Exit!

by Grizelda Grootboom

  Did I feel good about myself?

  I felt sexy, crazy, happy, high, the best stripper in the whole country. I felt that I could get anything I wanted.

  This Eastgate mall club became very popular and opened branches in other towns where I also sometimes worked. I stayed with stripping for a couple of years, despite facing the occasional abuses by clients.

  The original club was eventually closed down because it was raided by police, who arrested undocumented foreign girls from Japan and China, and South Africans who were stashing drugs.

  But I stayed on in and around Johannesburg, and continued to strip in small clubs. After the club closed down, I spent some time working at clubs in smaller cities and towns in the strip club’s network.

  Getting hired in a ‘white’ strip club around that time was a long process. The club would thoroughly examine you to make sure your health was good, that you don’t look like a druggie. Club owners always asked about my health, about what alcohol and drugs I took, what sex techniques I knew and so on.

  Often, when I went for a new job, I’d get checked out by a doctor, and the girls had to go every three months for tests. A blood test would be taken, but I never got my results. After stripping, plus private lap dancing, plus sex, how would I know my infection status? The answer is that I never knew if I had an infection. I just knew that if the club owner came back to me, I was fine. If the owner didn’t contact me, it may mean there was something wrong. They never said if we were sick or had HIV.

  We never bothered to know more because we thought the greater danger was a drug overdose. We didn’t know anything about ethics and responsibility. We didn’t want to know our HIV status; we weren’t told, and we didn’t ask.

  It would be club management who decided what work I would do each night; I didn’t get to choose. To impress the management, my skin needed to be baby-soft and smell nice, and so I always spent money on baby oil. The boss would check my flexibility, which was important for stripping on the pole. In this business, you get clients if your body looks good, not if you have a nice personality.

  The condition of my body dictated whether I would be a stripper, a lap dancer, a nude waitress, and so on. These days it’s different – workers have become more independent now in what they want to do at clubs. But I knew back then that these decisions were not up to me.

  What we had learnt as black escort girls in the late 1990s, was that we had to be very careful and survive, because it was hard to find clubs that wanted us back then. And we needed the security of the clubs because those girls who were working for the pimps on the streets were often left desperate.

  After a while working the clubs I decided that I needed to look for something more permanent.

  Lisa was an agent for girls like us. She was a mature lady; her face was wrinkled, and she had blonde hair and green eyes. She was introduced to me as someone who could help me find new work. Lisa was obviously strong in the sex work networks operating at that time, recruiting girls like me – I knew that if I arrived somewhere new, I could use her name to get me through the door. It was like a recommendation.

  I was twenty-two when I first moved from Joburg to Port Elizabeth, before my route took me back to Joburg, then on to Pietermaritzburg, then Durban and other small towns in KwaZulu-Natal, back to Joburg, and then to my final club in Port Elizabeth until I was twenty-six. Those were years lost in a haze of drugs and emotional dislocation.

  Back then stripping was the only life I knew. Drugs were really all that mattered to me. Lisa said I should try a small club in Port Elizabeth where she had once worked.

  I hitchhiked to Port Elizabeth using this method: I found a willing truck driver at a truck stop, gave him favours for the ‘free’ ride, arrived at the next truck stop, got cleaned up, got my drugs, found another trucker, gave him favours, and on it went. After I arrived in Port Elizabeth, I freshened up at the last garage, and then proceeded to the club Lisa had recommended.

  This club was just stripping and lap dances. Regular guys could come and pay at reception to watch a show and go for a lap dance. I started working there as a stripper.

  As I soon discovered, the other girls at this club were really young – some as young as sixteen. The youngest girls didn’t do lap dancing, but only strip shows and pole dancing. For these girls, stripping was just an extra job, something fun they did in front of their boyfriends for drugs and smokes. They danced as if they were doing school gymnastics!

  There were games in this club, and it was the pole dancers who competed for the most clients. Six girls would each dance on a table with a pole, performing her best moves. The guys would watch and cheer, moving around until they’d found who they thought was the best pole dancer. Then they’d shove cash into her panties. So one of the six girls would receive the most money, and then another six girls would start a new dance competition.

  Then there were other girls, the older ones, walking around the floor, checking out which guys wanted a lap dance. Unnecessarily, in this club the girls would go nude in front of the clients.

  I really didn’t like this place because the client base was generally made up of white Afrikaans men, who were quite racist. I had to learn how to deal with their attitudes, and not act hostile or angry towards them, even though I hated the way they treated me. There were also always these crazy raids, with the cops coming into the club. Then everything would stop. Two hours later, everything would be back to normal again.

  I soon knew that this club, with these young, inexperienced girls, just wasn’t my scene. When a client told me I was too mature for the place, I returned to Johannesburg the same way I had come: via truckers on the prostitution route.

  When I was back in Joburg, Lisa suggested I join a popular escort club in Pietermaritzburg. Getting there meant using the same trucking-prostitution strategy.

