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Getting Lost in the Rabbit Hole

Chapter Three

After about a year on the job, I had a monumental fallout with my editor, prompting me to leave the company and Cape Town. By any measure this was a calamitous event, but for me, it would also prove an enormous blessing on multiple fronts, not least in my private life. But there will be more about that later.

I only returned to Cape Town two years later, just in time to attend an end-of-year function at my new company. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the party venue, but it was an establishment with a distinctly African vibe about it, that is all I can tell you.

Once the function was done, I decided to take a stroll around the block and get to know the City Center better. During my previous stay in Cape Town, I seldom ventured beyond my neighborhood, so this was uncharted territory.

I was drawn to one venue in particular, where the music seemed to be blaring louder than anywhere else, and in broad daylight, too. So, I decided to search for an entrance.

While it was peculiar that both of the doors to the establishment were closed, the significance actually flew over my head completely. I was too naive to know any better. After all, I came to Cape Town from a small rural town. What was I to know about big city operations?

Once beyond the doors and thoroughly searched by two heavies, I was confronted by a R100 cover charge in what was essentially broad daylight. That was a little strange because I had always associated cover charges with late evenings.

But even then, I had no idea what I was walking into.

The two dark curtains beyond the cashier, which suggested there were immense secrets being protected in this building, really should have been my biggest clue, but what could a small-town boy like me possibly understand about the city?

While I had returned to Cape Town for work, my decision was partly driven by an attempt to forget Stacy Jantjies, with whom I had an extended entanglement during my two years back home.

When it dawned on me that Stacy wasn’t searching for more from our relationship, it felt like rejection, and I simply couldn’t handle it. Stacy was many things. She was bisexual, sexually liberated, adventurous, and she was coloured.

While I was now doing everything possible to try and forget her, Stacy honestly felt like the best thing that ever happened to me, the only thing that ever happened to me! I was the wandering bark, and she was my North Star. Only God will ever know what I might or might not have been to her.

Frankly, nobody will ever truly replace Stacy, but on that fateful Friday evening in Central Cape Town, I stumbled into a treasure trove that would allow me to block her out of my mind for a few hours, which felt like progress.

When I emerged beyond the two dark curtains, I was confronted by this enormous cage to my left and an upper platform littered with poles and railings that belonged on the set of Mad Max.

As it turns out, the name of the establishment was The Cage, and you didn’t need silly little things like signage to confirm that either.

The place was absolutely choked with men from all backgrounds. There were coloured men, white men, black men, Indian men, young men, old men, rich (looking) men, working-class men, single men, engaged men, and married men.

Deviants united!

There were even men who thought it prudent to bring their wives and girlfriends along for this sordid experience, but far be it for me to question the relationship dynamics of others.

If I were a gambling man, which I am, I would wager there was one thing that most of these chaps had in common - they were lonely. I certainly fell into that bracket. If there were one word I could use to describe my entire existence, it would be loneliness.

Without fully understanding what I just walked into, I could already tell that I was in the right place, among brothers.

All seats were taken, but those left standing clearly didn’t mind this minor inconvenience. It was a small price to pay for what they were getting in return, which was a level of visual stimulation and, in some cases, even physical fulfillment, unlikely to be matched anywhere else in their dreary old lives.

The Cage harbored scantily clad women everywhere you looked. To the left, to the right, in front of you, behind you, hanging off the walls, and hanging off the ceilings.

Every inch of The Cage was accounted for by a selection of Cape Town’s finest beauties. Well, some of them weren’t particularly breath-taking, but they were naked…which can often feel like the same thing.

The vast majority of those women were coloured too, which was just up my alley. I felt like I had died and woken up in heaven. In circumstances like these, you would think it impossible for any of the women to stand out, but a girl stood out to me in and amongst all of that splendor.

Beyond her many redeeming features, she was a pretty spectacular pole dancer, and the sports fanatic in me genuinely appreciated Sky’s athletic attributes. This was no longer just sexual; I was now recognizing somebody with athletic ability, a kindred spirit.

I subsequently stopped by The Cage every evening after work to catch my daily glimpse of Sky. I called it Woman Appreciation Without Approach or WAWA, but in English, it is more commonly known as stalking.

I would be at The Cage for breakfast on my days off and only leave when the sun came out the next morning. Sky had reeled me in without even tugging at a rod, and so far, as I could tell, there was no escape.

Who would want to escape this anyway?

The only thing that could break the cycle at this point was a three-month sabbatical in Johannesburg to participate in a company workshop. While free of Sky, whom I had never actually spoken to or touched, I was not free of the bug that now lived inside me.

A monstrous seed had been planted.

