I thought I could fix her. I believed that if only I hung in there long enough and showered her with love, affection and kindness, if only I could show here that not everyone was going to leave her or use her, then one day she would snap out of being such a lying, cheating, selfish, sociopathic whore. If I could show her unconditional love, and if I could get her to bond with me in a deep, meaningful way, I could save her from the drugs and from her own self-destructive behavior, I thought. I was a poster child for codependency.
Anyway, I didn't know at the time what she was doing behind my back while she was dating Theresa and then Snickers. Now, after 7 months in jail, her time was almost up. She had been sentenced to serve jail time followed by a six month rehab program. So upon her release she was going to have to stay at the Salvation Army. I was really worried about it, because I figured whatever she may or may not have done behind my back in confinement was going to be much worse once she had more freedom. And that's exactly what happened.
HALEY'S EMERGENCIES
"One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody."
"Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat."
"Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own."
Mother Teresa
I was faithful to Veronica, so I hadn't talked to Haley, Crystal or any other girl in months. By now Haley had realized that this was no coincidence, and that I was ignoring her phone calls on purpose. During one of our last conversations I had told her that I had met Veronica. Since I was used to being completely open with Haley, I also told her that I had a feeling that there was something going on between Veronica and her new "friend" Theresa, and that I felt kinda stupid for being faithful to Veronica, while I was pretty sure that she was cheating on me.
Haley was heartbroken when I kept ignoring her calls after that. She and I had been through so much together. We had been so close. She felt I was the only person in the world who really cared about her. And now I was giving her the cold shoulder, like she was nothing, because I was in some bullshit relationship with a jail whore who cheated on me the whole time.
Haley left me a bunch of really sad voicemails on my phone, whenever I ignored her calls. One time she sobbed: "Why are you treating me this way? Why are you just ignoring me? I love you. Veronica doesn't give a shit about you. She's just using you. You and I have known each other for so long now. Why don't you love me the way you love her? What does she have that I don't have? I wish someone would love me as much as you love her."
That voicemail broke my heart. I hated the thought that Haley was in pain because of me. I really did care about her a lot. I did love her. But I had never really thought of her in a girlfriend kind of way, because she was so bad on drugs. I didn't think she was interested, or even capable of being in a relationship, because she was so high on crack or heroin or alcohol all the time. I don't think I had seen her sober for even one minute in the past year or two. And she was getting worse and worse.
In the beginning, Haley and I had still been able to do normal things together when she stayed at my house to get away from her miserable life on Palm Beach for a little while. But lately she had just been hiding in the bathroom for hours, smoking every bit of crack that she had brought with her. It was supposed to last her all night, until the next morning, but instead she smoked it all at once. Every damn time.
When she finally ran out of crack, she'd come out of the bathroom and ask me to take her back to Palm Beach or Ione. That was bad enough. But then she'd beg me to give her a couple of dollars, so she could buy more drugs. The first couple of times she did that, I felt bad for her and gave her some money.
But then I realized that she did this to me every time now. I was getting fed up and I told her that it wasn't fair to make me drive all the way from Bonita Springs to Palm Beach Boulevard to get her, drive her all the way back to my home, thinking we'd spend some quality time together and watch a movie or something, and then she'd just hide in the bathroom the entire time, and as soon as she got out, she'd ask me to drive her all the way back to Palm Beach. What the fuck?!
I told her if that's how it was gonna be now, then at least I wanted to have sex with her first. That made her cry. She said: "Please don't talk to me like that. Please don't make me feel like a whore. Everyone treats me like I'm a piece of meat. I can't handle it, if you talk to me like that, too."
She said she didn't want it to be like that between us. She said she wants to have sex with me when she stays at my house, but she wants it to happen naturally, not on command. She said she wanted to feel like a normal girl, and like I care about her, and like we're making love, not like I was just fucking her like some cheap whore.
I knew her well enough by now to know that she was telling the truth. She really did want to feel loved. But how was that ever gonna happen, if all she did was hide in the bathroom, smoking crack for hours, and then wanting to go right back to Palm Beach, as soon as she got out? And that's why I didn't see how we could be in a relationship while she was on drugs like that.
When I met Veronica, I obviously knew she was on drugs, too. But she still seemed to be able to function on a somewhat normal level. And when she asked me to be in a relationship with her, she had been sober for a few weeks in jail.
Anyway, now that I had made a commitment to be faithful to Veronica, I stopped talking to every other girl, including Haley.
