The Heroin Scene in Fort Myers

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  As my texts arrived, Nancy was reading them out loud to Veronica, and they were both laughing at me. They thought they were cool as shit. I hated them both so much at that moment, hearing how arrogant and obnoxious and condescending they were.

  When Veronica was around other inmates, she liked to pretend that she was a hustler and a bigshot drug dealer, and that she made enough money selling drugs so she didn't have to trick. She liked to talk down to other girls. She called them nasty hoes, and she pretended that she was above tricking.

  The truth however was that she was much worse off than most other girls who tricked. She was homeless when I met her, and she literally had nothing except the clothes on her back. Veronica had walked 41, selling her body to anyone who passed by. She was on the lowest rung of the ladder. Being a streetwalker on 41 or Palm Beach is the lowest form of prostitution in Fort Myers. There is nothing lower than that. It's the final destination on the downward spiral of drug addiction.

  Veronica didn't want the other hookers to know that she was even lower than most of them, and that she had sucked dick for as little as $20 and that she had let thugs fuck her for a single hit of crack. So she liked to put on a grandiose act of what a successful hustler she supposedly was.

  When Nancy read my text messages out loud to Veronica, she commented: "That Oliver dude is getting to be a headache. You should ditch his ass."

  Veronica replied: "Yeah, that dude is stalking me. He's obsessed with me. He's like totally in love with me or something. I never even had sex with him, but he does everything I say and buys me everything I want. I used to have a whole bunch of dumb motherfuckers like him."

  Then they both laughed again. I was really really hurt. And then all I could think was: payback is a bitch.

  I called the front desk at the rehab and told them Veronica was hiding a phone. I told them exactly where to find it: in a hole she had cut into the bottom of her mattress. It was her first infraction, so I knew she wouldn't be sent back to jail, but she'd get 2 weeks of room restriction. Basically she was going to be grounded and couldn't leave her bedroom for 2 weeks. Not that big a deal, but at least she wasn't going to be able to use the phone I gave her to cheat on me anymore.

  Then I hacked Dees phone and told him if he didn't stay the fuck away from Veronica from now on, I would make his life miserable. Then I hacked his Facebook page, and got in touch with his wife and told her that he was cheating on her with Veronica.

  To me that was the end of the story. I really wanted nothing to do with Veronica anymore. She was, without exaggeration, the worst human being I had ever met in my life.

  I decided to go back to New York for a while, to lick my wounds and forget about Veronica. For the next 2 weeks I didn't hear from her anymore.

  But while I was in New York, her mother Rachel kept calling and texting me. She was getting awfully friendly with me, when I told her that Veronica and I were no longer talking to each other. Rachel started sending me poetry and her favorite songs. And she asked me to read her blog.

  Then she told me that her husband, Veronica's stepdad, the doctor, was a horrible person. Supposedly he treated Rachel like shit, and she said she wished she could meet a nice guy like me. Suddenly I had a sense of Déjà vu. This was a replay of what I had gone through with Alice and her friend Kat, and Kayla and her friend Morgan. Rachel was hitting on me. She was moving in on Veronica's man. Later Veronica told me this wasn't the first time her mother had hit on one of Veronica's boyfriends.

  I didn't tell Rachel that I saw the text messages between her and Veronica, while Veronica was on her death bed in the hospital. I didn't tell her that I knew she and Veronica were more drug buddies than mother and daughter, or that I knew Veronica had learned how to be a slut from her mother.

  Rachel told me that her husband had cancelled her health insurance, and now she was no longer able to get her medication. She was talking about her benzos. He really wasn't a horrible person. He was trying to get Rachel clean. But when you try to get between an addict and her drugs, you are the enemy in her eyes. Just like I was suddenly Alice's enemy when she ran away from rehab and I tried to get her to go back.

  Rachel texted me that she needed a couple of hundred dollars to get her prescription filled. I'm certain if I had told her that I'd give her the money for her drugs, if she'd let me fuck her, she would have. But I didn't reply. Having sex with Veronica's mother was a taboo I wasn't going to break, no matter how much I hated Veronica at that moment for cheating on me and talking shit about me behind my back with her little crackwhore friend Nancy.

  In the past, Veronica had told me a lot about how mean her mother was. She said Rachel would be pleasant one minute, and then a total bitch the next. She'd become totally unhinged and viciously aggressive over nothing. The more Veronica told me, the more Rachel started to remind me of my ex-wife Donna. They seemed to be personality twins. These stories about Rachel were the first time I ever even heard the word benzo. I had no idea what benzos were, until Veronica told me that Rachel was addicted to them. She explained to me that they were a class of tranquilizers that were even more addicting than opiates, and even harder to kick. She listed a few: Valium, Xanax, Ativan, Lorazepam...

