Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey

by Oliver Markus

  She called me and cried: "Why would you do that to me? Why would you hurt me like that? I hate you!"

  "Are you fucking kidding me?" I asked. "That's the kind of shit you've been doing to me for years. Now I did it to you for a week or two, and you act like I'm a monster. All I did was give you a taste of your own medicine for a few days."

  After a while we both calmed down again. She told me she loved me and still wanted to come home to me, have a baby and be together. We made up. I told her that this was really, really her last chance. If she cheated on me with Wendy or anyone else again, I would be done with her for good. I told her if I hear one more rumor about her and another girl, I was done. She said that wasn't fair, because even if she didn't do anything, people would still accuse her of being with this girl or that girl.

  When Haley called me and I told her what Veronica said, she replied: "Bullshit. Veronica is such a drama queen. Nobody gives a shit about her. People have better things to do than to make up stories about her. The only reason people talk about her is because she's a hot mess. I have a lot of friends in jail, but you don't ever hear any rumors about me being in a relationship with some other girl in jail."

  After Veronica and Wendy made out in the court holding cell, they had themselves moved into dorm 2 together. Just like Veronica had done with Kim the last time she was in jail. And just like with Kim, Veronica claimed that she and Wendy weren't even talking to each other anymore, and they were on opposite ends of the dorm.

  "I swear there is nothing going on between us anymore now," Veronica said. "The corrections officers watch us like hawks, because they know there used to be something between Wendy and me, and we were separated into two different dorms. They're not going to allow us to even talk to each other in the rehab dorm now."

  Later I found out that was all just a bunch of lies again. They never stopped dating. They were a couple the whole time they were in dorm 2 together. Veronica never stopped cheating on me for even one day.

  Remember Wigger's girlfriend Abby? He had been cheating on her with Lucy and a couple of other girls, while she was in jail. Abby had a sister, Tabby. Both of them were drug addicted hookers, and occasionally they had threesomes together with a "client." Nice.

  One of the girls Wigger was fucking behind Abby's back while she was in jail was her own sister, Tabby. Yupp, Abby's boyfriend was cheating on her with her own sister. Classy. What a guy, what a guy.

  Then Tabby got arrested and ended up being Veronica's new bunkie in dorm 4, after Wendy had been moved from dorm 4 back to dorm 3. Veronica started cheating on me, and on Wendy, with Tabby. Once Veronica was moved to dorm 2, she continued to write Tabby love letters behind Wendy's back. And she continued to write love letters to Kathleen, who was in dorm 2 with Veronica and Wendy. Are you getting a headache yet?

  Haley kept telling me that Veronica was still lying to me. Veronica denied it. Other people told me Haley was telling me the truth. Veronica claimed they were all just a bunch of haters. She said if I wanted to know the truth about what she was doing in dorm 2, I should ask the girls she was hanging out with, like her friend Cassidy. She would tell me that Veronica was being good, and that she told everyone she was my girlfriend, nobody else's, and that she wasn't seeing anyone else behind my back anymore.

  After Veronica had made several other girls lie to me in the past, I had no intention of asking the people she told me to ask. I figured if I asked Cassidy anything, Veronica would bribe her with some snacks to tell me whatever Veronica told her to say.

  I decided to pick my own two girls in dorm 2 and ask them what was really going on between Veronica and Wendy now. One of them was Morgan, the girl who used to be Kayla's best friend. I hadn't talked to her in two years, ever since I had dropped a garbage bag with her things off, after she had cheated on me with her baby daddy for some heroin.

  Morgan had violated her probation a few months ago and was now also in jail. Even though I hadn't talked to her in ages, I hoped she still cared about me enough not to let Veronica keep hurting me like that, and that she would tell me what was really going on behind my back.

  Then there was Greta. She was one of Haley's best friends. Since she knew Haley and I were very close, I believed she would tell me the truth as well.

  I wrote both of them a letter, asking them to please be honest with me and not let Veronica play games with my heart anymore. I told them how much she had hurt me for the past two years, and that enough was enough. Neither one of them wrote me back. Instead they gave my letters to Veronica. Traitors! She called me up and bragged about it.

  A day or two later, Greta was released from jail. I contacted her on Facebook, and now she told me that Veronica was cheating on me with Wendy the whole time.

  Then, a few days later, Wendy screamed at Kathleen, because she found out that Veronica was still writing her love letters. The officers sent Wendy to D pod. It's the jail within jail. Usually the inmates are allowed to roam around in a large dorm, but if they break the rules, they get locked up in small cells in D pod.

  I just couldn't lie to myself anymore. Veronica was still the same old lowlife, still lying and cheating on me. She really was never going to change, no matter how many times she swore she was going to be faithful to me from now on.

