Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (6 page)

A hacker from the competing crew Legion, who
was loyal to Tammy's online board, and hated my guts for the things
I had written about his crew in Sex and Crime, began to spread the
rumor that that wasn't really me in the picture. He claimed that it
was a picture of a male model from a fashion catalog. He didn't
even seem to realize that he was actually flattering me in his
attempt to insult me.

He had some kind of heart condition, and he
had received a heart transplant. In retaliation for him trying to
spread rumors about me, I spread the rumor that his new heart was
actually a pig's heart. He died a few years later, at a pretty
young age. And to this day the one thing many sceners still
remember about him is that he was the recipient of a pig heart
transplant.

Not one of my finer moments.

Anyway, since other hackers couldn't get to
me with their online insults, they attacked Donna instead, and
tried to get to me that way. Things got really ugly, but I always
stuck up for her.

Then one day Donna told me that the rumors
they were spreading about her were actually true. I was speechless.
As it turned out, her deep dark secret was that Jeff wasn't really
her roommate. He was her husband. And she wasn't really 22 like she
had told everyone in the hacking scene. She was actually 32. Twelve
years older than me!

MY FIRST STREET FIGHT IN NEW YORK

"I am never proud to participate in violence, yet I
know that each of us must care enough for ourselves that we can be
ready and able to come to our own defence when and wherever
needed."

Maya Angelou

It took me a couple of days to digest the
fact that the girl I had been talking to on the phone for a year
wasn't who I thought she was, and she had been lying to me this
whole time.

But then I remembered those three worst case
scenarios I had contemplated earlier. Was the fact that she was 12
years older than me really worse than her being in a wheelchair or
having cancer? No, of course not. Her age really didn't make any
difference at all. She was still the same Donna I had been talking
to for a year. She was still the same person who knew everything
about me at this point, and who could always make me smile.

At this point we still had not met in person
yet, and now I understood why she had been hesitant about meeting.
But now that her secret was out, I figured we finally needed to
meet. I decided to surprise her.

I told her I was going to work, like every
morning. And, like every morning, we were going to stay connected
on the phone until I get home from work.

But I didn't really go to work that morning.
I went to the airport, got on a plane and flew to New York for the
first time. I rented a car and drove to Donna's house. I got there
about 8 hours after I had told her I was going to work. So she was
expecting me to get home from work and say hello on the phone any
minute now. Instead I knocked on her door.

She didn't answer. I kept knocking. Finally
she poked her head out the window and saw me standing there,
wearing my new round John Lennon sunglasses that I had told her
about on the phone a day earlier. She looked at me like I was a
ghost. At first it didn't register in her brain who I was. How
could that possibly be me standing in front of her door in New
York? She thought she was connected to me on the phone in Germany
and that I was going to get home from work any second now. Then she
yelled I should wait for her in the car and she'd be right out. She
had to get dressed first.

I sat in the car for about half an hour
until she finally came out. She got into the car and didn't know
what to say. She just stared at me. Then she said that after
talking to me on the phone for a year, finally seeing me in person
felt like she was looking at a movie star. It felt unreal. We were
both nervous. Then we hugged and kissed.

After a little while we both relaxed a
little. We drove to the park that was one block away from her house
and sat in the grass and talked. She was finally her old self and
yelled at me for surprising her like that. But she was really happy
that we finally met and we were laughing and kissing and having a
great time. Once we got used to sitting in front of each other and
not just talking on the phone, we both realized that we really did
know each other very well after talking to each other for a
year.

It was getting really late so I had to drive
her back to her house. On the way she asked me to pull over. It was
dark. She said she wanted to sit in the backseat with me and hang
out for a little while longer. She took a map that was lying in the
rental car and covered the window that was facing the sidewalk.
Then she opened my zipper while we were kissing. She started to
stroke my dick until I got hard and then gave me a blowjob. After
over a year of knowing each other, this was the first time we had
real sex, not just talking about it on the phone. And the way she
sucked me was exactly like she had always described it: Slow and
tender, with feeling. It felt amazing. But I was so nervous, I
couldn't cum.

When I finally drove her back to her house,
Jeff came out, yelling and screaming. He had obviously been waiting
for us by the window. After Donna had finally told me the truth
about being married, she told me that she and Jeff were married on
paper, but not really. She said she had met him a few years ago and
they were both lonely, so they decided to get married for financial
reasons and live together, and split the rent and bills, but that
they were really just roommates. She said they slept in separate
rooms and never had sex. She emphasized again and again that she
and Jeff weren't really married married.

Apparently Jeff didn't get the memo. He was
pretty fucking pissed that his wife was out all night with some guy
from Germany. He confronted me and told me to get out of the car.
Donna kept yelling at him not to make a scene. I was pretty
startled by the whole situation. This was the first time I was in
America, the first time I was in New York, and here I am, on the
first day, entangled in a street brawl, about to get my ass kicked,
because I just had sex with a married woman. What the fuck just
happened?

Jeff asked me if I knew that Donna was with
him. I didn't really know how to answer that. So I said, "yeah, I
guess." I was gonna go into how she had told me that they were not
really together, but before I got a chance to say anything else, I
already had his fist in my face.

Everything after that was just a blur. I'm
not a street fighter. I'm not a redneck or a thug. I'm a thinker. I
grew up living a pretty sheltered life. Well, apart from the FBI
raids and my dad almost killing me. I went to an elite private
catholic school. I lived in a good neighborhood. I didn't go to
bars or clubs. So I was almost never in any kind of situation that
would lead to a real fight.

