PART OF THE RISKINESS OF prostitution – even when it’s organised with an escort club – was allowing a paying client to beat me up, hurting my body. I let the abuse happen. This is why it was better to be high when I let a client have his way with me – it’s part of the reason why drugs were so important to me. I couldn’t have done my job otherwise.
The escort agency had rules, though. One of them was that we were not supposed to smoke the client’s coke with the client: you did so at your own risk. I had my own stash of drugs, but when I was in a private club room, it was a risk I took. I was not going to sit at the bar without a client. So if a client wanted to abuse me, I’d let it happen as long as he provided the drugs.
It was all kept quiet, because we were both breaking the rules. But if I didn’t let him do what he wanted with me and that made him unhappy with me, he could tell the boss that we were coking in the room. Then, I’d be in trouble.
That’s the power of money and drugs.
Another reason why the club needed rules was that a client could actually be a cop trying to catch out the club for having drugs. That’s why I would ask a new client to take off all his clothes and have sex first, before I took any drugs with him. Then he wouldn’t be able to lock me up because he’d already had sex with me – I could have said that he had raped me. My logic was that he could not pay at the club reception for a sexual service, and then lock me up for drugs.
We assessed new clients by figuring out whether any of the girls already knew him, and using our own intuition about whether he was ‘real’ or an undercover cop. If a client was someone we didn’t know, someone who’d just dropped into the club for the first time, then we wouldn’t mess with him or his drug stash.
I once had a client who was a cop, and when I went to untie his trousers, he immediately showed resistance. I then felt his badge and pistol. I stopped what I had been doing.
‘If you’re not going to have sex, then you can get a refund,’ I said. I left the private room ‘to get a cigarette’ and gave a sign to the club management that I was with a cop.
At other times, someone would tip off the cops that there were drugs at the club, and then the cops would raid. And so we girls were arrested a lot. We’d laugh about having ‘a rest’, which meant going to a jail cell to get some sleep.
We were usually dressed in our bikinis when we were picked up, and only sometimes did we manage to grab a jacket as we were herded by the police out of the club.
With our hands handcuffed behind our backs, we would plead with the cop: ‘Please, wrap the jacket around my shoulders, please, please, please …!’ It was so cold outside in our little bikinis!
The owners of the club would bring out their lawyers. We girls in the jail would tell the lawyers that if they didn’t bail us out, we would talk: we’d disclose that the club did have drugs. In the end, the owners would use money we had earned to bail us out – so we lost that income. It was cruel that they did that; it felt like punishment. When we were let out of the cells the next day, the club owners would just give us a packet of cigarettes, R100 and one gram of coke. But the money for our labour was gone. Of course the owners themselves were never caught. I don’t know why.
We were once taken to court for having drugs, but there was no trial because the cops couldn’t find the actual drugs at the bar. Most of the time, we girls wouldn’t bring our own coke to the clubs – instead, we would just pop ecstasy tablets.
It was only Tracy, our bar lady, who would hide coke behind the bar. It was brought to the club by these tall Afrikaner guys who carried out illegal abalone harvesting. They would always arrive high, with their hair still wet from their dives in the ocean, and they would stay the whole night. The cops were always looking for these guys.