Every week or so, a girl leaves the Street never to return. Sometimes a girl may experience some boredom and decide to take a break for a week, but the break lasts forever. At other times a girl may hit a jackpot. For instance, by fair or rough play, she hooks a “real rich honey” who helps her leap to a different social level. Some girls shift locations in search of greener pastures. A girl moving upward from the Street heads to an upmarket brothel or any of the emerging places within the lush estates that are accommodative to our trade. The latter is always a higher probability than the former because many of the up-market brothel owners think a girl from the Street is stale, and not cultured enough to discreetly handle high net worth enough individuals. It’s not necessarily that such owners ask for a girl’s experience, but somehow they can tell where a girl comes from even if she claims to be just out of college. One would think that there is a Street Mark engraved on our faces, but no, the telltale signs are the distinct mannerisms that we acquire while here. These range from the vocabulary we use unconsciously to the way we pronounce “honey” even when we mean what is spread on bread.
The thing with coming and leaving the Street is that there are no ceremonies involved. Perhaps if leaving the Street was something planned, there would be farewell parties; how such parties would look can only be left to the imagination of the part of the brain that deals with insecurities and not the erotic section. But then, as I may have mentioned, leaving is not something to plan about; it just happens, more like an accidental death. Of course, if you are the concerned kind of John you will doubt me, because you may have heard the classical line “I plan to quit next month”. This, for your information, is as rhetorical as saying “I am fine” in answer to “How are you?”
For me, the most interesting part of leaving is when I meet a girl who has disappeared. It’s always a very pretentious situation. The conversations with the girls I have met always start with the girl trying to be indirectly dismissive of me. So she will say something along the lines of “So you are still chasing men”. There is no way to put this sentence in English and still retain its punch; a veiled rudeness said in a “Who in her right mind is still on the Street?” tone.
That aside from August and for the next three months is the period relatively more girls disappear or rather migrate. It’s the tourist season and the time some of us go try our luck at the coast. So many stories circulate here about what happens there, but the most prominent and the ones often repeated have to do with hitting a jackpot. Almost all girls who migrate to the beaches never come back to the Street. Not necessarily because they have hit it, but I think it’s more out of the shame of failure.
This year I plan to also go down to Malindi and hopefully have the Italians chase me. I have never done the tourist circuit and it’s one thing I believe I should do before I call it a day. It would be too much for me to expect me a jackpot so I will lower my expectations and say I am just going for the experience. One thing I am sure to do is come back to the Street whether I hit a jackpot or not.
