Dipping her Toes in the Sugar Bowl

Anna arrived home with her heart skipping. She wasn’t so lucky with transport on the way back and had to took the bus which dropped her off at the bus stop two kilometers from her house where she had to walk. She took a picture of herself when she had been seated at Lush and sent it to Harare Daddy. He sent back the fire emoji seven times. If sugar dating is this easy then why work at all? The main reason that Anna had been taking these crap jobs is because she had always believed that you can start from the bottom and move your way up. Even though she had been good in school, she was creatively inclined. She loved drawing much to her mother’s disappointment (although everything she did in her life was much to her mother’s disappointment). She had thought that she could work part time at restaurants or as a receptionist in order to fund her art especially since her mother had point blank refused to allow her to go to art school and ‘waste money’.

There was a shop in town called MG Stationary where she could buy art supplies and renew her art skills. Start drawing again. She hadn’t really worked on her art for a few years. Anna shakes her head. The first step is first finding a place to live first. She needed to find a room to rent so she started to look through F******k. She put ‘Room to Rent Harare,” in the search bar and found the cheapest room to rent was for students and going for seventy-five dollars a month. She gulped. There went her hundred dollars. What happened to those rooms that used to go for fifty dollars in decent areas? She finds that the only rooms that she can afford are in the ghetto. She sighs. She’s desperate but she knows that she can’t live in the ghetto. She’d be a target for thieves being the suburban girl that she is, poor or not.

She keeps looking and there seems to be these shady middlemen all over the internet.

-Is it normal that places are only available through agents?- Anna texts into a F******k renters group. Within five minutes there are more than ten replies. People complaining about how agents are scammers and keep taking all the listings, that it is an unscrupulous way of making money especially in an economy as tough as the one they live in. That answers it for Anna, many people are saying that these agents are everywhere and it’s hard to find a place without them.

Anna sighs, why are the Moving-Out Gods against her? She sighs. Maybe she can find someone that needs a roommate and they split the rent in half. She can try looking in an area like Mount Pleasant where there are a lot of students that attend the local university. She logs off, trying to save her data then realises that she actually has money for more data…but she mustn’t be wasteful. If she gets carried away this money could just disappear just like that and she would be back at square one…she’s already made the mistake once before.

Having that money in her e-wallet made her feel giddy. A person on a forum had told her that you can’t just rely on one sugar daddy. She had to explore her options. She went back on Seeking Arrangements then checked up on any other sugar daddies nearby…nothing. Apparently she was in a region that was rather dry and guys from other countries weren’t looking for long distance sugar babies. Anna decided to d******d the other sugar dating app that she had heard about called Sudy. Some people had said that they highly recommended it. She goes through the app and sees that most active countries are China and America. Nowhere is any African country mentioned damn.

She decides to go on an actual dating app. Apparently that’s one way of getting a sugar daddy of you use the right language. You have to set the age to a place where the man knows what’s up but you have to be careful not to be mistaken for a sex worker. She goes on tinder and swipes right on a bunch of older men. They all have the same aesthetic, big bellies and taking pictures besides a luxury car or on a vacation at a luxury resort. She receives a confirmation that she’s matched with three guys and starts to talk to them. They all ask her out for drinks. Now she’ll need a schedule.

After that Anna checks the sugar dating forums and says that she met a guy on Seeking Arrangement called Harare Daddy. Almost immediately girls start to respond to her.

-Girl get out of there! That guy is a well-known sexual assaulter!-

-He used to live in South Africa and the UK and would look for sugar babies there. He traps you by inviting you for lunch or dinner and doesn’t show up the first day with some lame excuse. He does that so that you think that he’s a legit nice guy with no ulterior motives. Then he asks you for lunch at a hotel the second time. He will drug your food or drink and next thing you will find yourself waking up naked in a hotel room. He would work with the hotel staff and bribe them. He is HIV-positive and many of the girls who would not have taken post exposure prophylaxis would test positive a few weeks later-

-He changes his username on Seeking Arrangements all the time because his profile always gets reported for abusing women. We need to make sure that this one is taken down too-

“Dafuq!” Anna screams out loud. She hears the dog whimper excitedly and start running outside. Her mom has arrived home. Her eagerness has disappeared. She had been one date away from being taken advantage of. She had to be much more careful. She’ll just give Harare Daddy excuses until he gives up on her and moves onto someone else…that’s a dark thought but it’s not like she can report him to the police for a crime that he hasn’t committed yet.

She looks at the guys that she just agreed to go out with. At least she got money from Harare Daddy. But she can’t just spend it. After this two day holiday she can go on dinner dates by lying to her mother that she worked double shifts. Actually why doesn’t she quit her job? She has a …starting point...even though she doesn’t have enough money for rent yet, it’s is not like the job that she’s doing will ever give her enough money. The money she gets after working the entire month including tips and transport is still less than one hundred dollars. This money can at least help her hustle for one month. Maybe another sugar daddy might give her money.

Anna starts to write her letter of resignation. She wonders if she can mail it. She doesn’t feel like going all the way back to the restaurant and actually handing it in in person. She ends up typing the letter on the writing app on her phone. She sends it to the manager through W******p.

-lol, I just handed in my letter of resignation today as well- he texts her back.

-Why?- she asks him.

-This place is full of shit- he texts her back.

-Well, amen to that. Good luck to you-

-Good luck to you too-

She was going to need all the luck that she could get so that she could actually get some money doing this sugar dating stuff.