  I eventually arrived at this club, where about eight of us girls had our own rooms in a quiet private house. The girls were all white, mostly from other countries, but they were friendly, and we all shared our drugs.

  But this was another place whose crowds of white male clients didn’t like black girls. In Joburg I had learnt to dance, to writhe on the floor and do various suggestive moves around a pole. But the clients here preferred the white chicks, apparently. I wondered why they had invited a black girl to perform there, when clearly the place was very white. The club and clients didn’t like my style. It was also not very busy and I wasn’t getting much money. I became a bit bored, so I decided to leave.

  I spent the next few months travelling from one small KwaZulu-Natal town to another, finding clients, hustling rides with truck drivers, and keeping my drug habit going. I was gaining more experience as a hustler and a prostitute on the street again, a stripper in clubs and escort agencies when I could get that work, and a survivor on drugs.

  If I needed more clients, I would ask a client in one club to refer me to other clubs. If I ended up getting a job at the new club, I would have to give the original client a service free of charge.

  Trusting my client could also be risky though, and I could end up in the wrong hands. The client could take me to their own drug pimp, who would then make ‘a deal’ to use me: the pimp could claim that the client had brought me because he owed the pimp money. Then I was essentially ‘bought’, and I wouldn’t receive any money for services I rendered while working for that pimp.

  Escaping from a club I was not comfortable with sometimes meant moving to other towns and cities, and travelling was always risky. I always got into trouble going to unknown places. If I had a client, I could ask to be dropped at a club in Durban, but if I didn’t know anyone there, I’d end up on the street. Or I might be dumped, and have to find my own way around in the middle of the night.

  If I didn’t have a client and was on the street late at night, a man could approach me and ask, ‘Who’s pimping you?’ That’s how you get into the wrong hands. There are pimps looking for girls like me on the streets, and I wa
nted to avoid them.

  So I learnt to prostitute myself for transport with the truckers. After I had left a club, I’d walk the highways, hoping to get a ride to the nearest garage. There, I’d find another lift to the next garage, until I found a trucker who could take me further, sometimes all the way back to Joburg, in exchange for favours.

  At the garages, I would change into my normal jeans and clothes. I would buy a gram of coke, some ecstasy and weed – enough to last me for a couple of hours on the highway. If I was going to get high, I had to be inside the truck, because being on the road was too dangerous.

  Communication with the truckers was very easy: they knew what I needed, and vice versa.

  ‘Where can I drop you?’ a trucker would say, and we both knew that meant sex.

  Sometimes it meant physical abuse as well.

  It was a risk I took over and over again.

  And I was feeling quite lonely and lost. I never had time to make friends in these places I was in. I was never anywhere for very long. I decided to return to Johannesburg to find work there. I would be less lonely there.

  It was now 2003.

  During this year on the streets and in the clubs of Joburg, I struggled on, feeding my drug habit. In the classier strip clubs I learnt how to dress nicely, knowing that I should not wear short skirts as this was the dress of the street girls.

  At night I still preferred the safety net of the clubs, but in broad daylight I would hang around in malls, bars and restaurants, looking for clients. If you look like a prostitute during the day, in Midrand or Kempton Park, even your fellow prostitutes don’t care that you are there. Instead of being in competition, the girls would challenge each other, because it was only the blow-job guys who wanted us during the day. It was money we earned to pay for our smokes.

  But even so, it wasn’t safe being a prostitute on the streets during the day. It was better, and safer, at night, when everyone was working: cops were out, pimps were out, girls were walking the streets, and ambulances were roving.

  It could be dangerous during the day, when no one from our world was around. A guy could drive me far out of town, beat me up, then violently do his thing with me. I kept as safe as I could during the day by not dressing up too much, or exposing myself too obviously.

  I just never understood how people could be so brutal.

  Fifteen

  AFTER I’D BEEN BACK IN Joburg a while, I met a guy who referred me to a nice club in Randburg.

  It was early January in Joburg, summer-holiday time, and no one was around. Business had been very quiet, with just a few foreign tourists. This guy took me to the club, which was in an estate. It looked like a sports club, with a hotel for sports people who were visiting in town.

  We entered the compound through high gates with security guards. On the fields nearby, men were playing sports. The cream walls of the large hotel building impressed me – it looked like a posh place with big, comfortable rooms.

  Once we were in, I noticed that there were lots of German girls with long blonde hair living there. The guy explained that the men who were staying there were are on business, and that the girls gave massages.

  It looked clean. It looked safe.

  ‘So why are you bringing me here?’ I asked.

  ‘You can stay here for a while and work,’ he replied.

  I asked him, ‘But what’s in it for you, leaving me here?’

  ‘Just say you’re a chick from KZN and that you’re not a working girl. I brought you here for an opportunity. You will get paid for it.’

  I didn’t get paid, and I spent three weeks inside this estate. I was given my own room, and I could find my own clients.

  But I was not allowed to leave.

  Because of the security, we couldn’t even try to walk through the gates.

