Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (4 page)

My uncle knew that I had something to do
with computers and that I received a lot of packages with disks
from people around the world every day. But he didn't know any
details. He called me and asked me if I knew someone named Lucifer,
and if I did, to tell him to stop that 1 cent stamp nonsense or
face jail time, because the postal police was watching Lucifer's PO
box.

I had no choice but to abandon that PO box
and rip up my pink card. That was the end of my career as
mega-swapper. But I continued to hang out on my crew's online
headquarter every day.

I realized that the police was circling
closer and closer around me and that I had to be even more careful
about my double life from now on. I even went so far as to ask one
of my school friends to come to copy parties with me, to pretend to
be Lucifer, so that people saw Lucifer and Goliath at the same
place at the same time, and nobody would get the idea that it was
really just me using two different names. All the other members in
my crew knew the truth, but they kept their mouths shut and didn't
reveal it to anyone else outside of our crew. They understood the
necessity of my lie to avoid arrest.

A few months later, the German FBI suddenly
raided my parents' house a second time anyway. But this time they
weren't even looking for me, neither under my new name Lucifer nor
under my old name Goliath. They had been looking for a different
hacker, who called himself Pentagon. Someone had Pentagon's name in
his little black contact book, and had accidentally written my
address under Pentagon's name. So the FBI came to my house, looking
for someone else. Luckily there was nothing incriminating in my
room, but my parents totally freaked out on me anyway.

From that point on I was really on thin ice
with them. And they started to become more and more suspicious
about me locking myself in my room and being on the phone all the
time. They even thought I might be on drugs and had a little
intervention on one of the rare occasions they happened to catch me
outside of my room in the hallway.

Then at some point they finally caught on to
the fact that I was connected to America 24/7 and they went ape
shit! They did the math, and it turned out that within just a few
months, I had spent enough time on international calls, that if I
got caught, they would have to pay over a million dollars in phone
charges. This was before cell phones. Everyone still used regular
landlines, and the phone in my room was on their account. So they
locked my phone. I could still receive calls, but I couldn't make
calls, because the dial pad was locked. Then I figured out that I
could still dial numbers, if I took the receiver off the phone and
tapped on the little contact button the receiver rested on, when
you aren't using the phone.

If I had to dial a 3, I had to quickly tap
that button three times. If I had to dial a 9, I had to quickly tap
it nine times. It was incredibly tedious, especially for long
international phone numbers, because if I miscounted, I had to hang
up and start all over again. It was such a pain in the ass!
Eventually my parents realized that despite the lock they put on my
phone, I was still able to make phone calls somehow. So they took
my phone away altogether.

That made my long distance relationship with
Donna all the more difficult. Since I couldn't call her from the
house anymore, I recorded the blue box tone on a tape and then I
went to public phone booths and held up my walkman to the phone and
played the tone that gave me a free international line to call
Donna in New York.

I spent hours in phone booths every day.
Winter came and it was freezing. I ended up catching pneumonia. By
then I had graduated from school and was now working in a school
for mentally handicapped kids. Back then they still had a military
draft in Germany, and every male over 18 had to join the army for a
year.

I have always had a problem with authority.
The idea that some knuckle-dragging sergeant, with half my IQ, was
going to boss me around didn't sit too well with me. I figured as
soon as someone tells me to crawl through the mud, I'm gonna tell
them to go fuck themselves, and then I'll spent a year in some army
jail cell. Not my idea of fun.

So I became a conscientious objector. If you
refuse to join the army on moral grounds, you have to give them a
good reason why you are against killing someone on command. You
could either go to an oral interview and try to convince the panel
that you're not army material, or you could write an essay.

The interview basically consists of a bunch
of trick questions: Imagine you walk through the woods with your
girlfriend, and suddenly a guy tries to rob you and kill her. You
have a gun. Do you shoot the guy to save your girlfriend's life? If
you say no, they tell you you're lying, because of course you would
do anything to save her life. If you say yes, they tell you, "see,
you would fire a gun and kill someone if necessary, so you are fit
to join the army." There is no right answer for these types of
questions.

I figured the essay would be easier. It
worked. I didn't have to join the army for a year, and I got to
work with handicapped kids for a year and a half instead. They made
the civilian service longer, so that it deters people from taking
"the easy way out" of their military service. I enjoyed working
with those kids and I even planned on going to college to become a
special ed teacher and work with handicapped kids for a living.

DONNA THE RECLUSE

"You don't love someone because they're perfect, you
love them in spite of the fact that they're not."

Jodi Picoult

Even when I worked at the school for
handicapped kids, I still talked to Donna for hours every day. I
basically spent all my free time on the phone with her. Sometimes
we talked until the sun came up and I went to work without having
slept at all.

By now I had lost all interest in the
illegal hacking scene, so Lucifer had retired. But I still
continued to run my software company as Goliath and we had produced
a few popular video games. Some of them were distributed by a
German software company that later became part of Electronic
Arts.

I was only 20, but I had already made a nice
amount of money with those video games and I ended up flying to New
York whenever I had a chance, to spend time with Donna. During one
particular 3 month time period I ended up flying to New York 6
times. Sometimes just for a weekend.

The handicapped kids I worked with were
always sick. Long time teachers are used to it. They have a pretty
strong immune system and they don't get sick all the time from
being around sick kids. But I hadn't been around these kids for
that long, so I wasn't as immune as the other teachers were, and I
caught every cold those kids had. One time I caught the chickenpox
from them. I figured, while I was on sick leave, it was the perfect
excuse to hop on a plane and go visit Donna in New York for a few
days again.

