They try to hide the grittiness of Las Vegas prostitution somewhere between neon and sleaze, horneyness and loneliness.

The strippers and prostitutes try to come off as your next girlfriend without the maintenance.

The idea of legal prostitution in Las Vegas is a touchy subject. Ask the big casino owners in private and they'll all tell you, placed strategically somewhere between the bar and the wedding chapels isn't such a bad proposition for lack of a better term.

The idea of Caesar's Palace sending a beautiful hooker over to the private room where the high-roller is beating the house out of thousands and with the compliments of the house for the weekend is a great promotion for the house. She starts her lap dance on him at the crap table and he's history. By the time he hits the blackjack table he's doubling down on a 15 after the dealer checks his 10 when she starts to unzip the poor schmucks' pants. When we take a look at the strip joints and out-call services in Las Vegas all we want to see is babes without bras. But the millions of legal and illegal dollars that flow in and out of these places would make even Bill Gates blush.

Talk about legalizing prostitution in Clark County might make for great debates amongst the radio talk show hosts, maybe even get a 30 second spot on the 11 o'clock news, but don't even speak the words out loud or the guns from the guys behind the girls will come out blasting, and they ain't taking or leaving names. These guys aren't about to give up their multi-million dollar sleaze businesses just to hand it over to the casinos…not without taking a big chunk for providing the hookers. This isn't the candy-coated roller coaster, buffet and bingo world of Las Vegas; this is more the Blade Runner vision of future Las Vegas.

My initiation into the world of prostitution was just after hitting town in '81. Like a horney Boy Scout on his first field trip to Hootersville.The sign said "Mae's Brothel 30 miles." I'd only been living in Las Vegas for a couple of months when I took the ride to Pahrump just over the Clark County line. I was intrigued by the name of the sleepy town 60 miles NW of Las Vegas; I heard they had a new winery there and a little casino in case anyone was asking for excuses for why I was traveling to Pahrump.

What I didn't know for sure was if this sign was for real. REAL LIVE PROSTITUTES right here in my own back yard. God I love this place. I took the left turn thirty miles down the road; I had to see for myself what a whorehouse looked like. I dreamed up visions of a Victorian manor, Playboy centerfold girls traipsing around in Victoria Secrete lingerie, girls swinging from red velvet swings kicking their legs and blondes with German accents and long black cigarette holders blowing smoke rings in my face. I'd ring the door and Hef would answer in a smoking jacket and a pipe, a blonde on each arm "Welcome to the mansion." Ahh, this would be heaven.

I reached the end of a long road only to see three or four double sized trailer houses sitting in the desert, surrounded by high chain-link fences and a security camera at the locked gate. "Visitors please ring the bell." Was all the welcome they gave on the outside. "NO WAY, NO FUCKING WAY, WHERE'S THE MANSION, WHERE'S THE BLONDES, WHERE'S HEF?!!"After the long ride up with visions of me in a sudsy Jacuzzi with twin red-heads drinking champagne and smoking cigars (me, not them) all I got was a prickly pear cactus in my foot and a high-voltage chain-linked welcome. Not quite my idea of a warm, fuzzy sex.

I decided to pass up the harsh reality of prostitution in Nevada I had the feeling I would be buzzed in, they'd check my credit at the door, spray me down with some sort of disinfectant, stamp my hand, tell me to remove my clothing and wait in the waiting room, maybe put on a paper toga or something, hand me one of those mini bottles of Smirnoff's which they'd probably charge me twenty bucks for, send in some tattooed, spiked haired weirdo biker girl named Buzzy with a pierced eyelid and a small egg timer, she'd turn it upside down and say "GO!!" "Come on pal, see the sand glass? Get the picture? You got three or five minutes, depending on how you like it done, over easy, or hard boiled. You need a Playboy magazine or something to get you started?" Willing to keep my visions as long as possible I just grabbed a Subway sandwich in Pahrump and headed back to Las Vegas, money and pride safely in hand, so to speak…damm

The only reason prostitution wasn't legalized in Clark County and the city of Las Vegas is only a small stipulation in the laws that say no county with a population of over 250,000 can have legalized prostitution. That was decided in 1952, but the loophole that legalized it in the other Nevada counties was born on the back of that law that said it "wasn't" legal in Clark County, population around 262,000 in that year.