But like Hussy, Haley knew that I would never say no if she had an emergency and needed my help. So when Haley realized that I was ignoring her calls on purpose, she started to fabricate all sorts of emergencies to get me to talk to her and spend time with her.
One time she told me that she had an offer for a regular job, that would allow her to stop tricking on Palm Beach. She told me she needed to go to the DMV and get a copy of her driver's license, before they gave the job to someone else, and only I could drive her to get her papers.
Every time I saw Haley, I tried to convince her to go to rehab. I told her all she had to do was say the word, and I would drop everything and drive her to rehab right away. So one day she told me she finally decided to go to rehab, and she needed me to take her there before she changed her mind. I drove all the way to Palm Beach to get her and drive her to detox in Port Charlotte. But after I picked her up, she said she wanted to make a quick stop and say good bye to an old friend first. She disappeared in his house for a few minutes and then told me to take her back to where I had picked her up. She really wasn't going to Port Charlotte. She had just conned me into taking her on a quick drug run. She did that a lot. She always came up with new stories why she needed me to come get her. It was an emergency! And then it always ended up being just another drug run.
Then one night she called me with yet another so-called emergency. Her baby daddy Rodney had just gotten out of jail again recently, and they were staying together at a dirty little trap house off of Palm Beach Boulevard. Now he was supposedly trying to kill her, because he thought she had stolen his last bag of heroin.
It was late, and I was already in bed. I had taken some melatonin, a natural supplement that's supposed to help you fall asleep. I really wasn't in the mood to get up and drive all the way to Palm Beach for one of her fake emergencies again. She had cried wolf one too many times.
But I could tell by the panic in her voice that she wasn't kidding this time. She really was scared for her life: "Please come get me! PLEASE!!! He's going to kill me!"
I got up, got dressed and drove to Palm Beach to get her. I had no choice. Even though she had fooled me a bunch of times with fake emergencies, what if this one was real? And it really did sound like the real deal this time. What if I didn't go get her and then the next day I'd read in the paper that her dead body was found in a ditch somewhere? I wouldn't be able to live with myself.
When I pulled up in fron
t of the run down house where they were staying, I called Haley. She didn't answer the phone, but she came running out from behind the house. Rodney was right behind her, chasing her with a baseball bat, taking swings, but narrowly missing her. Holy shit! I'm as anti-gun as they come. But in moments like these, I really wished I had a gun.
Haley was quicker than Rodney. Taking swings slowed him down. She easily jumped the broken chainlink fence in front of the house and got in my car. "GO!" she yelled, while he was clumsily trying to jump over the fence as well. The baseball bat in one hand made it difficult. We took off down the road.
Haley was hysterically crying, trying to explain what had happened, but I couldn't understand a word, because she was sobbing so hard. And it didn't really matter anyway. It was just another normal day in the life of Haley the crackwhore. Although it was a different story every time, all the stories were the same somehow. This wasn't the first time she sobbed so hard that I couldn't understand her, and it wouldn't be the last. Rodney tried to call her a few times, before her phone died. She slowly calmed down. "Thanks for coming to get me, Oliver. You just saved my life."
I gave her a hug with my right arm while holding the steering wheel with my left, and said: "You need to get clean, sweetie. If you keep doing drugs and hanging out with these lowlives, you really will end up dead one day."
By the time we got back to my place, it was 2 am, and I was dead tired. The melatonin really worked. "I'm going to bed," I said.
"I'm way too hyper right now. I can't sleep. Is it ok if I sit in the living room for a while and play around on the computer?" Haley asked.
"Sure. Just don't wake me up at 4 am and ask me to drive you back to Palm Beach," I said.
Haley laughed and promised she wouldn't.
At 4 am, she came into the bedroom and woke me up anyway. I fucking knew it. "I'm sorry, but Rodney keeps calling me, and he knows where you live. He said if I don't come back he'll come here and start problems," she said.
"Bullshit," I mumbled half asleep. "Your phone is dead, and we both know Rodney doesn't know where I live, and he has no way of getting to Bonita Springs anyway."
"No, really, he keeps texting me," Haley insisted.
"No he's not. Show me his texts," I demanded.
Of course she couldn't. Her phone really was dead, Rodney really didn't call or text her, and she just wanted me to take her back to Palm Beach so she could get more crack.
I was so pissed at her, but I knew that I wasn't gonna get any more sleep until I drive her back. I dropped her off at the same house where Rodney tried to kill her with a baseball bat, and by the time I got home, the sun came up. I went back to sleep.
