifer’s coworkers shows up and sits to my right. The extremely well endowed Hispanic woman is wearing a black, low cut something that might be described as clothing, that’s if you’re being liberal with the word.
She isn’t there to talk books or careers, road trips, or politics. She’s there for the business of pleasure. She must figure that if blondie isn’t going to close the deal, she’s going to show her how it’s done. She leans in so aggressively that I’m afraid that at any moment I’ll have to pluck a boob out of my French fries. In short order the newcomer decides that the only breast I’m interested in is the one on my plate, grilled and resting between two slices of bread. She leaves to join two of her coworkers at a corner table.
Jennifer asks me about my family and I tell her, in great detail, about my wife, two children, and four grandchildren. She tells me about the one meaningful relationship she had that didn’t work out.
She tells me that given her work situation, she’s set aside the idea of a committed relationship and then asks me what I think about that.
I tell her that nothing’s impossible and then apologize for the cliche. But I do offer my own experience. I tell her about my own experience when I was 23 and going through a period of hedonism, and trying to figure out what to do with my life. You know – like grow up.
I tell her about Sandy, who was in “the business,” and who I had a short relationship with. “Of sorts,” I add.
She asks me if Sandy worked in a brothel and I explain that she was living in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, and worked off a client list. She called herself a call girl. Her mother and sister in Sacramento were taking care of her young son from a broken marriage. Sandy’s family didn’t know what she was doing for a living.
When Jennifer asks how the relationship worked out I tell her that we were basically ‘friends with benefits.’ We did cheap dates; movies, kite flying in the park, occasional runs, and diner food because I didn’t have a lot of money, and she was trying to save hers. And sometimes we slept together. Sandy, I suppose in a move to make sure I wasn’t getting attached, put it more bluntly, “We’re just fucking,” she told me one morning.
We both knew that while she was only three years older than me in years, her life experience spanned a gap of decades. We both knew that I wasn’t father material.
I closed the chapter offering that maybe Sandy and I were in states of flux. She’d been through a divorce and my fiance had broken up with me. Maybe we just filled gaps.
When Jennifer asks how long the relationship lasted, I tell her, “Three months. There one day and gone the next. A friend told me that Sandy went back home to Sacramento.”
During our conversation, Jennifer is like a periscope, continually looking around, obviously looking for prospects. “If you need to get up and leave, you won’t be hurting my feelings,” I tell her.
“Thanks, it’s cool. When it’s slow it’s nice to just sit and talk with someone who just wants to sit and talk.”
She’s still relatively new here. She tells me that when she first started she was terrified. On the first day, when she was taking her STD test, she told the madam, “I don’t know if I can do this.”
Well, no shit, I’m thinking.
Jennifer tells me that early on, one of her veteran coworkers approached her, pointed to a man and said, “That guy wants to spend time with me and you.”
She says that she’s always on edge – probably a good place to be in this line of work.
Jennifer does like her schedule. Two weeks on, two weeks off, and mother nature’s flow has some say in the program.
When she asks me why I stopped in Reno I offer the story about my love/hate relationship with the so-called, Biggest Little City. It’s a tawdry place but holds some nostalgia with people who remember the glory days. That and it’s cheaper than Vegas and more relaxing. I also tell her that it’s part of my Highway 395 roadtrip and I’m headed for Tonopah in the morning.
“Isn’t that part of a song?” she asks.
“Yep. The only reason I’m going there.”
When she asks me what I’m doing tonight I tell her that I’ve been living off of frozen burritos and canned chili and I’m looking forward to a good meal. And then I’m going to do some gambling.
“Don’t do that. Spend your money here. It’s not a gamble,” she says.
I tell her that a repeat visit for anything but food would be a gigantic gamble. With my marriage.
With the check presented, the conversation has reached a natural conclusion. I’m off.
On the ride back to Reno, I reflect on my short time with Jennifer and the first question I ask myself is, ‘Was she bullshitting me?”
Maybe. But I’m convinced she wasn’t. Clearly she would like to be doing something else. I know that was the case with Sandy. Anyway, bullshit or not, it shouldn’t matter to me. I don’t judge. Didn’t judge Sandy and I don’t judge Jennifer. I’ve adopted my wife’s philosophy that, ‘in this world you do what it takes to get by,’ as long as it’s legal and you don’t hurt anyone. Yeah, I know, Sandy was operating on the wrong side of a law that shouldn’t be.
