Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (10 page)

Two TLC cops, wearing bulletproof vests
under their plain clothes, jumped out of the car and pointed their
guns at me and yelled: "GET OUT OF THE CAR! GET OUT OF THE
CAR!!!"

The woman on the backseat and I were
shocked. We got out of the car, and the cops asked the woman a
couple of questions about me, wrote up my license, and then
impounded my car on the spot.

Now the lady and I stood in front of the
supermarket without a car, and I had to try to explain to her what
just happened. It was so embarrassing. Then she called another cab
and one of my buddies came to pick us up.

Without my Flintstone mobile I couldn't work
for that car service anymore, so I applied at a different taxi
company. They were a little bit more legit. They actually had a
fleet of their own cars. They were old, crappy retired police
cruisers. The first night I started working there, the dispatcher
put me in the oldest, shittiest car that none of the other drivers
wanted.

This was a bigger company, with more long
distance trips. The dispatcher sent me to a neighborhood on the
other end of Brooklyn that I had never been to. I had to take the
highway to get there. As the highway was bending into a curve, my
driver side door suddenly swung wide open. The lock was broken, and
whenever the car was leaning into a curve, the door just opened up
all the way. I felt like I was gonna fall out onto the highway. I
had two or three more calls that night, until the car broke down,
and I spent the rest of my shift waiting for a tow truck.

Canarsie, the Brooklyn neighborhood Donna
and I lived in, had been all Italian and Jewish before I moved
there. But right around the time that I moved there, the
neighborhood began to change. More and more black people from Haiti
and Jamaica moved in, and over the course of just a few years, the
whole neighborhood had turned from almost all white to almost all
black. We were the only white people left on our block.

I'm not racist. After World War 2, the
German school system was set up to never allow another Holocaust to
happen. German children are being taught to be tolerant of all
people and to never judge a person by the color of their skin or
their religion.

But of course there are some right-wing
extremist racists in Germany, just like anywhere else. Like those
skinheads that started using computers to spread their message of
hate online for example. Even one of the members in my hacking crew
had been a skinhead. At first I thought it was just a poor fashion
choice, but later I found out he really was a hardcore racist. He
ended up in prison for arson. He had set fire to an immigrant
shelter full of Turkish families seeking asylum in Germany.
Psycho.

Anyway, when you live in Europe and watch
American movies or sitcoms, you get the impression that racial
tensions in America are a thing of the past. So when I moved to
Brooklyn, and all the white people seemed to hate blacks, and all
the black people seemed to hate whites, it caught me by surprise.
This was not the tolerant melting pot America I had seen in
movies.

At first I thought the white people I met in
Brooklyn were just a bunch of racist halfwits, when they talked
about how much they hated niggers. But then I even heard some black
people complain about niggers.

Have you ever seen Chris Rock's stand-up
routine about the difference between black people and niggers? It's
so true. Most black people are nice, decent folks, but the ones who
act like trash make all the other black people in their
neighborhood look bad.

But niggers really come in every color. The
only thing I hate more than black kids acting like thugs and
niggers, are white kids acting like thugs and niggers. Is there
anything more pathetic and ridiculous than some white kid from the
suburbs trying to act like he's a gangsta from the hood? Pull your
pants up, dipshit. You're embarrassing yourself.

Although most of the black families from
Haiti and Jamaica who moved to Canarsie were nice, hard-working
people, there were also a bunch of thugs and niggers who turned the
neighborhood to trash.

There was this little convenience store
right down the block from where Donna and I lived. I went there all
the time, to get a bottle of Pepsi or a loaf of Wonderbread. One
day I was just about to walk into the store, when I heard a popping
sound behind me.

I turned around and saw a minivan drive by.
At first I could only see the right side of the van, but as it was
slowly rolling further down the road, I could now see the back of
the minivan, and a foot sticking out of the left side of the
vehicle. Suddenly the whole body was being shoved out of the door
and fell into the street. Then the minivan sped off. The popping
sound I heard right behind me a few seconds earlier was a gun shot.
This guy had been shot and killed in the minivan, just as it was
passing me.

There was a phone booth right outside the
store, so I called 911 and reported that I had just seen a person
being shot and that his dead body had been thrown out into the
street just a few feet away from me. The 911 operator told me a
cruiser was on the way to my location and asked if I was willing to
testify. I said no. I didn't want to end up getting shot just
because I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

But this was now the new reality of our
neighborhood. The crime rate had gone up dramatically. Local stores
and banks were getting robbed on a daily basis, and suddenly there
was graffiti and broken glass on the sidewalk everywhere. Canarsie
was turning from a quiet suburban neighborhood into the hood.

I picked up some guy who had to get a ride
to the projects nearby. When we got there, we saw two guys running
across the parking lot right in front of the car. The second guy
had a gun and was shooting at the first guy, while chasing him. My
passenger was afraid to get out of the car and asked me to take him
back home.

It was getting scary to drive a cab in New
York at night. You never knew what was gonna happen. Then a cabbie
murderer made the headline news. This guy kept robbing cabbies for
the few bucks that they had in their pockets and then shot them, to
leave no witnesses. I was not going to get myself killed for
minimum wage, so I decided to quit my little adventure as NY cab
driver and look for a safer job.

"You are part of the rat race because you are letting
them treat you like a rat. This is the modern definition of a
slave."