I woke up around noon and tried to get some work done on my computer. That's when I noticed my two external hard drives were missing. Haley had stolen them while I was sleeping. Motherfucker! I went out of my way for her in the middle of the night and literally saved her life, and she thanked me by robbing me in my sleep. Nice.
I was so pissed at her, I needed revenge. I was thinking about pretending not to have noticed that she robbed me and then, when she calls me the next time, I'd pick her up and beat the shit out of her. Oh, who was I kidding? I had never hit a girl, and I wasn't going to start now, no matter how pissed I was at her.
While I was plotting my revenge, she called me: "Hey sweetie, wanna come get me again?"
"Are you fucking kidding me?" I blurted out. "You stole my fucking hard drives!"
"What are you talking about? No, I didn't," she claimed. "We have known each other for so long now. You know I would never steal from you! I would never jeopardize our relationship like that. You mean too much to me."
"Spare me the bullshit and give me back my hard drives, or I'll call the cops," I demanded.
"Fuck you! Now you're gonna threaten me with the cops? FUCK YOU! I don't have your stupid hard drives," she yelled. She acted like she was highly offended.
"I'm warning you. I never make empty threats," I said. "I'm telling you, I really will call the cops if you don't give me my drives back."
She kept denying it, so I hung up on her and called the cops.
A deputy arrived a few minutes later. Haley was blowing up my phone, calling over and over, trying to convince me that she really didn't have my drives, and that I shouldn't call the cops. She even tried to threaten me. She said she knew a lot of bad people who could make my life very difficult. She should have known better, because that only pissed me off more.
I answered the phone right in front of the police officer and told Haley one last time to give my drives back, and told her that if she continued to deny it, I would just hang up and file a report with the officer who was standing right in front of me. She denied it again, so I hung up on her.
The next time the phone rang, I picked up again, and a voice said: "Please come get me! Ron hit me again. This time I broke up with him for good."
Wait. What?
"Huh? Who is this? And who is Ron?" I asked.
"It's me, Jennifer," the voice said. "Can you come and get me?"
Remember Jennifer the gold digger who looked better than Jenna Jameson? I used to see her for a while, while I was living in that big house in Pennsylvania. She and I had talked about moving in together a few times, and she had asked me to come rescue her a couple of times, when she and her alcoholic boyfriend Ron had yet another violent fight.
But after I met Alice and stopped seeing Jennifer, we didn't talk for a few weeks, and then I saw on Jennifer's Facebook page that she and Ron moved to Dallas. I didn't hear from her in well over a year, and suddenly, out of nowhere, she called me to come and get her in Texas. While I was in the middle of filing a police report, because Haley had stolen my hard drives. You can't make this shit up. Well, you could, but why would you want to?
I told Jennifer that I was sorry I couldn't help her right now, and that I was dealing with my own crisis at the moment. Then I sat down with the officer and filled out the paperwork for the report. He asked me how much the drives were worth.
"Well, they're used," I said, "so they're probably not worth more than $50 each. But to me they are irreplaceable because all my photos are on those drives. I can't replace those. And all my work is saved on them."
"Sorry, but if the value of the stolen property is less than $300, we don't do anything," the deputy explained.
"What? So you're not gonna do anything?" I asked in disbelief.
"Nope. I'm going to take your report, but as soon as I walk out of your door, I'm going to close your case," he said.
Unfuckingbelievable. I was about to lie and pretend that Haley had stolen some cash, too, so that the total value would be over $300. But then the phone rang again. It was Haley.
"Look, I swear I didn't take your drives. But to save our relationship, I'll do whatever I can to help you find them, ok?" she said.
Remember that little joke, about the alcoholic and the drug addict? The addict will steal from you and then help you look for it.
"Whatever," I said. "As long as I get my drives back, I really don't care who took them."
"I swear I didn't take them. I think maybe Rodney stole them. I know a lot of people, so I'll ask around for you, ok? Please don't file a report, I promise you'll get your drives back tonight," she said.
"Ok, if I get my drives back tonight, I'll drop the charges," I promised.
"She agreed to give me my stuff back," I told the officer. "I'm going to meet up with her on Palm Beach."
"Oh no you're not," the officer said sternly. "You're going to get yourself killed."
"Well, if you guys aren't gonna do anything, I really don't have a choice. I need my drives back," I said.
Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey Page 33