Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey

by Oliver Markus

  Then her letters changed. They looked and sounded different. Sloppy. Like she wasn't really putting all that much effort into them. Or like she was writing them hastily, maybe while trying to hide the fact that she was writing me from some other inmate. Maybe a girl she was dating in there? I found out later that my instincts were right again.

  A week or two later, Veronica told me that she had a fight with some other inmate, and that the other girl threatened to write me a letter, to tell me what Veronica was up to in jail. Veronica was clearly worried that I would be upset about the letter, and she swore that whatever the other girl was going to write me, was all lies.

  I told Veronica that if there was anything I should know about what she was doing in jail behind my back, it would come out sooner or later, and that it was better if I hear it from her, rather than from someone else.

  In her next letter, Veronica wrote that she had made a friend in jail. Her name was Theresa. She said she didn't mean for it to happen. Right there she gave herself away again. People only say that kind of thing if they cheat, not if they simply make an innocent friend.

  She wrote that she needed a female companion in her life to be truly happy, but that I didn't have to worry about it, because she still loved me and wanted to be with me, but she was going to do things with Theresa, that she couldn't do with me.

  Apparently she really thought that was an acceptable thing to write, and didn't even realize how badly it hurt me. When I'm in a relationship with someone, that girl is the center of my world. She's not just my lover, but also my best friend and confidant. She is closer to me than any other person in the world. There is nothing I could do with someone else that I can't do with her.

  And here Veronica was telling me that she was gonna do all the things with Theresa, that she couldn't do with me. That obviously implied that she felt closer to Theresa than to me. I was always going to be the third wheel.

  Rather than trying to explain that with a million words, and risk being misunderstood, I decided to show Veronica exactly how I felt when she wrote me that stuff about Theresa.

  I wrote her a letter back, and wrote pretty much exactly the same stuff she had written me. I wrote that I had met a new friend, and that her name was Faith. Faith didn't really exist. I made her up. She was simply a mirror image of Theresa. But of course I didn't tell Veronica that. I made her believe Faith was a real person.

  I told Veronica that I didn't mean for it to happen, but that I needed a friend like Faith in my life, because with her I can do all the things that I can't do with Veronica. Veronica and Theresa had been living together in the same dorm for weeks, so I told her Faith and I had been spending a lot of time together every day for the past few weeks.

  Veronica had asked me how I would feel about her "occasionally" having sex with Theresa and if I would be ok with that. The concept of being faithful to someone seemed foreign to her. So when I wrote her back, I asked her if it was ok if I had sex with Faith every now and then. I wrote that it would work out perfectly, because then I could do all the things with Faith that Veronica may not want to do with me. Like, if Veronica didn't like going to museums, I could do that with Faith. And if Veronica didn't like anal, I could do that with Faith, too.

  When Veronica got my letter, she freaked out. She was livid. She threatened to beat the shit out of Faith. "I'm gonna drag a ho!" she screamed on the phone. She was sooo upset and jealous about Faith moving in on her man. Then I told her that Faith didn't really exist, and she was really just an imaginary mirror image of Theresa that I had created to show Veronica how her letter made me feel.

  Finally it sunk in, and she said I really fucked with her head. She said she understood now why all that stuff with Theresa was not ok. She told me she would never cheat on me with Theresa or anyone else. She said she was 100% faithful to me and I had nothing to worry about. Later I found out she was lying to me the whole time, and that Veronica and Theresa were officially a couple and had been dating in jail for months.

  But at the time I didn't know that yet. I did get more and more suspicious though, because I caught Veronica in more and more lies and keeping secrets. Kayla had told me a few months earlier that girls in jail date each other and have sex with each other all the time.

  I didn't tell Veronica I knew that was going on. I just asked her, if girls in jail have sex with each other. She said: "No of course not. Don't be ridiculous. This isn't a youth hostel. It's jail. You can't have sex here."

  She was clearly lying. And why would she lie about that, unless she was having sex with someone in jail and didn't want me to know about it?

  Kayla always told me the latest gossip that was going on in jail, about who was making out with each other, who got caught writing love letters, who was taking showers together, and so on and so forth.

  But Veronica kept her jail life completely secret. I realized later that she was afraid she might accidentally let slip out a bit of information that would reveal that she was dating Theresa. So she figured the less she told me about what was happening inside the jail, the better. But the more I realized that she was purposely keeping things from me, the more suspicious I got.

  While she was cheating on me all this time with Theresa, I really had been 100% faithful to Veronica. I had never cheated on Donna in over 15 years of marriage, and I wasn't going to cheat on Veronica either. I completely stopped talking to any other girls. I wouldn't even answer the phone when Haley or Crystal or any other girl tried to call me.

