The Heroin Scene in Fort Myers

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  HURRICANE SANDY

  "Just as a heroin addict chases a substance-induced high, sex addicts are bingeing on chemicals. In this case, their own hormones."

  Alexandra Katehakis

  "Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw."

  Fran Lebowitz

  It was October 2012 when I was back in New York. Halloween was right around the corner. I kept looking at Veronica's escort ad on Backpage. It was driving me crazy. I kept picturing her in my head, spreading her legs for other guys, letting them touch her beautiful breasts, letting them ram their cocks in her soft little pussy, sucking them off, swallowing their cum, and getting high with Kim. I was miserable. It was torture to have these images play over and over in my head. I couldn't take it anymore. I had to make it stop!

  When an inmate absconds from the Salvation Army rehab program, it takes a few days before their probation officer files the paperwork that leads to a new warrant.

  It took over a week until there was a warrant out for Veronica's arrest after she left rehab. As soon as the warrant came out, I hacked her phone, got her location, told Crimestoppers that she was staying at the Days Inn in North Fort Myers and gave them her phone number. A cop called her to set up an escort date. She and Kim were arrested the same day. I finally felt better. Balance had been restored to the universe. After all the pain she had caused me, now she was going to rot in jail again. Good. Fuck her. Karma is a bitch.

  As soon as Veronica was back in jail, she started to call me again. She told me how sorry she was for running off like that and cheating on me, and that she loved me and she hoped I still loved her. I told her to lose my number and go fuck herself, and that I wanted nothing to do with her anymore. I hung up on her.

  Then I wrote her a really vicious postcard, telling her that she was a lying, cheating crackwhore sociopath with no conscience, the scum of the earth, and that no matter how pretty she thought she was on the outside, she was ugly on the inside. I told her she was the worst human being I had ever met in my life and if she dropped dead tomorrow, the world would be a better place.

  Then Hurricane Sandy hit New York, right before Halloween. The streets were flooded. Almost every block had one or more huge old trees that were uprooted by the storm and knocked over, blocking the road. The power went out. The cell phones didn't work anymore, except in a few rare spots. The gas stations had no more gas. It was horrible. The chaos reminded me of the days right after 9/11.

  It took my postcard over a week to get to Fort Myers. In the meantime, Veronica kept calling me. When I finally had a signal for a few minutes, I answered the phone. She told me she had heard about the hurricane on the news and she hoped I was ok. She said she knew I wanted nothing to do with her anymore, but she had to tell me something: she was pregnant, and I was the father.

  Considering she just fucked every guy in town a few days earlier, I had a hard time believing she was so sure I was the father, if she was even pregnant at all. She replied that she had used a condom with all those guys she met on Backpage, and I was the only guy she let cum inside of her without a condom. And she told me that if it had been any of those other guys, it would be too soon for the jail pregnancy test to be positive already. She said the baby could only be mine.

  Veronica had lied to me so much, I didn't believe anything at all she said at this point. And since Linda had already lied to me about being pregnant with my baby a year or two earlier, this all seemed oddly familiar again.

  But what if Veronica really was pregnant? What kind of a horrible guy would I be if I left her hanging, broke, homeless, all alone, and in jail... and pregnant? I decided to give her the benefit of a doubt. I still loved her, despite all the fucked up things she had done to me, and I still wanted to have a future with her, because I believed that deep down, under all that grimey drug addict bullshit, she was a sweet, kindhearted person, who had been through a lot, and needed someone to love her. So we made up.

  She called me every day, and I figured out a spot where my cell phone worked, even though the power was still out in Brooklyn. I went to that spot every day and waited for Veronica's call.

  Donna started to wonder why I was always leaving the house around the same time of day. She finally began to suspect that I wasn't celibate after all, and that I was seeing someone. She kept telling me that I was keeping a secret from her, and she demanded to know. But I still didn't tell her anything. I knew it would only cause problems.

  A few days later Veronica got the vicious postcard I had sent her after her first call. She cried on the phone and told me the card really hurt her feelings. I told her I was sorry and that I had written it before I knew she was pregnant. I really felt bad. I meant every word when I wrote it, but I knew how deeply my words cut her already wounded soul.

  Veronica had been sent to dorm 4 when she got to jail, while Kim was sent to dorm 3. Suddenly I saw on the Sheriff's website, that both of them were now in dorm 2, the rehab dorm. I asked her if they had purposely signed themselves into that dorm so they could be together. Veronica denied it and said she wanted nothing to do with Kim anymore, and that they were on opposite ends of the dorm and not even talking to each other anymore. She said she really didn't give a shit about Kim. When she ran away from my house, she just wanted to have a drug buddy she could get high with. It could have been anyone else, besides Kim.

