The Heroin Scene in Fort Myers

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  PLENTY OF FISH

  "Online dating is just as murky and full of lemons as finding a used car in the classifieds."

  Laurie Perry

  Obviously the ad for a mutually beneficial relationship backfired. So I put a half-assed profile on Plenty Of Fish, or POF for short. It's a free dating website.

  I ended up going out on a date with Maxine. She was 32, I think, and taller than I was. And she wore high heels when we met at a little Italian restaurant on Bonita Beach Road. She towered over me like a giant Amazonian. And she had broad, manly shoulders. She reminded me of a Football player. She probably could have given me a piggyback ride around the parking lot.

  Over dinner, she told me about some of her weirder experiences on POF. She said one guy asked her if she was into taboo stuff.

  "What do you mean by taboo?" she asked him.

  "You know, tabooooo," he replied mysteriously.

  "You mean like child pornography or something?"

  "Sex with dogs," he said with a sparkle in his eyes.

  As it turned out, he wasn't really looking for a date for himself, but for his dog. He asked Maxine if she'd like to have sex with his pitbull.

  Apparently there's this whole big underground dog sex fetish scene. Maxine told me that this guy said there are dating websites out there that specialize in this sort of thing. People post profiles for their dogs, and then other people pick which dog they want to have sex with.

  She told me that dogs can cum over and over again, without needing a break inbetween, like men do. And she described different dog breeds' penises to me.

  "Uhmm, you know WAY too much about having sex with dogs," I said.

  "Oh, I just asked that guy a lot of questions," she replied and laughed.

  After dinner we went back to my place and talked for hours. We were sitting on my living room couch, and Maxine was smoking weed. She lived in Naples and managed some sort of charity for low income families in Immokalee.

  By 2 am she was so high, she said she couldn't drive anymore. She asked if she could spend the night. I said sure. We slept in bed together, but nothing happened.

  The next morning she went home to change, and then drove to Immokalee. On her way to work she texted me: "Why didn't u try to have sex with me last night? R u not attracted to me?"

  "I didn't know u wanted me to," I replied.

  "Why do u think I spent the night in ur bed?" she asked.

  "I thought u really were too high to drive home. I didn't want to take advantage of the situation," I texted. Man, I felt like a dodo.

  Later that day she texted me again: "R u an ass man or a tit man?"

  "What do u mean?" I texted back. Apparently I'm a little slow sometimes.

  "Do u get off looking at ass or tits? What do you like better?"

  "I like breasts. So I guess I'm a breastman," I replied.

  A few minutes later she texted me some pictures of herself in her office. She wore a dark, professional-looking business suit. Her white blouse was unbuttoned and her bra was open. She was flashing her breasts at me.

  I guess that shoulda really got me going, but I was so not interested. I didn't even text her back. She was just too damn weird.

  A few weeks later, I met Flora on POF. She was 35 and kinda heavyset. She had monster boobs. Not the porn star kind. The ten ton tilly kind. She said she managed her own party business. We went out to dinner at her favorite restaurant in Naples.

  Then she asked me to come over to her place for dinner a few days later. She had a son. I think he was maybe 9 or 10 years old. She had told him all about me, before I arrived.

  At the dinner table, he suddenly asked her: "Is Oliver going to be my new dad?"

  Flora replied: "Well, Mommy and Oliver have just met a few days ago, but we'll see how things go. Would you like him to be your new dad?"

  "Yeah, he's nice," her son replied.

  She thought that was adorable. I thought it was crrreepy.

  After dinner she put her son to bed and we talked on the couch for a while. She kept telling me that she thought I was brilliant and amazing: "You're such an amazing cartoonist. You are just so brilliant."

  Did I mention she thought I was amazing and brilliant?

  She kept flattering me so much, I was getting really uncomfortable. I guess I'm not very good at receiving compliments, and she was laying it on really thick.

  She invited me over again a few days later, but I made some excuse. I really didn't feel like hanging out with her and her kid.

  We didn't talk to each other any more after that, until we reconnected again a year or two later, when I was going through some drama with my girlfriend Veronica. But I'll get to that later.

  So, when I reconnected with Flora again, we hung out a few times. Usually at her place. She cooked dinner and we watched a movie.

  Then one day she texted me: "How come u have never tried to have sex with me? Is it because I'm not European?"

  "I didn't know u were interested in that. I thought we were just friends," I texted back.

  The next time we met, she made sure I got the hint. She talked about sex a lot that night. She told me she had threesomes with some of her guy friends. And she told me she met a guy online who was into cuckolding. She said that's when a guy likes to watch his girlfriend have sex with another guy. I told her that was not my cup of tea.

  Then she asked me if I was into breastfeeding. She told me she found a fetish website a few months ago, and all the guys on there were into breastfeeding. She said she joined the forum, and started talking to a guy from Alaska. A few days later, after she sent him pictures of her ginormous udders, he flew from Alaska to Florida to meet her for a wild suckling session.

