Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (16 page)

Once Liz and I landed in Fort Myers, I
rented the most luxurious BMW they had at the airport and we stayed
at the Waldorf Astoria in Naples. There was really no need for that
gaudiness. I guess I figured it would impress Liz. But she wasn't
the kind of girl who was impressed by money.

Sheila really did come through. We met her
at the 711 on College Parkway and Route 41 and she gave Liz a bag
of free weed. Liz had also baked some weed brownies before we left
New York. She had taken those with her. She ate most of them, but I
tried some, too. They didn't do anything for me.

During the week we spent in Florida
together, we explored Naples, Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel, Matlacha,
etc. We had a lot of fun.

A few weeks after that trip, she told me
that her uncle worked as an instructor at a yoga school in Chapel
Hill, North Carolina. The school had an opening, so she decided to
leave New Paltz and move to Chapel Hill to pursue her dream. I
never saw her again after that, but we still keep in touch on
Facebook.

She gave me a little good bye present: my
very own bag of Diesel. It probably would have only lasted her a
weekend. But it lasted me several months, because I hardly ever
used it. I just tried it a few times while I was relaxing in the
hot tub. But it never really did much for me. My head would feel
heavy, and I might get sleepy, but that was it. No funny colors and
no spinning kaleidoscope. I never got as high again as that first
time.

When the bag ran out, I threw away my glass
pipe. I had no need for it anymore, since I really wasn't
interested in weed.

After Liz left for North Carolina, I met
this girl Raven. She was only 19. She had seen my online ad, and
asked me if I'd be interested in a mutually beneficial
relationship. She told me her dream was to become a porn star in
Los Angeles, and she needed to come up with some money to move to
California. Alrighty then.

After the shit I had gone through with
Linda, I figured that an arrangement like that wouldn't really be
all that different than what Linda had been doing to me. Really the
only difference was that Raven was perfectly honest and upfront
about the fact that she was simply looking to make some money.

Raven had long flowing black hair, a
beautiful face, huge brown eyes, and a very nice body. But she was
nowhere near as sexy as Jennifer. We got together a few times.
Raven was cute, but she was a total ditz. She was such an airhead,
it was impossible to have a conversation with her about anything
other than her moving to California soon, to break into the porn
industry. That's all she cared about.

Raven really did end up in porn. When I
googled her stage name a few months later, there were porn videos
of her all over the Internet. Porn stars always seem so far away,
so unattainable. It was weird to see videos of her on the web and
think: "Wow, I actually had sex with that girl. I had sex with a
real life porn star!"

I met her again a year or so later, after
she had moved back to New York. We got together and she told me she
hated Los Angeles and the people she had been around. They all
treated her like a piece of meat. Well, duuuuh!

"Be careful who you trust. Even the devil was once an
angel."

Proverb

While hanging out with Liz, and then later
with Raven, I became more and more involved in buying and selling
real estate online. Making web pages for each property was a
tedious, time consuming task that required a lot of concentration,
because if you accidentally type the wrong tax map number, you're
buying or selling the wrong property.

I placed a job ad online to find someone who
could help me out with making these real estate web pages. Alice
was one of the people who applied for the job. She was 24 and
almost as petite as Liz and she also had long dark hair. She looked
a bit like a tiny version of Angelina Jolie.

She had been the personal assistant of a
real estate broker in the past. So she had some experience in this
field. Perfect! However, since I do things my own way, I was going
to have to explain quite a lot of stuff to her. It was a steep
learning curve. But she was very smart and a quick learner.

I was buying and selling real estate like a
realtor, without actually having a realtor's licence. You don't
need one when you own the properties you buy and sell. You only
need a license if you sell someone else's property.

And I did my own closings, without hiring a
lawyer. Normally people hire a lawyer to prepare the new deed. I
did all the paperwork myself, because when I used to work at the
newspaper in Brooklyn, I had seen that lawyers really just use the
same template over and over again and then charge an arm and a leg
for nothing. I saved about $1000 in legal fees every time I sold a
property and prepared the deed myself.

So Alice had to learn how to be a web
programmer, a graphic designer, a realtor, and a lawyer. And she
pulled it off.

Then, after a few weeks, I started to notice
that she had a hard time concentrating. Suddenly she made a lot of
mistakes or just stared at the screen and couldn't remember the
next step.

By now we had spent so much time together
that we were getting pretty close. We started having sex. Liz had
been gone for a few months, and I really wasn't all that interested
in Raven the airheaded wannabe porn star. Especially not after
Alice and I started getting intimate.

More and more, I got the feeling that Alice
was hiding something from me. But I wasn't sure if I was just being
paranoid. Who could blame me for being paranoid, after the crap I
had been through with the last few girls I met? Within just a few
months, I had sex with more girls than during my whole life before
my divorce. And during those months I learned more about women, and
how deceitful and manipulative they could be, than other people
learn during an entire lifetime.

I asked Alice if she was hiding something
from me. She said no. It was hard to imagine that anything could be
wrong when she looked at me with her beautiful eyes and gave me
that pretty smile of hers. And she had such a beautiful, carefree
laugh. And her laugh came so easily. Sometimes all it took was to
say a word in a funny voice or to give her a silly look, and she'd
just crack up. She was just the sweetest girl. I loved being around
her. Just being in the same room with her made me happy.

