Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (17 page)

Her father had left them. Her mother was so
abusive, she had broken Alice's collar bone during one of her
severe beatings. Then her mother started dating other guys and was
way more interested in them than Alice. Her mother shipped Alice
off to her grandmother in Tennessee, to be raised there. But after
Alice got used to living with her grandma and got very close with
her, her mother got jealous and wanted Alice to come back. Her
mother ripped her out of the environment she had finally learned to
call home.

Things didn't get any better when she was
back in New York with her mother. Whenever her mother and one of
her guy friends wanted to be alone, they would kick Alice out into
the streets. Sometimes in the middle of the night. If she didn't
want to leave, they hit her. Alice felt abandoned and alone. She
wanted to kill herself, and became a cutter. Then she turned to
drugs.

She had smoked crack for a while, but
overdosed a few times and had to be rushed to the hospital. She was
able to stop smoking crack, but continued to do heroin.

She really used to work in a real estate
office, but lost her job when they found out she was addicted to
drugs. Drugs cost a lot of money. The only way for a girl to come
up with that much money on a daily basis is to sell her body. She
was so ashamed of the things she used to do for drugs.

She told me that when she first started
doing it, some guy had hired her for his escort company. He
promised her she wouldn't have to have sex with anyone, and that
all these guys just wanted to hang out with her, or watch her
strip. Of course that was a lie.

She found out pretty quickly that these guys
wanted more from her than just watch her dance. She started giving
them handjobs. That's all she was willing to do. She was so
disgusted with herself, that it made her use even more drugs, to
get through each day.

Her wrist started hurting from jerking off
all these guys every day, so she decided that it was quicker and
easier to just give in to what they really wanted her to do. She
just didn't have the strength to fight it anymore, and she ended up
just letting them have sex with her. It didn't really make much of
a difference anymore at this point. Her self-respect was completely
gone. But the only way she was able to get through having sex with
all these guys day after day was by doing heroin before she walked
into their hotel room, and then do heroin again afterwards to
forget what she had just done.

She had been raped, beaten and abused by
these guys. Finally she was so miserable with her life that she
tried to get clean and went to rehab. All her so-called boyfriends
up until then had been black or latin dope boys who hit her, abused
her physically, sexually and emotionally. They all pimped her out.
One of them even made her go trick on her birthday.

Eventually she met this man while escorting,
who told her that he really cared about her. He was white, like
most of her "clients." He convinced her to get clean. Everything
seemed great, until she got out of rehab and moved in with him, and
he turned out to be even more abusive than those dope boys she had
dated earlier.

He raped and beat her when she didn't do
exactly what he said. He always demanded that she was naked in the
house, even when she cooked or cleaned. That made her feel very
vulnerable. And if she didn't obey him, he would beat her while she
was naked. And then, when she was cowering on the floor, he would
force her to give him a blowjob. She was his sex slave. One time he
beat her so badly, he threw her through a sheetrock wall. Then he
threw her out of the house, in the middle of winter, naked, while
there was snow outside.

She relapsed a few weeks after getting out
of rehab, while still living with her abusive "boyfriend." Who
could blame her?

Then she went to rehab a second time. After
she got out of rehab, she moved in with someone else and tried to
turn her life around.

She was trying to find legitimate work, and
that's how she had found my job ad. She said the reason why she
hadn't told me all that stuff earlier was because she didn't want
me to look at her as the person she used to be, but as the person
she is trying to be now.

Unfortunately the guy she had moved in with,
after her second rehab, was one of her ex-boyfriends. Some latin
dope boy who called himself Curly. She didn't know where else to
go.

She didn't tell me about moving in with him
though. I didn't find out about that until a few months later. But
of course he was the reason why she had relapsed yet again, and why
she couldn't concentrate at work anymore after a few weeks of being
so good at making real estate web pages for me.

Now that I knew the truth about her, I had
to figure out how I was going to deal with it. Her drug habit was
getting worse again, and at this point she was getting useless,
when it came to doing work on the computer for me.

Should I just tell her to leave and lose my
number? I couldn't do that. I felt so bad for her. She was such a
sweetheart, and she had such a hard life. Who wouldn't end up on
drugs if they were in her shoes? She was not a bad person. She was
a victim, just like Christiane F in Zoo Station.

I used to think there really was no reason
to outlaw prostitution. I thought, if girls want to do that kind of
stuff, why should I care? But after Alice told me the reality of
what it's like to be a hooker, and why virtually all hookers turn
to drugs, and why almost all drug addicted girls become hookers, it
was pretty clear to me that she and the other girls who did this
stuff were absolutely miserable. They did not enjoy having to do
this shit at all. It ate at them. It traumatized them. It destroyed
their self-respect. No matter how much a hooker pretends she
doesn't mind what she's doing, deep down she feels like she's the
scum of the earth, because that's how men make her feel.

When I read Zoo Station as a kid, I told
myself, if I ever met someone like Christiane F, I would be nice to
her and treat her with kindness and respect.

When I tried to imagine what deep dark
secret Donna could possibly be hiding from me, I told myself that
even if she had been a prostitute in the past, I would still love
her and be with her.

Now I really was faced with that very
situation, with a girl who really had been through all that stuff.
I gave Alice a hug and a kiss and told her I was glad she told me
the truth. She started to tear up.

