By Jacob Nthoiwa

I just lay there for a while after regaining consciousness. Directly above me was the stain in the ceiling where the roof leaked. It looked like a big gray map of South Africa. And that darker gray spot at the centre where the water oozed through when it rained was exactly where Jozi was located.

Or, better still, maybe it was exactly where I, Sabelo … (well, you don’t need to know my last name) formerly of … well, far from that dirty grey patch, was now located,

I thought of my life like the slow drip, drip, drip of that leaking roof, and my body was like the puddle it made on the floor.

My mind was wandering. I felt like I must have blacked out for hours, but I could see now that it was still light outside. And when I turned my head slightly to look at the cheap wall-clock above the counter, I realized I could only have been unconscious a few minutes.

I tried to lift my head, but it felt as heavy as lead. A sharp pain shot through the back of my neck. I gave up on the idea and decided to survey the tiny shop with my head on the floor. Not easy. One of my eyes seemed to be swollen closed. Vision in the other kept dissolving and reassembling, like a crappy bootleg DVD.

I started with the shelf directly in front of me. Everything seemed to be in place. A neat row of Erex (“For Stronger Erections and Peak Performance!”), Roughriders and Slippery Stuff (”Enhancing the Pleasure of Human Contact!”). The Specials of the Week. I had arranged the display myself this morning, while the boss did his morning cash count.

I turned my head gingerly in order to view the other parts of the room. No pain this time, though my neck felt as stiff and inflamed as an Erex-tion. The rows of DVDs stretched undisturbed to the back of the shop. Schoolgirls. Bondage. Threesomes. Orgy. Man-to-Man …. Thank God everything was still there, I thought to myself.

“Every time a customer puts something in HIS pocket, it comes out of YOUR pocket, bra!” That was the extent of my terms and conditions of service. So you can imagine how anxiously I scanned the shelves, and how relieved I was to see that nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Whatever those guys had wanted, it wasn’t a year’s supply of porn videos and sex aids.

That left the cash register. I could just eyeball the front of this antique from where I lay (“Hey, it’s what’s IN the focken thing that counts, not how fancy the outside is, bra!”). It didn’t look like it had been shoved around or anything, but I couldn’t see the tray from down here. I imagined it wrenched open, the afternoon’s takings gone (not much, but still a hefty chunk of my monthly peanuts – “You’re lucky you’re not out on the street selling your black arse, bra!”)

I dragged myself to the counter. “Thank God,” I whispered to no one. They had not touched the till. But when I reached the door, I realized it was locked. Bastards, I thought. I tried to shout for help, but my throat felt like a blocked toilet. Then I remembered how one of the guys had held me down by the neck, shoving his thumb against my windpipe just before I passed out.

The can of Fanta I had been drinking was still where I left it, between the till and a half-eaten pie. The Fanta was still cool and the pie still warm, but I sure didn’t feel like tucking in. As I tottered there, I caught a stray whiff of the pie (steak and kidney) and retched. My legs gave way under me, and I sank down on my knees, gripping the counter to break my fall. The room started to wobble in front of me. Was I going to faint?

I squinted at the counter, trying to focus on something to anchor my vision. Next to the pie was the booklet I had picked up earlier from the boy who stands by the end of our street preaching “the word of God”.

I laughed and choked at the same time. The cover of the booklet showed a young guy kneeling in prayer, and here was I kneeling beside it. It seemed funny because I gave up on God a long time ago. I only took the pamphlet because I didn’t want to be rude to the boy.

He is always stuttering something along the lines of “Can you share a minute with God to listen to his wisdom”, “Happiness is what you are seeking. Do you want to find how you can get it?”

Usually I just smile and hurry past. Today, though, I don’t know what possessed me. Maybe it was an omen. I said “Sorry, I’m busy.”

“I promise you, sir, it will not even take a minute.” His face lit up like no one had ever talked to him before.

“Sorry man, I’m late for work.” I had stopped at arm’s distance from him, but now the crowds of people rushing past were forcing me to edge closer to him. We were almost touching. He looked into my eyes from inches away, beaming goodwill at me.

“If that is the case, sir,” he said with a strange formality, “please consult this pamphlet and I promise you it will change your life.” He locked his eyes on mine, and pushed the booklet under my arm, then patted my elbow with his other hand. It felt like something an old man might do, but this kid was a couple years younger than me at least.

“Whatever” I said under my breath, and hurried away, staring at the pavement to fight the urge I had to look back and see if he was still watching me, still beaming away.

When I got to the front door of the shop, I looked down the road, but he was busy with another victim now. An old woman so short and bent over she only came up to the middle of his chest. She was craning her neck to look into his face, and they were both chattering away like old friends. Then suddenly he half turned and looked straight at me. The big smile flashed again, and he waved at me with his armful of booklets. I hurried into the shop.