  I sent Veronica one final letter. I told her what a pathetic lowlife piece of shit she was. And then I decided to give her a taste of her own medicine one last time.

  I had sex with a couple of different girls over the next few days, and I took a picture of each one of them sitting on my bed. Then I printed each picture as a postcard, and mailed them all to Veronica. On the back of each postcard, I wrote a spiteful little comment, about how much sexier this girl was than Veronica, or how much better that girl was at making me feel good. And behind each comment, I drew a carefree little smiley face. I wanted her to picture us laughing at her, because we were.

  Veronica had written me a while ago, that if she ever found another girl in "our" bed, she would kill me and the other girl. So I figured it would get under her skin to see all these girls on "our" bed.

  And while looking at each picture, she would know that each of these beautiful girls had been naked in "our" bed and spread her legs for me.

  Each of the girls I asked was happy to participate in my little revenge plot, because none of them liked Veronica, and they all knew what a lying, cheating lowlife she was, and how much she had hurt me and many other people with her psychotic games.

  Later some girl called me from dorm 2, and told me that the whole dorm was laughing about Veronica behind her back, because she had been bragging that she was a master manipulator and that she controlled me like a mindless little puppy who would do whatever she said. So those postcards kinda cramped her jailhouse swag a bit.

  And every time another one of my postcards arrived, and the officer yelled Veronica's name across the dorm during mail call, her face got beat red with embarrassment on her walk of shame, to go get the card. Everyone knew it was another picture of another girl I fucked, while thumbing my nose at Veronica.

  I had learned during my hacking days, how to really get under someone's skin, if I wanted to. And it worked. I heard from other inmates that Veronica's jaw dropped to the floor when she started getting those cards from her "obedient puppy."

  I heard that she was ripping them up in a fit of rage, as soon as she got them, and then pieced them back together afterwards, to get another look. When I sent her a picture of Lucy, she couldn't rip it up fast enough with her hands, because the glossy photo paper was too strong, so she tore it to pieces with her teeth.

  I heard that even inmates who usually didn't get involved in petty jail house drama thought it was great that I put Veronica in her place with my entertaining little stunt.

  How ya like me now, bitch?

  Veronica continued to throw herself at Wendy, Kathleen, a girl called Moira and a bunch of other girls in several different dorms, telling each of them that she supposedly loved them
oh so much. It was just sad. She was making a spectacle of herself. But that wasn't my problem anymore.

  I was done with her. Really, really, really done this time.

  NICOLE

  "We accept the love we think we deserve."

  Stephen Chbosky

  "A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one."

  Mae West

  "Everyone says that love hurts. But that's not true. Loneliness hurts, rejection hurts, losing someone hurts. Everyone confuses these with love, but in reality love is the only thing in this world that covers up all the pain and makes us feel wonderful again."

  Unknown

  When Lucy's aunt Nicole was released from prison in April 2013, she swore she would never touch drugs again. She moved into a halfway house, started her own little lawn care business, did tattoos on the side, and went to church and NA meetings regularly. She was determined to never go back to her old life.

  When I met Lucy in June 2013, she had told me to keep in touch with her aunt, because she knew she was headed for jail soon. She wanted me and Nicole to be able to update each other about her situation.

  Lucy's mother was a drug addict, who had abandoned her as a baby, and her dad Dick was a drug dealing scumbag. It was Nicole who raised Lucy, almost like her own daughter. Nicole was the one holding Lucy in all her baby pictures. She taught her how to walk, how to talk, and how to take drugs. Later Lucy's grandma Gloria took over for Nicole.

  Nicole and I friended each other on Facebook, and while Lucy was in jail, Nicole and I started chatting with each other at night. I told her I loved Lucy, and that I was hoping to be able to show her that a sober life was worth living.

  Nicole and I became pretty close, and we often chatted all night long. She started telling me about herself. She said she had tried to kill herself many times, because she had been through some really traumatic stuff in her childhood.

  She told me her brother, Lucy's dad Dick, had raped her ever since she was 4 years old. They weren't related by blood. Nicole's father had married Dick's mother Gloria.

  While Dick raped Nicole night after night, his brother raped Nicole's younger sister. Nicole often heard her sister cry and choke in the bathroom, while Dick's brother shoved his dick in her mouth.

  Dick was more than 10 years older than Nicole, so he was a teenager when she was still a toddler. He raped her for years, until she was 15. He was in the car with her, and tried to force her to have sex with him again. She floored the gas pedal and headed straight for a tree. She wanted to kill him and herself. The car hit the tree at 80 mph. He was lucky and didn't get all that hurt. But her right leg was shattered. She wasn't able to walk from the age of 15 until she was 18. That's when he finally stopped raping her. But he continued to make nasty remarks to her all the time, saying things like: "What color panties are you wearing?" or "Remember, I was the first to fuck the shit out of you." She hated Dick, but never told Lucy what her father had done to her.

