Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (7 page)

Donna followed Jeff into the house and they
had a talk. He told her that he would file for divorce and move out
as soon as he finds a different place to live.

So he was still there for the next 2 weeks,
while I was visiting Donna in New York. I stayed at a hotel a few
miles away, but Donna never wanted to go there. It took me a few
years until I realized she had agoraphobia. Anyway, while I was
there, we hung out all day every day and had sex every night. At
first we did it in the car, in the same dark corner we had done it
that first night. But that got old after a few days.

So then we had sex in the park near her
house at night. Right in the middle of the lawn. Until a police
cruiser drove through the park and put their spotlight on us.
Luckily we weren't doing anything at that moment, but we were about
to. Donna wasn't wearing any pants or panties, and while we were
squinting into the police lights, and they told us to stand up, she
asked me if her T-shirt looked like a dress. It didn't. But I said
it did. The cops didn't arrest us. So it was all good.

During the second week, we just brazenly
hung out at her house, and we had sex there while Jeff was at work.
It was really strange. Even when he came home from work, I was
still there, and Donna and I sat on the living room couch, watching
TV, while he was hiding in his room, fixing a VCR or something.
Occasionally he walked through the living room, right past us,
without saying a word, to go to the bathroom. I kept expecting him
to storm into the living room one day and pick another fight with
me, or pull a gun on me or something, but he never did.

Donna told me that after the fight, Jeff had
a lot of respect for me, because I didn't beat him to a pulp,
although I could have. Suddenly I had street cred in New York,
because I let him get up without hitting him back, after he
suckerpunched me.

Eventually I had to fly back to Germany. But
after that first trip I was hooked, and I kept flying back to New
York every couple of days. Jeff did move out after a few days, so
then Donna and I were able to just hang out at her place whenever I
came over. No more crazy sex romps in the park.

All these transatlantic flights were getting
pretty expensive, and then my mom and stepdad had figured out that
I was constantly on the phone with America, so they wouldn't let me
use the phone at the house anymore. At that point I had to keep
going to phone booths to talk to Donna. It couldn't go on like
this. Especially after I caught pneumonia and almost died.

So I decided to move to New York and live
with Donna, instead of going to college to become a special ed
teacher in Germany. My parents flipped out. They thought I was
throwing my life away.

"Do not correct a fool, or he will hate you. Correct
a wise man, and he will appreciate you."

Proverb

Every time I flew to New York, I came with a
tourist visa, which allowed me to stay in the US for three months
each time. After those three months were up, I had to leave the
country for at least one day, or I'd be an illegal immigrant.

After I completed my mandatory civil service
in Germany, I had no reason to fly back anymore. But after I stayed
with Donna for almost three months, my visa was about to expire,
and if I got caught overstaying my legal welcome, I could be
deported and banned from re-entering the States.

So something needed to be done. I figured
the easiest thing would be, if I fly back to Germany for a few days
and come right back. Then I'd have a fresh three month tourist
visa. But Donna was afraid I wouldn't come back, so she didn't want
me to go. She told me if I fly back to Germany, for even just one
day, it's over.

But what else could we do? She suggested we
get married, because once I'm married to a US citizen, I could
apply for a green card and they wouldn't be able to deport me, no
matter how long the paperwork would take.

Even though we had known each other for well
over a year at this point, we had only lived together for about 3
months, and I really didn't want to get married so quickly. I was
only 20. I told her I wasn't ready to get married, and flew back to
Germany. I told her I'd be back soon, but she was so upset, she
said she never wanted to talk to me again. We didn't talk to each
other for two weeks or so. I was miserable. I kept trying to call
her from Germany, but she wouldn't answer. I wrote her a letter.
Finally she called me, and asked me to come back.

When I arrived in New York the next day, I
saw that she had fresh scars on her wrists. She had tried to kill
herself after I left. Now she tried to trivialize it and said that
she was only playing around and accidentally cut deeper than she
meant to.

I felt so bad for her, I agreed to marry
her. And it really didn't seem like such a terrible idea. We did
love each other, and hey, if it didn't work out, I could always get
a divorce later.

But in the meantime, every nice day together
would be a gift that nobody could ever take away from me
afterwards. And how fucking awesome is it that some little computer
geek from Germany is marrying this hot woman in New York? I felt
like one of those two kids in that movie Weird Science, who created
the perfect woman on their computer and then brought her to
life.

A few days later, on February 6th 1993,
Donna and I ended up getting married. In the living room. By now
the money I had made producing video games was running out. I
needed to find a job, but while my green card application was being
processed, I was technically an illegal alien fresh off the banana
boat. Legally I was not allowed to work, because I didn't even have
a social security card yet.

In school, I had always drawn silly little
pictures, cartoons and comics, to pass the time when I got bored.
Donna knew I could draw pretty well, so she asked me to draw her a
picture of a knight fighting a dragon. It came out pretty good, and
she suggested that I should try to make a living drawing cartoons
or comics.

That seemed like a pretty cool idea. After
all, if Mikey Mouse and Bugs Bunny can make billions of dollars, I
should be able to make at least a little bit of money with my own
cartoons. It was worth a shot. I had no idea at the time how tough
it is to break into that business.

I drew a batch of 10 single panel gag
cartoons, similar to Gary Larson's The Far Side. Since everything
in Europe is a lot more liberal than in the States, they have a
much darker, edgier sense of humor as well. I was used to the
uncensored cartoons in German humor magazines like Titanic, which
often included nudity and very bad taste, like graphic dead baby
jokes. Not the kind of stuff any American magazine or newspaper
would ever publish.

