Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (19 page)

Anyway, even the ancient Egyptian pharaohs
convinced ordinary people that God had put the pharaoh in charge,
and that it was God's will that everyone else was starving and
working themselves to death building pyramids for the pharaoh,
while the pharaoh bathed in milk and honey.

For centuries, religion has been used by the
rich people in power, to tell the poor, that it was God's will that
they were poor: "God made me your king. Don't question my
authority. It comes directly from God. If you don't obey me, God is
gonna be really pissed at you."

And then the rich added insult to injury, by
convincing the poor that God wanted them to have miserable lives,
because everything happens for a reason, and God was testing their
faith. And if they got through a lifetime of poverty and misery,
they would be richly rewarded for never losing their faith by going
to paradise, or heaven, after they die. Meanwhile the rich lived
their lives of luxury and excess in the here and now, at the
expense of the poor they exploited and fooled with promises of rich
rewards in the afterlife.

Ever since the Age of Enlightenment,
Europeans slowly learned to see through that scam, and today it is
really really bad political form for a politician to ever mention
God in a speech. In Europe, you can believe in whatever you want,
but don't ever try to pretend that you are acting on God's behalf
or that you are speaking for God, and that if someone disagrees
with what you do, they are going against God's will. That's simply
manipulative bullshit. If a German politician said that God told
him to invade Iraq, his career would be over in a heartbeat. People
would look at him like he has lost his mind.

But in America, that ancient religious scam
still works. American politicians, especially right-wing extremist
Republicans and Tea Party fanatics, still pretend they know God
better than anyone else does. And they claim they know exactly what
God wants, and if you disagree with them, you are a bad person, and
God is really mad at you, and you're going to hell.

To Gina it was pretty baffling to hear me
say these things. A lot of the points I raised had never occurred
to her before, because she never questioned her beliefs. She just
assumed that what she was being told about God and the bible was
true.

At the end of the conversation, she said
that she could tell that I really cared about Alice, and that I was
a good person, even if I don't believe in God.

Then Gina called Alice and told her that
this was a once in a lifetime opportunity for her and of course she
should go to Hawaii with me.

"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy
without fighting."

Sun Tzu

Alice told me she wanted to come with me,
but that she would need $100 worth of dope for every day we were
away from her drug dealer. Each bag of heroin cost $10. She needed
to shoot up at least 3 bags at a time, 3 times a day. That's 9 bags
a day. The 10th bag was kind of a bonus.

She said without $100 of heroin a day, she'd
get terribly dope sick and the whole trip would be ruined. We were
going to be in Hawaii for 10 days, so she needed to pack $1000
worth of her medicine. Yeah, she seriously called it her
medicine.

It didn't even occur to me that if I got
caught at the airport with her, while she's smuggling $1000 worth
of heroin on board, I would be going to prison for a long long
time. I just wanted her to have a good time, and show her how nice
life could be sober. Don't ask me why showing her how nice sober
life could be involved $1000 worth of heroin. It seemed to make
sense at the time. Shut up.

When we arrived at the airport, she stuffed
the heroin between her legs. It was a LOT of heroin, so she had a
hard time walking. But we made it. The TSA officer at the metal
detector even tried to flirt with her, while we were sweating
bullets.

We had so much fun in Honolulu. We stayed at
the Outrigger hotel, right on the beach. Every day was filled with
fancy filet mignon dinners at nice restaurants, Broadway-like
shows, a helicopter tour of the island, a submarine tour of the
ocean floor, massages at the spa, shopping trips, etc. We even
visited Dog The Bounty Hunter.

There was a little gift shop next to his
office. Alice talked to his employee for a few minutes. We ended up
buying Dog's book, hand-signed by him. The employee in the gift
shop told Alice that there was a really bad ice (crystal meth)
problem on Hawaii. And then he told her that she should never start
doing drugs. She gave me a look and smirked. She thought it was
funny that a guy who should have a keen eye for who's on drugs and
who isn't, couldn't tell that she was a heroin addict. And she
really didn't look like an addict at all.

Anyway, we had a great time in Hawaii. One
day she skipped across the street like a little girl and said that
being here with me was the happiest she had ever been in her life.
That made me feel really good. I figured, if this doesn't give her
a good reason to get clean, then nothing will.

When we got back to New York, she called her
roommates in Middletown to let them know she was back. I still
didn't know that she was living with this dope boy Curly and his
little crew of drug selling thugs.

She had told me she was living in a two
bedroom apartment with a young lesbian couple. But I started to get
that feeling again that she was lying to me about something.
Especially when we drove from the airport to her house in
Middletown, and she didn't want me to drop her off right in front
of her house and help her carry all her bags in.

Instead, she asked me to drop her off one
block down the street from her house, and she said she would carry
everything herself. She was tiny, and her bags full of goodies from
Hawaii probably weighed more than she did. That's when I knew
something was up. I asked her who she was living with. She insisted
it was only her in one bedroom, and those two girls who were dating
each other were supposedly living in the other bedroom.

When I got back to my house in the woods
near Milford, I just needed to know the truth, so I hacked her
laptop in her house and turned on the camera on it, so I could see
who was in the house with her. There were two girls, but also a
couple of black guys. Now I knew she had been lying to me again.
Then I saw that she and Curly were living in one of the bedrooms
together. What the fuck?!?

I was sooo pissed at her. I texted her that
I knew about her living with Curly and fucking him, and that I
wanted nothing to do with her anymore. Lying whore! I didn't talk
to her for a few days after that.

