Going to New York

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  After a while, the post office realized that what I was doing was intentional, and that I was defrauding the post office by overwhelming them with hundreds of packages with improper postage on purpose every few days. Suddenly the postal police was on my trail.

  Luckily my uncle just so happened to be working for the main post office in Aachen, and he was in charge of the PO box department. So when the postal police investigated who owned Lucifer's PO box, which was the return address on all those packages with insufficient postage, the warrant landed on my uncle's desk. Back then PO boxes in Germany were free and anonymous, similar to Swiss bank accounts. All you had to do was ask a clerk for a box number, and he handed you a little pink card with a PLK number on it. Then people could send mail to that PLK number, and you could go pick up your mail at the post office by showing the clerk the little pink card.

  My uncle knew that I had something to do with computers and that I received a lot of packages with disks from people around the world every day. But he didn't know any details. He called me and asked me if I knew someone named Lucifer, and if I did, to tell him to stop that 1 cent stamp nonsense or face jail time, because the postal police was watching Lucifer's PO box.

  I had no choice but to abandon that PO box and rip up my pink card. That was the end of my career as mega-swapper. But I continued to hang out on my crew's online headquarter every day.

  I realized that the police was circling closer and closer around me and that I had to be even more careful about my double life from now on. I even went so far as to ask one of my school friends to come to copy parties with me, to pretend to be Lucifer, so that people saw Lucifer and Goliath at the same place at the same time, and nobody would get the idea that it was really just me using two different names. All the other members in my crew knew the truth, but they kept their mouths shut and didn't reveal it to anyone else outside of our crew. They understood the necessity of my lie to avoid arrest.

  A few months later, the German FBI suddenly raided my parents' house a second time anyway. But this time they weren't even looking for me, neither under my new name Lucifer nor under my old name Goliath. They had been looking for a different hacker, who called himself Pentagon. Someone had Pentagon's name in his little black contact book, and had accidentally written my address under Pentagon's name. So the FBI came to my house, looking for someone else. Luckily there was nothing incriminating in my room, but my parents totally freaked out on me anyway.

  From that point on I was really on thin ice with them. And they started to become more and more suspicious about me locking myself in my room and being on the phone all the time. They even thought I might be on drugs and had a little intervention on one of the rare occasions they happened to catch me outside of my room in the hallway.

  Then at some point they finally caught on to the fact that I was connected to America 24/7 and they went ape shit! They did the math, and it turned out that within just a few months, I had spent enough time on international calls, that if I got caught, they would have to pay over a million dollars in phone charges. This was before cell phones. Everyone still used regular landlines, and the phone in my room was on their account. So they locked my phone. I could still receive calls, but I couldn't make calls, because the dial pad was locked. Then I figured out that I could still dial numbers, if I took the receiver off the phone and tapped on the little contact button the receiver rested on, when you aren't using the phone.

  If I had to dial a 3, I had to quickly tap that button three times. If I had to dial a 9, I had to quickly tap it nine times. It was incredibly tedious, especially for long international phone numbers, because if I miscounted, I had to hang up and start all over again. It was such a pain in the ass! Eventually my parents realized that despite the lock they put on my phone, I was still able to make phone calls somehow. So they took my phone away altogether.

  That made my long distance relationship with Donna all the more difficult. Since I couldn't call her from the house anymore, I recorded the blue box tone on a tape and then I went to public phone booths and held up my walkman to the phone and played the tone that gave me a free international line to call Donna in New York.

  I spent hours in phone booths every day. Winter came and it was freezing. I ended up catching pneumonia. By then I had graduated from school and was now working in a school for mentally handicapped kids. Back then they still had a military draft in Germany, and every male over 18 had to join the army for a year.

  I have always had a problem with authority. The idea that some knuckle-dragging sergeant, with half my IQ, was going to boss me around didn't sit too well with me. I figured as soon as someone tells me to crawl through the mud, I'm gonna tell them to go fuck themselves, and then I'll spent a year in some army jail cell. Not my idea of fun.

  So I became a conscientious objector. If you refuse to join the army on moral grounds, you have to give them a good reason why you are against killing someone on command. You could either go to an oral interview and try to convince the panel that you're not army material, or you could write an essay.

  The interview basically consists of a bunch of trick questions: Imagine you walk through the woods with your girlfriend, and suddenly a guy tries to rob you and kill her. You have a gun. Do you shoot the guy to save your girlfriend's life? If you say no, they tell you you're lying, because of course you would do anything to save her life. If you say yes, they tell you, "see, you would fire a gun and kill someone if necessary, so you are fit to join the army." There is no right answer for these types of questions.

  I figured the essay would be easier. It worked. I didn't have to join the army for a year, and I got to work with handicapped kids for a year and a half instead. They made the civilian service longer, so that it deters people from taking "the easy way out" of their military service. I enjoyed working with those kids and I even planned on going to college to become a special ed teacher and work with handicapped kids for a living.