  Lorazepam? That name sounded familiar. Donna had been taking Lorazepam for as long as I could remember. After meeting Veronica, I finally realized that I had been married to a drug addict for over 15 years and didn't even know it. Suddenly Donna's bizarre behavior made perfect sense. I read up on Lorazepam, and the side effects listed sounded very familiar. Donna had almost all of them. The information I read about these pills also said that you're not supposed to take them for more than a few weeks. Donna had been taking them every day long before I ever even met her, so she had been on those pills for at least 20 years at this point. Wow. Mind blown.

  Over the next few days, while Veronica and I weren't talking, Rachel told me two more times that she needed money. She and her husband were on and off. Right now they were separated again, and he had shut off the cable in her apartment, so now she couldn't even watch TV anymore. She said she needed a couple of hundred dollars to pay her cable bill and a few other bills, and asked if maybe she could come over and watch TV at my place. I could hear baum chicka baum baum porno music in my head, while reading her texts. I know I could have had sex with her if I wanted to. But I was in New York.

  While I was up there, I placed a new online ad. I didn't have the ambition to start dating. I was way too depressed. But I wanted to forget about Veronica, and I figured the best way to get over her was to cheat on her with someone new and make sure that Veronica finds out about it. I don't know. It seemed to make sense at the time.

  This girl Erin answered the ad. I already knew what to expect, so I hacked her and my instincts were right: she was a drug addict, who had spent the last few months in Collier County Jail. Erin and I texted back and forth. I didn't tell her I knew everything about her already. I wanted to see what she was going to tell me on her own. I told her that I had just broken up with my girlfriend and was looking for some meaningless sex. She was ok with that.

  After a few days, she told me that she used to have a drug problem and went to jail, and lost custody of her daughter. Now her baby daddy's mother had custody of her and didn't want to give her back. I had heard it all before. It was the same story like with Morgan and her daughter. Erin and I made plans to meet, once I got back to Florida, even though I wasn't really sure yet when I was going to leave New York.

  I didn't hear from Veronica for two weeks, while she was on room restriction. Then she started calling me again. She asked me to come back to Fort Myers, and pick her up, because something had happened and she wanted to run away from rehab.

  We had talked about this earlier. I read up on the Salvation Army rehab program. The statistics weren't very encouraging. For addicts in her age group, the success rate was barely 50%. The other 50% didn't complete the program. The average time spent in rehab, before they ran away, was 2 months and
2 weeks.

  It made sense. While they were confined to the rehab center during the first 2 months, it was relatively easy to resist temptation. But once they had to go out into the real world and look for work, it only took about 2 weeks before they relapsed. I told Veronica all that early on, and we made a backup plan: She said if she relapsed, she'd run away from rehab instead of being sent back to jail. She'd come live with me, like we had planned all along, and we'd have a baby. Then, a few months later, after her belly was big enough where anyone could clearly see that she was pregnant, we would hire a lawyer and we'd ask the judge to give her house arrest, or "community control" as the courts in Florida call it, instead of jail time. That way she could be home with me and raise the baby.

  She and I hadn't talked in 2 weeks, ever since I caught her cheating on me with Dee. I really shouldn't have even answered the phone when she called. But I loved her, and I missed her. So when she called, I was happy to hear her voice, despite everything.

  "Why are you in New York? I need you! Please come back as quickly as possible. Leave there today," she demanded.

  I asked her if she was absolutely sure she wanted to leave rehab. She said yes, because two of her roommates had gotten caught having sex with male inmates at the rehab center. She said her roommates were sent to jail based on hearsay, and she claimed it was only a matter of time before she would be sent back to jail because of hearsay and false accusations, just like the other girls.

  Since I knew for a fact that it wasn't just hearsay, because I had read Nancy's text messages to the guy she was fucking in rehab, I figured Veronica was worried about going to jail, because she did have sex with someone, too.

  But hadn't I already been over that in my own head when I first found out about Dee? She had sex with so many people before I met her, was one more really going to make a difference? If she wanted me to pick her up, take her home and have a baby together, maybe this relationship was still salvageable.

  "Ok," I said. "But don't make me drive 1200 miles down there, and then you'll change your mind before I get there."

  "No, I'm not going to change my mind," she replied. "I'm definitely leaving rehab. Either you come pick me up and I come live with you, or I'll be on the street and you know what's gonna happen then. I'll start tricking on 41 again or I'll live in a trap house with a dope boy."

  I got in my car that same day and drove back to Florida.

  Of course she changed her mind before I got there.

  She said she would call me during every break between her rehab classes, until I got to Fort Myers. But instead I didn't hear from her any more for the next two days. By the time she finally called me again, I was home in Bonita Springs.

  "I changed my mind. I think I should stay and complete the program, you know?" she said.

  I couldn't really say anything. She wanted to try to finish rehab and complete the sentence, instead of getting new warrants and going back to jail. It was the right decision. But I was still pissed that I drove almost 1200 miles for her and she didn't even say thank you, or that she was sorry for making me drive all this way for nothing.

  Erin kept texting me, and I told her that I was back in Florida now, but that I had changed my mind about having sex with her, because Veronica and I were trying to work things out, and I didn't want to cheat on her anymore now. Erin said she understood and it was cool. She still wanted to keep in touch though, just in case.

