A drug addicted hooker will tell some random guy after having sex with him two or three times that she loves him, because she knows that if he believes it, he will end up being her braindead goon who will do almost anything for her, like give her money if she claims she is about to get evicted, or her cell phone is about to get shut off, or her baby hasn't eaten in two days, or she needs to get bailed out of jail, or she supposedly needs an abortion.
Not every guy is stupid enough to fall for the big love lie. But if a hooker tells enough guys that she loves them, one or two lonely guys are bound to fall for it. It's almost like going fishing. Or phishing. Phreakers used to play the same game when they tried to get people's credit cards. Not everyone fell for the big lie, that the hacker was an employee at the credit card company's fraud department and needed the victim's personal information to examine some unusual activity on their account. But there always were a few gullible people, so if the hacker kept calling enough people, and kept repeating the same lie often enough, eventually he ran into someone who fell for it.
I like to believe that Alice really did love me. But who knows. Maybe I was just another sucker.
Anyway, I did what the officer told me: I searched for her on Backpage, in case she had posted an escort ad. Nothing. I contacted all of Alice's friends. Nobody knew where she was. Not even Becky or Mary. I even called Kat. Then I called Enrique, her drug dealer. I guess I should have started with him.
He seemed nervous when he heard my voice: "Look man, I want no trouble with you. And I don't want to get in the middle of this."
"Don't worry," I replied. "I just need to know if you have seen Alice or you know where she is."
"Uhh, yeah, she's been coming around every day, buying dope from me. Look, even if I didn't sell it to her, she would get it from someone else. At least I know my stuff is good. She's staying with some old lady she met in rehab."
Once he told me that, I hacked his phone and got Alice's new number. Then I hacked her new phone and saw who she had been talking to and where she was staying. At the Super 8 in Newburgh.
She had called all her old "clients" and went right back to escorting, even without posting on Backpage. She was in some sort of weird relationship with that old lady. Maybe she felt that the old lady was a substitute for her mother, and giving that lady drugs would make her love Alice the way her mother never loved her. I don't know.
I called Alice's new number a bunch of times. She kept ignoring me. Then, finally, after a few days, she answered the phone. I tried to convince her to let me take her back to rehab. No chance. Then I asked her to at least come home with me. Nope. Wasn't gonna happen. When we were together, she had been the sweetest girl in the world. When we said good bye at the rehab admission office, everything was ok between us, and we were about to move to Florida after she got out of rehab, and we were going to live happily ever after.
But now she was suddenly acting like a total bitch. Like I was her worst enemy. Well, in her drug-crazed mind I was. I was the guy trying to get in between her and what she loved most in the world: her drugs. That made me the bad guy in her eyes. The way she talked to me reminded me of a dog growling at me because I'm trying to take away his bone.
Alice's friend Becky was worried about her, too. So she kept calling me to find out if I had found her yet. I told her that I had talked to Alice, but she didn't want to come home. Becky asked for Alice's new number, so maybe she could talk some sense into her. But Alice wouldn't answer the phone for Becky either.
Becky and I started talking every day, and we ended up hanging out a few times. Becky was really nice, but of course it didn't take me long until I realized that Becky wasn't just concerned about her missing friend Alice, or trying to cheer me up because I was so heartbroken and needed a shoulder to cry on, but that in the back of her head she figured it couldn't hurt to get on my good side now that I was unexpectedly single.
Oh, and guess who I found on Backpage while searching for Alice. Linda, the scam artist who had conned me into paying for her fake abortion not just once but twice about a year and a half earlier. Apparently she had moved from answering personal ads and scamming unsuspecting guys, to placing escort ads. Aaand she now had a new baby girl! Just a few months old. At first I thought I suddenly had a baby daughter. But Linda said it wasn't mine. Once I did the math, I found out that Linda had already been pregnant before I met her. She told me she was sorry for scamming me into giving her money for an abortion by pretending it was my baby back then. She said she really had planned to get an abortion, but then she changed her mind.
When I asked her about what made her start escorting on Backpage, and whether she was on drugs, she said she wasn't. I didn't believe her. She was way too squirrely to be sober. She told me that she wasn't proud of being an escort, but she just couldn't find a regular job, so she did what she had to do. "It is what it is," she said. I hate when girls who escort use that phrase as if it justifies everything.
She told me she hated doing that stuff, because no self-respecting guy wants to be in a serious relationship with a whore, so it was a very lonely life. And most of the guys who tricked with hookers made these girls feel like shit. There were even online forums, where guys rated girls on their looks and their "skills." I had found some reviews of Alice. It broke my heart to read what a bunch of random strangers had to say about having sex with my little Alice.
