Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (42 page)

She told me that Snickers was a stalker who
wouldn't leave her alone. At the same time she told Snickers that I
was a stalker who wouldn't leave her alone. Veronica told me that
she wanted to get a tattoo with my name right over her pussy. At
the same time she told Snickers she wanted to get her name tattooed
over her pussy. She told me she couldn't wait to get out of jail
and cuddle up with me under her pink Disney princess blanket. She
told Snickers exactly the same thing.

That's how Veronica operated. She threw
herself at a bunch of different people and kept telling them all
that she loves them. And then, when someone finally said it back,
she acted like they were chasing after her instead. She talked shit
about them behind their backs, and acted like she wanted nothing to
do with them while she was around other people. It was her way of
trying to make herself feel wanted, powerful and in control.

While all this stuff between Veronica,
Snickers and Theresa was going on, Veronica was also sending love
letters to a bunch of other girls. She was fishing. She was
throwing herself at a dozen different people at the same time,
selling everyone dreams, using the same lines with everyone, hoping
someone would actually love her back for real. She was desperate
for love, and she was always worried that whoever she was with
would leave her once they got to know the real her, so in every one
of her fake relationships, she was always with one foot out the
door right from the start, always looking for the next fake
relationship already. She thought she was completely unlovable,
because not even her own parents loved her. So why would anyone
else ever really love her?

In all her fake relationships, she actually
bribed people to be with her. She bribed guys with sex. And she
bribed girls by giving them drugs, or candy while she was in jail.
She thought nobody would ever want to be with her, unless she had
something to offer them.

While living on the street, she had sex with
a bunch of different guys for money, so that she could use the
money to buy drugs for herself and her girlfriend, which was always
another crackhead. Of course the only thing the other crackhead
really cared about was crack. So as long as Veronica fed them
drugs, they pretended to be her girlfriend, even if they weren't
gay at all.

But as soon as Veronica had nothing to offer
them, they moved on to the next person who would give them money or
drugs, unless she left them first. There was no loyalty, no love
among any of them, although they all constantly threw around the
word love. And the more Veronica dated other crackheads, the more
she reinforced the idea in her head that everyone will leave her
sooner or later, and nobody will ever truly love her. It was really
sad to watch.

At one point, right after she had told me
that she wanted to be my girlfriend, she asked me to log into her
Facebook account and link both of our accounts in a relationship.
She couldn't remember her password, but her phone was set up to
automatically log into her Facebook. She asked me to get her
belongings, including her phone, out of the jail's property
storage.

Once I picked up her phone, I went through
all her text messages. I was being nosy. Shoot me. What I found
shocked me. While she had been in the hospital, she threw herself
at every single person in her contacts, male or female. She told
everyone she loved them and wanted to be in a relationship with
them. She was hoping that someone, anyone, would say it back.
That's how desperately lonely she was. And she was networking,
hoping other junkies, who "love" her, would bring her drugs into
the hospital. It worked.

A bunch of her so-called friends brought her
crack and Dilaudid pills, or "Ds." Those are even stronger opiates
than the oxycodone Blues. She was also on a Dilaudid IV drip in the
hospital, because of the excruciating pain in her leg. Between all
the drugs she was doing, she was more fucked up in the hospital,
than she had ever been while living on the streets, bouncing from
one cheap motel to the next.

Then I found text messages that proved she
had been having sex with guys while she was in the hospital. One of
her johns texted her how much he enjoyed eating out her pussy in
her hospital bed. Her mother Rachel later told me Veronica not only
had sex with johns, but with some of the doctors, too. How sick is
that?

But Rachel was by no means innocent. The
text messages that shocked me the most were the ones that involved
her. Rachel was a benzo addict. She was hooked on Xanax and
alcohol. When she mixed those, she completely blacked out. And she
had turned her daughter into an addict by feeding her Xanax
whenever she had a bad hair day at school, or felt anxious, like
teenagers with low self-esteem often do. When Xanax didn't do the
trick anymore, Veronica moved on to harder drugs, until she ended
up on heroin and crack. And Veronica learned from her mother how to
survive by manipulating men with sex. Like mother, like
daughter.

Veronica and Rachel had such a disturbed
relationship, they really didn't act like mother and daughter at
all. They were drug buddies.

Both of them were tall, skinny and
beautiful, and they had the same strange rivalry that I had noticed
between Alice and her mother. Like I said, the more time I spent
around drug addicts, the more I saw the same situations repeat
themselves over and over. Only the names changed.

Rachel pretended to be holier than thou when
I had met her at the hospital, but now in the text messages on
Veronica's phone, I could see that Rachel not only knew about
Veronica having sex with guys for money and drugs, but encouraged
it, because she benefited from it. Whenever Veronica had drugs,
Rachel got some. Veronica was Rachel's most reliable source for her
own drugs. Rachel left the dirty work up to her daughter. In the
past, Veronica had sex with johns for money or with dope boys for
drugs right in Rachel's house, and Rachel not only knew about it,
but got a cut.

The most recent text messages in the phone
were from Veronica's stay in the hospital, right before she went to
jail. She and her mother Rachel were texting back and forth about
buying drugs from dope boys who visited Veronica in the hospital.
Her condition was so critical, the doctors thought about amputating
her leg to save her life. She was literally on her death bed.
Meanwhile her mother made Veronica meet dope boys and buy drugs for
her. On her death bed! Rachel gave her money for drugs, to get
Xanax, but gave her a few extra dollars, which Veronica used to buy
herself more crack and Ds.