  DONNA THE RECLUSE

  “You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.”

  Jodi Picoult

  Even when I worked at the school for handicapped kids, I still talked to Donna for hours every day. I spent all my free time on the phone with her. Sometimes we talked until the sun came up and I went to work without having slept at all.

  By now I had lost all interest in the illegal hacking scene, so Lucifer had retired. But I still continued to run my software company as Goliath and we had produced a few popular video games. Some of them were distributed by a German software company that later became part of Electronic Arts.

  I was only 20, but I had already made a nice amount of money with those video games and I ended up flying to New York whenever I had a chance, to spend time with Donna. During one particular three month time period I ended up flying to New York six times. Sometimes just for a weekend.

  The handicapped kids I worked with were always sick. Long time teachers are used to it. They have a pretty strong immune system and they don't get sick all the time from being around sick kids. But I hadn't been around these kids for that long, so I wasn't as immune as the other teachers were, and I caught every cold those kids had. One time I caught the chickenpox from them. I figured, while I was on sick leave, it was the perfect excuse to hop on a plane and go visit Donna in New York for a few days again.

  I can't believe they actually let me on the plane. I felt like patient zero. I could have had the swine flu or Ebola or something. During the flight, my chickenpox got worse and worse. By the time I got off the plane, I looked like a leper. I was seriously afraid the customs officers at Kennedy Airport would take one look at me and quarantine me or something. But they let me right through. So much for border security.

  A few weeks later I caught pneumonia. Not sure if it was the result of having caught 3 consecutive colds from the kids, or because I had spent so much time in freezing phone booths, talking to Donna. Either way, I collapsed at my parents
' house with a very high fever.

  For days I had this really bad cough that just wouldn't go away. Then, while brushing my teeth one night, the bathroom suddenly turned black and white, and everything seemed to move away from me. Obviously that was just what it looked like, because the blood was leaving my head, so my eyes were playing tricks on me. But it really did look like the whole room turned black and white and moved away from me. I think that's why people see a tunnel of light when they die. I think it's simply the blood leaving their eye balls and their field of vision narrowing to a pinpoint.

  I was able to call out for my mom and my stepdad right before passing out. They called an ambulance and I was rushed to the hospital. Turns out I had pneumonia for a while already, before I finally collapsed that night. The doctors told my parents they weren't sure if I was going to make it. For the first few days in the hospital, there was a pretty good chance I might die. But I got through it. After I got out of the hospital, I was on sick leave for a few weeks. So of course I hopped on the next plane and flew to New York again.

  When I had first started talking to Donna over a year earlier, to convince her to make her bulletin board the exclusive online headquarter for my hacking crew, she had mentioned that she had a roommate. This guy Jeff, who worked as a technician in an electronics store, and spent all his time fixing broken TVs and VCRs and stuff like that.

  Whenever Donna and I talked on the phone, I often heard her yell at Jeff to get out of her room, or to go let her dogs out, or get her cigarettes. She was treating him like shit. Like he was her personal servant or something.

  As the weeks and months went by, and we talked every day, we got closer and closer. Donna and I started having phone sex. This was before the first time I flew to New York to visit her.

  One night she asked me on the phone if I masturbate. Well, yeah, doesn't everyone? Then she asked me how often. She asked me to describe in detail how I do it. Then she asked me to do it on the phone with her and let her listen to me cum. I was shy at first, but she kept whispering all sorts of sexy things into my ear that got me hard. From that point on we had phone sex almost every night. That's why I always locked my bedroom door, so my parents wouldn't suddenly walk in on me. And because I was locked in my room all the time, they started to think I was on drugs.

  Donna asked me how big my dick was and asked me to take pictures of it before and after she made me cum, and mail them to her. And she sent me naked pictures of herself. It was pretty exciting to have a girlfriend in New York, who got a kick out of making me cum on the phone every night.

  But I could tell that something was bothering her. I asked her what was wrong. Finally Donna told me she had a deep dark secret. She said if she told me what it is, I would never want to talk to her again. It was obvious that her secret really was weighing on her conscience, and I kept asking her to tell me, and I promised her that she would feel so much better once she gets it off her chest.

  I told her that I know from experience that carrying around a dark secret has a way of making you feel trapped and alone: "I know what it's like to put up these invisible walls in your head that you hide behind, and you don't want to let anyone peek inside those walls and see the real you, because you're afraid they won't like you anymore once they know your secret and they know the real you. But it's a really good feeling when you find someone you can trust. And you can share your dark secret with them without fear of being judged or that they will like you any less. And then, when you can finally let it all out, that secret suddenly no longer has any power over you. Sometimes things seem really bad when they fester in the dark, but once you drag them out into the light, and you talk about them, they aren't so bad after all."