  Later I found out all that was a bunch of lies. They really did sign themselves into dorm 2 to be together, and Veronica and Kim were dating the whole time they were in jail together. Veronica cheated on me day after day, while telling me on the phone how much she supposedly loved me and how faithful she was to me. She went so far as to act all insulted that I hadn't noticed how much progress she had supposedly made in the rehab dorm. How much she had grown as a person. How much different she was now, compared to the last time she had been in jail.

  But all that was just bullshit. Nothing had changed. She still was the same old lying cheater she had always been. While she told me that she wanted to have a future with me, get married and have a baby together, she told Kim that she wanted to have a future with her, and raise Kim's baby with her. Kim really was pregnant in jail, because she had sex with a dope boy in rehab. He called himself Lay-Z. In the past, Erin had sex with him, too. Kim was the 6th girl he got pregnant. Ahh, family values. It reminded me of the joke about Father's Day being the most confusing day in the hood.

  But Veronica didn't just cheat on me with Kim. She also cheated on Kim with other people. She had absolutely no loyalty to anyone.

  While Veronica had been in rehab, and her mother Rachel was hitting on me during those 2 weeks when Veronica and I weren't talking to each other, Rachel had told me that she felt her daughter was a sex addict. To me the term "sex addict" just seemed to be a lame excuse for being a slut. Hey, I can't help it. I have a problem: I like sex. Well, everyone likes sex. But that's no excuse to be a lying cheating whore. So cut that shit out, slut.

  But then I read up on sex addiction. It often affects people who have been abused or abandoned. When a young woman’s childhood lacks a healthy connection with a parent or she is sexually abused, she may develop a misunderstanding of the words love and sex. These girls will confuse sexual abuse, neglect or inappropriate sexual behavior for love and seek these destructive behaviors in relationships later on in life, because they never learned the correct meanings of love and intimacy. The abuse or abandonment they suffered in early childhood was deeply traumatic, and sex addiction is one of the ways they try to cope with their PTSD.

  I read that therapists have noticed a significant link between sex addiction and sexual abuse. When sexual abuse occurs at a young age, the child often becomes dissociated between what healthy and non-healthy sexual relationships are.

  Some people, who have been sexually abused during their childhood, reenact what has been done t
o them, to somehow gain control over it. I wondered if what Veronica did with the girls in all her fake relationships was a replay of what had been done to her by her mother's boyfriends. Did they finger her when she was a little girl? Is that why she was so obsessed with doing it to other girls now?

  Other people use sex as a substitute for love. Everything I read about sex addiction fit perfectly in Veronica's case. I came to the conclusion that Rachel was right. I sent some articles about this stuff to Veronica later, but she never wanted to talk about it.

  Anyway, while she was in dorm 2 with Kim, a whole bunch of people tried to warn me that Veronica was cheating on me. I just didn't want it to be true.

  Remember Nancy? She was Veronica's roommate in rehab. She had been holding Veronica's phone and read my text messages to Veronica, and they were both laughing at me, because I was so upset after finding out that Veronica was cheating on me with Dee.

  Now Nancy was back in jail, too. She was in dorm 2 with Kim and Veronica. And she ended up writing me a letter, telling me that Veronica was lying to me the whole time, that she was fucking Kim almost every day, and that she was not really pregnant.

  Nancy wrote she wished she had a guy like me in her life, because everyone in jail knew I was taking good care of Veronica, putting money on her books, talking to her on the phone every day, visiting her twice a week, and sending her funny postcards every day.

  So Nancy decided to make a move on Veronica's man, and tried to get me on her team. What else is new? Like I said, drug addicts do that sort of thing all the time. There is no love or loyalty among them.

  Altogether 14 different people reached out to me to warn me that Veronica was lying and cheating on me, and that she was not really pregnant. Several of them suggested that they would be a better girlfriend, if I gave them a chance. Not just Nancy. Another one of them was Veronica's ex-girlfriend Lola, who was now in prison. She wasn't gay, but she had dated Veronica for a few months, because she kept giving Lola drugs.

  Lola wrote me dozens of long letters from prison. She had nobody else. Many of them were more than 10 pages long. One was even 17 pages. She wrote almost every day, even though I didn't even write her back at first. They became more and more intimate. At first she told me a bunch of horror stories about what a lowlife Veronica was. But then she started writing me love poems and explicit sex letters.

  After I had found all of Veronica's love letters in my closet, she acted like it was no big deal. "So what? It's just letters," she scoffed. She obviously didn't grasp what a betrayal it is to send someone else love letters, when you're supposedly in a relationship.

  So I decided to show her what it feels like, just like I had done when I invented Faith. I started writing Lola back. Almost all the drug addicts in Fort Myers know each other, and gossip travels fast. Even though Veronica was in jail and Lola was in prison, I figured it wouldn't be long, until Veronica found out that her ex-girlfriend and I were writing each other pretty steamy sex letters. But Veronica never did find out, so eventually I told her myself. She was really upset. Now all of a sudden she realized that writing letters to someone else was not nothing.

