KERRI WAS ONE OF THE girls who worked in the club, and I struck up a friendship with her. She was a tall white girl with freckles on her face, and she had long, silky brown hair. Her feet and legs were nice and smooth, like a football player’s. We performed a threesome for a client, and I enjoyed having sex with Kerri. I actually became fond and protective of her, even though I didn’t know her very well, and that was a first for me.
People in the club disliked that Kerri and I were getting close and hanging out together. Friendships like that weren’t really encouraged.
I remember saying I would visit her at her house, not knowing she lived right across from our boss, Sunette. I was surprised to find that Kerri still lived with her parents, who charged her rent to stay there. Kerri couldn’t understand why we couldn’t hang out together – she was OK with me visiting.
Kerri accidentally fell pregnant. Sunette said that she should have the baby and Sunette would provide the childcare. I had heard that Sunette could not have children of her own. I just had a strange feeling about this. I didn’t trust the situation.
Kerri worked as a stripper up to her ninth month of pregnancy. I became the protective, emotional girlfriend. We hung out on Saturday afternoons when we weren’t working, and we had a baby shower, which was nice.
She gave birth to a baby boy.
Then Kerri’s heart turned around. When the baby was nine months old, she gave the baby to Sunette to care for. Sunette would bring the baby to the club and brag about him to everyone.
And this upset Kerri. She changed her mind again, and asked Sunette to give the baby back. I don’t know what happened, but Sunette was very upset. Kerri left the club with her baby.
I never heard Sunette speak about the baby again, but I was heartbroken to lose such a special friend.
Then came Elton, a handsome, classy coloured man who enjoyed cricket. We started seeing each other outside of the club, although I knew he had a wife and daughter, and another girlfriend. I knew that I was not allowed to have a client as a boyfriend, but I felt very comfortable with Elton because he was so kind to me.
He would come to the club and pay R350 for an hour just so that I could rest. We would kiss and fondle sometimes, but mostly he let me sleep. I got to the point where I really thought I was in love with this guy.
He knew Sundays were my off days, and so he would pick me up from my place in his black Jetta, in which he always played his favourite Toni Braxton songs. We would go out for breakfast, followed by walks on the beach. Elton would make Sundays a lot of fun.
Of course we had sex – I felt I owed him that since he paid for my rest time at the club – but not very often. He also didn’t allow me to take drugs in front him, so I would always get high before we met up.
I didn’t have a phone, so I never knew when he would come to fetch me. I just had to wait for him, and I’d get anxious when a week went by and I hadn’t seen or heard from him. Then, he would suddenly arrive on a Friday night, and book me so I could sleep. We agreed that he shouldn’t walk out after a session, but stay at the bar for a while so it looked legitimate.
As time went on and this became the norm, I started getting furious at him for leaving me for so long all week. To get back at him for being so silent during the week, I would try book another client before he booked me. This went on for months. When we were in the room together, we wouldn’t have sex but would end up arguing.
‘You didn’t even come by to see me last Sunday,’ I would tell him.
‘Can I pick you up later tonight?’ he would ask.
‘What? Of course not!’ I’d retort, angrily. ‘Don’t you know I’m a whore? I can’t do that!’
Elton had a steady job working as the general manager at a large food chain store. He also had a club in one of the local townships outside Port Elizabeth. Sometimes, after my work, he would pick me up and take me to his club. This was dangerous because club managers circulate around the clubs to see if their girls are picking up other clients. So I would wear a crazy hair weave so I wouldn’t be spotted. Or I would hide under the DJ tables, where I could give him a blow job as he stood by.
Elton excited me and I fell for him.
He told me a lot about himself, but I never discussed myself.
In the escort agency, all of us girls discussed the fact that some clients really grew to like us. But also, I wondered, if a client really cared, then why didn’t he make me his girlfriend and let me leave this business?
‘Oh, here comes my boyfriend!’ one girl would say.
‘Oh, please. If he’s your boyfriend, then why doesn’t he rescue you from this hellhole?’ another would reply. And it was true. We girls would talk about this among ourselves.
