WHILE I WAS AT SUNETTE’S agency, I had one cool guy, a regular client and a rich one, who had started to book me at his house. He had another girl at the club, Tammy, who did threesomes with me. Until he met me he’d never known there was a black girl at the agency.
Among the girls, we had this thing that we never spoke about our clients if we thought we were falling in love with them. We had to stay neutral. But Tammy would talk about this guy all the time, and how good he was towards her. She kept bragging about him, how he was so nice, taking her for dinner and talking to her for hours.
This irritated me, so I told Tammy that he was also very good in bed! She was shocked – she’d thought she was his only girl. So I carried on. I bragged about him and his sexual antics. When Tammy learnt that he seemed to prefer me, she got jealous, but I competed with her and won his preferences: he kept booking me and not her for three weeks.
This is the kind of thing that would make the girls betray each other. The club didn’t have a policy about the girls harassing each other. So, in this kind of situation, the other girl would try to destroy anything of mine, like my lingerie and even my reputation.
It worked like that. Even the client enjoyed the drama.
By my second year at the club, I was used to many different types of clients, but some are more memorable than others.
A black priest and his wife once booked me in the ‘Queen’ room, which had a rich gold-and-brown colour scheme. I guess the priest wanted royal sex. He even arrived wearing his white collar!
He was very upset with his wife because she had told him that she didn’t want sex. She had two reasons: firstly because she felt pious about their sexual relationship, and secondly because she thought he had been cheating on her. I wondered why they had chosen to deal with these issues at the escort agency. I was already high on drugs when I met them, and they were very sober.
‘What will make my wife want to have sex with me?’ the priest pleaded.
So I tried to make them horny, and started dancing, slowly. He reacted by taking off his collar. I stopped and told them to get comfortable because they would enjoy what was coming. I could see the wife was angry and uncomfortable – she was very stiff. I took her hand and moved it towards her husband, helping her touch him, and she slowly became interested. Soon they started caressing each other and I left them alone to enjoy themselves.
‘Another successful day at the office,’ I said to myself, relieved that there’d been no sex for me.
Those were the kinds of moments when I enjoyed my job.
And then there was ‘Greek’, a very depressed, weird guy.
He’d book me for two hours, and he would bring the coke. We might cuddle a bit, or I’d massage him. And then he would start talking about his wife, how she didn’t do the things he asked, or he’d wonder aloud what she would like, whether or not she would want someone else in the room during sex. Stuff like that. I never understood why he would want us to get high, and then just sit and smoke in the room, talking and talking.
I found that Greek had lots of emotional issues, and he used me as a sounding board. It was good money, but I wasn’t his counsellor and our sessions put me on edge.
I had to take his coke, because if I didn’t, it would look as though I was going to cheat or rob him. And I knew I always had to be sensitive to his needs, otherwise he would complain to the club, and the boss might slap me to get into line. But Greek was so boring. And because I was bored, I would have to add more ecstasy or smoke more weed, just to keep my energy levels up for the night’s next client.
Sometimes he could not have an erection when I massaged him, and this worried me because this is what I did professionally! My job was to satisfy my client. I tried some stunts, like asking him if he’d like to be tied up, or if we could bring in another girl for a threesome.
Anything to be more active, because unless I was physically active, doing my thing with the client, my drugs would cause me great discomfort. I was used to getting high before I met a client – that’s the only way I could pull off a ‘good heist’. So by the time I had taken coke with Greek, I would be sweating – the coke in my head would make me horny and I’d have to find ways of calming down my body.
With Greek, I would sometimes have to take two cold showers during our talking sessions – just to cool down. I would have to tell Greek that I was using the bathroom.
Although we mostly talked, sometimes Greek would come to the club already high. Then he’d be rough with me, slapping me and throwing me against the wall. He’d shout at me, making me act as though I was his wife.
‘Why don’t you want to go on vacation with me? You said you wanted a break!’ he would shout, then slap me.
‘No! No!’ I would fake cry.
That’s how he acted out his anger.
Did I like prostituting myself?
When I was high on drugs, I felt horny myself. By this time I was not only addicted to drugs, but to sex itself. I had become a sex addict. And I wanted to do a good job – I felt satisfied when a client climaxed.
‘I’m not here to drink tea with you,’ I would say.
The lifestyle could be fun, sometimes. I liked it when the agency would send us out to buy new lingerie for a particular strip show. I liked when I was walking through a shopping mall and someone recognised me as a stripper. Sure, I liked this lifestyle.
But there are emotions that come out when you’re in your own space. That’s when the memories come back. When I was alone in my room, and not high, these memories would haunt me. I would fight myself back and forth:
‘I shouldn’t be doing this … but I know why I’m doing it.’
‘I’m not normal. I cannot go out there and be normal.’
‘I can’t go home to my mom.’
‘Ntombi would say I knew what I was getting into …’
Lousy memories.