But I couldn't stop thinking about her, and
I did keep track of what was going on in that trap house. A few
days later, one of the two lesbian girls in the house was chatting
with her sister who lived out-of-state but was going to come for a
visit. Her sister was asking about who else was living in that
house. So the lesbian girl mentioned Alice. Her sister asked who
Alice was, and the lesbian girl, who was supposedly Alice's good
friend, told her sister: "She's nobody. Just one of Curly's
hoes."

The fact that one of Alice's so-called
friends would talk about her like she's worthless garbage hurt my
feelings, even though I was still so pissed at her. I felt
protective of her, because I really cared about her.

I fucking hated all these people in that
house. In my mind, they were the reason why Alice was on drugs and
why she couldn't tear herself away from that shit, no matter how
much nicer sober life could be. As long as she lived in that place,
she was never going to get clean.

After we hadn't talked to each other in a
few days, Alice suddenly started texting me and told me she needed
my help. She said she had a huge fight with Curly and the rest of
his crew, and she told them all to move out. She said they had
tried to kick her out, but her name was the one that was on the
lease, so they couldn't get rid of her, but she could get rid of
them.

I thought that was great news. I figured,
once all these assholes are out of that house, maybe there's a
chance I could convince her to get clean.

She told me she had asked them to leave
tonight, but Curly had paid this month's rent as well as the
initial security deposit, and he wasn't going to leave, unless she
gave him $2000. So I met up with her and gave her the money. Yes, I
know now how stupid that was. But it seemed like the only right
thing to do at the time.

After I gave Alice the $2000, I didn't hear
from her anymore for a few days. I was getting so pissed again. I
felt like she totally played me. Finally she did return my texts.
Turns out, that same night she had reconciled with Curly, and he
didn't move out, and she just spent the $2000 on a whole bunch of
heroin.

I didn't talk to her for a few days. I was
getting so disgusted.

Suddenly she started texting me again,
because there was new drama. Curly's crew had come home after
selling drugs all day, when suddenly some other crew held them up
at gunpoint in the parking lot right outside their house and took
all their money.

Now Curly and his crew were scared, because
they didn't know how the other crew found out where they lived, and
they didn't feel safe in that house anymore.

Did I have anything to do with that? Did I
tell the other crew where Curly lived? Maybe. Possibly. Alright,
yes, I did. I wanted that motherfucker out of that house and away
from Alice.

And the fight that had happened a few days
earlier was because when Alice and I went to Hawaii, she had told
Curly that she was going to Hawaii with her grandma Gina.

But I texted the lesbian girl who had talked
shit about Alice to her sister, and I told her that Alice had been
in Hawaii with me. The lesbian girl told Curly, and he flipped out.
That's why he had told Alice to leave. That plan backfired royally,
because it ended up costing me $2000. Fail!

But the fact that another crew now knew
where Curly lived scared the shit out of him and he really did move
out. Mission accomplished! And the beautiful part was that Curly
had no idea that I had anything to do with it. Like ninjas, hackers
like to attack from the shadows.

Alice didn't want to put the next house in
her name again, because the other people in the house had totally
run it into the ground, and she didn't want to be responsible for
the damage. I asked her if she wanted to come live with me and go
to rehab. No, of course not.

She had met another latin dope boy. He
called himself Tattoo. He gave her drugs, so she went to live with
him. I was so sick and tired of this shit at this point, that I
decided to just be done with it and move to Florida.

I told a realtor to list my house in the
Poconos for sale, and then I told Alice that I was leaving for
good. I was hoping that would mean something to her, and she'd try
to stop me or come with me or something. But, nope, she was too
busy getting high.

I figured she'll never have any reason to
get clean as long as Tattoo keeps feeding her drugs. Maybe if I got
rid of Tattoo as well, and being an addict became more and more
difficult for Alice because all the dope boys she knew were getting
arrested, she might finally want to get clean.

Have you ever played out one of those
fantasy fights in your head? You know, who would win a fight
between Superman and The Hulk? Well, in a fight between a hacker
and a dope boy, the hacker wins every time, because he can hit the
dope boy without even being in the same state.

After the house in the Poconos sold, I moved
into one of my houses in Lehigh Acres, Florida. While I was down
there, I hacked into Tattoo's phone. When I heard him talking about
driving from Middletown to the Bronx to re-up, I called the
Sheriff's Department and told them what car he was driving, and
when he was going to be back in Middletown, and that he would have
a brick of heroin in his car.

They had cruisers on standby waiting for
him. I could track the location of his phone, so when he was coming
back from his trip to the Bronx to stock up on his drug inventory,
I called the cops back and gave the Sheriff's drug task force a
heads up. They were able to intercept him at the highway off-ramp.
Tattoo went to prison. Another one bites the dust!

After Tattoo was out of the picture, Alice
called me. She told me that Tattoo had gotten arrested, and I acted
surprised. She said now she was staying with her friend Mary,
another heroin addicted hooker. Mary's drug habit was even worse
than Alice's. Alice shot up 3 bags of heroin at a time. Mary shot
up 8 bags at a time.

In order to support her very expensive
habit, Mary worked double shifts in a grimey little strip club just
outside of Middletown. And while she worked there, she would try to
find guys who would come home with her after work, to have sex with
her for money.

Mary had a 12-year-old little boy, Mikey. I
got to know him a little better a few months later, when Alice and
I babysat him, while his mother was stripping. He was just a little
kid, but he already knew all about heroin, and that he had to lie
about it, if anyone at school or from Child Protective Services
asked him about it. Mikey knew that his mom took her clothes off
for money. She even tried on her stripper outfits in front of him.
And he knew that his mom had a lot of male friends who gave her
money. How sad is that? Mikey was so messed up in the head.