Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (15 page)

"Because my dream has changed," I replied.
"I thought having a beautiful house in the Poconos would make me
happy. But it didn't."

It was getting late, and she went home. It
had been nice to have some company for a change.

She came over again after work a day or two
later. She made meatballs in tomato sauce for me. She made the
sauce from scratch, using fresh tomatoes. She really went all out,
and put a lot of effort into making dinner, to impress me. She was
a good cook.

Patty ended up spending the night. We went
into the huge hot tub in the master bathroom. It was big enough for
4 people. You could float in it on an inflatable mattress. I loved
that tub. The hot, bubbly water was so relaxing. I could spend
hours in it, and just forget the whole world for a little
while.

I felt kinda weird seeing her undress in
front of me. But hey, I wasn't complaining. At least now I knew she
wasn't a transvestite. She had all the required lady parts to
qualify as 100% female.

I got into the tub first, and then she got
on top of me, facing me, with her big boobs dangling in my face. I
kissed them. In my head, I compared them to Donna's boobs. Patty's
breasts were smaller than Donna's. And Patty's nipples where bigger
and darker. Almost too big and too dark. Then she started playing
with my dick and she tried to slide it inside of her and ride
me.

I couldn't believe how easy it had been to
meet another girl after Donna, and how quickly I ended up having
sex with her. I really had thought it was going to take much
longer, and that I was going to have to slog through dozens of
awkward blind dates, until I finally connect with a girl, and we
get close enough, where she would want to spend the night and have
sex with me.

Somehow being in the tub seemed to be too
distracting. I couldn't have sex with Patty. So we decided to go
into the bedroom and try it again on the bed. Same thing. I just
couldn't do it. My mind wanted to, but my dick apparently decided
that this was a good time to go on strike. What I learned that
night was that I really don't like one night stands with
strangers.

Patty came over a few more times after that.
She was a counselor at a drug rehab in Scranton. I thought that was
pretty interesting, so I asked her a bunch of questions. All I knew
about drugs or addicts at that point was what I had read in that
book Zoo Station, when I was a kid.

We did end up having sex a few times, but it
always felt forced to me. Fake. I neither felt horny, nor did I
feel like I had a deep emotional connection with her that would
make me want to make love to her. I really just did it, because I
figured, hey, there's a naked girl next to me. Might as well have
sex. But for some reason I really didn't enjoy sex with her. I
wasn't sure why. There was just something off-putting about
her.

I guess it wasn't even one big thing, but
many little things, like her manly voice, and the way she would lie
next to me in bed and closely examine my naked body, like I was
under a microscope. She was looking for zits on my stomach, or my
shoulders. She was a pimple popper. Hey, if you want to pop your
own pimples, knock yourself out. But leave my zits the hell alone!
Somehow she seemed to think that looking for a zit on me, and
popping it, was very intimate. To me it was just crrreepy.

And while lying in bed, every few minutes
she checked my belly button for lint. There usually wasn't any in
there. But she'd stick her finger in it anyway, stir around in it
for a second or two, and then examine her finger tip for traces of
lint. Who the fuck does that?!

Two or three other girls had answered my
online ad as well. I stopped seeing Patty after we got together 4
or 5 times and I decided to meet some other girls instead.

Jennifer was 26 and she looked like a model.
She had actually been a stripper in the past. Now she worked as a
realtor, selling time shares. She had long bleach blonde hair and
huge breast implants. She had the perfect body and a beautiful
face. She could have been Jenna Jameson's prettier sister.

The first time I had sex with Jennifer also
started out in my hot tub. Her boobs were about as big as my head.
And they were just perfect. Holy crap, were they perfect.
Everything about her was perfect. I loved having sex with her. I
could see myself getting used to that.

Then, after we had seen each other a couple
of times, she finally told me that she was actually still in a
relationship with this guy Ron, and they were living together and
they had 4 children. Holy fuck.