She still came over all the time after that.
I didn't ask her to do any more work on the computer though, but I
kept paying her anyway. I really cared about her at this point, and
I couldn't bear the thought of her going back to having sex with
all these other guys. I'd rather just give her money than have her
go back to escorting. I didn't realize at the time that I was her
enabler. I was making it easy for her to be an addict. So why would
she ever stop?

We started doing the kind of things I used
to do with Liz: we went out to eat, got massages at fancy spas,
visited museums and shows like Cirque du Soleil and Wicked in
Manhattan, and so on. Now that I knew she needed heroin to get
through the day, she didn't hide it from me anymore. It became
normal to me that she shot up two or three times a day. To me it
was almost like she was a diabetic. They need injections of insulin
to feel ok. Was heroin really all that different? Well, yeah, of
course it was. I was really just deluding myself.

Eventually I kept asking her to go back to
rehab, but she didn't want to. Of course not. Why would she? She
wanted to have her cake and eat it, too. She wanted to have a nice
life AND do drugs. Normally you can only have one or the other, but
I was making her life as addict easier and more comfortable than it
had ever been.

She told me that she had tried rehab twice,
and failed twice, so it was pointless. She said: "I'll quit when
I'm ready."

"So, when is that gonna be?" I asked.

"I don't know. But not today."

That was her standard answer. I learned
later that that's what all addicts say: "Yeah, I'll quit
eventually. But not today." It's never today. That's the nature of
addiction. The rational part of your brain knows that you should
quit, and you really want to quit at some point, but not today.
"Today I want to get high."

It doesn't even matter what you're addicted
to. The principle is always the same. Even when it comes to food:
"I know I need to stop eating candy and junk food. I know I should
go on a diet. But not today. Maybe tomorrow. So I might as well
enjoy eating candy and junk food today. A lot."

And when people tell themselves they will
start a diet tomorrow, they feel it's ok to binge one last time
today. Might as well make the most of today! So they stuff their
face with way more food than they would normally eat, because the
good times will be over tomorrow.

But then, when tomorrow comes, you really
don't feel like starting the diet yet, so you allow yourself one
more day of binging. And another one. And another one. Sometimes
the thought of going on a diet soon actually makes you eat
more.

And then there's the what-the-hell
effect:

"I was doing so good on my diet, but then I
screwed up today and ate a donut. What the hell, since today is
already a lost day anyway, I might as well stuff my face with the
whole box of donuts."

Drug addicts think the same way: They know
they shouldn't do drugs. And if they have been clean for a while
and screw up even just once, they feel now they might as well do a
bunch more, until they go back to being clean. But of course once
they start using again, the thought of getting clean is quickly
forgotten.

Don't ever think you're better than a drug
addict, because your brain works the same as theirs. You have the
same circuits. And drugs would affect your brain in the same way it
affects theirs. The same thought process that makes them screw up
over and over again would make you screw up over and over as well,
if you were in their shoes. You probably already are doing it, just
not with heroin or crack, but with food or cigarettes, or something
else you shouldn't be doing. Like hacking.

When you push someone's head under water for
5 minutes, they will drown. It doesn't matter if the person is a
sinner or a saint. It's just a natural process. If their head is
under water, the lack of oxygen will make them drown. That rule
applies to everyone, good or bad, equally. It doesn't matter if the
drowning person has strong moral fiber.

And it doesn't matter if you're a good or a
bad person, once you become addicted to drugs. What happens next is
inevitable. It's a natural process that happens in everyone's
brain, once the drugs take over. So don't ever fool yourself into
thinking that only weak or bad people get addicted.

Anyway, I went all out to show Alice how
nice life could be if she were sober. I thought if I give her an
incentive that's good enough, she will want to get clean and stay
clean. So I asked her to come to Hawaii with me for 10 days.

She was scared at first. Drug addicts don't
like to go too far away from the place where they get their drugs.
It's like they're mentally chained to it. Flying half way around
the world, thousands of miles away from her dope boy, was a
terrifying idea.

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition
from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does
not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and
courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express
the results of his thought in clear form."

"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity
opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social
environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such
opinions."

"I cannot conceive of a personal God who would
directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly
sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation."

Albert Einstein

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic
is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier
than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and
dangerous quality"

George Bernard Shaw

"All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant,
useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher."

Lucretius

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true,
by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."

Seneca the Younger

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the
rich."

Napoleon Bonaparte

"I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our
Almighty Creator. By fighting the Jews, I am doing the Lord's
work."

Adolf Hitler

Alice didn't really talk to her mother
anymore, but she talked to her grandma Gina in Tennessee a lot.
When she told Gina she was afraid to go to Hawaii, Gina asked to
talk to me. Alice gave her my number.

Gina called me and asked me about my
intentions with Alice. I explained to her how I felt about her
granddaughter, and that I wanted to show her a better life and
convince her to get sober. We talked for over 2 hours. She wanted
to know more about me, so I told her about my alcoholic father and
how he had been the perfect negative role model, and that he made
me want to be a better man than him, because I wanted to be nothing
like him. And I told her what it was like to be married to Donna.
And about my experiences with the girls I had met before Alice.