  She said it was the most intense, most erotic bonding experience of her life. She told me that he took great care to pay attention to each nipple equally, to not favor one over the other. And then he suckled on her clit for the grand finale.

  Then she asked me if I would like to suckle on her breasts like an infant.

  "Uhh, I'm not sure," I replied.

  She got all emotional, and said: "You are so brilliant, so amazing. I would be so proud if you were my son." She teared up.

  She had been drinking a lot that night, and this was just getting too damn weird. I wanted to get outta there!

  She kept telling me how amazing and brilliant I was, and how honored she would be to breastfeed me.

  "Hmm. I'm hungry," I said. "I need a snack."

  "What do you want?" she asked. She probably thought I meant I wanted some of her milk.

  "What do you have? You know what, I'll go take a look myself," I said, got up and walked into the kitchen. I was going to check her cabinets, and pick something that she didn't have, so I could pretend to go get it at the store. It was after midnight by now, but there was a 24 hour Walmart just down the street. I noticed she didn't have my favorite: Nutella.

  "Hmm. I'm really in the mood for a Nutella sandwich right now. Too bad you don't have any. I'm just gonna run to Walmart real quick and grab some."

  "Are you sure? It's late."

  "Yeah, I'll be right back," I said, and quickly exited her apartment.

  I had seen comedies and sitcoms, where two people meet on a blind date, and one of them pretends to go to the bathroom and then ditches the other one. I always thought that was so unrealistic. Nobody does that. Even if you have a bad date, at least you finish your meal and say good night. Nope, tonight I found out that sometimes people really do run away. I just did. I literally ran away from a girl who wanted to breastfeed me.

  While I was driving back to Bonita Springs, she texted me: "R u coming back?"

  I didn't respond.

  A few minutes later she texted me: "Ur not coming back, r u?"

  Then a few minutes later: "REALLY?"

  Then: "Wow. Seriously? WTF"

  The next morning, she texted me: "I guess I'll just never be pretty enough or skinny enough for u."

  Aww. That made me
feel so bad, because I really hurt her feelings. I had been a real jerk. So I texted her back: "No, it's not that. U were really drunk, and u know I don't like being around drunk people. So I thought it was better if I leave. I'm sorry."

  I had brought over two DVDs the previous night, because I really thought we were going to watch a movie after dinner, not have her mammaries for dessert. A few days later she texted me: "I don't hate u for leaving like that. I still got ur movies. When do u want to come get them?"

  I didn't reply. She could keep the movies.

  I was not a fan of Plenty Of Fish, after meeting Maxine and Flora. I figured I might as well go back to plan A, and see if I'd meet someone nice with my ad for a mutually beneficial relationship.

  MORE OF HUSSY'S LIES

  "I can take any truth; just don't lie to me."

  Barbra Streisand

  "A single lie destroys a whole reputation of integrity."

  Baltasar Gracian

  "We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger."

  Tad Williams

  I started seeing three girls who answered my online ad. One of them was Manuela, a medical student from Equador. She was petite, skinny, with long black hair and a perfect body. She was only 20 and had this really timid, mousy little voice. She almost sounded like a cartoon character. But she was unbelievably beautiful. She could have been a professional model. And she was smart. We often made fun of those annoying illiterate American kids, who spell everything wrong, trying to emulate some idiotic gangsta rapper, and quoting asinine lyrics, because they think being dumb and shallow makes them look cool.

  Manuela was going to go back to Ocala when the next semester started, but for now she was staying at her parents' house at The Forum on Colonial Boulevard. She didn't have a car, so I usually picked her up and we'd spend time together at the The Hyatt right there. But when her parents weren't home, we had sex in her bedroom. It was a typical teenage girl's room. It hadn't changed since before she went to college. There were teddy bears on the shelves, and a lot of pink everywhere. I felt like I was living in one of those pornos, where a guy has sex with his kid's gorgeous babysitter or something.

  When Manuela moved back to Ocala, I saw on her Facebook page that she started dating a one-eyed firefighter. Apparently he was the love of her life. I never heard from her again.

  I was also seeing another 20 year old girl at that time. Her name was Kayla. She was a quirky math student who grew up in Sayville on Long Island, New York, not far from where I had lived in Brooklyn. Kayla was 6 feet tall and a little chubby. She had long bright red hair. She was not nearly as pretty as the medical student from Equador, but also very smart. Kayla had a great personality and she always made me laugh with her silly little jokes. We both had the same strange sense of humor. She was a little punk, with a lip piercing and the word bitch tattooed right over her pussy. She liked to wear ironic t-shirts and paint each of her nails a different color.