  I tried to reassure her that no matter what, I wouldn't love her any less. But she just wouldn't tell me. That just blew my mind. We had gotten so close. Every day she told me she loved me. She had sent me naked pictures of herself. She had told me many times on the phone that she couldn't wait to finally meet in person and touch me, kiss me, and feel me inside of her. At this point she should have been able to tell me anything. What could possibly be so bad that she felt she couldn't talk to me about it?

  Of course when someone says they have a dark secret, your brain automatically starts imagining all sorts of worst case scenarios: Maybe she's in a wheelchair? Maybe she has cancer and she's on chemo and she's bald? Maybe she used to be a prostitute? And that's were I hit the limits of my imagination. I couldn't think of anything that would be worse. Anything else, no matter what, would be less bad than those three scenarios.

  For the next few sleepless nights, I tried to play out each of those scenarios in my head. I tried to be honest with myself about how I would feel if she was in a wheelchair, with everything that entails. We would never be able to travel or go out to eat or go to the beach like a normal couple. The wheelchair would dominate every aspect of life. Everything would be a hassle. Everything would be complicated. And sex with her probably would never be the way I had pictured it in my head when we had phone sex.

  But ultimately none of that mattered to me. I read somewhere that falling in love with someone through letters or on the phone is the truest form of love, because you are in love with the actual person, with their true essence. You are in love with their mind, not their body. And I really cared about Donna after all the time we had spent talking to each other. I figured I would be a pretty shallow asshole if I would let a disability change my feelings for her. That's not the kind of person I want to be. And I'm not. So I was going to stick by her, wheelchair and all.

  But what if she had cancer? Do I really want to get attached to someone who has a terminal illness and who may die soon? I thought about that saying, "it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." That made a lot of sense to me. None of us really know how long we have left to live. You may be perfectly healthy, and then get hit by a bus tomorrow.

  It doesn't make any sense to say no to love, just because it may end in a few months. Every day with that special someone in your life is a gift. If it ends up lasting a lifetime, that's perfect. But even if it only lasts a few months or years, nobody can ever take those days away from you afterwards. They will forever be a part of you and your story. So I decided that even if Donna has cancer and she's going to die soon, I won't let that stop me from loving her and spending as much time as possible with her now, for as long as possible.

  But what if she used to be a prostitute? No matter how liberal I may be about most things, when it comes to love and sex, I am pretty traditional. I'm not into free love. I'm not into fucking around with just anybody.

  Love is really just a word we use to describe a deep bond between two people. And the thought that the girl I love has sex with someone else is unbearable to me. I think of sex as the most intimate thing two people in love can share. It's the ultimate bonding experience. I can't have sex a bunch of times with a girl and not bond with her or care about her. And I can't handle the thought of the girl I love having sex with someone else and sharing that kind of intimacy with another person besides me.

  So if Donna had been a prostitute while she and I were talking to each other on the phone every day, I wouldn't have been able to handle it. I would have told her to stop doing that or I wouldn't be able to talk to her any more, because it would hurt me too much to get attached to her any further, while she is having sex with other people.

  But if she had been a prostitute in the past, before she and I met, I figured I would be able to deal with that. I wouldn't be happy about it. It would bother me a lot that every guy in town had his dick inside the girl I love. Disgusting! But as long as it's in the past, and she's loyal to me now, and we have a strong bond that nobody else can break, then I would be able to forget about it and focus on a future with her instead of worrying about her past.

  While growing up in Germany, I read a book, called Zoo Station, about a teenage prostitute. It was a true story. Her name was Christiane F. She had grown up i
n a broken, abusive home. She started doing heroin at 13 and ended up as a teenage prostitute at 14, tricking on the streets of Berlin, near the Zoo subway station.

  That book was a huge hit. It sold millions of copies and was made into a movie that ended up being one of the highest grossing films in German movie history. Christiane F made so much money off her life story that she ended up being a millionaire. Her book was required reading in most German schools.

  Growing up, that book was the only thing I had ever known about drugs or addicts, until I moved to the States years later and met actual drug addicts in person. I think I was 14, when I read Christiane's book. And I felt really bad for her. I could relate to her, because my childhood wasn't all roses either. I was just lucky that there were no drugs around me while I was growing up.

  My father was a violent alcoholic. What's your very first childhood memory? Blowing out the candles on your birthday cake? Playing with your favorite doll? Your toy truck? Well, my very first memory is sitting in the backseat of the car. My mother was behind the wheel, as usual, and my dad was sitting next to her. He didn't have a license. They were arguing about money. She earned a lot more than he did. He wanted money from her to get drunk. She told him she couldn't give it to him, because she needed to pay the rent and bills. Suddenly he grabbed her by the back of her head and slammed her face into the steering wheel.