I guess he figures a guy that works in a sex shop really needs saving, I chuckled. He thinks he’ll score a lot of points if he brings me around. But appearances are deceiving. I’m probably less interested in sex than he is!

Working in a place like this will do that to you. I mean it’s not as if I’m here because I want to be. The boss is right, I’m here because I haven’t got any focken thing else to do, short of selling my body or mugging old women for cellphones and spare change.

I’m really a very nice person, which is why I’ve learned to lie a lot since I started working at the shop. People ask me where I work, and when I tell them in a shop they always go “So what does your shop sell?” Everyone. My brothers, my mother, my relatives, my neighbours, but they never get an answer.

I open the booklet to the center spread. A colour picture of an outdoor scene. The green of the plants looks so peaceful. There is a group of people, various ages, all colours, all grinning happily like the boy on the corner, eyes locked on mine through some trick of the illustrator. I move the page around, but their eyes stay locked on mine.

They are playing with animals. A young white girl with long blonde curls is running with a lamb, and nearby a black boy sits beside a lion, brushing its hair. Further back in the picture a brown couple looks up at the sky, smiling at the birds flying by. The sky is a deep, endless blue that feels like it could swallow me up…

Someone is banging on the door, hard. And shouting.

I turn, expecting the thugs to have come back for the stuff they didn’t take earlier. It must be them. They locked me inside to make sure no one could help me while they went for a vehicle or something. The key turns in the lock. Maybe they’ve come to finish me off.

The door opens and the shouting suddenly stops. Silence.

“Sabelo!” It’s the boss. “What the fock are you doing?” He’s staring at me with his eyes popping. I’m kneeling on the floor of his shop with a Jehovah Witness magazine in front of me. He lets out a sound between a snarl and a laugh. “Are you bloody praying now, bra? Of all the…”

But then he freezes again, because he’s seen the blood on the floor, and the blood all over me. And smeared all over his DVDs and sex toys.

“What the fuck?

But he doesn’t rush to help me. Doesn’t move at all. Just stares. First at me, then at the register.

“Have we been focken robbed?” I hate it when he says “we.” I feel a strange urge to yell at him “It’s not my FOCKEN shop!”

And then, all at once, it comes back to me. “I got raped.” I say it matter-of-factly. I hear the flat tone of my voice like it’s coming from someone else. “In a sex shop,” I add, and then I start laughing.

I have never been in an ambulance before. I’ve always associated ambulances with people dying from accidents and shootings. Never rape. Come to think of it, I never think of rape. That’s a distant thing that happens to vulnerable people. Not strong young men like me.

“Just calm down” says one of the ladies.

She turns to the other lady, “Give him something to calm him down.”

I feel a prick on my arm. I am still laughing

“Mtwana wami!”

“Sabelo!”

My mother’s voice. My body is heavy from the medication. She’s trying so hard not to cry. When I look at her without saying a word, she tries smiling at first, then with that who-am-I-kidding look, the smile changes into a deep long sob. I force myself not to join her. Jozi has made me tough, but maybe not that tough.

I turn away and face the clock on the wall, pretending to sleep. I stare at the pale white face, the red numbers and the cool, steady pulse of the second hand until the clock movement consumes me. I watch the minute hand click through another space each time the second hand reaches the top with a weird fascination. Every minute now means having to deal with the shame.

The nurses come in. One grabs my wrist to check my pulse, while the other shoves a thermometer into my mouth. They say nothing. I’m just another hunk of meat to them, I guess. My mother must have stopped sobbing a while ago. She’s just sitting now, stooped over in her chair but staring up at me. I think of the old woman I saw talking so earnestly with the preacher boy.

“How are you feeling, son?” she finally asks. Her voice is hoarse with crying.

I try to reply but my throat still feels crushed.

“Shhh shhh! Its okay ” she assures me. “Just rest.”

“You are safe now. Just rest”

One of the nurses bends over and whispers something in my mother’s ear. Then she helps her to her feet, and they go over to the corner of the room, as far way from my bed as they can get. The nurse must have decided to tell my mother what happened, that I wasn’t just another Jozi mugging victim, because I hear my mother gasp and start to speak before the nurse shushes her and leads her outside to the corridor, where I hear them muttering to each other. Shame seems to seep from their low, guarded tones. It joins the shame ticking out of the clock, and the shame I can see on the other nurse’s long horsey face, as she stands at the end of the bed, pretending to check my chart, but actually staring at me from over her thick, round spectacles.

I silently pray that her colleague in the corridor is not telling my mother where I work. What would “sex shop” mean to my mother? Could she even imagine how “shop” and “sex” could fit together?