What it failed to include was every other cactus tree and rock in the state of Nevada, which in 1952 everyone figured if they weren't coming to Las Vegas, they weren't stopping anywhere else in the state. (Reno and Carson City being the only exception thanks to the liberal divorce laws and the legal brothels only a few minutes drive from Virginia St. ) But that doesn't stop anyone.

The major prostitution business in the city is done through out-call services. You call one of those "Entertainment" businesses and tell them you want a "dancer" to come out to your hotel room as if you were gonna put on a Ricky Ricardo record and do the Samba with her.

When she gets there, body guard in tow, she makes sure she gets the money up front, she sets up the boom-box, a bad disco number comes on as if you give a shit what she's playing, she's naked in a couple minutes and she says "You want me to stop?" well, once she's naked you gotta ask yourself something "there's nothing left to take off, what's she mean "stop" she gonna take off her nail polish or something?" then the demand to show her another $50 or $100 and she'll make your night worth remembering, as if you were gonna forget a blonde with 36 Double D tits in your face for twenty minutes when you last visited Las Vegas. ("Let's see, I did a couple buffets, played a little blackjack, had a few drinks, yah, that's all I remember,….uh wait a minute, I seem to remember dropping $500 to have sex with a lusty 22 year old who looked like Cindy Crawford, or was I just imagining that?")

But that's the "clean" side of whoredom in Las Vegas. There are the strip clubs that only do lap dances in the front rooms, the "private" dances are strictly "art interpretation of sex." (I think they still call it a blow job, don't they? Well hell, if President Clinton doesn't call it sex and the Supreme Court didn't throw him out on his ass, how can they prosecute you for doing "oral masturbation" in a booth with Shirley at the Spearmint Rhino for twenty bucks?)

Then there are the street walkers on the north Strip and south Fremont St. as well as the seedy motel corridor that exists on the east side of the Strip between Sahara and Charleston streets. The finer casinos attract the finest hookers in their lounges and bars. They're usually out-of-town hookers that come in for weekends and holidays and of course the conventions. The idea of legalized prostitution in Las Vegas is viewed as a threat to all these groups. But the question is where the illegal prostitution money is going to?

The out-of-town hookers work in tandem with hotel personnel to get their business quietly advertised. The hotels certainly don't want their good clients going to Pahrump for three or four hours and spending all that good money, they don't want to send them down to the Oasis Motel for an hour either. They're not going to get them a ghetto girl that smells from Wal-Mart douche and a crack pipe either. The hotels frown on the outcall services also since they're mostly rip-offs and leave a bad taste to most who use them leaving them overcharged and sometimes unsatisfied (there are completely legal, they only do lap dances, I think in the phone book, in the 112 pages dedicated to "entertainment services" the one on page 87 that reads "Big Bertha and her Beautiful Bouncing Braless Babes" and believe me, you don't want Bertha, or any of her bouncing braless babes on your lap.

Soon the idea of regulated prostitution will come to the Las Vegas voters. They'll decide if they want the millions of dollars of taxed revenue in their coffers, or leave it to the slugs and pimps that get it now. And with these millions of dollars at stake, I guarantee you that the local government will have something to say about this. I think they've always done to us what the whores are doing to their clients every day anyway.

Our illustrious mayor, Oscar Goodman, who makes no bones about legalizing prostitution in Clark County in order to regulate it is on our side. Soon the voters can decide if they want the Health Department to license the prostitutes, to check them for diseases weekly and clear them as they do now in the outlying counties of Nevada where each prostitute has to carry a current health card in order to "do it" besides they are also required to use protection in every case (sorry guys, gotta put a sock on it). They can even drug test them to make sure you don't have the crack smoking, needle popping whores that are out there now carrying everything from Syphilis to Aids. Not a bad idea if you've ever walked from downtown to the Strip and seen a 200 pound black girl in a way-too-small dirty white stretch mini-skirt with huge tits falling out of a pink tube top and stretch marks asking you if you want to have a good time for ten bucks, all you can think is "yah, let's screw, then I can blow my brains out when we're done."

--Ken Pearlman