  A lot of people say Romeo and Juliet is the most romantic love story every told. I disagree. I think seeing an old couple who has been married for 40 years is way more romantic. They truly are each other's best friends and soulmates. They truly have grown together as one, like one soul in two bodies. That's beautiful.

  That's the kind of relationship I want to have. I want to grow old with someone. I want to go through life together, face storms together, enjoy the happy little moments together, and be there for each other always. But in order to have a loyal partner, you have to be a loyal partner. You can't expect someone to be loyal to you, if you're not loyal to them.

  Unfortunately people who have abandonment issues don't grasp that simple concept. People like Veronica, who have been abused and abandoned by their parents at an early age, believe that if their own parents don't love them enough not to leave them, then nobody will ever love them enough, and everyone will leave them eventually. And being abandoned or betrayed like that hurts terribly.

  Nobody has ever killed themselves over a broken arm. But every day, thousands of people kill themselves because of a broken heart. Why? Because emotional pain hurts much worse than physical pain.

  When someone you love leaves you or betrays you, it hurts like nothing else in the world. I know, because I went through it with Alice. Queen Elizabeth II of England once said: "Grief is the price we pay for love." So true.

  People who have been abused or abandoned during early childhood, people like Veronica and all the other drug addicted inmates in LCJ, are so scared of being abandoned and hurt again that they are afraid of real relationships. Many of them prefer to be in shallow, meaningless, fake relationships, because they think those relationships can't hurt them. Someone you don't really care about can't really hurt you all that bad when they leave you or cheat on you. But those meaningless fake relationships leave you empty inside. You will never find real love like that, because you will never develop a deep, meaningful bond with someone.

  They all want to find someone who will truly love them and never leave them, but they don't even realize that by acting slutty, and bouncing from one shallow fake relationship to the next, always cheating, never faithful, they're sabotaging themselves. Nobody will ever take you seriously as a potential life partner, if all you ever do is cheat on people and jump from one shallow relationship to the next.

  And yet that's all the love-starved drug addicted girls in LCJ do. They're afraid to put all their eggs in one basket and really commi
t to one person. One day they profess eternal love for this person, and the next day they proclaim they are madly in love with the next person. And they constantly cheat on everybody with everybody else. They really have no idea what love actually is, because they don't know how to really bond with another human being. They confuse sex with love.

  And that's exactly what Veronica was doing, just like all her so-called friends. They all had dated each other in various combinations. And most of them had dated the same guys, usually dope boys, at one point or another. They all supposedly loved each other, and then cheated on each other 5 minutes later.

  Veronica wasn't just cheating on me with Theresa. She was cheating on Theresa with a dyke (or a "stud" as dykes in jail like to call themselves) who was known as Snickers. I guess she liked those candy bars a lot. She had short blonde hair and she liked to say she looked like Justin Bieber. Everyone in jail knew Snickers. She had gotten arrested so often, she had spent more time of her young life inside of jail than out. She looked like a boy. She had dated pretty much every girl in jail at one point or another, because she was just as love-starved as everyone else in LCJ. And now she and Veronica were dating, too. Behind Theresa's and my back.

  Snickers thought Veronica had broken up with Theresa. But then she realized that Veronica was still cheating on her with Theresa. Theresa and Snickers both got really pissed at Veronica, and decided to date each other to make Veronica jealous. It worked. She was really upset about it and wrote me letters about how depressed she was. But she didn't tell me what exactly she was depressed about. I didn't find all this out until much later. At the time I thought she was simply depressed about being in jail, so I tried to cheer her up by sending her funny postcards every day.

  She told me that Snickers was a stalker who wouldn't leave her alone. At the same time she told Snickers that I was a stalker who wouldn't leave her alone. Veronica told me that she wanted to get a tattoo with my name right over her pussy. At the same time she told Snickers she wanted to get her name tattooed over her pussy. She told me she couldn't wait to get out of jail and cuddle up with me under her pink Disney princess blanket. She told Snickers exactly the same thing.

  That's how Veronica operated. She threw herself at a bunch of different people and kept telling them all that she loves them. And then, when someone finally said it back, she acted like they were chasing after her instead. She talked shit about them behind their backs, and acted like she wanted nothing to do with them while she was around other people. It was her way of trying to make herself feel wanted, powerful and in control.

  While all this stuff between Veronica, Snickers and Theresa was going on, Veronica was also sending love letters to a bunch of other girls. She was fishing. She was throwing herself at a dozen different people at the same time, selling everyone dreams, using the same lines with everyone, hoping someone would actually love her back for real. She was desperate for love, and she was always worried that whoever she was with would leave her once they got to know the real her, so in every one of her fake relationships, she was always with one foot out the door right from the start, always looking for the next fake relationship already. She thought she was completely unlovable, because not even her own parents loved her. So why would anyone else ever really love her?