She must know what pornography IS, I guess, that men and women, and men and men, and women and women (and women and dogs – Has she even heard of that? – were paid to have sex in front of a camera, and that other men and women paid to watch the result, but I would bet my life, literally, that she had never seen a porno film, and that she couldn’t really imagine one either, wouldn’t want to in the first place.

And now the nurse might be explaining to her that not only were there shops that sold these things, but her son worked in one, selling the stuff to other men, and probably, they’d obviously both assume, selling himself along with the DVDs and lubricants and butt plugs and cock rings…

Out in the corridor my mother has started sobbing again.

I work in Strydom Park in a small shop called ”Slick”. It’s not one of the big chains, just a two-man operation, the boss and me. I know his name of course, but I prefer to call him “boss”, just like he prefers to call me “bra.” I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’s called me Sabelo. He must have been knocked out of his socks this afternoon when he called me that. Well, who wouldn’t be shocked to find their sex shop assistant on his knees with a bible tract in the middle of the afternoon? Not to mention soaking in blood and blind in one eye.

We specialise in what the boss likes to call “romantic enhancers” – toys, pills, lube, videos and magazines for every possible taste. A small operation, but, hey, sex is popular, and a lot of people seem to need enhancements. The shop makes enough to keep the boss in a four-bed Tuscan villa somewhere in Randburg. He’s shown me pictures. Two mean-looking kids and a fat wife in way too much makeup.

And enough to keep me in, well, I have a little place in Diepkloof. One bedroom, combined with kitchen, sitting room, drawing room, office and den. All-in-one. Easy to keep clean. And it beats sponging off my mom’s pension, which is all she has now.

I was a surprise. All my siblings are twenty and more years older and have lives that have never had much to do with me. The old man disappeared shortly after I was born, from the shock of producing another kid at fifty-something, I like to think. But no one really knows what happened to him. He went downtown to look for work one day and never came back.

This job has been my secret for close to six months now. I’m ashamed of the work I do, though I’m not a prude. Sex is sex, and people can do what they like, I just feel embarrassed to be in the business of it. I mean, how often will you hear someone saying, I work in an adult shop, except maybe in one of those kitsch magazines that are targeted at our “liberal” rebellious youth?

But I never imagined anything like this could happen. My grandmother used to say events you can’t imagine ever happening are like seeing an albino snake. It’s rare to find one, but they do exist.

The guys who come to “Slick” are mostly either sad old characters who’d rather wank than deal with a real human being or they’re high-school kids on a dare. I tell them where to find what they’re looking for, take their money and ignore them. They usually prefer to ignore me too. Sure I’ve had guys come on to me once in a while, but one quick look has always been enough to send them out the door. I’m a good-looking type – white guys especially go for me – but I’m not into that.

As I said, I’m not into much of anything right now. I guess some people might get turned on being surrounded by porn all day long. The boss, for example, disappears into the back room with a new DVD half the times he stops by. But for me, all this stuff just makes me droop.

It had been a very slow morning. I was having lunch when the buzzer went off for the first time in more than an hour. I opened the security door and saw three men who didn’t look like they could harm an ant. Fortyish. Office types, or maybe IT salesmen, that kind of thing. Chinos and golf shirts. Regular guys you see on the street every day.

The man who came in first was tall. White and chunky. A little rough around the edges when you got closer to him. He once went to a gym, but not lately. He looked at me and nodded, then looked away, following the racks of DVDs with his eyes. Not someone that went to sex shops for his retail therapy very often.

He was followed by a short replica of himself. He wore the same kind of outfit, only his chinos were green instead of khaki, and his shirt had horizontal stripes that made him look even shorter.

The third man was coloured. I am intimidated by coloured men, don’t ask me why. He looked almost white, but his hair gave him away. He wore khaki cargo pants and a tight t-shirt. Bulging muscles that he was obviously proud of. His gym membership had not lapsed.

They entered the shop in a line, which they couldn’t help doing because of the way the entrance was constructed, but they stayed in single file as they cruised down the aisle. They’re probably here on their lunch break, I thought, just to browse around and boost their libido for their wives or girlfriends later that evening.

They separated and went around the small shop browsing through the stacks of DVDs, never stopping for long in one place. A bit like young boys doing something they think will land them in trouble. I get this kind a lot, so I just ignored them and continued munching on my pie. I was pretty sure they weren’t shoplifters. I’ve developed a sort of sixth sense for that since I started working here. Anyway, it was the end of the month. That pie was probably all I would eat for the day.

“Excuse me?”

I swallowed my mouthful of pie and looked up. It was the shorter white guy, standing by the “Schoolboyz” collection.

