Susan Kahumbura
Memoirs of a Prostitute
The rush here on the streets is to acquire as much as possible within the shortest time. This is because in our trade we become less competitive as we age. Also, as with all illegal trades, we never know when the government might decide to tighten the noose and kick us off the street like the drug pedlars atthe coast.
The urgency to accumulate makes it impossible to play fair at all times, and hence the need to pull a trick or two once in a while.
Although when I came onto the street I was already psychologically hardened, there were some things I wasn’t prepared for like the extremes of the tricks. But with the new company, I quickly overcame such moral reservations. A common stereotype in society is that prostitutes are thieves; not only of emotions and husbands but also of material things. A stereotype stressed by Cheupe, who I met during my first week on the street. “Whether you steal or not, everybody thinks you are a thief,” she told me as we sat on a pavement sharing a cigarette.
The first thing I noted when she first talked to me was her face, which was scarred as if a bleaching experiment had backfired. She chain-smoked and constantly sipped some pungent liquor from a plastic bottle she always carried. The sentence about stealing had come from nowhere but it was what she used to introduce me to spiking. She peddled the drugs that I could use to make men black out so that I could offload everything from them.
Still with a touch of innocence, I never imagined myself drugging a man. But Cheupe,with her husky voice and warped, street smart-logic, convinced me the spikes were a must-have because with men you never know when opportunity may strike. And unless I was in the trade for other purposes, there was no reason why I shouldn’t use any means to get money from men.
Cheupe had two types of drugs; a powder-like substance and chewing gum. I couldn’t imagine a man chewing gum offered by a prostitute. I bought and kept the drugs in my handbag, never sure I would get to use them. She also offered some tips; not to use the drugs on a sober man; not to spike a regular customer; to build trust with a client before drugging him, and, if need be, to corroborate with the watchman.
One day an African man driving a Mercedes-Benz with diplomatic licence plates picked me, and we drove to a guest house in Westlands. He bought some wine and we ended up in the room. He was fairly drunk and seemed the perfect target. Although I was hesitant to do it, I wanted, just like all other girls, to have a story to tell and to belong. And because the man was foreign, the temptation was high.
When the rather drunk man excused himself and went to the bathroom, I removed a small paper with a pinch of the powder from the pocket of my jeans and emptied all of it into his glass of red wine. To my surprise, the wine changed colour to green. “What the hell!” I thought to myself. Cheupe had played a trick on me. “Shit!” I had to do something. Fast.
As he came back from the bathroom, I removed my jacket and threw it on the table on top of the two glasses of wine, while beckoning the man to come my way. I was all over him with my hands and mouth. The spilt wine soaked into the carpet. In a few minutes, he seemed dead asleep. In his pocket were $900, a Nokia phone and a credit card. “Just leave my credit card and phone. You can keep the rest. It is all yours.” The guy wasn’t asleep. I went straight home, plotting a trick to pull on Cheupe. She had me this time.