It’s check-in time at the Reno Suites and there’s no parking in the temporary check-in lot in front of the entrance so I drive around the block and park in front of the Greyhound station. Of all the places that I would rather not park, this one probably tops the list. Looking at the denizens hanging around outside the depot I feel like I’m being eyeballed like a lamb who just stumbled into the wolf’s den. I pray that when I return the car windows will be intact and my stuff untouched.
When Cora and I spend a weekend in Reno we stay at either the Peppermill or the Atlantis, the two best hotels in the Biggest Little City. Good restaurants, decent casinos, nice pools, no musty smells and a fair chance that we’ll go home without an infestation. But they charge resort fees. I’m only spending one night and I don’t want to absorb the extortionary “resort fee,” that the hotel-casinos charge – that the Reno Suites does not. You know, the resort fee? It’s that line item that itemizes all of the things short of a bed that you would like in a hotel room. It’s the charge that doesn’t appear on your computer screen until you’re asked to pay up. It’s sort of like getting ready to pay for your new car and hearing the salesman ask, ‘Oh, and would you like tires with that car?’
And let’s be honest here. Reno is not a resort destination. It’s not Nice, it’s not Playa del Carmen, and it’s not Bora Bora. It’s fucking Reno, man.
All I want tonight is a bed and some quiet. And, that good dinner, steak or sushi, which I expect to find at either Peppermill or Atlantis. As it turns out, all I’m going to get is the bed.
At the front desk I ask if there’s parking and the reservationist tells me that it’s free – anywhere on the street that I can find a spot. Which means I’ll be removing everything from the car; from my luggage, to my jacket and cap, to any stray gum wrappers.
I get on the elevator with a kid humping a backpack full of school books. He’s wearing a polo shirt bearing the logo of one of the local middle schools. When he sees me push the button for the 13th floor, he says, “The thirteenth floor is haunted you know.”
“I guess I’ll have to take my chances with the ghosts.”
But for the rumbling of the elevator there are moments of silence, and as the elevator comes to a stop at his floor the boy says, “That’s okay, we move every three weeks.”
He steps off and as the door closes he wishes me a good day.
The implication of what he said strikes me as the elevator grumbles towards my floor. The boy, just a few years older than my grandson, just told me in a roundabout way that he and his family are homeless and they’re bouncing from shelter to shelter (yes, I realize that we’re supposed to say “unhoused”, but a euphemism isn’t going to make them feel any less – “unhoused”). It’s one of those, ‘there but for the grace of God,’ moments.
The room is tolerable if you look past the fact that there’s an in room coffee maker but no coffee and no cups. The plus is that there is a bed, and a toilet, and toilet paper. What more can one ask for?
Time to hit the tables. There’s no action at the Reno Suites so I go to the Atlantis. Ten minutes in and I’m down a hundred dollars at the Blackjack tables. Even the Filipina dealer who I’ve come to know over the years has done me wrong. Off to the Peppermill. By mid-evening I’m up seven hundred dollars and it’s time to find dinner. Saturday night and everything is full. Back to Atlantis. The sushi restaurant is overflowing. So is everything else, and the hotdog joint and the deli are closed for the night.
Fuck it. I may go to bed hungry, but I’m six hundred dollars to the good.
What a night. I managed to get the room that shares a thin wall with the elevator. I might as well try to sleep beside the New York subway tracks. Every few minutes I not only hear, but I literally feel the rumble of the elevator making its rounds. It’s like one of those soothing massage beds without the soothing part. And this is Reno. People are going up and down.
all
night
long.
The next morning my complaints at the front desk are met with, ‘too bad, so sad.’ I’m hoping for some monetary relief but the Reno Suites folk aren’t feeling charitable.
It’s early in the morning and after checking out I decide to go to the Atlantis and join the society of life’s losers, and gamble first thing in the morning. Like the small handful of my fellow losers staggering about the casino, I’m bleary eyed. But unlike my compatriots I’m not bent over the first screwdriver of the day. At the Atlantis, which picked my pocket last night, I win another hundred dollars, lose two hands, call it quits and cash in my chips. After a coffee and the biggest apple fritter in the display case, it’s next stop – Tonopah.
The Life in My Years 