“Yeah?” I answered unenthusiastically. I knew these guys were never going to buy anything. He gave me an awkward half-smile, the kind that says “I don’t want to shout in a place like this,” and just stood there, so I put the pie down next to the till, pushed myself up and headed over. As if on cue, the two other guys stopped browsing and walked over to join their friend. We all arrived at the same time, like we were in some kind of play. I thought, “Hey, maybe these guys are cops.” If so, they were out of their territory. The trio who came in once a month for their pay-off would be pissed.

And if they were worried about the “Schoolboyz”, well, appearances are deceiving, as I said before. The boys might look 13, but they were all certified 18+ by the State of California, and we could prove it. Sure.

“May I help you?” I looked the short guy straight in the eye. Friendly but firm.

“Do you have any, er, bondage materials?” he asked with the same hesitant smile.

“Sure do,” I said casually. These guys weren’t cops, they were just newbies.

I led them to a small section at the back of the shop labeled BDSM. They followed me in single file. “Costumes and, er, paraphernalia are the other side of the counter,” I added, rolling the long word around in my mouth. It was a favourite of mine. It made me feel almost like a scholar, a specialist in exotic tribal customs.

But when I went to head back to the counter, the three of them were standing shoulder to shoulder, blocking the aisle.

I started to turn and head the other way, but the tall one put his hand on my shoulder. He had hair running right up to his knuckles. “Hey!” I said. I was more shocked than scared. People don’t touch each other in a sex shop.

“How about you give it to us?” he said in a weird, gruff voice, like he was pretending to be a heavy in a movie. His face was as pink as the lining of one of our Fleshlite jerk-off toys.

“What?” I was thinking robbery. “Give what?”

I was looking up at the tall guy’s big pink face when the coloured oke suddenly feinted to my left in a rugby move, got behind me, pulled my hands back and expertly bound them together with something that clicked. Jesus, handcuffs! The short guy rushed to the door and locked it.

“You are going to be our bitch today” the tall one said, in the same stage whisper.

“We are going to show you how to do it, you fucking moffie,” the coloured guy added, in a high-pitched whine.

They said nothing more the whole time. In a way, that was almost the scariest part, and the most humiliating. Not a word, not even a sound, except for their breathing.

The short one came back from locking the door and without a word to the others started unbuckling my belt. In a movie, I would have kicked him in the nuts, there would have been a surround-sound crunch, and he would have gone down like a lead weight.

But as soon as I started to move, the tall guy punched me hard in the eye, like he’d been planning it, and Shortie yanked my pants down, trapping my feet. I sank to my knees, pain charging through my head, and felt their hands on me ….

I can remember the rest now in detail, but you’re not gonna hear about it.

Maybe if I was a girl, it would be easy to talk to my mother about it, for my mother to talk to me and console me. How can she understand how a man could be raped by other men? She is a traditional Christian woman. All these things are alien to her.

I wonder if she thinks I’m a homosexual because this happened to me. I asked myself if she thought that was sex for me. Rape has been packaged so much nowadays, it’s difficult for our parents to understand.

I wonder if she is going to discuss this with her friends, her church members, or is she gonna keep this among those who are already in the know. When she came back from talking to the nurse, she just stared into space as if I was a dead body laid out in the mortuary.

She has been sitting besides my hospital bed without saying a word to me for hours now, while I pretend to sleep.

“Can you please excuse us, mma, I need to talk to Sabelo in privacy.” It’s the boss. She stands up without saying a word and silently leaves.

He sits down and gives me a plastic bag with food. He has a strange look on his face. I guess he’s gonna fire me.

“Thanks for the food,” I say. It comes out as a cough.

He looks around nervously, then without looking at me he says, “The CCTV camera was on the whole time.” He then looks at me smiling, still looking nervous.

I don’t get where he is going with this. I recognize the smile, and I do not like it.

“What?”

“The whole thing was recorded. It’s all there on tape,” he says, smiling apologetically. I do not like this.

“That’s good news,” I finally say. “We’ll catch the bastards now.”

“You can’t see their faces.”

“Where is this tape?” I ask, but he ignores the question.

“I watched the whole thing.”

I stare at him.

“And …” he looks down, “it’s brilliant.”

“What?”

“It’s the real thing,” he stumbles. “No lights, no make-up, no phony acting.”

I just stare.

“Look, my bra, I’ve been in this business for twenty years. I’ve seen it all. And what I’ve learned is, there’s nothing rarer than …. reality. People come in that shop looking for fantasies because they’re scared of reality. But reality is what they want, they just can’t face it.

My mouth is open. I think I’m dribbling.

“Don’t you see, bra? The tape, YOUR tape, is perfect. It’s the real thing, but you can watch it without being involved, just like a fantasy, but it’s REAL. That’s so rare, it’s priceless. Like what my old nurse used to say, like an albino snake!”