Anna felt like a huge weight lifted off her shoulders. She needed a reason to leave the house. She would lie to her mother that she was still working so that she could get out of the house. To give herself some extra cash she would bake muffins and sell them to people she knew worked in town. That would give her enough money for transport and maybe a few cosmetics. Honestly it would probably give her more money than her waitressing job had been paying her.

That night her mother is in a very mellow mood and talks pleasantly to her for the first time in a while. It’s during those calm moments that Anna sometimes wishes that her mother could be like that all the time.

The next day, Anna wakes up with her legs feeling sore. She gets a bucket and puts hot water in it to soak her calves and feet. The physical impact of having worked six days a week and eight or more hours per day for a job that didn’t give any real perks were catching up with her. She felt very tired. Today she was meant to have lunch with a Tinder date but after taking a good look in the mirror she decided to give herself a day of rest. God knew she needed it after she had been through. She’d rest until her mother came back from work and then cook and clean up a bit.

She went to her mother’s bedroom where there was a double bed and lay down. One of the few moments that she had the comfort of sleeping on something besides the floor. Anna closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift off, not minding that she hadn’t checked to see if the front door had been locked.

When Anna wakes up there’s a figure standing over her. Anna screams and tries striking the figure.

“Stop over-reacting!,” the figure says, it’s her mother. Anna had slept through the day. Anna keeps screaming and nearly falls off the bed. She lays on the floor and starts to shiver. Her entire body feels cold all of a sudden even though she’s covered by a blanket. Mrs. Moyo looks at her daughter and feels her forehead. Her temperature is very, very high and she’s shivering. She’s sick. Mrs. Moyo helps lift Anna back to the bed which is no easy feat with Anna being a tall woman and slightly delusional from the fever.

Anna wakes up to the feeling of a cold towel being put on her forehead. She’s coughing. Her mother gives her soup. This is weird and nice. Anna can’t remember the last time that her mother took care of her when she was sick. Usually when she’s sick her mother acts up and yells at her for being useless when she’s feeling well and useless when she’s sick. She would have thought that her mother would have yelled at her for sleeping on her bed.

The next three days, Anna is very sick.

“As soon as you get a job interview you get sick. The devil doesn’t want you to work. You must pray and fast more,” Mrs. Moyo tells her. Anna’s fever breaks on the third day and it goes down to being a flu. This sucks. Her mother is not the type to take people to hospitals so Anna doesn’t know what was wrong with her but it was probably burn out. Her body is still sore especially her legs and she has this deep feeling of lethargy that doesn’t seem to want to go with sleep. That’s going to set her back a bit. Maybe she actually needs some time to gather herself together. It’s now January. The time of the year when everyone claims that they’re broke because they spent too much in December, but sugar daddies are not allowed to be broke. February is just around the corner which means that it’s the time that girls will be getting a lot of gifts. Perfect sugar daddy dating time for Anna. Actually any time that she needs money is the perfect sugar daddy dating season.

On the third day Anna is walking again and able to move around which means being taken out of her mom’s room and moving back to sleeping on the floor. She missed one of the dates that she was meant to go on. Whatever shit happens. She sends an apology to the guy and he doesn’t reply even though it shows that he is online. Well possibly that ship has sailed. She decides to check out some podcasts from BBC Sounds. There’s one that is called Random Men Pay My Bills from BBC Tell-it. In the podcast Riyadh Khalaf interviews a financial dominatrix. Anna hadn’t know that there were various ways to get people to cover your bills. It was interesting and honestly kind of dark and disgusting, something that she would have never considered if it wasn’t for her mom’s abusive behavior towards her and the constant dead end jobs that she had been working. Realistically, if she had just had one job that would allow her to pay rent for herself and food she’d never try this, but anyway, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

From the podcast Anna learns that you can use Twitter to look for pay-pigs who will basically give you money to insult and exploit them. She tries the steps that she hears in the podcast and creates a findom profile on Twitter. After a few hours there are no men offering to pay a tribute.She knows she can’t expect things to work quickly. The first rule is to not allow anyone to talk to you until they pay tribute. The tribute money she set was twenty-five dollars. She noticed that other findom girls were charging fifty dollars but she was just starting off and didn’t know what to do. She’d give this a few days…at this rate she’d have an OnlyFans if she wasn’t careful.

Anna sighed and decided to delete her findom Twitter account. This was putting herself in the public eye too much. At least sugar dating was much more discreet. She knew the story about the frog in the hot water. When they put the frog in hot water it immediately jumped out but when they put it in cold water and slowly boiled it the frog would die without jumping out. This was definitely an easy slippery slope to actual sex work. She had to be smart. In fact she had to be smart and make it unclear that she was sugar dating. That was rather sleazy in one way, but maybe she could raise enough money to move abroad like that girl from the BBC podcast. She didn’t see a future for herself in Harare anyway.

There was a notification from her Tinder. The guy had responded.

-I’m so sorry that you’re sick. Get well soon hey. Hope we can reschedule our drink- he texts her. Well, it’s good not to jump to conclusions. Anna sighs in relief. That could be another ten dollars maybe. Anna coughs into handkerchief, she needs to shake off this sickness so that she can get back to business. The sickness is a reminder to her that her job had been working her so hard that it had made her sick. Maybe her body had just been pushing through. She wasn’t the only one that had gotten sick because of that job. The previous manager before the one that just quit had to be hospitalized for a week after collapsing on the job. Anna knew that she hadn’t worked as hard as that manager had because that manager had basically set up the entire business. But still it wasn’t worth going through that much pain for a bunch of shits who didn’t care about you.