Episode 14 (Part 2): Why I Chose The Street

Nairobi Raha Escort Diaries

So where was I? Yes, this girl reciting Yeat’s second coming. She was sitting among a group of men, who seemed more than awed. The men bought beer and she recited more poems. I knew the Yeats poem very well. My father recited it occasionally and so did my English teacher who did it with so much enthusiasm. But well, ironic as it may be, I wondered what the hell, with her seemingly good education, she was doing at SJ.  She was not exceptionally beautiful, her short hair was dull and her clothes very plain. Then I noted the men only bought her beer and didn’t seem to have any intention of sleeping with her. To the men, she was an object of admiration and not desire. In the same way, people are amazed by a ten-year-old genius who can do complex sums. For a second our eyes met. I smiled. “Why are you looking at me?”, She asked loudly.  I just turned and looked in a different direction, as the men giggled.

Men who drank ( and maybe still drink) at SJ during the day looked like junior corrupt civil servants skipping work or came to enjoy the toil of their corruption. They wore cheap suits and carried a newspaper or some envelope. During the day there was so much talk of ‘helping you get a passport’ and such stuff. Those who were not civil servants looked like the men about town. City hustlers and brokers. And as usual at the SJ there is bound to be some student drowning his fees and the many other men who come from the furthest corner of the city supposedly to empty their bladders. Looking at the men that first day at the SJ I was a little heartbroken. It’s not exactly what I had expected. I had hoped for some more class, some feeling of sophistication, and an aura of money, but there was none of it in its stead a sense of hopelessness and confused lives. To make it worse and hurt my ego, for more than half an hour none of the colorless men at the SJ had talked to me or given me more than a passing glance.

I had some money and could have bought myself a beer or soda but I had quickly learned that ” Buy me a soda or beer” was the ice-breaking statement used by girls. So I decided to get up from the hidden corner, where I sat, and take a walk around, so that perhaps even if men didn’t like my face, they could see what else I possessed. I was dressed, even by SJ standards, in a very conservative manner. In my naivety, I thought men in a place like SJ would think me special, so it didn’t matter how I dressed. I somehow thought once I walked inside the SJ, all men would troop to me. It turned out to be wrong. Looks and not swag seemed to carry the day.

The new young girls of the SJ tend to hang out along the corridor next to the urinal. Walking along that corridor  I saw the aggressive young girls confronting men ” Twende shortie”.Let’s go for a short time. Some of the men, who work on themselves in the urinal, agreed. I passed a man and he touched my ass. I went red with anger and almost insulted him. Then I remembered what I had come to do. Quickly I smiled and looked at him. He just went away. Later I realized men who touch women’s asses are without cash to pay for them. Outside the short-time rooms, at the end of the corridor, were men and girls waiting, knocking on the doors to urge those already inside to hurry up. It looked comical.

Nowadays when I think of the first day at the SJ, I realize how silly and street dumb I was, though at the time I believed was a girl of the street, and not literally. Though I was the new kid on the block, my aloofness was not helping my freshness translate to money. Some girls seemed to have lived at the SJ all their adult lives. It’s very easy to tell; They look tired and lacking a female shine. These could have slept with 4500 men in five years at a rate of 3 men per day for 300 days. Only newbies to the SJ sleep with such. Men want something new, something that other men haven’t had a look or taste of. I was new, but no one wanted me.  Anyway, I went back and sat down, a little exposed and now very near the poetic girl. I wanted to talk to her but she was very drunk. So I tried to smile and put some droopy eyes, a lusty look as the other girls did. Slowly I started becoming like them.

My walk around seemed to have helped. A man approached me. ” Short time how much?” he asked. It was such a direct question. I had spent so much time wondering what to charge. I regarded myself so highly, forgetting what mattered to men in such a setting was my performance in bed. I was thinking of a figure based on that for some stupid reason, I was more special than all the girls there. Before that, I had done some other veiled prostitution, you know the kind when in college and out in a club, a man picks you and in the morning it is obvious he should pay for a ‘taxi’ and ‘lunch’. That was always easy, though I didn’t always get as much as I wanted.

” How much will you pay?” I asked the man who was waiting.

” The usual,” he said.

” How much?”

” 200″

I felt light in my head. I was mad. It looked like an insult.

” I am not that cheap,” I said.

” Alright,” the man shrugged and walked away smiling.

Something was wrong.

To be continued. One last part...


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