One day we were cuddled up under a blanket
on the couch in the TV room, watching Wall-E. We were naked and we
weren't really paying attention to the movie. She was about to give
me a blowjob. She told me that I could cum in her mouth if I wanted
to. She had given me blowjobs before, but never until I came. We
always ended up having intercourse. I asked her if she swallowed.
She replied, "Generally I don't."

Generally? Wait, what did she mean by
generally? That sounded to me like she gave blowjobs so often, to
so many different people, she had general rules about her blowjob
performance, and exceptions to those rules. That sounded like there
was a whole lot of blowing going on. Someone who only gives
blowjobs to her boyfriend, wouldn't use the word "generally" in
that context.

Barely noticeable gestures, secret winks,
knowing looks, or the inflection of a single word, overlooked by
most people, stand out to me. Sometimes I can extrapolate an entire
page worth of information from just one look or one word.

For example, imagine you overhear a
conversation between two people, and one of them says to the other:
"We never talk anymore."

At face value, it's simply a statement that
two people aren't talking. But when you really think about that
sentence, there is a lot more to it. To me it sounds like those two
people used to talk a lot more in the past, because they used to
spend a lot of time together. And then something happened, and they
grew apart. So they probably used to be in a relationship, the
relationship went sour, they split up, and the person saying that
sentence feels sad about the fact that things didn't work out
between them. And the person who said that sentence misses the
other person, because he/she still has feelings for the other
person.

I guess women call the ability to read
between the lines "female intuition." I think women are right, a
lot of men are ignorant bores, who don't pick up on cues and they
need to be hit over the head with a hammer to get a clue. But my
intuition was always triggered by minute details. I think I have
always been very perceptive, especially when I'm trying to find out
something. Maybe because information gathering, and paying
attention to the smallest clues, was an important part of being a
hacker.

Alice's use of the word "generally" in the
context of a blowjob made me think that she was a hooker. And
suddenly the fact that she had a hard time concentrating lately
made me think that she was on drugs. Suddenly I had the feeling
that my sweet, innocent, lovable Alice was a drug addicted hooker
just like that girl Christiane F in the book Zoo Station, with
everything that entails: abuse during childhood, abandonment, being
mistreated by guys, feeling all alone in the world, etc. All that
popped in my head, because she used the word "generally."

But I couldn't just ask her, "Hey, sweetie,
are you a crackwhore?" That wouldn't go over too well. What if I
was wrong? She would be so insulted, she'd probably never talk to
me again.

Now my senses were on high alert, and I was
looking for any tiny clue that would prove that my theory was
right. I looked at her arms, to see if I could find any track marks
from shooting up. I couldn't. Well, I really didn't even know what
track marks are supposed to look like. I had never seen any before.
I could probably stare right at them and not even know that they
are the track marks of a heroin addict.

Then I noticed that Alice had a bunch of
tiny dots on the back of her hands. I had never seen or heard about
that before. Seeing those dots didn't ring a bell. I figured, well,
they kinda look like needle marks, but why would they be on the
back of her hands, and not on her arms? I had no idea at that time
that long time heroin addicts have a hard time shooting up in the
veins in their arms, because their veins collapse. So eventually
they have to shoot up in the back of their hands, their legs, feet,
neck or even their forehead.

I held Alice's hands in my hands, to get a
better look.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"What are these dots?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"Are those needle marks?"

She started to laugh nervously: "Haha, no of
course not. Why would I have needle marks on my hands?"

It was getting awkward. She pulled her hands
away and changed the topic. I was sure I was right, but I still
didn't want to make any false accusations, and destroy whatever
relationship we had at this point. But from that moment on, that's
all I could think about.

I flew to Fort Myers a few days later, to
buy another property at a real estate auction.

I hadn't hacked in years. I had told myself
I was never going to do that again, because once I started doing
that again, I knew I would want to do it just one more day, one
more day. There is always something else you're dying to find out
about someone.

If you could press a big red button and find
out every little secret about your significant other, would you? Oh
stop denying it, you know you would.

Wouldn't you love to be able to read
people's minds? Of course you would. Everybody would. Hacking is a
little bit like that, because you can find out what people are
hiding in the back of their heads.

So while I was staying at a hotel in Naples,
Florida, I started to hack into Alice's medical records. Within a
few minutes I found out that she had 3 abortions, that she had been
in drug rehab for her heroin addiction, that she had overdosed on
crack several times and almost died, and that she had to be
resuscitated in the hospital. And that she had applied to be a
surrogate mother and carry someone else's baby to term, to make
some money, but that she had been rejected because of her medical
history.

I couldn't say that I was surprised, but I
was speechless anyway. Alice was such a sweet girl. She had an
amazing personality and such an adorable, innocent little girl
laugh. How could that girl be a heroin addicted hooker?

I texted her and told her I knew about her
past. She texted me back and acted like I was full of shit. So I
told her what I had just found out. She was shocked that I had
found that information about her and told me that she was really
mad at me, because supposedly she had planned to tell me the truth
about her past as soon as I got back from Florida, but by finding
it out on my own, I ruined everything.

Yeah, right. How convenient. When I asked
her if she was hiding anything, she said no. When I asked her about
her track marks, she denied everything. But now that I found out
the truth on my own, she suddenly claimed that as soon as I was
gonna come back from Florida in a few days, she was going to tell
me everything. Bullshit.

When I got back home a few days later, she
came over and we had a talk. She told me that she had been on
heroin for about 7 years, ever since she was a teenager.