She had 3 kids from her previous boyfriend,
a drug dealer in Philadelphia. She left him when she met Ron. Ron
was the father of her 4th kid, but he was raising all 4 of them as
his own. He also worked in real estate.

Ron was an abusive alcoholic who beat
Jennifer, and she wanted to get away from him, but couldn't do it
on her own. So she was looking for someone else who would take care
of her and her 4 kids. She figured my huge house would be perfect
for them.

Once I knew Jennifer was still living with
Ron, I kinda stopped seeing her. But every now and then, when she
and Ron were breaking up yet again, or he hit her again, or she
called the cops on him again, she would call me, and we hung out
and had sex.

She would tell me what a horrible person Ron
was and we'd make plans for a future together, even though I knew
that next week she'd be back with Ron anyway. And deep down I knew
that no matter how incredibly hot she was, and no matter how much I
enjoyed having sex with her, I really didn't want to be with her,
because she was obviously a cheater and a gold digger.

One time, when she told me how great things
would be once we live together, she said that she would hire a
personal trainer for me, and a stylist, and she'd pick out a
fancier car for me.

Obviously she didn't really like anything
about me, except my wallet. She didn't like the fact that I had
gained weight after my divorce, because I eat too much junk food
when I'm depressed. She didn't like that I dress casually and
wanted me to look more like a high roller. And she didn't like that
I drove a Durango, and she wanted me to drive a Cadillac or
Mercedes or BMW or Porsche instead. She was utterly shallow and
empty inside. All she cared about was looks and money. She was
beautiful on the outside, but ugly on the inside.

Then I met Linda. She was 30. She had dark
hair, a nice figure and a pretty face, even though her nose was a
little too big. She was a single mother and had a 2-year-old son.
She told me that she had just lost her job as a receptionist in a
doctor's office and that she was struggling to make ends meet.

After we had known each other for a week or
two, and we had sex a few times, she asked me if I could maybe help
her out with her electric bill. A few days later she supposedly
needed help with her phone bill. Then she needed groceries, because
her kid was starving. And so on and so forth. Every time we got
together, she supposedly needed money desperately or her world was
going to go up in flames.

Being the oblivious space alien that I was,
it took me a while to catch on to the fact that she was just
playing me like a fiddle.

One day she called me and told me she didn't
get her period. She said she was pregnant and I was the father. She
said we really didn't know each other well enough yet to have a
child together, so she wanted to get an abortion and asked me to
pay for it. I gave her a couple of hundred dollars, when she came
over later that day.

A few days later, when she came over again,
and I asked her how she felt and how the procedure went, she told
me the abortion didn't take. She said her cervix hadn't dilated
enough, and that's why they couldn't perform the abortion, but
since the doctor did start the procedure, they still took her
money. She said now she was still pregnant, but had no more money
left, and needed to go for another abortion. Naive as I was, I
believed her, and gave her another couple of hundred dollars.

A few days later she told me that the second
abortion didn't take either, because her cervix still wouldn't
dilate enough. That's when I finally put two and two together and
realized that she was constantly asking me for money. I wasn't sure
if she really was pregnant or not, but I sure as hell wasn't going
to give her any more cash ever again. I told her I would call the
abortion clinic and pay over the phone with a credit card. She
tried to make excuses for why that wouldn't work and why she needed
me to give her cash: "They won't even talk to you if you call them,
because you're a guy."

"Well, then tell them it's ok to talk to
me," I said.

"I can't. They won't talk to you over the
phone. Patient confidentiality," she replied.

"OK, then I'll take you to the clinic
myself, and I will pay them with a credit card in person."

"They don't take credit cards."

"OK, then I'll give them a check."

"They don't take checks."

"OK, then I'll hand them cash. But I'm not
giving the cash to you. I'm going to give it to the receptionist at
the clinic."

"OK, fine," she said. "I'll go for the
abortion next Tuesday."