Saurabh Sharma

I landed a job in the graphic department of
a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn. At first I had to create the ads
for local advertisers. The old lady who owned the newspaper liked
my work, and after just a few weeks I was promoted to production
manager.

I was now in charge of the entire newspaper.
I was the one who determined how many pages each issue had, how
many copies to print, what the newspaper looked like, and where
each article and advertisement went on each page. It was another
job I had gotten by pretending to know their software, even though
I didn't. I had to learn everything on the fly, without letting
anyone know that I had no idea what I was doing.

After a few weeks, I was pretty good at my
job and had made several improvements to the paper. Before I took
over, the previous production manager still had cut and paste
boards, where each page was literally being glued together with
snippets of text on paper strips. And photos still had to be
developed in a dark room. Like we were a bunch of savages or
something.

I upgraded their computer systems, installed
a network, optimized the work flow and went fully digital. The
layout of each page was now being created on networked computers
and all photos were digital images.

The old lady who owned the paper passed away
just a few weeks after promoting me to production manager. A lawyer
bought the paper and moved his law office into the back of the
newspaper building. Every time one of his clients came to see him,
I saw how his little law firm operated: If someone came to have a
will or a deed prepared, the lawyer charged him $1000 and then told
his minimum-wage secretary to take care of it. She had an archive
of legal document templates, and all she had to do was fill in the
client's name and a few details. That's it. Pretty easy money.

For legal reasons, the newspaper was not in
the lawyer's name, but in his wife's name. I guess he figured if
anyone was going to sue the newspaper, his wife would be the one to
take the fall, not him, and they wouldn't be able to get to the
assets that are in his name.

In order to make the story believable, we
were instructed to treat his wife like the boss whenever she
happened to stop by the office. It reminded me a lot of the
precautions I took as a teenager, to create a believable story of
how not I but my non-existent friend Lucifer was supposedly the one
running my hacking crew.

Being the production manager was an
incredibly stressful job. I was close to having a nervous breakdown
once or twice, because it was up to me to make sure the newspaper
came together in time for the deadline. Otherwise there would be no
newspaper at the newsstands the next morning. If anything went
wrong, it was my fault, because I had forced the old folks who had
worked at that paper for decades, to welcome the 21st Century into
their office. Change is never easy. And some of the old folks
fought me every step of the way.

And on some days, it just didn't seem like
the paper was going to come together in time, because everything
went wrong. But somehow it always worked out in the end, even if I
had to stay in the office until 11 pm, while everyone else went
home at 5 pm. I was not on the clock. I was getting the same salary
each week, no matter how long I stayed. So when I was in the office
until 11 pm, I wasn't even getting paid for it. It was just my
German sense of duty that made me want to do the right thing and
get the job done, no matter how.

The old lady who used to own the paper was
very supportive of me and the changes I had made to improve the
paper. I was running the show, and she told the others to listen to
what I was saying.

But the lawyer had no clue about the
newspaper industry and why there even had to be a deadline at all.
He told the lady who was in charge of taking ads not to turn away
any ads, no matter how late they came in, even if it was past the
deadline.

I started to hate my job. I tried to explain
to him why a deadline is important. I can't put the paper together
if all of a sudden there's a new ad that needs to be created, and
then placed onto a page that is already full. So now I have to tear
that whole page apart again, and I might have to re-arrange other
pages to make room for whatever important information or ad was on
the page I had to re-do to make room for the new ad. There's only
so many hours in a day, and when a few unexpected ads come in past
the deadline, there is just no way to put the paper together in
time.

But this lawyer just didn't get it. He kept
giving these arrogant speeches. I guess in his mind they were
supposed to be motivational. He would say things like: "I am fine
without this newspaper, but you folks need this job. So you better
do whatever it takes to make it happen. This newspaper is like a
boat. If it sinks, you all drown. I am the only one here who can
swim."

He was such a fucking douchebag.

Everyone else nodded politely and went back
to work. Nothing he said made any difference to them, because they
all went home at 5 pm. I was the one who always ended up getting
stuck with the extra work if the paper wasn't ready by the 5 pm
deadline. So I was the only one who stood up to him and tried to
tell him why it couldn't go on like this.

He pacified me and pretended to take what I
say to heart. But then he went behind my back and told Carol, the
lady who was in charge of taking the ads, to ignore me and keep on
taking ads past the deadline anyway, even if I tell her not to. He
was just a greedy bastard who figured every ad is more money in his
pocket.

One day an advertiser called way past the
deadline and wanted to have a full-page, full-color ad in that
week's issue. Carol took the ad but didn't tell me about it. She
asked Kenny, one of the other guys in the graphic department, to
make the ad, but not tell me about it, and then give it to her, so
she could sneak it into the paper without me even knowing about it
until the next day, when the paper appears at the newsstand.

Before I took over as production manager,
the paper had always been black and white. One of the improvements
I brought in was a full color front and back cover, and a full
color middle insert. It allowed us to charge a lot more money for
ads when people wanted their ad to be the one in full color in the
middle. But I was the only one who knew how to make full color
pages.

In order to print a newspaper page in full
color, you actually have to break it down into 4 color separated
templates. Each template has one of 4 colors. And when all 4 colors
are overlayed on top of each other during printing, they create the
full spectrum of every color there is. Similar to the way a TV
screen has only 3 different colored pixels, but the TV mixes those
3 different colors to create every other color.