Finding Happiness in Los Angeles

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  "Yeah, we always break up and get back together." she giggled. "He asked me to marry him. We're gonna go to City Hall next Monday and get married!"

  Unreal. She said it so casually. It just blew my mind how little she cared about how any of this affected me. She did not consider for a second that I might be hurt when I find out she's still fucking Eric and they're making plans to get married. She had been telling me for weeks that she loved me, and the whole entire time it was all just bullshit again. I was just a toy she had been playing with to pass the time when she was bored. I was really no different to her than her stupid hamster.

  "FUUUCK YOUUU!" I yelled and hung up.

  FIFTY SHADES OF CRAPPY PORN

  "In America, sex is an obsession. In other parts of the world it's a fact."

  Marlene Dietrich

  "I come from a place where we're not that shy about our bodies."

  Heidi Klum

  I told Jenny, the girl in San Francisco who had decided to help me find my "Lady Love," about Carmen.

  "You can't trust anyone online," Jenny lectured me. "At least you didn't send that psycho bitch any money. Don't give up. You will find your Lady Love when you least expect it. Or she will find you."

  I know she meant well, but that line was such a cliché. It wasn't very comforting to me. In my experience, good things don't just happen on their own. Bad things do. All the time. But good things you have to make happen.

  I decided to focus on my book. I prepared some ad campaigns to promote it, but then I ran into the problem with censorship again. Americans are obsessed with censoring everything. Not just nudity or curse words. No, even the word Sex is taboo. I couldn't run any ad campaigns for a book with the word Sex in the title.

  So I renamed Sex and Crime into Oliver's Strange Journey. And I split it into three parts, because most people prefer to read three shorter books rather than one really long one.

  Book 1 was called Oliver's Strange Journey and was all about my life in Germany and New York. It ended when Alice ran away from rehab and I moved to Florida.

  Book 2 was called Love is an Addiction. It was about Florida and how I met Veronica.

  Book 3 was called Oliver's Revenge. It was still about Veronica, and how I met Lucy. It ended when I got on the plane to Germany and told myself NO MO HO.

  Recently I changed it again. I called the whole shabang Bad Choices Make Good Stories, because I really liked that title. I gave the first book the sub-title Going to New York. And I combined the second and third book into one, and called it The Heroin Scene in Fort Myers. And that's how they turned into the books that you know today.

  Fifty Shades of Grey was really popular at the time. Like most guys, I didn't understand its appeal to women. What was so great reading about BDSM? We men are visual. Reading about sex doesn't really do it for us. We wanna see the goods. We want close-ups of nipples and pussies and stuff. Why would anyone read porn? Especially when it's censored? Out of curiosity I checked out a sample of Fifty Shades. Let's just say it wasn't my cup of tea.

  Why do women love to read about sexually aggressive billionaire bad boy alpha males but condemn the same behavior in real life?

  In East Germany, they used to have this really crappy car model, called the Trabant, or Trabi as people called it. It was a really bad car. Objectively bad. The engine was bad. The body was bad. It drove bad. The acceleration was bad. Everything about it was bad.

  But millions of people drove it, and even loved it, because they didn't have access to West German cars. For a long time they didn't even know just how bad their Trabi really was, because they had nothing to compare it to. They had no frame of reference.

  Of course when the wall came down, East Germans quickly got rid of their Trabis and bought much better West German cars, because West German cars, like Porsche, Audi, Mercedes and BMW, are objectively good cars. These cars are not even in the same league as a Trabi. They outperform a Trabi in every imaginable way.

  Fifty Shades is a Trabi. It gets the job done. But nothing about it is good by any definition of the word.

  A movie like The Room (the source material for the comedy The Disaster Artist) is objectively a terrible movie. You don't have to study the history of film-making to realize that everything about it screams bad. Fifty Shades is like The Room.

  So why did Fifty Shades become such a huge hit?

  Luck.

  Pure and simple.

  Fifty Shades started out as self-published Twilight fan fiction. It got popular because Twilight was popular. Then a big publisher picked it up, to make money. Sex sells. And then they made a movie, to cash in on the fad. E.L. James was at the right place at the right time. Good for her.

  Fifty Shades became a phenomenon not because it was particularly good, but because it hit the Zeitgeist. America was finally ready for porn to go mainstream.

  Of course it helped that the book boyfriend in Fifty Shades was rich. I doubt it would have become as popular if Christian Grey was a professional burger-flipper.

  It spawned a whole industry of copycats. Tens of thousands of generic imitations that all had one thing in common: the book boyfriend was filthy rich. Because people who love money even get a little dopamine kick when they just think or read about having money. Just like addicts, who get a kick even when they just think or talk about their drug.

