Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (45 page)

Veronica replied: "Yeah, that dude is
stalking me. He's obsessed with me. He's like totally in love with
me or something. I never even had sex with him, but he does
everything I say and buys me everything I want. I used to have a
whole bunch of dumb motherfuckers like him."

Then they both laughed again. I was really
really hurt. And then all I could think was: payback is a
bitch.

I called the front desk at the rehab and
told them Veronica was hiding a phone. I told them exactly where to
find it: in a hole she had cut into the bottom of her mattress. It
was her first infraction, so I knew she wouldn't be sent back to
jail, but she'd get 2 weeks of room restriction. Basically she was
going to be grounded and couldn't leave her bedroom for 2 weeks.
Not that big a deal, but at least she wasn't going to be able to
use the phone I gave her to cheat on me anymore.

Then I hacked Dees phone and told him if he
didn't stay the fuck away from Veronica from now on, I would make
his life miserable. Then I hacked his Facebook page, and got in
touch with his wife and told her that he was cheating on her with
Veronica.

To me that was the end of the story. I
really wanted nothing to do with Veronica anymore. She was, without
exaggeration, the worst human being I had ever met in my life.

I decided to go back to New York for a
while, to lick my wounds and forget about Veronica. For the next 2
weeks I didn't hear from her anymore.

But while I was in New York, her mother
Rachel kept calling and texting me. She was getting awfully
friendly with me, when I told her that Veronica and I were no
longer talking to each other. Rachel started sending me poetry and
her favorite songs. And she asked me to read her blog.

Then she told me that her husband,
Veronica's stepdad, the doctor, was a horrible person. Supposedly
he treated Rachel like shit, and she said she wished she could meet
a nice guy like me. Suddenly I had a sense of Déjà vu. This was a
replay of what I had gone through with Alice and her friend Kat,
and Kayla and her friend Morgan. Rachel was hitting on me. She was
moving in on Veronica's man. Later Veronica told me this wasn't the
first time her mother had hit on one of Veronica's boyfriends.

I didn't tell Rachel that I saw the text
messages between her and Veronica, while Veronica was on her death
bed in the hospital. I didn't tell her that I knew she and Veronica
were more drug buddies than mother and daughter, or that I knew
Veronica had learned how to be a slut from her mother.

Rachel told me that her husband had
cancelled her health insurance, and now she was no longer able to
get her medication. She was talking about her benzos. He really
wasn't a horrible person. He was trying to get Rachel clean. But
when you try to get between an addict and her drugs, you are the
enemy in her eyes. Just like I was suddenly Alice's enemy when she
ran away from rehab and I tried to get her to go back.

Rachel texted me that she needed a couple of
hundred dollars to get her prescription filled. I'm certain if I
had told her that I'd give her the money for her drugs, if she'd
let me fuck her, she would have. But I didn't reply. Having sex
with Veronica's mother was a taboo I wasn't going to break, no
matter how much I hated Veronica at that moment for cheating on me
and talking shit about me behind my back with her little crackwhore
friend Nancy.

In the past, Veronica had told me a lot
about how mean her mother was. She said Rachel would be pleasant
one minute, and then a total bitch the next. She'd become totally
unhinged and viciously aggressive over nothing. The more Veronica
told me, the more Rachel started to remind me of my ex-wife Donna.
They seemed to be personality twins. These stories about Rachel
were the first time I ever even heard the word benzo. I had no idea
what benzos were, until Veronica told me that Rachel was addicted
to them. She explained to me that they were a class of
tranquilizers that were even more addicting than opiates, and even
harder to kick. She listed a few: Valium, Xanax, Ativan,
Lorazepam...

Lorazepam? That name sounded familiar. Donna
had been taking Lorazepam for as long as I could remember. After
meeting Veronica, I finally realized that I had been married to a
drug addict for over 15 years and didn't even know it. Suddenly
Donna's bizarre behavior made perfect sense. I read up on
Lorazepam, and the side effects listed sounded very familiar. Donna
had almost all of them. The information I read about these pills
also said that you're not supposed to take them for more than a few
weeks. Donna had been taking them every day long before I ever even
met her, so she had been on those pills for at least 20 years at
this point. Wow. Mind blown.

Over the next few days, while Veronica and I
weren't talking, Rachel told me two more times that she needed
money. She and her husband were on and off. Right now they were
separated again, and he had shut off the cable in her apartment, so
now she couldn't even watch TV anymore. She said she needed a
couple of hundred dollars to pay her cable bill and a few other
bills, and asked if maybe she could come over and watch TV at my
place. I could hear baum chicka baum baum porno music in my head,
while reading her texts. I know I could have had sex with her if I
wanted to. But I was in New York.

While I was up there, I placed a new online
ad. I didn't have the ambition to start dating. I was way too
depressed. But I wanted to forget about Veronica, and I figured the
best way to get over her was to cheat on her with someone new and
make sure that Veronica finds out about it. I don't know. It seemed
to make sense at the time.

This girl Erin answered the ad. I already
knew what to expect, so I hacked her and my instincts were right:
she was a drug addict, who had spent the last few months in Collier
County Jail. Erin and I texted back and forth. I didn't tell her I
knew everything about her already. I wanted to see what she was
going to tell me on her own. I told her that I had just broken up
with my girlfriend and was looking for some meaningless sex. She
was ok with that.

After a few days, she told me that she used
to have a drug problem and went to jail, and lost custody of her
daughter. Now her baby daddy's mother had custody of her and didn't
want to give her back. I had heard it all before. It was the same
story like with Morgan and her daughter. Erin and I made plans to
meet, once I got back to Florida, even though I wasn't really sure
yet when I was going to leave New York.