And there came a time when we all started getting fed up with the club. Girls were starting to leave. For me, working at the escort agency was getting boring. I was getting tired of it all, tired in all the busyness. Every week, the cops would raid the club, looking for people selling drugs. We’d get locked up half naked, and have to pay bail from our own funds.
Elton was the main reason I stayed in Port Elizabeth for so long. He was my last client before I discovered I was pregnant. I was twenty-six by then, and I discovered I was pregnant when I was about three of four months along. And I started to enjoy this life inside me.
That’s when I started to thinking things could change. I felt like I could be a woman. I thought, wow, I still have time to do this mothering thing. I still have time to change.
I wanted to keep the baby and I started calling it Summer, but agency management said no – when I told Sunette I was pregnant, she told me coldly that the club could not continue to employ me unless I had an abortion.
Confused, I thought about how they had allowed Kerri to keep her baby and continue working, both during and after her pregnancy.
Sunette said she had a solution for me. Abortion. She didn’t care about my opinion.
She had complete authority over my life. When someone in this business has that kind of authority, they are not thinking about your life. They are not thinking about your heart, about what is best for you. They are only thinking about your body, and they’ll tell you straight out that you are not going to bring issues like this into their business.
So she told me that I had to abort the baby. And I thought to myself, look, you’re obviously going to be killed here.
The abortion was done that same day, and it was done forcibly. I protested, so I was drugged.
That day, seeing Summer’s tiny legs in the sink next to me made me feel like I was murdering someone. Afterwards I bled a lot and I was told to just put a sponge in my private parts to stop the bleeding. That same evening I was told to take a client.
While I was waiting, half naked in my lingerie at the bar, I saw this guy coming towards me. And something in my aching gut just said no.
I just couldn’t do it. And that was the day I said, ‘This is it.’
When you say no to a pimp, that’s when you get killed. But I decided that day to say no to Sunette. When I said it out loud, the club bouncers beat me up so badly that I collapsed. They probably also gave me injections to put me out, because I remember nothing after that.
I don’t even remember when they drove me from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg and dumped me. I was found on Bree Street in Joburg and taken to the hospital. When I woke up several weeks later, both my body and my mind were damaged.
In the hospital, I was visited by a kind nun, who prayed for me while I was there, and then took me to a Catholic rehabilitation centre for drug addicts. I hardly knew this nun, and in my state I hardly ever spoke to her, but I think she saved my life.
At the drug rehab centre I got very sick on their detox programme – I had the shakes, emotional fits and a runny tummy. When I had the shivers, craving for a drug, my mind would think of devilish ways to get coke.
In those first three weeks of rehabilitation, not taking coke or any other drugs and not having sex was not too difficult for me because I had made up my mind to change. I still had my cigarettes and weed, and my heart was aching for change.
But mostly, for about five months after the forced abortion, I was out of it. I don’t remember much except that I was in and out of hospital during this time, and had to take tablets to keep me calm. And I felt like I was in a mad house. I was not myself.
Did I contemplate suicide? Oh my goodness, yes!
I hadn’t been suicidal after I gave birth to Z, and after I’d given him up for adoption. I had hurt very badly, but I was younger and I’d had my drugs afterwards to soothe me. But I was suicidal after I lost Summer. And I was not on drugs this time – this time, during my rehabilitation, the emotional pain was strong. There was nowhere I could hide from my pain; I had to face it.
Mostly, I just wanted to die.
There were times during my hospital stays that I took off the bed sheet and tied it around my neck. I would tie the other end to the bed, hoping to fall off during sleep and be choked. The dreams I had were all about falling into a dark hole. But I never fell off the bed.
And I kept coming back to the same thought: that this abortion had been forced upon me. I’d had no choice. That it was part of this trafficking story.
I had lost my Summer, another baby, to this lifestyle.
I told myself then that I didn’t want to do clubbing and prostitution any more. After my drug rehab, the nun who had cared for me looked for a safe place for me to stay. She placed me in a shelter.