  A lot of women dream about finding their Prince Charming. But why does it have to be a prince? Why not Burger-flipper Charming?

  Because a prince is rich. Prince is an old-fashioned word for billionaire. Women have been fantasizing about billionaires long before Fifty Shades. They just called the filthy rich guy a prince back then.

  In the 1960s, Europe went through the age of sexual liberation. Since the 1960s, women in Europe know it's ok that they like sex. Sex is not a bad thing. It's a normal part of life. Like eating and drinking.

  But feminists in Europe didn't just fight for and win the right to enjoy sex. They won on all fronts. Remember Margaret Thatcher? In England they had a female head of state decades before America! We still don't have one! Even a bunch of Muslim countries already had female presidents!

  In Germany, like in many other countries, gender equality and equal rights are further along than here in the States. Women hold more positions of power in business and politics than here in the US. Angela Merkel is just the tip of the iceberg. And there's less of a pay gap between men and women. Most German men are feminists, which simply means we were raised to see women as our equals, who deserve equal rights and equal respect.

  My grandmother was a doctor. My mother was the CEO of a big company. She's my hero and she has always been my best role model. That's why I know that women are every bit as good and smart and hard working as men, if not more so.

  In countries like Germany, Iceland, Sweden or Norway, gender equality is a given, not something to still fight over. And of course it's ok that women like sex. That's why over there people don't use phrases like "slut shaming" or "sex-positive" to separate yourself from the mainstream, who still thinks sex is bad and dirty, like here in America.

  Over there you don't have to identify yourself as sex-positive, because everyone is sex-positive. Like everyone is breathing-positive. Who doesn't love to breathe?

  America is about 50 years behind the times on all that. America is only now going through that sexual liberation. And Fifty Shades played a big part in that.

  Most American women used to think porn is dirty, and if you like it you're a whore. But thanks to Fifty Shades, it's suddenly ok to like porn. Even though many female readers are still too embarrassed to call it porn, so they call it erotica. But both words are synonyms and mean exactly the same thing. Don't believe me? Check Thesaurus.com.

  Both words, porn and erotica, mean sexually explicit material. Erotica is just a much older word. Sexually explicit material has been called erotica for thousands of years. Google Ancient Roman Erotica, or Ancient Greek Erotica or Ancient Egyptian Erotica, and you'll find
all kinds of really really old porn. And it's just as explicit as modern porn.

  And no, the difference is not that erotica has a storyline and porn doesn't. That's just what erotica writers like to say, so they don't have to admit they're writing dirty, filthy porn.

  Why is it so hard for many erotica authors to admit that erotica is porn? Everyone loves porn!

  The average man thinks about sex every tits seconds.

  And plenty of porn has a storyline. Check out the hardcore porno flick Pirates (also known as Pirates XXX). It's an action-adventure porno, produced by Digital Playground and Adam & Eve in 2005.

  The year is 1763. Captain Edward Reynolds is a pirate hunter. He's not a great commander, and his crew knows it. Only his first officer Jules believes in him.

  When they save a young woman named Isabella from drowning, she tells them that her husband's ship has been destroyed by the ruthless Captain Victor Stagnetti and his crew of horny pirates.

  Ohhh, the drama!

  Reynolds and his crew go hunting for Stagnetti, who tries to find a map that leads to a powerful secret on an island somewhere in the Caribbean. Stagnetti finds the secret "staff" unlocked by Isabella's husband Manuel.

  And the plot thickens!

  After the crew escapes the spawn of darkness summoned by Stagnetti, their ship engages Stagnetti's in the climactic battle, ending Stagnetti's reign as a pirate.

  Sounds like your typical erotica novel, doesn't it?

  E.L. James didn't mean to be the catalyst for a sexual revolution. She just wanted to write some pornographic Twilight fan fiction.

  That it became more than that was simply a convergence of circumstances that played out in her favor. It was nothing more than dumb luck, that it was her book, and not some other random crappy porn book, that became the focal point.

  Anyway, one of the other people on Goodreads that I had sent a free copy wrote a long, detailed review. Her name was Shelly.

  What she wrote about my book stood out to me. She really got it. She understood how I felt and why the book was the way it was.

  I sent her a private message and thanked her for taking the time to write such a thoughtful review.

  She wrote back that she knew why the book didn't have a happy ending, and why it just ended with me getting on the plane to Germany, while none of the storylines about the girls had a satisfying conclusion.

  To stick a happy ending at the end of my book about drug addiction, where everyone suddenly gets clean and lives happily ever after, would have been a lie. The point of my book was its honesty and realism.

  There are no happy endings in real life. A person's story doesn't suddenly end when something good happens. If you get married, that's not a happy ending. It's the happy beginning of your next chapter together.