Linda agreed that a lot of these guys enjoyed being cruel in their reviews. They liked the sense of power they got from talking about a girl like she was a piece of meat or a toy. Linda told me she tried not to let her bad reviews get under her skin, but that wasn't easy, because she was ashamed even of her good reviews. She told me that after getting too many complaints, she had even learned to allow random guys to cum in her mouth and swallow. Something that had always made her gag and throw up in the past.
I had called her, just in case she might know where Alice was, because Alice and Kat had told me a long time ago that most of the girls on Backpage know each other. But Linda didn't know Alice. She hadn't been in this "business" long enough yet.
Like Becky, Linda also figured it couldn't hurt to get friendly with me again, now that I was single. So Linda started calling me almost every day, acting concerned and offering me her shoulder to cry on. She had a lot of insights into the mind of an addict and told me that I shouldn't take what Alice did to me personal, because that's just what addicts do. I told her she knew way too much about drugs and the drug mentality for a sober person. She finally admitted that she "used to" smoke crack and had been in rehab for it. I was pretty sure she didn't want to admit that she had relapsed, and her crack addiction had made her resort to escorting. I felt bad for her young son and baby daughter.
I had bought and sold about 4 or 5 condos in the Grandview Palace in Liberty. I decided to sell the last one, the one Alice and I had been living in. I made up my mind to finally end things for good with her. Well, actually she had made up my mind for me, since she was the one who broke up with me and refused to come home. Anyway, I got rid of that condo and moved to Florida.
WELCOME TO FORT MISERY
"You come to Fort Myers on vacation, leave on probation, and come back on a violation."
Unknown
Bonita Springs, and the whole Southwest Florida metro area, from Fort Myers to Naples, had seemed like paradise, the few times Alice and I came here together. We thought it was the perfect getaway to escape the drugs in New York. We had no idea that Fort Myers has a drug problem that is probably even worse than in New York.
Everything that had happened to me before I moved to Florida was about to seem like child's play, compared to the bizarre things that were about to happen next.
Alice and I had planned to renovate the condo in Bonita Springs together. She loved the way I had decorated the mansion in the Poconos, so we planned to recreate the interior of that big house in the condo in Florida, only on a smaller scale.
But when I arrived in Florida, I
was so heartbroken, miserable and depressed, the last thing I wanted to do was start some big renovation project. Especially not all alone. I didn't feel like doing anything. Nothing seemed to bring me any kind of joy. I tried cheering myself up by going to the beach. But when I got there, I couldn't wait to go home and wallow in misery in the privacy of my own home. Movies couldn't hold my attention, and video games seemed boring and pointless. Nothing I used to enjoy could cheer me up.
I spent hours lying on the floor or on the bed, just staring at the ceiling. I wasn't even thinking about anything. My mind was blank, and I just stared at nothing. And before I knew it, the day was over. This went on day after day. Life was painful. I felt like I was never going to be happy again. Like there was no point to even go on living. I wasn't really suicidal. I wasn't thinking about killing myself. But continuing to live and be this miserable seemed so pointless.
As a child, when all that stuff with my alcoholic father was going on, I often felt trapped by my problems, like a bird in a cage. When things were really bad, I thought about killing myself, and ending all my problems. I began to look at suicide as an emergency exit from my cage. I told myself that if I really couldn't take it anymore, I could leave the cage at any time. Suddenly I didn't feel so powerless anymore. Now I had a choice.
Every time I faced another situation that made me miserable, I asked myself if it was so unbearable that I should just leave my problems behind by escaping through my emergency exit. But now that I had a choice, and I no longer felt like the powerless victim of circumstances that were beyond my control, my problems really didn't seem all that bad anymore.
Was a bad grade on my math test really worth killing myself over? No, of course not. In a few weeks or months from now, this math test would be long forgotten. The thought that I could commit suicide if I really wanted to, was actually comforting to me. It helped me put trivial little problems into perspective. Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's all small stuff. In the grand scheme of things, almost nothing that happens ever really matters in the long run. I still have the same laid back attitude today. I guess once your own dad tries to kill you, nothing else seems all that scary anymore.
So I didn't really want to kill myself after losing Alice. But I didn't really want to go on living either. I didn't eat for 8 days. Not because I wanted to starve myself to death, but because I just wasn't hungry, and I had no interest in food. My world was not ok without Alice.
Have you ever played Silent Hill? Your game character explores a haunted village, cut off from the rest of a world by a mysterious fog. Every now and then your character falls into a different dimension, where the same village now looks grotesque and evil. Like the whole world has cancer. That's how I felt without Alice. It was still the same world, but somehow everything was different.