  I discovered that the German girls were there because they were being ‘taught’ how to ‘speak English’. That was the line, anyway. There were also some local Afrikaans- and English-speaking girls who were qualified strip workers. They hid themselves somewhere in the estate during the day.

  At night, it was another ballgame.

  The conference room of the estate turned into a swinging club, and all-night parties took place inside private rooms. The male clients had sex with each other as well. Drugs were everywhere. You could smoke anything you wanted – it was all there.

  Where was I in all of this?

  I was high on drugs, but this is the only time I can remember when only my boobs worked, not my cookie. The men liked massaging themselves between my large boobs, coming that way rather than through intercourse.

  Trapped inside the estate, with nowhere to go, I became disgusted by the semen: it was all over my face and body. During my sex work, a guy would just grab my hair, and shove his thing into my mouth, then spill his semen all over my face.

  So how did I get out of this big hotel estate finally? I had been there for three weeks. Then, one day, the hustler guy who initially brought me there arrived with a friend, another businessman, a black African from Ghana.

  I had often felt sad about these African businessmen coming to South Africa. Local businessmen would approach me with money, and my job would be to entice their African business partners to sign a contract. This meant, for instance, that I had to get the African man so drunk that he would finally sign. It bothered me that I was part of the exploitation of others, when I had also been exploited.

  This time, my original trafficker didn’t recognise me as by now I had a changed my hair into a big Afro.

  My plan for getting out of the estate was to seduce the Ghanaian guy and then get him to take me out. The problem was that when I asked him for a drink, he treated me as though I was a waitress, and said ‘No, thank you.’

  I tried to hint that I wasn’t a bar lady trying to serve him a drink, that I was there for the same reason as all the other girls – the white girls.

  It took a while to get through to him.

  The image many men have of sex workers was portrayed by the German ladies with their long blonde hair and shiny white skin. Not by a voluptuous black woman with high, high heels and a contoured corporate dress that made her look like a sexy business woman. Mr Businessman was surprised by me.

  I started to chat to him. He didn’t know my background, so I told him a sob story about being dumped by my boyfriend, and that I could give him what he wanted far better than those white girls could. I tried to convince him to take me out with him, and I told him to tell his businessman friend, because I didn’t want the whole thing to backfire.

  My Ghanaian client eventually did what I asked. I don’t know who he paid off, but he came to get me later, and took me out of the estate to his hotel. He was sweet with me, too. I felt like he took care of me, almost like a daughter.

  It was done.

  But I was left shocked after this experience of being a sex slave. So it was back to Joburg’s streets, earning my own money for sex and thereby feeling that I was controlling my own drug habit.

  When I was not working at an agency, I had my own South African clients and pimps. And again I had to try not to be controlled by the pimps. It’s dangerous to try to get out of the pimp’s hold on you, but it can be done with a willing client. He’s also the guy I might ask to drive me out of town so I can avoid a pimp. It was often these clients who took me to the smaller clubs outside of the cities.

  That’s how many of my journeys began.

  They would take me from Joburg to these clubs that played rock ’n’ roll and old love songs. These places were too cozy for me, with mainly white Afrikaans guys who all knew each other. The women there worked as prostitutes and also handled the bar – usually, they basically ran these places. They were older women, too.

  I would sometimes stay at a small-town club for a few days, but it never really lasted. As a black woman, I usually felt out of place at these clubs. I was just glad I had had the Port Elizabeth experience so I understood Afrikaners. For me bac
k then, although it was unpleasant, I didn’t take their words or actions as racist – I just understood them to be the influence of alcohol or drugs.

  It was good that I could speak their language, although for many of those Afrikaners, it didn’t matter – it was the colour of the skin that was important.

  I would stay in these small towns for a few nights with different clients. Sometimes a client would get me a taxi in the morning to go wherever I had to go. I’d lie: ‘My boyfriend dumped me, and I need money to get back home.’ Then I would go to the town’s nearest mall and hang out until the evening for more work. When I had enough money, I’d return to Joburg.

  But truck transport often landed me in the wrong place. I’d try hitching a ride back to Joburg, and the driver would say he wasn’t going there but could drop me at another club on his route.

  Then I’d land at yet another boer club.

  I remember walking into this small-town club once. I was all dusty, with old make-up on, and I walked up to the bar. The bar lady just looked at me and didn’t say a word.

  So I battered her with fluent Afrikaans. I knew she hadn’t expected me to speak Afrikaans.

  I had big, thick blonde braids at the time. She told me I was just a black whore, but probably a good one. She still had an attitude after that, but she became nicer. So I ordered a double brandy and Coke, an ‘Afrikaner’ drink, to show I knew I was on her ‘turf’.

  The place was dead. You could smell the dust. I heard a comment in Afrikaans from somewhere, ‘O, dit gaan baie donker wees in hierdie klub vanaand’ (Oh, it’s going to be dark in this club tonight).

  She asked me, ‘Are you passing by?’ and I started telling her about my issues. We chatted about that. As soon as she was comfortable with me, the guys took note, and the drinks started coming. My social light was on.