  I told Veronica about each letter or phone call I had gotten from those 14 girls. And each time she claimed that they were only saying those things about her, because they were jealous of her, or they wanted to get with me, or they hated her, or they didn't want to see us happy together, or whatever.

  Haley was happy when I told her I wanted to have lots of revenge sex with her, because I was done with Veronica after she ran off with Kim. But then, when I told her a week or two later that Veronica and I were talking again, because she was pregnant, Haley got really angry: "That's the oldest lie in the book! Veronica is just trying to manipulate you! She knows you had enough of her shit, and she thinks by pretending to be pregnant, she'll be able to make you stay with her. Don't fall for it!"

  I told Haley that I was giving Veronica the benefit of a doubt, because I didn't want to leave her hanging, in case she really was pregnant.

  A few days later, Haley called me and claimed that now she was pregnant, too. Supposedly I had gotten her pregnant when we had all that revenge sex. I didn't believe her for a second, but she insisted that it was true. Later, when I was back in Fort Myers, I made Haley pee on a pregnancy test right in front of me, so she couldn't fake it. It was negative. But she continued to pretend she was pregnant anyway: "The test must be broken! I know my body! I know I'm pregnant!"

  I had anticipated that reaction, so I had bought 2 pregnancy tests, just in case. I made her take another one. That one was negative, too. She was definitely not pregnant.

  Anyway, Veronica always had some kind of excuse, why what the other people were telling me about her supposedly wasn't true. And every single time I decided to give her the benefit of a doubt, because I didn't want to face the possibility that I had been wasting almost 2 years of my life with a worthless piece of shit who was really just playing me and using me.

  I stuck with her through thick and thin, because I believed that's what you do when you love someone. I told myself a long time ago I wouldn't abandon Donna, even if she was in a wheelchair. And Veronica was crippled right now. Maybe not physically, but mentally and emotionally. I don't want to be the kind of person who leaves someone when they are most vulnerable. There's an old Swedish saying: "Love me when I least deserve it, because that's when I need it the most."

  I told myself that all those other people didn't know Veronica like I knew her. I believed that they weren't lying, but that they were talking about the old Veronica. The grimey lowlife who had lived on the streets. But I believed she had changed. And they just couldn't see it, I told myself. Of course I was just lying to myself. They all lived with her in the same dorm. They were around her 24/7. They knew her a lot better than I did.

  Several people told me that Veronica bragged about conning me. I knew they weren't all just making that up, but I told myself that Veronica was so damaged in the head, she thought it would make her look weak if she admitted to the other inmates that she had real feelings for me. She didn't want anyone to know that she was really just a little pile of misery, who depended on someone else's kindness for her survival.

  So instead of telling people she appreciated that I was there for her, and risk looking like a charity case, she thought she would look cool if she told people she was conning me, like she was a hustler and a player. Just like during her conversation with Nancy at rehab, when I heard her pretend we never even had sex, and that I was just some dumb motherfucker that she was manipulating to buy her whatever she wanted. I think that was just her way of pretending to be in control of her life, when really she had no control over anything whatsoever. She wasn't even allowed to go to the bathroom without asking a corrections officer for permission first.

  After more and more people told me that she wasn't really pregnant, I knew she had been lying all along. Erin and Lola both told me to ask her for the sticker on her food tray. Pregnant girls get double rations in jail, and the sticker on their tray says "pre-natal diet" and then their name. Lola told me if Veronica couldn't send me that sticker, she wasn't really pregnant.

  So I asked her to send me the sticker. She claimed she did, but I never got it. She claimed her letter had gotten lost somehow. I asked her to send me another sticker. That's when she finally came clean. After months of pretending to be pregnant, she finally admitted that it was all a lie. She said she did it, because she was afraid I'd never talk to her again.

  All this time, Veronica told me that she couldn't wait to come home to me, be sober, get married, have a baby and live happily ever after. But in her letter, Nancy wrote that that was all a lie, and that Veronica was telling people in jail that her dad was going to get her an apartment in Forestwood on Brantley Road, near College Parkway. It just so happened to be in walking distance of Pine Manor, one of the worst drug neighborhoods in Fort Myers.

  Nancy wrote that Veronica was telling everyone she and Kim
were going to live there and she would sell drugs and pimp out other girls. She was going to be the man, the provider, in her relationship with Kim.

  A few days after Halloween, I drove back to Fort Myers. When I visited Veronica in jail, she acted arrogant and condescending. I could tell that she really was dating someone else, and that she was putting on a show for them. I was getting so tired of this shit. Why was I wasting my time with her, if she was really just conning me?

  I had tried to show her unconditional love. I tried to show her that even after she fucked up repeatedly, I wasn't going to abandon her. But all I was doing was teaching her that it was ok to treat me like a doormat. Instead of learning what real love is, all she learned was that even if she cheats on me, I wasn't going to leave her. So to her, cheating on me was ok. I kept hoping that once she got out of jail, and we lived together, things would get better.