Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (21 page)

Kat and I talked for about five or six
hours. She was clearly trying to lay the groundwork for a
relationship. She was not going to leave, until she was sure she
had her foot in the door with me.

She finally left at night, when she had to
get her next fix. About half an hour later Alice finally came over.
We hadn't seen each other in a few weeks. As soon as she walked in,
I realized how much I missed her. And the first thing she realized
was that something was wrong.

"Someone was here," she said.

I played stupid. I had no idea how she knew
that. Women's intuition I guess. Maybe something about the tone of
my voice, or a guilty look on my face, had given it away.

We went in the bedroom, and took our clothes
off. She spread her legs for me and I got on top of her. Suddenly
she yelled: "Oh my God!! Mary was here! You had sex with Mary! I
can smell her perfume on you!"

I told her no, that Kat just left half an
hour ago, and that Alice was obviously confusing their
perfumes.

She demanded to know what Kat did at our
condo and why I smelled like her perfume. So I told her. Alice was
livid. She was sooo upset and jealous. She was pacing back and
forth, ranting and raving, while gesturing wildly. She was a woman
scorned! She swore she would beat the shit out of Kat, if she ever
saw her again. Then she lay down next to me, spread her legs again
and said: "I want you to cum inside of me."

While I was inside of her, she was giving me
dirty looks. The pressure was on. Somehow I knew that if I couldn't
cum now, because I just had sex with Kat a little while earlier, it
would make Alice even more angry. As if making me cum was HER job
and hers alone.

They used to be best friends for years, but
now this one incident ended their friendship. Alice never talked to
Kat again after that day, because she felt so betrayed.

Funny how it didn't even register in her
brain that she had been hurting me like that the whole time with
the shit she did. In her head there was nothing wrong with her
staying with Papi Chuloco and having sex with him for drugs, and
letting him pimp her out and having sex with all these other
people. But me having sex with Kat was suddenly an earth shattering
catastrophe. Pretty bizarre, especially considering that she had
actually asked me to have sex with Kat a few weeks earlier, when
Kat was dope sick.

We started hanging out a few times a week
again after that night. But she was still living in hotel rooms
with Papi. Mary and her little son Mikey ended up living in the
same room with them. Alice and Mary had pretty much the same
relationship as Alice and Kat had in the past. They were almost
like a married couple, and they posted ads on Backpage
together.

Papi had heard stories about me and knew who
I was. When he found out that Alice was hanging out with me again
all the time, instead of tricking with random strangers, he beat
the shit out of her. He was ok with her having sex with strangers,
or even with her regulars, but he didn't want her hanging out with
me. I guess because he knew that she had feelings for me, or
because he was worried that she would decide to come live with me
again.

Every time Alice came over to the apartment,
and Papi called her phone, she pretended to be somewhere else. She
was scared not to answer the phone when he called, because she knew
he would beat her because of it when she got back.

I remember one time, when we were in bed
together, she was sitting on my lap, riding my dick, when Papi
called. She answered the phone while we were having sex. He asked
where she was, and she lied and told him she was sitting in a hotel
room, waiting for a "client" but that he didn't show up yet. It was
just so bizarre to me that he was ok with her having sex with
"clients" but not with me.

Every time we got together, I asked her how
she was feeling. And every time she said the same thing: "I'm
fine." She was so emotionally closed off. She was hiding her pain
behind a wall. Every time I saw her, it took a while, until she was
comfortable enough to open up. To her, being honest about how she
really felt wasn't easy. Having emotions, being sad or crying, was
considered a weakness in her world. But the truth is, it takes
courage to allow yourself to open up and be vulnerable.

She never wanted anyone to know how
miserable she really was. For what? What would anyone who cares
about her say if she told them she was miserable with her life?
They would tell her to change her life. And a drug addict does not
want to hear that. It really really annoys them when you keep
telling them that their lives would be so much better if they quit
those damn drugs and stopped doing all those horrible things they
need to do to get drugs.

It's not like they're stupid and they don't
know that the drugs and that lifestyle is making them miserable.
The problem is that they are so addicted, they can't stop. You
might as well tell someone in a wheelchair that he would be a lot
happier if he got up and walked. He knows that, but he can't.

So, first she would say: "I'm fine." And
then a little while later she would finally thaw out and tell me
what really happened during the day. She told me things like:
"Today Papi tried to throw me off the second story balcony at the
Howard Johnson. I really thought I was gonna die this time."

To her that was just another normal day.

One day, before I had taken her to Hawaii, I
told her that she didn't even know how miserable her life really
is, because it's all she knows. She had nothing to compare it to.
To her, miserable was normal. But if anyone else had one of her
normal days, it would probably be the worst day of their lives. She
just smiled a sad smile and looked at the floor, but she didn't say
anything.

I had to go to Florida again, to take care
of one of my new rental houses, a duplex in Lehigh Acres. Alice and
I had been hanging out a lot again lately, and she became more and
more open about how abusive Papi was, and how badly she wanted to
get away from him. By now almost a year had passed since we had
been to Hawaii together.

I asked her if she remembered what she had
told me back then: that our time together in Hawaii was the
happiest she had ever been in her life. I told her every day could
be like that, if only she would finally get away from scumbags like
Papi.

That day was the first time she told me that
of course she wanted to come back and live with me again, but she
was scared that once she moves back in, she's trapped, and then
I'll force her to get clean. I couldn't blame her for being scared,
after what she had been through with that guy who treated her like
a sex slave after she had been in rehab. And after what she had
been through with every other guy, really.