When I had been hanging out with Liz the yoga pothead about a year or two earlier, she was very self-conscious about her body. She was so short that even just a few extra pounds made her look like a chubby garden gnome in her head. As a teenager she had been anorexic, and even when she was in her 20s, she still struggled with her body image.
One day she told me that she was going to go on some kind of new age three day cleansing fast. She was going to eat nothing for three whole days. She claimed it was good for the body and the soul. Plus it's a great way to lose a few extra pounds. She asked me if I wanted to go on the three day fast with her. Well, she had already talked me into smoking pot for the first time, so why the hell not go on some silly three day hunger strike, too? Who knows, maybe I'd like it. (Yeah, right.)
I was fucking STARVING by the end of the first day. I thought each day the hunger pains would get worse and worse. But they didn't. Once your hunger reaches a certain level, it maxes out. It doesn't get worse. You're just really hungry all the time.
After completing the three day fast, I was proud of myself. I had accomplished my goal and resisted temptation. I had cleansed myself. And I had not given into the urge to shove some food in my mouth, no matter how strong that urge was. And when you haven't eaten in three days, a chocolate donut starts to look an awful lot like crack, believe you me.
When Liz and I met at the Sushi restaurant in New Paltz, to celebrate our victory over food, I proudly told her how I had kept telling myself, "food is an addiction, food is an addiction," every time I felt tempted to grab some food and break my promise to myself.
She was suspiciously quiet. Finally she fessed up and admitted that she had relapsed after just one day of staying off food. She hadn't told me, because she felt stupid, and because she didn't want to discourage me. So, like an idiot, I had starved myself for three damn days for no good reason.
Now I was so hungry that I ordered 2 full meals at the Sushi restaurant. When I weighed myself the next morning, I weighed more than before I had started the fast. So starving myself for three days had actually made me gain weight. Go figure.
Anyway, back to my deep dark vortex of depression, after I moved to Florida without Alice. I didn't eat for eight days in a row. And it didn't even bother me. My depression was so intense, it was even stronger than extreme hunger.
And I had nobody. No support network. No close friends who could come over and pat me on the back while I whine about how much I miss Alice. For several weeks, I was a shut in. I didn't want to go outside, because there was nothing out there that interested me. The only two people I talked to on the phone every day were Alice's friend Becky, and Linda the con artist turned hooker. Both were 1200 miles away, in New York. Both of them listened to me whine on the phone for hours every day. That couldn't have been easy. But they called me back every day to comfort me. (And to get their foot in the door.)
After a few weeks, I told myself it couldn't go on like this. If I ever wanted to be happy again, I needed to go out there and meet some new people. Make some friends in Florida.
But I had no ambition to go out on a blind date with some stranger and try to force myself to make small talk. I didn't have the strength to be witty, charming or amusing. And who would want to go out on a date with a sullen, bitter, dull, totally depressed sad sack? Nobody.
It was a vicious cycle. I didn't want to go out and meet someone new, because I was depressed. And as long as I didn't meet someone new, I was going to continue to be depressed.
Finally I had an idea. It seemed like the perfect solution at the time. I was going to approach this like any other problem I had tackled in the past, and take the path of least resistance. I was going to take the easiest shortcut to reach my goal. At this point, my goal was simply to get laid. (Shut up. Don't judge me.)
I figured that having sex would make me forget about how miserable I felt. At least for a little while. And who knows, maybe I'd meet a nice girl, have sex with her a bunch of times, and we'd actually get to know each other, like each other, and we'd end up in a real long term relationship.
In hindsight, that was obviously the dumbest plan ever. But at the time it seemed like a valid approach to ending my depression. (Obviously my cognitive abilities were a little impaired at the time.) So I was going to try to meet a girl that's wife-material by posting an online ad looking for a hoe. What could possibly go wrong?
HUSSY
"Don't trust a hoe, never trust a hoe..."
3OH!3
I posted an online ad, looking for a girl who might be interested in a mutually beneficial relationship. Rrright to the good stuff! She'd get what she really wants, and I'd get what I was looking for, without the tedious hassle of getting to know each other on awkward dates first.
Several girls responded to my ad. Hussy was one of them. Of course her name wasn't really Hussy. But it's my book, so I'm going to call her whatever I want.
Hussy was a short, petite 27-year-old with blonde hair. She wasn't exactly the most beautiful girl in the world, but she wasn't all that bad looking either. She had been in a bad car accident as a teenager, and she was self-conscious about the big, noticeable scars on her pale forehead. About
a year or two later, after we had gotten so close we had planned on moving in together, she revealed that she had lost all her teeth in the accident as well and was wearing dentures. She said only 3 people had ever seen her without her false teeth in: her mother, her baby daddy, and me. Apparently I really did have a way of making girls feel comfortable around me.
Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey Page 21