I can't believe they actually let me on the
plane. I felt like patient zero. I could have had the swine flu or
Ebola or something. During the flight, my chickenpox got worse and
worse. By the time I got off the plane, I looked like a leper. I
was seriously afraid the customs officers at Kennedy Airport would
take one look at me and quarantine me or something. But they let me
right through. So much for border security.

A few weeks later I caught pneumonia. Not
sure if it was the result of having caught 3 consecutive colds from
the kids, or because I had spent so much time in freezing phone
booths, talking to Donna. Either way, I collapsed at my parents'
house with a very high fever.

For days I had this really bad cough that
just wouldn't go away. Then, while brushing my teeth one night, the
bathroom suddenly turned black and white, and everything seemed to
move away from me. Obviously that was just what it looked like,
because the blood was leaving my head, so my eyes were playing
tricks on me. But it really did look like the whole room turned
black and white and moved away from me. I think that's why people
see a tunnel of light when they die. I think it's simply the blood
leaving their eye balls and their field of vision narrowing to a
pinpoint.

I was able to call out for my mom and my
stepdad right before passing out. They called an ambulance and I
was rushed to the hospital. Turns out I had pneumonia for a while
already, before I finally collapsed that night. The doctors told my
parents they weren't sure if I was going to make it. For the first
few days in the hospital, there was a pretty good chance I might
die. But I got through it. After I got out of the hospital, I was
on sick leave for a few weeks. So of course I hopped on the next
plane and flew to New York again.

When I had first started talking to Donna
over a year earlier, to convince her to make her bulletin board the
exclusive online headquarter for my hacking crew, she had mentioned
that she had a roommate. This guy Jeff, who worked as a technician
in an electronics store, and spent all his time fixing broken TVs
and VCRs and stuff like that.

Whenever Donna and I talked on the phone, I
often heard her yell at Jeff to get out of her room, or to go let
her dogs out, or get her cigarettes. She was treating him like
shit. Like he was her personal servant or something.

As the weeks and months went by, and we
talked every day, we got closer and closer. Donna and I started
having phone sex. This was before the first time I flew to New York
to visit her.

One night she asked me on the phone if I
masturbate. Well, yeah, doesn't everyone? Then she asked me how
often. She asked me to describe in detail how I do it. Then she
asked me to do it on the phone with her and let her listen to me
cum. I was shy at first, but she kept whispering all sorts of sexy
things into my ear that got me hard. From that point on we had
phone sex almost every night. That's why I always locked my bedroom
door, so my parents wouldn't suddenly walk in on me. And because I
was locked in my room all the time, they started to think I was on
drugs.

Donna asked me how big my dick was and asked
me to take pictures of it before and after she made me cum, and
mail them to her. And she sent me naked pictures of herself. It was
pretty exciting to have a girlfriend in New York, who got a kick
out of making me cum on the phone every night.

But I could tell that something was
bothering her. I asked her what was wrong. Finally Donna told me
she had a deep dark secret. She said if she told me what it is, I
would never want to talk to her again. It was obvious that her
secret really was weighing on her conscience, and I kept asking her
to tell me, and I promised her that she would feel so much better
once she gets it off her chest.

I told her that I know from experience that
carrying around a dark secret has a way of making you feel trapped
and alone: "I know what it's like to put up these invisible walls
in your head that you hide behind, and you don't want to let anyone
peek inside those walls and see the real you, because you're afraid
they won't like you anymore once they know your secret and they
know the real you. But it's a really good feeling when you find
someone you can trust. And you can share your dark secret with them
without fear of being judged or that they will like you any less.
And then, when you can finally let it all out, that secret suddenly
no longer has any power over you. Sometimes things seem really bad
when they fester in the dark, but once you drag them out into the
light, and you talk about them, they aren't so bad after all."

I tried to reassure her that no matter what,
I wouldn't love her any less. But she just wouldn't tell me. That
just blew my mind. We had gotten so close. Every day she told me
she loved me. She had sent me naked pictures of herself. She had
told me many times on the phone that she couldn't wait to finally
meet in person and touch me, kiss me, and feel me inside of her. At
this point she should have been able to tell me anything. What
could possibly be so bad that she felt she couldn't talk to me
about it?

Of course when someone says they have a dark
secret, your brain automatically starts imagining all sorts of
worst case scenarios: Maybe she's in a wheelchair? Maybe she has
cancer and she's on chemo and she's bald? Maybe she used to be a
prostitute? And that's were I hit the limits of my imagination. I
couldn't think of anything that would be worse. Anything else, no
matter what, would be less bad than those 3 scenarios.

For the next few sleepless nights, I tried
to play out each of those scenarios in my head. I tried to be
honest with myself about how I would feel if she was in a
wheelchair, with everything that entails. We would never be able to
travel or go out to eat or go to the beach like a normal couple.
The wheelchair would dominate every aspect of life. Everything
would be a hassle. Everything would be complicated. And sex with
her probably would never be the way I had pictured it in my head
when we had phone sex.

But ultimately none of that mattered to me.
I read somewhere that falling in love with someone through letters
or on the phone is the truest form of love, because you are in love
with the actual person, with their true essence. You are in love
with their mind, not their body. And I really cared about Donna
after all the time we had spent talking to each other. I figured I
would be a pretty shallow asshole if I would let a disability
change my feelings for her. That's not the kind of person I want to
be. And I'm not. So I was going to stick by her, wheelchair and
all.