Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (27 page)

Not every guy is stupid enough to fall for
the big love lie. But if a hooker tells enough guys that she loves
them, one or two lonely guys are bound to fall for it. It's almost
like going fishing. Or phishing. Phreakers used to play the same
game when they tried to get people's credit cards. Not everyone
fell for the big lie, that the hacker was an employee at the credit
card company's fraud department and needed the victim's personal
information to examine some unusual activity on their account. But
there always were a few gullible people, so if the hacker kept
calling enough people, and kept repeating the same lie often
enough, eventually he ran into someone who fell for it.

I like to believe that Alice really did love
me. But who knows. Maybe I was just another sucker.

Anyway, I did what the officer told me: I
searched for her on Backpage, in case she had posted an escort ad.
Nothing. I contacted all of Alice's friends. Nobody knew where she
was. Not even Becky or Mary. I even called Kat. Then I called
Enrique, her drug dealer. I guess I should have started with
him.

He seemed nervous when he heard my voice:
"Look man, I want no trouble with you. And I don't want to get in
the middle of this."

"Don't worry," I replied. "I just need to
know if you have seen Alice or you know where she is."

"Uhh, yeah, she's been coming around every
day, buying dope from me. Look, even if I didn't sell it to her,
she would get it from someone else. At least I know my stuff is
good. She's staying with some old lady she met in rehab."

Once he told me that, I hacked his phone and
got Alice's new number. Then I hacked her new phone and saw who she
had been talking to and where she was staying. At the Super 8 in
Newburgh.

She had called all her old "clients" and
went right back to escorting, even without posting on Backpage. She
was in some sort of weird relationship with that old lady. Maybe
she felt that the old lady was a substitute for her mother, and
giving that lady drugs would make her love Alice the way her mother
never loved her. I don't know.

I called Alice's new number a bunch of
times. She kept ignoring me. Then, finally, after a few days, she
answered the phone. I tried to convince her to let me take her back
to rehab. No chance. Then I asked her to at least come home with
me. Nope. Wasn't gonna happen. When we were together, she had been
the sweetest girl in the world. When we said good bye at the rehab
admission office, everything was ok between us, and we were about
to move to Florida after she got out of rehab, and we were going to
live happily ever after.

But now she was suddenly acting like a total
bitch. Like I was her worst enemy. Well, in her drug-crazed mind I
was. I was the guy trying to get in between her and what she loved
most in the world: her drugs. That made me the bad guy in her eyes.
The way she talked to me reminded me of a dog growling at me
because I'm trying to take away his bone.

Alice's friend Becky was worried about her,
too. So she kept calling me to find out if I had found her yet. I
told her that I had talked to Alice, but she didn't want to come
home. Becky asked for Alice's new number, so maybe she could talk
some sense into her. But Alice wouldn't answer the phone for Becky
either.

Becky and I started talking every day, and
we ended up hanging out a few times. Becky was really nice, but of
course it didn't take me long until I realized that Becky wasn't
just concerned about her missing friend Alice, or trying to cheer
me up because I was so heartbroken and needed a shoulder to cry on,
but that in the back of her head she figured it couldn't hurt to
get on my good side now that I was unexpectedly single.

Oh, and guess who I found on Backpage while
searching for Alice. Linda, the scam artist who had conned me into
paying for her fake abortion not just once but twice about a year
and a half earlier. Apparently she had moved from answering
personal ads and scamming unsuspecting guys, to placing escort ads.
Aaand she now had a new baby girl! Just a few months old. At first
I thought I suddenly had a baby daughter. But Linda said it wasn't
mine. Once I did the math, I found out that Linda had already been
pregnant before I met her. She told me she was sorry for scamming
me into giving her money for an abortion by pretending it was my
baby back then. She said she really had planned to get an abortion,
but then she changed her mind.

When I asked her about what made her start
escorting on Backpage, and whether she was on drugs, she said she
wasn't. I didn't believe her. She was way too squirrely to be
sober. She told me that she wasn't proud of being an escort, but
she just couldn't find a regular job, so she did what she had to
do. "It is what it is," she said. I hate when girls who escort use
that phrase as if it justifies everything.

She told me she hated doing that stuff,
because no self-respecting guy wants to be in a serious
relationship with a whore, so it was a very lonely life. And most
of the guys who tricked with hookers made these girls feel like
shit. There were even online forums, where guys rated girls on
their looks and their "skills." I had found some reviews of Alice.
It broke my heart to read what a bunch of random strangers had to
say about having sex with my little Alice.

Linda agreed that a lot of these guys
enjoyed being cruel in their reviews. They liked the sense of power
they got from talking about a girl like she was a piece of meat or
a toy. Linda told me she tried not to let her bad reviews get under
her skin, but that wasn't easy, because she was ashamed even of her
good reviews. She told me that after getting too many complaints,
she had even learned to allow random guys to cum in her mouth and
swallow. Something that had always made her gag and throw up in the
past.

I had called her, just in case she might
know where Alice was, because Alice and Kat had told me a long time
ago that most of the girls on Backpage know each other. But Linda
didn't know Alice. She hadn't been in this "business" long enough
yet.

Like Becky, Linda also figured it couldn't
hurt to get friendly with me again, now that I was single. So Linda
started calling me almost every day, acting concerned and offering
me her shoulder to cry on. She had a lot of insights into the mind
of an addict and told me that I shouldn't take what Alice did to me
personal, because that's just what addicts do. I told her she knew
way too much about drugs and the drug mentality for a sober person.
She finally admitted that she "used to" smoke crack and had been in
rehab for it. I was pretty sure she didn't want to admit that she
had relapsed, and her crack addiction had made her resort to
escorting. I felt bad for her young son and baby daughter.