  Kayla wanted to become a financial advisor or something like that, but she had a drug problem and had been arrested and spent some time in jail. Now she was a convicted felon, and finding a job in the financial field was going to be difficult, if not impossible. But she wasn't going to let that stop her from finishing her college degree. She was on probation, so she wasn't doing any more heroin, but she still drank like a Russian sailor, and smoked a lot of fake weed.

  And I was seeing Crystal. She was a beautiful 30-year-old, with long blonde hair. She was skinny, tall and had amazing fake boobs. She had been a stripper for a while, and a model. Then she had worked at a real estate firm, but after the market crashed, she started working as a waitress at Applebee's. The first time I met her, she was as skinny as a skeleton. It made her huge fake boobs stand out even more. She was addicted to oxycodone pills and occasionally smoked crack. She was dating this guy Jerry, a wealth management advisor at some stock brokerage. He was almost 10 years younger than her.

  Every time I had sex with Crystal, she brought this huge industrial-strength dildo, that plugged into a wall outlet. She loved rubbing it on her clit while we had sex, but to me it was kinda annoying and distracting, because it was in the way. And she was one of those girls who liked to scream and moan like a porn star. Her over-the-top theatrics sometimes made me feel inadequate, because I felt like I wasn't living up to the hype.

  And then there was a fourth girl, Haley. I had met her the first time I had come to Florida. I'll tell you more about her later.

  I had sex with at least one of these 4 girls every day, sometimes even with two of them on the same day. I was pimpin'. I was living the rockstar life.

  In June, I suddenly started getting text messages from Patty the drug counselor. It had been a year since she had been at my condo in Florida for two weeks, to spend her birthday with me. It was almost time for her next birthday now, so she decided to get in touch with me again. We hadn't talked to each other in a year, ever since our falling out after our road trip.

  Patty texted me that she couldn't stop thinking about me, and that she knew she had been acting crazy last year. She said Rocky's death really messed with her head, and her anti-depressants were all off. She said now her medication was on point, and she was doing much better. She said she wanted to come spend her birthday with me again and see where things could go with us.

  I really was not interested at all in ever seeing her again, so I just ignored her texts. Patty continued to text me several times a day, and had a one-sided conversation with me. Every evening she told me about her day, about work or going grocery shopping and cooking, about a cut on her foot and her visit to the emergency room, and so on and so forth. She acted like we had an ongoing conversation, although I never wrote back.

  Then she texted: "Guess what? I booked a flight for tomorrow! I'll see u soon!"

  That's when I finally wrote her back: "What? No, u can't just show up here! I'm seeing someone!"

  I lied. I really wasn't in a relationship with anyone. My so-called relationship with Hussy was over at this point, and I just had sex with a different girl every day, but I wasn't going to tell Patty that. I really wasn't proud of being a manwhore. I just kinda fell into that situation, because I really liked and cared about all 4 of the girls I was seeing, but I wasn't in a serious relationship with any of them.

  When I first met Patty at my big house in Pennsylvania, she had told me that pretty much every drug counselor used to be an addict, who got clean and then decided to help other addicts get their life back. Patty said she was the rare exception. She had never been an addict. Some of her patients felt that made her lack credibility. How could she possibly know what they were going through, if she had never been an addict herself and walked a mile in their shoes? Patty told me her reply to them was: "A doctor doesn't have to be a diabetic to understand diabetes and help a diabetic patient."

  But after she had been acting so weird at my condo in Florida during those two sex-crazed weeks, and after she had been having a one sided text conversation with me a year later, I was starting to wonder if Patty really did not have some sort of substance abuse problem. She had told me that she takes Xanax to help her sleep, and that she likes to drink red wine.

  When she texted me that she had bought a plane ticket and was coming to Florida uninvited, to spend her next birthday with me, and I told her not to come because I was seeing someone else, she totally lost it. She texted me over 40 messages between midnight and 4 am. Most of them didn't even make sense. She called me a snapping turtle. She said I lied to her. Apparently she thought I was still dating Alice, even though I hadn't seen Alice since she ran away from rehab in Rhinebeck, NY and I had moved to Florida by myself.

  Patty texted me that she was going to call the cops on me for harboring a drug addict at my house. She said she'd have me deported, because this is America and she's an American but I'm on
ly a guest here. She became totally unhinged and sent one hateful text after another.

  Apparently she was still just as crazy as she had been a year earlier. I had the feeling she was drinking wine that night and mixed it with Xanax, and now she was drunk texting me this incoherent drivel. I texted her back that she was nuts, and that I never wanted to hear from her again. Then I blocked her number.

  That didn't stop her. The next day, Patty really did fly down to Fort Myers, and really did come to my condo. She didn't knock on my door though. Or maybe she did while I wasn't home. I don't know. But a day or two later, she posted pictures of the outside of my condo on her Facebook page, as proof that she had really come to see me. How fucking weirrrd is that? I was starting to feel like I had an actual stalker.