I sent my first batch of cartoons to King
Features Syndicate, the largest distributor of newspaper comics.
They supply thousands of papers across the country with daily comic
strips. I was so oblivious, I had no idea how remote my chances
were of actually selling a cartoon to King Features. It's kinda
like a kid writing a movie script with crayons and then sending it
to Universal Studios, hoping to get a movie deal. It just doesn't
happen.

And then it happened anyway. King Features
bought one of the cartoons from the very first batch of cartoons I
ever drew and published it in thousands of newspapers. I thought,
"Hey, that was easy. Fame and fortune, here I come!"

It wasn't until a few months later, that I
found out how lucky I had been. It was almost like winning the
lottery. I was told that every year, over 3000 new artists submit
their cartoons to King Features, hoping to make a sale and get
their cartoons syndicated in thousands of newspapers. And from what
I was told, only about three or four new artists get lucky each
year. And here I was, selling a cartoon to King Features at my very
first try. Woah!

I figured, making a living as a cartoonist
would be a piece of cake. But after that first lucky sale, I didn't
sell anything for a while, because my sense of humor was just way
too dark for American magazines. It took me a while to understand
the different sense of humor in America.

In the meantime I had also submitted a
manuscript for a comic book to a German cartoon publishing house.
The editor there wrote me a personalized rejection letter and
politely explained that my cartoons were amateurish crap. He told
me that a pretty famous German cartoonist, who had dozens of books
published, just so happened to be living in New York at the time as
well. He gave me that famous cartoonist's phone number and
suggested I give him a call and get some professional advice from
him.

Mr. Famous Cartoonist Guy was nice enough to
meet up with me at his house. He looked at my German cartoon book
manuscript and told me the same thing the editor at the publishing
house had told me: "Kid, this is crap." Then he gave me a lot of
good tips that really did improve my work a lot. He knew I wasn't
making enough money as freelance cartoonist to survive, so he told
me about a German language newspaper on 72nd Street in Manhattan,
which was always looking for people in New York who could speak
German.

I met the head honcho at that newspaper and
he hired me on the spot. He asked me if I knew how to use the
desktop publishing software they were using at the newspaper. I
lied and said that I did. I figured since I had grown up around
computers, I should be able to learn the software on the fly. I was
right. From one day to the next, I had a job in the graphic
department of a newspaper in New York.

The boss liked my work and made me art
director after just two or three weeks. I got to put some of my
cartoons in the paper each week, and my boss told me he had always
dreamed of being a book publisher, not just a newspaper publisher.
He was just looking for the right kind of manuscript for his first
book release. I told him I had a manuscript for a cartoon book
ready to go. I really didn't. The book was going to be published in
America, so my crappy German cartoon manuscript was useless. But I
figured if he bites, I'd wing it and quickly throw together a bunch
of new cartoons for a book.

He went for it. So now I had to come up with
about 100 cartoons in a matter of a week. I drew cartoons every
waking minute at home. Those hastily drawn cartoons were shit.
Well, each new cartoon was a little bit better than the one before,
but honestly, the book was crap. But now I had my first book
published. Yayy! I felt like a real artist. I felt like I should be
wearing black turtleneck sweaters and a beret.

Working at a newspaper is very stressful,
and it wasn't really what I wanted to do, so I quit and decided to
live off my book earnings and my cartoon sales as freelance artist.
Well, there were no book earnings. I think I sold like three copies
of that book. (By the way, thank you for buying THIS book. You
rock.)

"Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It
is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are
crazy."

Nora Ephron

After a few weeks of pretending to be a
freelance artist, I had to admit to myself that I wasn't actually
making any money. I really shouldn't have quit my day job as art
director at that newspaper. So I needed to find a new job. Not that
easy.

Donna's brother's father-in-law Lou owned a
limousine service. Well, that's what he called it, but it was
really just a bunch of guys driving their own shitty cars. There
were no actual limos. It was a typical New York ghetto cab
service.

There are 2 different types of taxis in New
York City. The yellow cabs that everyone knows don't have radios,
but the drivers are allowed to pick up people on the street.
Limousines are not yellow, and the drivers have two way radios to
communicate with a dispatcher, but they are not allowed to pick up
people on the street.

Lou was always looking for drivers, so if I
had a car, I could start working for him right away. But I didn't
have a car. Donna's uncle Rick had an old junk car rotting in his
backyard. He said I could have it for free. He was probably happy
to finally get rid of that wreck. The transmission was slipping,
the seats were ripped, the ceiling in the car looked like it had
cancer, and the body was so eaten up by rust, that there were holes
in the floor in front of the backseat.

People sitting on the backseat could look
down and see the asphalt through the holes between their feet. It
was an old red Dodge. Rick jokingly called it the Red Baron. I
called it the Flintstone mobile, because I felt if I kick down hard
enough, my feet would be on the street, and then I could use my
feet to move the car, just like Fred Flintstone.

As an added bonus, the muffler was broken.
So the exhaust fumes were coming through the holes in the floor.
The car was basically a rolling gas chamber. I inhaled so much
carbon monoxide, I'm sure I lost quite a few brain cells, while
driving around in that death trap.

If I remember correctly, I was a New York
cab driver for about 2 years. Maybe a little less. I drew cartoons
during the day and drove at night, from 6 pm until 2 am. A lot of
crazy stuff happened during those 2 years.

There used to be a show on HBO, called Taxi
Cab Confessions. The cab was equipped with hidden cameras, and the
driver worked for the show. The people who got into the car had no
idea that they were being filmed. They said and did such crazy
stuff, I was sure that show was just as fake as wrestling. I
figured these crazy people couldn't possibly be real. It had to be
staged. Well, once I drove a cab myself, I realized that that show
really had been real. You really do meet a lot of crazy people when
you drive a cab.