  Ultimately every life is a tragedy that ends in death and grief. Grief is the price we pay for love. But along the way, there are some precious moments of happiness. And it's those fleeting moments that make life worth living.

  I liked the ending of The Sopranos. The screen suddenly went black. In the middle of a scene. Without any of the plotlines having been resolved. That's what real life is like. Everything keeps going, until someone turns off the lights and you're dead. And even then the story continues, without you. There is no such thing as a happy ending.

  The world didn't suddenly stop turning, just because I wanted to get off. I got on the plane to Germany, but everything in Florida continued as before, whether I was there for it or not.

  Shelly totally got that. But she was still dying to know what happened to all the characters in the book, after NO MO HO. So I wrote her a long email and gave her a quick run down of what happened to Lucy and Nicole, Veronica and Wendy, Haley and all the others. Basically I wrote her a brief outline of everything you just read so far in the book you're holding right now.

  Shelly said I should write a sequel, because she probably wasn't the only one who wanted to know what happened next. She was right. A lot of people had told me that. And that they were upset that it didn't have a nice clean happy ending that wrapped everything up neatly.

  "Maybe some day I'll write a sequel. If there actually is something that resembles a happy ending," I replied. "Otherwise it'll be pretty pointless. Just another 500 pages of the same things happening over and over, and there still won't be any kind of satisfying ending."

  We kept writing each other every day. After my Goodreads account was banned because of the trolls, Shelly and I continued our conversation in email.

  She was a voracious reader and loved romance novels.

  Figures!

  I made fun of her for being a Fifty Shades fan.

  We didn't talk about my book much anymore. She was less interested in my past, and more interested in the person I was today. We wrote each other hundreds of emails in a matter of weeks. Dozens a day.

  We talked about anything and everything: Books, movies, TV, art, culture, politics, religion, atheism, astrology, sex, traveling, dating, and whatever else popped into our heads.

  It felt good. I never had a deep conversation about anything meaningful with the drug addicts in Fort Myers.

  They didn't even really know me. All they knew was the part of me that worried about them and their drama. The part of me that catered to their needs. But they never cared enough about me to actually get to know the whole me.

  All they could think about was the next kick, and how to get it.

  Well, to be fair, I think most people are like that. Not just drug addicts.

  Most people are so caught up in the rat race, they don't have time to think about anything else. So they buy their world view off-the-shelf. Pre-packaged. One size fits all. Just add water.

  That's why Fox News, Trump or the NRA are so persuasive to a certain type of people. The non-thinkers.

  They are really good at coming up with catchy oneliners and slogans that can be easily remembered and repeated. When you repeat one of their catchy oneliners, it sounds like you've thought about the issue and now you're sharing your opinion, when in reality you never spent a single minute actually thinking about the issues, and you're just blindly regurgitating what you've been fed.

  They have figured out how to turn propaganda into fast food for the brain. They feed short attention span Republicans an unhealthy diet of easily digestible fast food propaganda slogans, like "America first!"

  There's no time to ponder whether the things we're being told about how the world works are actually true, if the bills are late. And the kids have soccer practice at three. No time to contemplate the meaning of life, or why we do what we do, and think what we think.

  If you call yourself a Christian, I'm sure you've heard the phrase "Jesus died on the cross for our sins" dozens of times. You've probably said it yourself many times.

  But do you even know what it means? Have you ever actually thought about what that sentence means?

  That phrase refers to the ancient pagan ritual of human sacrifice.

  Primitive pagans thought they could transfer all their sins on a goat or a lamb. And if they killed the goat, the sin died with it. That's where the term scapegoat comes from.

  Believing that God was appeased when Jesus died, is no different than killing a virgin on top of a pyramid to appease the gods and make it rain.

  Christianity is based on the pagan ritual of human sacrifice.

  It's primitive superstition that has long been proven wrong. Neither human sacrifice nor prayer will make it rain. And praying to God to stay sober works just as well as praying for less mass shootings. And we all know by now that prayer does absolutely nothing to stop gun violence.

  People don't believe in God because it's true, but because they were the victims of early childhood indoctrination.

  When enough people around you repeat something often enough, of course you start to believe it's true, without ever reflecting on it yourself. It's just easier. Especially if you don't have a lot of time to just sit around and think.
You have places to go, things to do, people to see, stuff to buy. No time for reflection and introspection.

  Shelly and I both were introverts. Introspection is what people like us do for fun. We pondered life's big questions together:

  Do dogs have a sense of humor?

  If you could start your life over again, what would you do differently?

  Would three boobs be better than two?

  Do flat-earthers believe that other planets are also flat?

  If God created man in his image... Does God have a functioning penis? And does God manually handle every penis he creates? Or does he outsource the job to penis-manufacturing elves?