I didn't hear from Veronica for two weeks,
while she was on room restriction. Then she started calling me
again. She asked me to come back to Fort Myers, and pick her up,
because something had happened and she wanted to run away from
rehab.

We had talked about this earlier. I read up
on the Salvation Army rehab program. The statistics weren't very
encouraging. For addicts in her age group, the success rate was
barely 50%. The other 50% didn't complete the program. The average
time spent in rehab, before they ran away, was 2 months and 2
weeks.

It made sense. While they were confined to
the rehab center during the first 2 months, it was relatively easy
to resist temptation. But once they had to go out into the real
world and look for work, it only took about 2 weeks before they
relapsed. I told Veronica all that early on, and we made a backup
plan: She said if she relapsed, she'd run away from rehab instead
of being sent back to jail. She'd come live with me, like we had
planned all along, and we'd have a baby. Then, a few months later,
after her belly was big enough where anyone could clearly see that
she was pregnant, we would hire a lawyer and we'd ask the judge to
give her house arrest, or "community control" as the courts in
Florida call it, instead of jail time. That way she could be home
with me and raise the baby.

She and I hadn't talked in 2 weeks, ever
since I caught her cheating on me with Dee. I really shouldn't have
even answered the phone when she called. But I loved her, and I
missed her. So when she called, I was happy to hear her voice,
despite everything.

"Why are you in New York? I need you! Please
come back as quickly as possible. Leave there today," she
demanded.

I asked her if she was absolutely sure she
wanted to leave rehab. She said yes, because two of her roommates
had gotten caught having sex with male inmates at the rehab center.
She said her roommates were sent to jail based on hearsay, and she
claimed it was only a matter of time before she would be sent back
to jail because of hearsay and false accusations, just like the
other girls.

Since I knew for a fact that it wasn't just
hearsay, because I had read Nancy's text messages to the guy she
was fucking in rehab, I figured Veronica was worried about going to
jail, because she did have sex with someone, too.

But hadn't I already been over that in my
own head when I first found out about Dee? She had sex with so many
people before I met her, was one more really going to make a
difference? If she wanted me to pick her up, take her home and have
a baby together, maybe this relationship was still salvageable.

"Ok," I said. "But don't make me drive 1200
miles down there, and then you'll change your mind before I get
there."

"No, I'm not going to change my mind," she
replied. "I'm definitely leaving rehab. Either you come pick me up
and I come live with you, or I'll be on the street and you know
what's gonna happen then. I'll start tricking on 41 again or I'll
live in a trap house with a dope boy."

I got in my car that same day and drove back
to Florida.

Of course she changed her mind before I got
there.

She said she would call me during every
break between her rehab classes, until I got to Fort Myers. But
instead I didn't hear from her any more for the next two days. By
the time she finally called me again, I was home in Bonita
Springs.

"I changed my mind. I think I should stay
and complete the program, you know?" she said.

I couldn't really say anything. She wanted
to try to finish rehab and complete the sentence, instead of
getting new warrants and going back to jail. It was the right
decision. But I was still pissed that I drove almost 1200 miles for
her and she didn't even say thank you, or that she was sorry for
making me drive all this way for nothing.

Erin kept texting me, and I told her that I
was back in Florida now, but that I had changed my mind about
having sex with her, because Veronica and I were trying to work
things out, and I didn't want to cheat on her anymore now. Erin
said she understood and it was cool. She still wanted to keep in
touch though, just in case.

A week later Veronica told me again that she
wanted to run away from rehab. I figured it would be a replay of
last time and she'd change her mind at the last minute again. But
no, this time she really did run away from rehab. She didn't even
last a month and a half.

"It is little wonder that rape is one of the
least-reported crimes. Perhaps it is the only crime in which the
victim becomes the accused and, in reality, it is she who must
prove her good reputation, her mental soundness, and her impeccable
propriety."

Freda Adler

While Veronica was at the Salvation Army,
Haley kept calling me every day. I didn't answer, because I was
still trying to be a good boyfriend and be faithful to Veronica, so
Haley left me voicemails.

One night, the messages sounded particularly
urgent again. It was another one of Haley's emergencies. She said
she had a really bad infection in her cheek, because she had been
scratching the scabs on her face. She said she needed me to take
her to the emergency room, or she might die. She said she was
sitting in Lorne's front yard. He wouldn't let her in the house,
and she had nowhere else to go.

I figured she'd just want to come to my
house for a while, lock herself in the bathroom for a few hours,
smoke crack, and then ask me to take her back to Palm Beach the
next morning. But she really did sound bad when she left the
message, so I decided to go get her, just in case it was a real
emergency. It was.

When I got there, I didn't even recognize
her at first. She looked like the Elephant Man. The left side of
her face was swollen to at least twice its normal size. She looked
grotesque. I took her straight to the hospital. In the emergency
room they asked her if she took any illegal drugs. She was going to
lie and say no, because she was ashamed. She thought they would
look down on her, as if she was human garbage. I told her she
needed to tell them the truth, in case this was an allergic
reaction to something she shot up, or some of the medication they
were about to give her may have bad side effects if they are mixed
with the stuff that she already had in her system.

She was surprised that they didn't treat her
any different after she admitted that she was a drug addict. They
gave her morphine to make sure she was ok and didn't get dope sick.
The doctors and nurses at Lee Memorial Hospital were really nice to
her.

After a few hours in the emergency room,
they admitted her into the hospital and brought her up to a room in
the contagious disease ward. She had a severe MRSA infection in her
cheek, and it was close to her eye. There was a chance she might go
blind in that eye. I stayed with her the whole time and she told
them I was her emergency contact. She had nobody else. It was
really late by the time she finally got a room, and they gave her
some sleeping pills. She fell asleep and I went home.