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When people asked, I'd say I became a prostitute because in the movies they always have the best comebacks. The real reason, though, was that I wanted to join the untouchables and see what that means from the inside. I could've done that by murdering someone or becoming a junkie, but the first would have been too mean, and the second would have taken too long. To make myself a prostitute, all I had to do was look up "massage parlors" in the phone book and strip down to bra and panties for the owner. Voila.

After sucking a businessman's cock at five, relieving a mentally retarded gas attendant of his virginity at six, and peeing in the mouth of a perfectly elegant old man at seven-thirty, I was still everything I'd been the day before: nineteen, married, a writer. I still wanted children. I still had to shovel the driveway when it snowed. What changed was, I could relate to anyone — or at least figure out what they wanted and become that. The other thing that changed was, in doing so, I became a liar. Lying is a bridge. If you pretend something long and hard enough, it will become real. Which can be good or bad, of course, depending on what you're lying about. When being in the business of pleasing cocks started to be what I was rather than my experiment, I got out. Prostitution sucks you in and makes you feel filled up while it empties you, the same way some religions do. It's a claustrophobic cult of transaction. You trade pieces of yourself — your mood, your tastes, your body parts — for other people's satisfaction in the form of money. After only a couple months, I was no longer hiding my personality at will — I was actually losing it, and I no longer knew what I was when there weren't strangers around whose minds I could read and project myself into. So I left.

My time spent with a hundred cocks originally brought me ten thousand dollars. But their memory just keeps bringing more fortune — with unofficial cock doctorate in hand, I've landed several great writing assignments, including this one. It was exciting to be sent to Nevada to spend a few days at The Bunny Ranch. I also felt nervous — I was throwing myself in with all these people strong enough to stay inside other people's dreams, a place where I had tried to survive and failed.

Highway 50, just outside Carson City, is lined with pawnshops and steakhouse casinos; it has much the same feel as prostitution itself — at once shabby and thrilling. I started tingling, thinking about men selling their watches and rings just for the chance to spend one more half-hour with a stranger in see-through black. Desperation in the air heightens the way everything looks — even these squat, gray Nevada buildings inside gray mountains. Off 50, a gravel driveway leads to the Ranch: a long pink trailer flanked by a helicopter landing pad to the right, a white stretch limo parked in front and a locked gate decked with propaganda for the house. "America's hottest cat house," Larry Flynt calls from one sign. "These girls are unbelievable," Governor Jesse Ventura proclaims from another.

The women remind me of pretty monkeys: they groom one other, chatter about food and cigarettes (wanting both and quitting both), re-tie strings of slippery outfits; they swear, joke, climb on top of each other and disperse suddenly to brood in separate corners. There's no TV, nowhere to go. They're at the Ranch for two weeks at a time, twelve hours on, twelve off. Each girl has her own room — just big enough for a chair, dresser and a bed that she'll sleep on after she's had enough sex on it to pay her expenses: nineteen dollars a night room and board; fifty dollars to the sheriff for her year's prostitution license (it's legal in Nevada); money to the doctor for her weekly STD tests (mandatory at the Ranch); between twenty and a thousand dollars a week for lingerie and shoes; then there's tips for the doorperson, the housekeeper, the cabbies who bring skiers and gamblers to the Ranch rather than to some other cat house, and fifty bucks a pop each time she enlists a "runner" to drive her into town for breakfast or shopping. Yet these girls look so free inside their tight, windowless little space. Gypsy, a cross between Kim Basinger and Liv Tyler, is close to six feet tall and has such irreverent posture she uses the seat of the chair as if it were the back.