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Swirling in the Dark

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The Homeless Diaries

Wolfgang Storm is a 38-year-old sports writer and former digital editor who has been on and off the streets for the last four years after burning his professional bridges. During those four years, Wolf, as he is better known among colleagues and peers, ekes out an unstable existence as a freelance writer, which often sees him languishing on the streets of Johannesburg for weeks at a time, living among hoodlums and addicts. On a cold and miserable evening in mid-July, a curious addict strikes up a conversation with Wolf, in which he tries to solve the mystery of what an apparently clean, articulate, and honest individual is doing on the streets of Johannesburg. Wolf, who has always been a loner, reluctantly entertains the conversation before doing some soul-searching of his own, reflecting on what many might actually deem a life well lived and trying to figure out why he finds himself in this current predicament. As Wolf gets lost in his thoughts, he zones in on his fraught relations with women, an aspect of his life that has troubled him more than any of the circumstances he currently faces on the streets. Narrating in the first person, Wolf takes readers on a retrospective journey of his life with women. A 21-year-old Wolf's journey starts in Cape Town, where he gives in to his urges and solicits the services of a street prostitute (who he only remembers as the Lady in the Red Shoes) for the first time, after weeks of agonizing about it. The moment is an instantly regrettable one, not least because Wolf does not feel he gets a meaningful return on his investment. In an attempt to put the whole encounter behind him, Wolf subsequently pursues more conventional courting methods but quickly discovers that dating is beyond him, partly because women don't find him that interesting but primarily because he does not possess the pluck required to pursue a woman. The chase is just too daunting for the ironically named Wolf. For professional reasons, Wolf returns to his hometown, where he becomes somewhat of a celebrity, working as a municipal reporter for the local newspaper, which in turn helps him land his first-ever girlfriend purely by accident. Stacy is a bisexual woman who works at the local municipality and has always been a fan of Wolf's municipal coverage. Being sexually liberated and adventurous, Stacy introduces Wolf to a world and life that he could never have imagined. However, the two lovebirds eventually drift apart, and Wolf jumps at the first opportunity to make a Cape Town return. In a bid to explore more of the city, Wolf unwittingly finds himself in a strip club for the first time, reigniting his curiosity about working women, whether they be on the streets or in licensed establishments like The Cage. While Wolf becomes a regular visitor at The Cage, he only expands on his curiosities when he attends a six-month training workshop in Johannesburg, where he makes a point of visiting numerous adult establishments in and around the city but only really settles on a place called the Honey Pot. Wolf develops a healthy relationship with two of the women who work the Honey Pot, such that he convinces himself he has actually fallen in love with one of them, Lisa. When Lisa nips his advances in the bud, Miranda becomes the rebound, and Wolf becomes her keeper. The training workshop eventually ends, and Wolf must return to Cape Town, where he sinks deeper into the city's dark underbelly and eventually settles on a well-hidden establishment called Majestique. Initially, Wolf develops an attachment with a dancer called Megan, building a relationship that expands beyond the walls of Majestique. Wolf ignores the limitations that come with this relationship, chief among them being that Megan is already spoken for, but Megan's fresh pregnancy saves him from becoming the villain in this arrangement. Due to her pregnancy, Megan is to leave the job, while a disillusioned Wolf decides to explore what else the working women of Cape Town have to offer. After investigating a string of strip clubs and brothels in Cape Town, Wolf decides that he was probably better off at the more affordable Majestique, where the rules were loose and women more sporting. When Wolf returns to Majestique, he is a bit relieved to learn that Megan has not returned and strikes up a similar relationship with Sky, who is also Megan's main rival. The change in dynamics causes massive friction when Megan does eventually return, culminating in Megan outing Sky's association with Cape Town's most violent gang. Like clockwork, a series of gang-related incidents, including a veiled threat by Sky's hitman fiancé, prompts Wolf to walk away from it all, deciding that he should never have ventured down this dark alley in the first place. Shortly after walking away, Wolf is hospitalized by an acute case of pancreatitis and put in an induced coma, where the ghosts of Sky and Megan haunt him in a series of highly imaginative but vivid hallucinations. The whole time it never occurs to him that none of this is real. In one of those hallucinations, Wolf imagines that Sky has been killed by her fiancé for her infidelity, while Wolf is hunted down for his part in the sinful act. While on the run, Wolf is aided by elements of the gang scene in Cape Town, who have their own agendas and personal scores to settle. One of those elements is gang matriarch Fatima, who also develops an attachment to Wolf. All of it feels real and is thus incredibly traumatic for Wolf, even after he awakens from his coma. If he was ever uncertain about his relations with strippers and prostitutes before, the coma experience helps settle the debate for him indefinitely. Wolf leaves this life and bumps into a potential soulmate in Amorette Bekker purely by accident, but their memorable romance is doomed by race and class dynamics. Amorette is a white South African woman of Afrikaans extraction, while Wolf is a black South African man of Zulu extraction. Finally, Wolf stumbles into a fraught relationship with a friend of a friend called Nandi, who, like Wolf, is Zulu. On the face of it, everything about this feels right and frankly overdue, but Wolf's attempts to win her over prove futile and prompt several lapses in judgment that ultimately see him out of a job and on the streets. Instead of evolving into something positive, Wolf's bias against black women turns into deep resentment, which lingers with him during a period of considerable adversity while slumming it on the streets. However, that does not wound him nearly as deeply as all the coloured and white women, with whom he shares some of his most pleasant memories, who don't even bat so much as an eyelid during his darkest hour. There is an loneliness about Wolf's homeless existence that eats away at the soul.