I asked her to come to Florida with me for a
few days, but she was afraid of what Papi would do to her if she
tried.

I went to Florida alone again. A few days
later she called me and told me that she was finally ready to leave
Papi and come live with me again. After all this time, she still
had a key to the apartment. She asked if she could move back in and
wait there for me, until I get back from Florida. "Of course," I
said. I was sooo happy!

When I got back from Florida a few days
later, my flight had landed much earlier than expected. I opened
the apartment door and saw a bunch of her bags on the stairs. It
looked like she was leaving. I walked upstairs. She was standing in
the hallway, doing Papi's laundry. Her eyes got big. She hadn't
expected me back so soon. She didn't know what to say. Papi was
lying in my bed, naked. He had a dumb grin on his face and said:
"Uhh, hi."

Apparently Alice and Papi had been living in
my apartment together, while I was gone. I flipped the fuck out! I
screamed at them to get the fuck out of my house. Alice tried to
calm me down: "It's not what it looks like! I told him to
leave!"

I wasn't in the mood for any of her bullshit
anymore: "Just get the fuck out before I call the cops!"

"I can't, I don't have a car. I told Papi to
leave, but he's waiting for a cab."

"GET THE FUCK OUT!!!"

Papi didn't say anything. He just put his
clothes on.

Alice was visibly upset: "Can I at least
borrow your phone for a second so I can call a cab? Mine is
dead."

I handed her my phone.

"It's really not what it looks like."

"Shut up. Just get out."

A few minutes later a cab came and they
left.

Later that night she texted me and told me
that I had misinterpreted the situation. She said that she had
asked Papi to drive her here so she could drop off her things here
and come back to me. Papi threw her bags into the hallway, and they
landed on the stairs. Then she told him to leave, but he told her
he wasn't going to leave without her.

She kept telling him to leave. He got
violent, grabbed a pair of scissors out of my kitchen drawer and
stuck the tip of the scissors against her neck and threatened to
stab her. She got really scared and told him he could wait there
until I would get there and then I'd give both of them a lift back
to the Howard Johnson. But she said that's only what she told him
so he would stop hurting her. She said she really wanted me to kick
out Papi, but not her.

At this point I was totally and utterly
disgusted by her, and sick of her hurting me every chance she got.
The next day I terminated my lease for that apartment and decided
to move to Florida for good, like I had planned about a year
earlier, when I had sold the mansion in the Poconos.

I had really only stuck around in Middletown
for the past year to be near Alice. But she was obviously not worth
the trouble. I had to admit to myself that things were just never
going to get any better with her, no matter how hard I tried to get
her away from the drugs and escorting on Backpage and living with
drug dealers. So I was just done with all this bullshit. I decided
to go to Florida and live there from now on. I had bought a nice
apartment in Bonita Springs a few months earlier.

"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from
admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."

Jane Austen

"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries
disappear and life stands explained."

Mark Twain

Remember pimple poppin' Patty, the drug
counselor?

At this point I hadn't talked to Patty in
over a year, ever since right after my divorce, back when I had
hung out with her 3 or 4 times at the mansion in the Poconos, and
she had made meatballs with tomato sauce from scratch.

After that I had met Jennifer, the gorgeous,
impossibly perfect gold digger. Then Linda, the scam artist who was
immune to abortions. And then Liz, the yoga pothead who moved to
North Carolina. And Raven, the airheaded wannabe porn star. And
finally, Alice, the heroin addicted hooker.

What a team, what a team! What an all-star
team!

Now, a year later, while I was living in the
apartment in Middletown and going through all this crazy turmoil
with Alice, I suddenly got a call from Patty out of nowhere:

"Hey Oliver! Remember me? It's Patty. It's
been a while. How have you been? I'm still thinking about you all
the time. Listen, can I ask you a favor? Can I come stay with
you?"

"Uhmm, wait, what? You want to come stay
with me?" I asked.

"Yeah, things are crazy here. I need to get
outta Scranton for a while. Disappear off the radar. Get away from
the paparazzi."

"Paparazzi? What paparazzi? What the hell
are you talking about?"

"Well, remember when we met last year and
you took me out to dinner at that steakhouse in Milford?"

"Yeah?"

"Remember I told you I had been there
before, because before I met you, I dated a musician who lived near
you in Milford?"

"Yeahhh?"

"He was actually a really famous musician.
You might know him."

I thought she meant he had a little local
band and played at fairs or in bars and restaurants around town. "I
don't think so. I don't really go to bars or clubs," I said.

"No, no, he was pretty famous. All over the
world. Especially in Germany, so you probably know him."

"Hmm, I don't know. Who is he?"

Then she told me his name and said he was
the lead singer of a famous heavy metal band. Im going to change
his name, like everyone else's name in this book. So let's call him
Rocky the rockstar, lead singer of the famous heavy metal band
Blood.

I was pretty underwhelmed. I had never heard
of Rocky or his band Blood, so he couldn't be all that famous.
"Nah, no idea who that is," I said.

"Google them. They really are pretty famous.
They had platinum records. Their music has even been used in horror
movies. And Howard Stern is a big fan," she said.

"Alright. I'll google it. So anyway, what's
going on with all that? Why are you trying to hide from
paparazzi?"

"Well, I met Rocky while he was in drug
rehab in Scranton. He was one of my patients."