During one of these text conversations, one
dope boy had been delayed, so Rachel was afraid he'd be a no show,
and told Veronica to call another one. Then both of the dope boys
showed up, and Rachel told Veronica to meet one of them in her
hospital room, while Rachel would meet the other one in the parking
lot.

With a mother like Rachel, who could blame
Veronica for being a totally screwed up train wreck?

When I found out Veronica was cheating on me
with Theresa and then with Snickers, and that she had been throwing
herself at a dozen other girls as well, I just felt sorry for her.
I should have been livid, because my so-called girlfriend was a
total whore, cheating on me nonstop. Instead I felt bad for her,
because she was so damaged, and this behavior was all she knew. She
was beautiful, smart, and had so much potential, but she was a
totally broken human being.

I thought I could fix her. I believed that
if only I hung in there long enough and showered her with love,
affection and kindness, if only I could show here that not everyone
was going to leave her or use her, then one day she would snap out
of being such a lying, cheating, selfish, sociopathic whore. If I
could show her unconditional love, and if I could get her to bond
with me in a deep, meaningful way, I could save her from the drugs
and from her own self-destructive behavior, I thought. I was a
poster child for codependency.

Anyway, I didn't know at the time what she
was doing behind my back while she was dating Theresa and then
Snickers. Now, after 7 months in jail, her time was almost up. She
had been sentenced to serve jail time followed by a six month rehab
program. So upon her release she was going to have to stay at the
Salvation Army. I was really worried about it, because I figured
whatever she may or may not have done behind my back in confinement
was going to be much worse once she had more freedom. And that's
exactly what happened.

"One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to
anybody."

"Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by
everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater
poverty than the person who has nothing to eat."

"Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared
for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own."

Mother Teresa

I was faithful to Veronica, so I hadn't
talked to Haley, Crystal or any other girl in months. By now Haley
had realized that this was no coincidence, and that I was ignoring
her phone calls on purpose. During one of our last conversations I
had told her that I had met Veronica. Since I was used to being
completely open with Haley, I also told her that I had a feeling
that there was something going on between Veronica and her new
"friend" Theresa, and that I felt kinda stupid for being faithful
to Veronica, while I was pretty sure that she was cheating on
me.

Haley was heartbroken when I kept ignoring
her calls after that. She and I had been through so much together.
We had been so close. She felt I was the only person in the world
who really cared about her. And now I was giving her the cold
shoulder, like she was nothing, because I was in some bullshit
relationship with a jail whore who cheated on me the whole
time.

Haley left me a bunch of really sad
voicemails on my phone, whenever I ignored her calls. One time she
sobbed: "Why are you treating me this way? Why are you just
ignoring me? I love you. Veronica doesn't give a shit about you.
She's just using you. You and I have known each other for so long
now. Why don't you love me the way you love her? What does she have
that I don't have? I wish someone would love me as much as you love
her."

That voicemail broke my heart. I hated the
thought that Haley was in pain because of me. I really did care
about her a lot. I did love her. But I had never really thought of
her in a girlfriend kind of way, because she was so bad on drugs. I
didn't think she was interested, or even capable of being in a
relationship, because she was so high on crack or heroin or alcohol
all the time. I don't think I had seen her sober for even one
minute in the past year or two. And she was getting worse and
worse.

In the beginning, Haley and I had still been
able to do normal things together when she stayed at my house to
get away from her miserable life on Palm Beach for a little while.
But lately she had just been hiding in the bathroom for hours,
smoking every bit of crack that she had brought with her. It was
supposed to last her all night, until the next morning, but instead
she smoked it all at once. Every damn time.

When she finally ran out of crack, she'd
come out of the bathroom and ask me to take her back to Palm Beach
or Ione. That was bad enough. But then she'd beg me to give her a
couple of dollars, so she could buy more drugs. The first couple of
times she did that, I felt bad for her and gave her some money.

But then I realized that she did this to me
every time now. I was getting fed up and I told her that it wasn't
fair to make me drive all the way from Bonita Springs to Palm Beach
Boulevard to get her, drive her all the way back to my home,
thinking we'd spend some quality time together and watch a movie or
something, and then she'd just hide in the bathroom the entire
time, and as soon as she got out, she'd ask me to drive her all the
way back to Palm Beach. What the fuck?!

I told her if that's how it was gonna be
now, then at least I wanted to have sex with her first. That made
her cry. She said: "Please don't talk to me like that. Please don't
make me feel like a whore. Everyone treats me like I'm a piece of
meat. I can't handle it, if you talk to me like that, too."

She said she didn't want it to be like that
between us. She said she wants to have sex with me when she stays
at my house, but she wants it to happen naturally, not on command.
She said she wanted to feel like a normal girl, and like I care
about her, and like we're making love, not like I was just fucking
her like some cheap whore.

I knew her well enough by now to know that
she was telling the truth. She really did want to feel loved. But
how was that ever gonna happen, if all she did was hide in the
bathroom, smoking crack for hours, and then wanting to go right
back to Palm Beach, as soon as she got out? And that's why I didn't
see how we could be in a relationship while she was on drugs like
that.

When I met Veronica, I obviously knew she
was on drugs, too. But she still seemed to be able to function on a
somewhat normal level. And when she asked me to be in a
relationship with her, she had been sober for a few weeks in
jail.

Anyway, now that I had made a commitment to
be faithful to Veronica, I stopped talking to every other girl,
including Haley.