  In all her fake relationships, she actually bribed people to be with her. She bribed guys with sex. And she bribed girls by giving them drugs, or candy while she was in jail. She thought nobody would ever want to be with her, unless she had something to offer them.

  While living on the street, she had sex with a bunch of different guys for money, so that she could use the money to buy drugs for herself and her girlfriend, which was always another crackhead. Of course the only thing the other crackhead really cared about was crack. So as long as Veronica fed them drugs, they pretended to be her girlfriend, even if they weren't gay at all.

  But as soon as Veronica had nothing to offer them, they moved on to the next person who would give them money or drugs, unless she left them first. There was no loyalty, no love among any of them, although they all constantly threw around the word love. And the more Veronica dated other crackheads, the more she reinforced the idea in her head that everyone will leave her sooner or later, and nobody will ever truly love her. It was really sad to watch.

  At one point, right after she had told me that she wanted to be my girlfriend, she asked me to log into her Facebook account and link both of our accounts in a relationship. She couldn't remember her password, but her phone was set up to automatically log into her Facebook. She asked me to get her belongings, including her phone, out of the jail's property storage.

  Once I picked up her phone, I went through all her text messages. I was being nosy. Shoot me. What I found shocked me. While she had been in the hospital, she threw herself at every single person in her contacts, male or female. She told everyone she loved them and wanted to be in a relationship with them. She was hoping that someone, anyone, would say it back. That's how desperately lonely she was. And she was networking, hoping other junkies, who "love" her, would bring her drugs into the hospital. It worked.

  A bunch of her so-called friends brought her crack and Dilaudid pills, or "Ds." Those are even stronger opiates than the oxycodone Blues. She was also on a Dilaudid IV drip in the hospital, because of the excruciating pain in her leg. Between all the drugs she was doing, she was more fucked up in the hospital, than she had ever been while living on the streets, bouncing from one cheap motel to the next.

  Then I found text messages that proved she had been having sex with guys while she was in the hospital. One of her johns texted her how much he enjoyed eating out her pussy in her hospital bed. Her mother Rachel later told me Veronica not only had sex with johns, but with some of the doctors, too. How sick is that?

  But Rachel was by no means innocent. The text messages that shocked me the most were the ones that involved her. Rachel was a benzo addict. She was hooked on Xanax and alcohol. When she mixed those, she completely blacked out. And she had turned her daughter into an addict by feeding her Xanax whenever she had a bad hair day at school, or felt anxious, like teenagers with low self-esteem often do. When Xanax didn't do the trick anymore, Veronica moved on to harder drugs, until she ended up on heroin and crack. And Veronica learned from her mother how to survive by manipulating men with sex. Like mother, like daughter.

  Veronica and Rachel had such a disturbed relationship, they really didn't act like mother and daughter at all. They were drug buddies.

  Both of them were tall, skinny and beautiful, and they had the same strange rivalry that I had noticed between Alice and her mother. Like I said, the more time I spent around drug addicts, the more I saw the same situations repeat themselves over and over. Only the names changed.

  Rachel pretended to be holier than thou when I had met her at the hospital, but now in the text messages on Veronica's phone, I could see that Rachel not only knew about Veronica having sex with guys for money and drugs, but encouraged it, because she benefited from it. Whenever Veronica had drugs, Rachel got some. Veronica was Rachel's most reliable source for her own drugs. Rachel left the dirty work up to her daughter. In the past, Veronica had sex with johns for money or with dope boys for drugs right in Rachel's house, and Rachel not only knew about it, but got a cut.

  The most recent text messages in the phone were from Veronica's stay in the hospital, right before she went to jail. She and her mother Rachel were texting back and forth about buying drugs from dope boys who visited Veronica in the hospital. Her condition was so critical, the doctors thought about amputating her leg to save her life. She was literally on her death bed. Meanwhile her mother made Veronica meet dope boys and buy drugs for her. On her death bed! Rachel gave her money for drugs, to get Xanax, but gave her a few extra dollars, which Veronica used to buy herself more crack and Ds.

  During one of these text conversations, one dope boy had been delayed, so Rachel was afraid he'd be a no show, and told Veronica to cal
l another one. Then both of the dope boys showed up, and Rachel told Veronica to meet one of them in her hospital room, while Rachel would meet the other one in the parking lot.

  With a mother like Rachel, who could blame Veronica for being a totally screwed up train wreck?

  When I found out Veronica was cheating on me with Theresa and then with Snickers, and that she had been throwing herself at a dozen other girls as well, I just felt sorry for her. I should have been livid, because my so-called girlfriend was a total whore, cheating on me nonstop. Instead I felt bad for her, because she was so damaged, and this behavior was all she knew. She was beautiful, smart, and had so much potential, but she was a totally broken human being.