On Monday night I tried to call her, to ask
her when I should pick her up and take her to the clinic. No
answer. I tried to call her a few more times on Tuesday. No answer.
Then I gave up. She never called me back. I guess once she realized
I wasn't going to give her one more dollar, she lost all interest
in me and moved on to her next victim.

For a few weeks after that I worried about
her really being pregnant, and that once she had the baby, she'd
try to come after me for child support. But she never did.

Then I met Liz. She was 24. She was going to
college to become a school teacher. But she hated her job, and
really wanted to be a yoga instructor. She was obsessed with weed.
Eeeverything revolved around weed. It was almost like a religion to
her.

The college town New Paltz, NY was about
half an hour away from my house in Pennsylvania. I met Liz for the
first time at a Sushi restaurant, and we ended up talking for
hours. She was very short and petite. One inch away from legally
being a midget, she said. She had dark hair, nerd-chic glasses and
a pretty smile.

We ended up hanging out every weekend for a
few months. We went out to eat, watched movies together, went to
art museums, spent a weekend in Atlantic City, and saw shows like
Cirque du Soleil and Blue Man Group in Manhattan. We visited the
Bronx zoo, and got massages at the ritzy Mohonk Mountain House
spa.

Liz always smoked weed when we hung out, and
kept asking me to try it. She knew I had never tried any alcohol or
drugs. Her argument that weed wasn't really a drug but a natural
herb finally convinced me to try it at least once. She was so
excited that my first time was going to be with her. She told me
that we would have to go buy me my own glass pipe first. We went to
a little smoke shop in New Paltz, that had a huge selection of weed
paraphernalia.

Then we went back to my house and sat on the
kitchen balcony, overlooking my back yard. It was dark. She showed
me how to stuff a pipe, light it, hold the carburetor, how to
inhale and how to hold in the smoke. Since I had never even smoked
a cigarette before, it made me choke so bad, I felt like I was
going to cough up a lung. Being so inept at this made me feel like
a total space alien again.

She told me to take 3 hits. I did. Then we
talked about God knows what. After a few minutes she asked me if I
felt anything yet. Nope. Nothing. A few minutes later she asked me
again. Nothing.

Then she told me that weed doesn't work on
everyone. Some people are immune to it, and they don't feel
anything no matter how much they smoke. She said apparently I was
one of those people. She was clearly disappointed.

Suddenly I had the biggest chipmunk cheek
grin on my face. For no reason. I felt like I looked like The
Joker. I tried to push my cheeks down with my fingers, to stop that
stupid grin. But it wasn't working. "I can't stop smiling," I said.
She started to laugh and asked me how I felt. The weed had finally
kicked in, and within a few minutes I was high as a kite.

We decided to go upstairs, into the master
bedroom. Walking up the staircase wasn't easy. Everything was
spinning like a kaleidoscope. I could barely even stand, never mind
walk up the stairs.

After we finally made it to the bedroom, we
were lying on the bed, watching Futurama. My whole body felt
tingly, and the colors in the cartoon were hilarious to me. I
thought purple and cyan were the funniest things ever. I was so
high, colors were making me laugh. Liz told me later that the stuff
I had smoked was called Diesel. She said it was pretty good.

Since I was getting more and more involved
in real estate investing, I flew to Florida a couple of times.
Usually to Fort Myers, because the Southwest Florida metro area was
the second hardest hit area during the real estate bubble, after
Las Vegas. So there were a lot of incredibly cheap brand new houses
for sale at real estate auctions.

I asked Liz if she wanted to come with me to
Florida for a week. She did, but she was afraid she wouldn't be
able to have a good time without weed, and she was scared to take a
big bag of weed on the plane with her. I told her my friend Sheila
in Fort Myers might be able to hook her up. Sheila was from Iran.
She had been a lawyer and then decided to move to the US and became
a realtor in Florida. She was really cool. Very smart. And a
progressive liberal, just like me. Since we were both immigrants,
we had a lot in common, and a lot to talk about.