I had bought and sold about 4 or 5 condos in
the Grandview Palace in Liberty. I decided to sell the last one,
the one Alice and I had been living in. I made up my mind to
finally end things for good with her. Well, actually she had made
up my mind for me, since she was the one who broke up with me and
refused to come home. Anyway, I got rid of that condo and moved to
Florida.

"You come to Fort Myers on vacation, leave on
probation, and come back on a violation."

Unknown

Bonita Springs, and the whole Southwest
Florida metro area, from Fort Myers to Naples, had seemed like
paradise, the few times Alice and I came here together. We thought
it was the perfect getaway to escape the drugs in New York. We had
no idea that Fort Myers has a drug problem that is probably even
worse than in New York.

Everything that had happened to me before I
moved to Florida was about to seem like child's play, compared to
the bizarre things that were about to happen next.

Alice and I had planned to renovate the
condo in Bonita Springs together. She loved the way I had decorated
the mansion in the Poconos, so we planned to recreate the interior
of that big house in the condo in Florida, only on a smaller
scale.

But when I arrived in Florida, I was so
heartbroken, miserable and depressed, the last thing I wanted to do
was start some big renovation project. Especially not all alone. I
didn't feel like doing anything. Nothing seemed to bring me any
kind of joy. I tried cheering myself up by going to the beach. But
when I got there, I couldn't wait to go home and wallow in misery
in the privacy of my own home. Movies couldn't hold my attention,
and video games seemed boring and pointless. Nothing I used to
enjoy could cheer me up.

I spent hours lying on the floor or on the
bed, just staring at the ceiling. I wasn't even thinking about
anything. My mind was blank, and I just stared at nothing. And
before I knew it, the day was over. This went on day after day.
Life was painful. I felt like I was never going to be happy again.
Like there was no point to even go on living. I wasn't really
suicidal. I wasn't thinking about killing myself. But continuing to
live and be this miserable seemed so pointless.

As a child, when all that stuff with my
alcoholic father was going on, I often felt trapped by my problems,
like a bird in a cage. When things were really bad, I thought about
killing myself, and ending all my problems. I began to look at
suicide as an emergency exit from my cage. I told myself that if I
really couldn't take it anymore, I could leave the cage at any
time. Suddenly I didn't feel so powerless anymore. Now I had a
choice.

Every time I faced another situation that
made me miserable, I asked myself if it was so unbearable that I
should just leave my problems behind by escaping through my
emergency exit. But now that I had a choice, and I no longer felt
like the powerless victim of circumstances that were beyond my
control, my problems really didn't seem all that bad anymore.

Was a bad grade on my math test really worth
killing myself over? No, of course not. In a few weeks or months
from now, this math test would be long forgotten. The thought that
I could commit suicide if I really wanted to, was actually
comforting to me. It helped me put trivial little problems into
perspective. Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's all small stuff.
In the grand scheme of things, almost nothing that happens ever
really matters in the long run. I still have the same laid back
attitude today. I guess once your own dad tries to kill you,
nothing else seems all that scary anymore.

So I didn't really want to kill myself after
losing Alice. But I didn't really want to go on living either. I
didn't eat for 8 days. Not because I wanted to starve myself to
death, but because I just wasn't hungry, and I had no interest in
food. My world was not ok without Alice.

Have you ever played Silent Hill? Your game
character explores a haunted village, cut off from the rest of a
world by a mysterious fog. Every now and then your character falls
into a different dimension, where the same village now looks
grotesque and evil. Like the whole world has cancer. That's how I
felt without Alice. It was still the same world, but somehow
everything was different.

When I had been hanging out with Liz the
yoga pothead about a year or two earlier, she was very
self-conscious about her body. She was so short that even just a
few extra pounds made her look like a chubby garden gnome in her
head. As a teenager she had been anorexic, and even when she was in
her 20s, she still struggled with her body image.

One day she told me that she was going to go
on some kind of new age three day cleansing fast. She was going to
eat nothing for three whole days. She claimed it was good for the
body and the soul. Plus it's a great way to lose a few extra
pounds. She asked me if I wanted to go on the three day fast with
her. Well, she had already talked me into smoking pot for the first
time, so why the hell not go on some silly three day hunger strike,
too? Who knows, maybe I'd like it. (Yeah, right.)

I was fucking STARVING by the end of the
first day. I thought each day the hunger pains would get worse and
worse. But they didn't. Once your hunger reaches a certain level,
it maxes out. It doesn't get worse. You're just really hungry all
the time.

After completing the three day fast, I was
proud of myself. I had accomplished my goal and resisted
temptation. I had cleansed myself. And I had not given into the
urge to shove some food in my mouth, no matter how strong that urge
was. And when you haven't eaten in three days, a chocolate donut
starts to look an awful lot like crack, believe you me.

When Liz and I met at the Sushi restaurant
in New Paltz, to celebrate our victory over food, I proudly told
her how I had kept telling myself, "food is an addiction, food is
an addiction," every time I felt tempted to grab some food and
break my promise to myself.

She was suspiciously quiet. Finally she
fessed up and admitted that she had relapsed after just one day of
staying off food. She hadn't told me, because she felt stupid, and
because she didn't want to discourage me. So, like an idiot, I had
starved myself for three damn days for no good reason.

Now I was so hungry that I ordered 2 full
meals at the Sushi restaurant. When I weighed myself the next
morning, I weighed more than before I had started the fast. So
starving myself for three days had actually made me gain weight. Go
figure.