  I felt really bad for Nicole, because she seemed like a nice person, but all her life she had been used and abused by guys. Her brother Dick wasn't the only one to rape her. And all her boyfriends were the same type of guy: some drug-using, violent redneck who treated her like shit and frequently beat her. That's all she had ever known. She thought that's all she deserved. No wonder she tried to kill herself so many times, and was addicted to drugs. To her, life was pain.

  At the NA meetings, Nicole met Johnny. He was the same type of guy as all the other guys she had dated before him. He was some drug addicted lowlife with a long criminal record, who had spent his entire adult life in prison. He just got out.

  They hit it off and started dating. It didn't take long before he relapsed. Of course that made her use drugs again, too. She stopped going to the NA meetings, because her sponsor and the other people she had met there and looked to for help, had all relapsed as well. Now they were calling her for drugs.

  That didn't really come as a surprise to me. The more I read about the AA/NA 12-step program, the less impressed I was. Ask any drug counselor, and they will tell you that the relapse rate for drugs like crack or heroin is about 98%. That means the current gold standard of addiction treatment, the 12-step-program, fails almost 100% of the time to keep people off drugs. In other words, it's clearly not working. Ask any addict, and they will tell you a dozen stories about their addict friends who went to a rehab program, and relapsed as soon as they got out.

  But imagine if any other medication or medical treatment had an almost 100% failure rate. That medication would not only be taken off the market, the makers would be sued for medical malpractice or land in jail. And now imagine if the patients who didn't get any better after the treatment were being blamed for the treatment's failure. That's exactly what happens when an addict fails to recover after being in a 12-step-based rehab program.

  The AA program was originally based on God as a cure for addiction. Only after people complained that this was akin to faith healing (Which also doesn't work. Nobody in their right mind would choose prayer instead of Penicillin when they get a bad infection.) was the word God replaced with the term "Higher Power." But it's still a thinly disguised religious program with religious terminology throughout. And since I don't believe God exists, to me it's no surprise that a treatment program that is based on something that doesn't exist is doomed to fail every time.

  At one point I spoke to a lady who had been running a halfway house for 17 years. She told me how strict her house rules were, and that the girls in her house had a curfew, had to attend an AA/NA meeting every day, etc.

  A little while later in the conversation, she told me that in those 17 years, she had only seen one single addict come through her halfway house, who truly got clean and did not relapse anymore afterwards. I thought it was funny that somehow she didn't connect the dots in her head, that what she was doing was clearly not working. But of course she blamed the addicts for their failure to get better. They just didn't want to get better bad enough. Imagine if you had an infected appendix, and instead of surgery or antibiotics, the doctor told you to attend prayer meetings every day, and when your appendix ruptures and kills you anyway, the doctor says: "Well, I guess you didn't want to get better badly enough."

  The magazine Free Inquiry published a very thorough article about AA, written by Steven Mohr, called "Exposing the Myth of Alcoholics Anonymous." Mohr characterizes AA as nothing more than a religious cult.

  Bankole A. Johnson, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, wrote in an article for the Washington Post: "For decades, Americans have clung to a near-religious conviction that rehab - and the 12-step model pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous that almost all facilities rely upon - offers effective treatment for alcoholism and other addictions. Here's the problem: We have little indication that this treatment is effective. When an alcoholic goes to rehab but does not recover, it is he who is said to have failed. But it is rehab that is failing addicts. The therapies offered in most U.S. alcohol and drug treatment centers are so divorced from state-of-the-art medical knowledge that we might dismiss them as merely quaint - if it weren't for the fact that addiction is a deadly and devastating disease."

  He concludes: "There is little compelling evidence that the AA method works, inside or outside a rehab facility. Although AA's emphasis on anonymity makes it difficult for outside researchers to determine its success rates, some have tried. What they have found doesn't inspire much confidence in AA's approach. A recent review by the Cochrane Library, a health-care research group, of studies on alcohol treatment conducted between 1966 and 2005 states its results plainly: "No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or TSF [12-step facilitation] approaches for reducing alcohol or drug dependence."

  But some addicts do get better. So there is hope. The Harvard Medical School did a study, and asked a whole bunch of people, who really truly got clean, how
they did it. 80% of them answered that they did not do it with the AA program, but on their own, at home, by staying away from other addicts, with the love and support of their loved ones. And I think that is the key: don't hang out with other addicts. Not even at meetings. Not even when they're in recovery, because virtually all of them will relapse sooner or later. So stay as far away from other addicts as possible. Surround yourself with truly sober people who love you.