Up until that point in my life, I had really
only been in three actual fights, and all of them were over in a
split second.

In junior high, some bully, who was two or
three years older and a lot bigger than me, kept picking on me
every chance he got. One day he tried to choke me from behind, so I
grabbed his arm, threw him over my shoulder with some kind of Judo
move that I had seen in a movie somewhere, and when he landed on
the ground, I punched him in the face as hard as I could. I knocked
out one of his front teeth. After that, neither he nor anyone else
at that school ever bothered me again.

My parents moved a lot, so I had to change
schools a few times. At the new high school I didn't know anyone
yet, so during the 5 minute breaks inbetween classes, I just sat
quietly at my desk and drew comics. The jocks in that class used to
take the cloth the teachers used to wipe the chalk board and make
it wet and tie it into a tight knot, so that it became almost as
hard as a baseball, and then threw it at the smaller kids in class
as hard as they could, to torment them. They thought it was
hilarious.

I was still sitting at my desk in the back
corner of the room, drawing, and politely asked them to please not
throw it at me. Of course that only made them want to do it more.
So next thing I know, that wet hard cloth ball suddenly landed on
my drawing and ruined it.

I had seen some prison movie, where some new
inmate had learned that in order to get respect in prison, you
should pick a fight with the biggest, baddest motherfucker as soon
as you get there. That way everyone will think you're a loose
cannon and leave you alone.

I figured that sounds like a good idea right
about now. So I took that cloth ball, walked up to the biggest jock
in class, who had thrown it at me, and shoved it in his face as
hard as I could. He flipped out and tried to beat the shit out of
me. He was a lot bigger than me, but I held my own and managed to
wrestle him to the ground and hold him down in a headlock. I was
scared, because I knew if the teacher for the next class didn't
show up soon, I was gonna get my ass kicked bad.

The jock was screaming for his buddies to
help him get me off him, but they actually stayed out of it and
laughed. They told him that he started it by throwing the cloth
ball at me even though I asked him not to. When the teacher finally
came, he separated us. The jock gave me some dirty looks during
class, but afterwards he came over to me and we shook hands. He
said that he respected that I stood up to him and that we were
cool.

After that little incident, nobody at that
school ever picked another fight with me and I got along great with
everybody. Apparently the things you learn from prison movies
really do have real world applications. Who knew?

My third and last fight in high school also
happened during one of those 5 minute breaks between classes. We
were all standing in a narrow hallway in front of the chemistry
lab, waiting for the teacher to get there and unlock the door. We
were all bored, so a bunch of the halfwitted knuckle-draggers in my
class started to shove each other against the walls and other
students.

When I was born, I had a hole in my heart.
The oxygen-poor blood in one half of my heart mixed with the
oxygen-rich blood in the other half. So there wasn't enough oxygen
in the blood that was circulating through my body, and my lips and
fingernails were blue. Some doctors told my parents I would die,
unless I get surgery to close the hole. Other doctors told my
parents that a baby cannot survive that kind of heart surgery, so
if they put me under the knife, I would probably die from that. So
my parents took their chances with the less invasive option, and
decided not to put me through surgery. The hole finally closed on
its own.

After that my heart still went out of rhythm
sometimes, for no good reason. From one second to the next, it just
shifts into overdrive and starts pounding like crazy, like I just
ran a marathon. Even when I'm sitting perfectly still. It can
happen after I drink soda that has a lot of caffeine, or I eat
chocolate. Or it can happen if someone shoves me.

So while we were all standing in that
hallway, waiting for the teacher to get there, I told the
knuckle-draggers not to shove me, because of my heart. Of course
that only made to them want to do it more. You'd think I'd have
figured out by then that telling a teenager not to do something
always has the opposite effect.

Anyway, some guy shoved me against the wall
as hard as he could, for laughs. So I grabbed him, turned him
around so he would face the opposite wall, and shoved him, as hard
as I could, face first against that wall. I broke his skull by
accident. He had to go to the hospital. I was suspended for a week.
Luckily the other kids vouched for me and told the principal that I
didn't start it and that I specifically told the other kid not to
shove me because of my heart. After that, once again, nobody ever
messed with me again.

But let's get back to Jeff and Donna. So
here we were, standing on the sidewalk in New York, and this guy
took a swing at me. I'm 6 feet tall and not exactly scrawny.
Although I don't ever start a fight, I can defend myself, if I have
to. And Jeff was a lot shorter than me, and he was really just a
little wet noodle. That fight was over in less than 10 seconds.
Somehow I grabbed him, knocked him to the ground with a leg sweep,
and sat on his chest with his head between my knees. I had no idea
what I was doing, but I sure looked good while doing it.

I grabbed his hair with one hand and made a
fist with my other hand and was about to bash his face in, while
screaming at him that I was gonna beat the shit out of him. He got
really scared and backed down. It's not like he had much of a
choice. Since he didn't try to fight back any more at that point, I
didn't punch him in the face and got off his chest.

He got up and walked back in the house
without saying another word. My adrenaline was pumping like crazy.
What a bizarre night this was! Like I said, I lived a pretty
sheltered, well-mannered, calm life as a teenager in Germany.
Especially after my dad had died and my mother had married my
stepdad. The most exciting thing that might happen on any given day
was that the grocery store at the corner had a new milkshake
flavor. I definitely wasn't used to having sex with a married woman
in New York and then getting into a street fight with her
husband.