Margaret, the Zulu sister I knew from my first experiences on Hillbrow’s streets eight years earlier, somehow heard my story and came to see me at that shelter. She was the first person from outside the rehab programme that I had seen since arriving back in Joburg. I was very quiet and not responsive – I just stared at her, wondering why she was visiting me. Mostly, at that time, I got irritated by people being in my space. I just wanted to be alone and quiet.
There were a few people in the shelter who slowly started to look familiar, but I didn’t care. We had group sessions, but I wouldn’t say anything, just listen to other people’s stories. They were stories about drugs, not prostitution. But I guess those stories encouraged me to push forward at least, to keep breathing.
As I got stronger, I was taken for training in making things, and I was taken to other rehabilitation centres. But in all that time, I had nothing to say to anybody. I remained quiet, my mind switched off.
Isolated.
This went on for over a year.
After a while I felt the need to be on my own and I left the shelter. I took to the parks, sleeping out, looking for a place to live. I had been off drugs for about a year by now, and I had no money. I went to churches for food and ate it in the parks. Doing this I could, at least, get through the day. Sleeping in parks each night, I actually really didn’t care what happened to me.
After living on the street, and wandering around for about a year, I found a new shelter which included a soup kitchen. The shelter was part of a church programme. That’s how I met the Houghton Methodists.
I decided to go to the church, even though I found the people irritating. There was lots of jumping up and down, praying loudly and singing, and loud talking. There was very little peace and silence. At least the nuns were quiet and didn’t say much to me – they seemed more spiritual.
In this new church, people welcomed me but I had always thought of myself as an independent person, a person who didn’t need help or interference, so I found it very hard to make any friends. People picked up on my attitude, and tried to draw me out. But I wasn’t ready to be approached or embraced in such a friendly manner. They thought I was being anti-social.
The ladies at the church irritated me, because I felt they used their ‘charity’ to control others. I got annoyed because even after all that had happened, I still had my pride. I felt they were condescending, with all their talking.
‘I hope you don’t smoke again.’
‘Why aren’t you wearing that nice dress we gave you?’
‘How are you feeling now …?’
Too many questions. And so my responses were cocky. I hadn’t realised that getting a plate of food meant giving out details of my whole life.
I did sit down with a psychologist to tell my story, and I trusted her because she was a member of the church. But I felt no consolation in her attempts to move me forward – I continued to carry with me the trauma of my forced abortion. We only had two sessions. I don’t know why. Perhaps I was not ready to confront my traumas and the stigma attached to me, a homeless and decrepit young woman grovelling around on the streets of Joburg.
The church had developed a form that stated where the people using the soup kitchen came from. The purpose was to collect money to send us home at Christmas. I didn’t accept this gesture, because the problem was this: if they give you a ticket ‘home’, and you’re indigent and family-less, where do you go when you get there?
The Methodists really tried to help, but nothing was working.
I had lost trust in people. Period. I couldn’t do this friendly thing with them. All I wanted was to be left alone.
Eventually I was told by the shelter that I was strong now, and that perhaps I should leave and look for my own place.
Because she had visited me in hospital, and because she was the only friend I could think of, I decided to look for Margaret to see if I could stay with her for a few days. I found her place in Hillbrow, but she wasn’t there. Her friend said I could stay for two nights. The place was so familiar, with the street life, the drugs, but I never did find Margaret.
I continued sometimes to look for my other old Joburg friends. At the end of every day’s wandering I would go back to the Hillbrow girls to see how they were doing. Some of them had pimps, and wanted a ‘trust-thing’ with me. I hung around their flat, cleaning it for them, but I didn’t want to go back to my old way of life, to their way of life.
And I couldn’t stay long with them because they often brought clients home. They told me that if I wasn’t doing the night work, it wouldn’t look right for me to stay there. So it was always back to sleeping in parks.
Other than that, I didn’t have much to distract me. My baby Z was more on my mind than ever before, even though I had never known him.
And at the back of my mind, I was thinking about how the Methodists might be able to provide an answer for my weary soul’s searching for a better life. It just hadn’t been the right time. I intended to return because, despite my issues, at the church I had felt for the first time that I had met my spiritual self.