  A week later Veronica told me again that she wanted to run away from rehab. I figured it would be a replay of last time and she'd change her mind at the last minute again. But no, this time she really did run away from rehab. She didn't even last a month and a half.

  MORE OF HALEY'S EMERGENCIES

  "It is little wonder that rape is one of the least-reported crimes. Perhaps it is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused and, in reality, it is she who must prove her good reputation, her mental soundness, and her impeccable propriety."

  Freda Adler

  While Veronica was at the Salvation Army, Haley kept calling me every day. I didn't answer, because I was still trying to be a good boyfriend and be faithful to Veronica, so Haley left me voicemails.

  One night, the messages sounded particularly urgent again. It was another one of Haley's emergencies. She said she had a really bad infection in her cheek, because she had been scratching the scabs on her face. She said she needed me to take her to the emergency room, or she might die. She said she was sitting in Lorne's front yard. He wouldn't let her in the house, and she had nowhere else to go.

  I figured she'd just want to come to my house for a while, lock herself in the bathroom for a few hours, smoke crack, and then ask me to take her back to Palm Beach the next morning. But she really did sound bad when she left the message, so I decided to go get her, just in case it was a real emergency. It was.

  When I got there, I didn't even recognize her at first. She looked like the Elephant Man. The left side of her face was swollen to at least twice its normal size. She looked grotesque. I took her straight to the hospital. In the emergency room they asked her if she took any illegal drugs. She was going to lie and say no, because she was ashamed. She thought they would look down on her, as if she was human garbage. I told her she needed to tell them the truth, in case this was an allergic reaction to something she shot up, or some of the medication they were about to give her may have bad side effects if they are mixed with the stuff that she already had in her system.

  She was surprised that they didn't treat her any different after she admitted that she was a drug addict. They gave her morphine to make sure she was ok and didn't get dope sick. The doctors and nurses at Lee Memorial Hospital were really nice to her.

  After a few hours in the emergency room, they admitted her into the hospital and brought her up to a room in the contagious disease ward. She had a severe MRSA infection in her cheek, and it was close to her eye. There was a chance she might go blind in that eye. I stayed with her the whole time and she told them I was her emergency contact. She had nobody else. It was really late by the time she finally got a room, and they gave her some sleeping pills. She fell asleep and I went home.

  I went back the next day. She was in the contagious disease ward, and I had to wear a gown and gloves before entering her room, just like when I used to visit Veronica a few months ago, when she was at the same hospital with a MRSA infection in her leg. She had been in the same ward, in the same room. Déjà vu.

  I brought Haley candy, coloring books, Burger King and a little laptop. I told her she could keep it. She was so happy, she cried. She told me how much it meant to her that I was there for her, and that with her new laptop she'd be able to get back into selling things on Ebay. She said this infection was a wake up call, and she would finally turn her life around now. I had heard that one before.

  I visited her every day and spent a few hours with her each time. We watched TV together, or we'd just talk and joke around. The swelling in her face was slowly going down. We had always been very close, but her little adventure as a freaky looking mutant brought us even closer.

  A few days later she left the hospital against doctor's orders, because she wanted to go smoke crack. It all sounded awfully familiar.

  The next day she called me up hysterically crying. I couldn't really understand what she was saying, because she was sobbing so hard again. I felt so bad for her. She was so upset, so hurt.

  "He raped me!" is pretty much all I understood. "Call the police!"

  "What?" I asked.

  "He stole everything! My shoes, my bag, my clothes, and the new laptop you gave me! And then he raped me! I'm naked! I don't even have any clothes! If I call the police they won't listen to me. They know I'm an addict and I turn tricks. They're not gonna believe me. But you're an upstanding citizen. They'll believe you!"

  Maybe. But the problem was, I didn't really believe her either. I figured this was just another one of her stories, to make me drive all the way up there and come get
her.

  "Well, I wasn't there," I said. "So I really don't know what happened. I don't even know where you are. If you want I'll come get you, but you're going to have to call the cops yourself."

  She told me she was at some dirty little trap house on Ione. When I arrived, the cops were already there. The cruiser was parked in front of the house with its lights flashing. Haley was standing in the street, crying, while talking to two officers. She really didn't have any clothes or anything else anymore. She was wearing some guy's t-shirt. No pants or shoes or anything else. Just that t-shirt. Good thing I brought her some of her clothes, just in case. She always left some at my house.

  The officers really didn't take her seriously. They thought she was just a tweaking crackwhore who was drunk or high out of her mind. They couldn't really understand anything she was saying either. So I told them about the laptop, her bag, her clothes, and that she said she had been raped. They looked sceptical.

  "Without evidence or witnesses, there's nothing we can do," they said. They didn't seem very interested in Haley or what she had to say. I had seen this attitude before, when I had tried to file a missing person report for Alice, and the cop told me to forget about her, like she was worthless garbage.