Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (25 page)

Remember I mentioned earlier that many bands
produce two versions of their music videos? A censored one for
America, and an uncensored one with nudity for European music TV.
Metallica's uncensored version of the music video for Turn The Page
shows a blonde woman who lives in hotel rooms with her little
daughter. During the day she works in a dirty strip club, taking
her clothes off in front of oogling perverts, while her little
daughter waits for her backstage. And at night she walks the
streets as a hooker and has sex with abusive men who rape and beat
her in the same hotel room she shares with her daughter. It's a
really, really sad video.

That video is one of the reasons why I don't
like going to strip clubs. How is it sexy to sit in a dirty room
filled with 100 sweaty predatory douchebags staring at a naked
girl? The dick to pussy ratio in that room does not work for
me.

And the one time someone had talked me into
going to a strip club with them, I just felt bad for the girls. I
just wanted to give them a hug, not stare at their naked bodies.
These girls all had this empty stare in their eyes while they were
on stage, like they really didn't want to be there, and their mind
was somewhere completely different. Kinda like what happened to my
mind when my father tried to break through my bedroom door and kill
my mother and me.

Anyway, Alice agreed that having a baby with
Papi would definitely not make her life better and she definitely
would not get clean because of it. She knew how miserable her
friend Mary's life was. It really was just as bad as the girl's
life in that Metallica video. And Alice knew how messed up in the
head Mary's little son Mikey was because of it.

Alice's friend Becky was not much better.
Well, she wasn't a stripper or a hooker yet, because she had
managed to limit herself to shooting only one bag of heroin at a
time, and only twice a day, so her habit was just $20 per day. But
even she couldn't quit drugs when she had her baby, and her
daughter ended up being taken away from her. Alice did not want to
go through that, so she decided to get an abortion.

I heard when Papi found out, he beat the
shit out of her, as usual. She was afraid for her life whenever she
was around him. It broke my heart to hear that.

I told her she could come live with me at
the condo in Liberty whenever she wanted: "Just say the word, and
I'll drop everything and come get you. The one thing I ask is that
you go to rehab and at least TRY living a sober life with me for a
while, and see if you like it."

That was a deal breaker for her. As much as
she liked being with me, because she felt safe and comfortable
around me, and I treated her with love and respect, she didn't want
to get clean. Not today. At some point in the future, yeah. When
she's ready. But not today. Never today.

Finally she couldn't take the beatings from
Papi anymore and ran away from him. But she didn't come to me. She
ran back to Curly and stayed in motel rooms with him, while he
pimped her out. I was so upset. I fucking hated all these God damn
dope boys!

I heard that Papi was looking for Curly,
because Curly stole "his" girl. I hacked Curly's phone and got his
location. Then I sent an anonymous text to Papi and told him where
to find Curly.

Curly and Alice were alone in the motel room
together, when Papi knocked on the door. Papi was huge. Curly was
tiny. He never stood a chance. As soon as he opened the door, Papi
suckerpunched him. He stormed into the room and threw Curly to the
ground and just started beating the shit out of him, while holding
Curly's frizzy hair with one hand so that he couldn't get up or
fight back.

Curly was crying for help. Alice screamed at
Papi to stop or she was going to call the cops. When she picked up
the phone, Papi ran off.

Hacker vs Dope Boy: Hacker wins. I wanted to
beat the shit out of Curly, but I didn't even have to do it myself.
I made Papi do it, and he never even knew I was using him.

Now Curly was thirsting for revenge. He had
been utterly humiliated in front of "his" girl. Papi had made him
scream for help like a little bitch. Curly couldn't just let that
go. He needed to restore his honor.

Curly said he was going to kill Papi. He
called his homies. They had guns, knifes and baseball bats. They
went on a manhunt, looking for Papi. Papi didn't have a crew. He
was fresh off the boat from Puerto Rico. Now he was hiding
somewhere, because he didn't stand a chance alone against a bunch
of armed thugs. Nobody knew where he was. So I hacked Papi's phone
and sent an anonymous text to Curly and his homies, with Papi's
location. Nobody ever heard from him again after that night.

Curly was still pissed at Alice, because he
was sure that she had told Papi where she and Curly were staying,
so Curly believed that whole clusterfuck had been her fault. He
beat her and kicked her out. Now she had nowhere to go, and she
called me and asked me if she could stay with me at the condo in
Liberty.

From that point on she lived with me and she
didn't escort or sleep around anymore. We stayed in Liberty, close
to Middletown, because that's where her latest drug dealer,
Enrique, was. Enrique was Tattoo's cousin. Somehow word got around
that if I was a pissed at a dope boy, bad things started happening
to him. So Enrique was always very polite to me, when Alice and I
stopped by his house to get her "medicine." He seemed scared of
me.

By now Alice's habit had gotten worse. She
could no longer get through the day on 10 bags of heroin. Now she
needed 20 bags, so her habit was now $200 a day.

Drug addiction is a progressive disease. In
the beginning one bag of heroin will get you high and make you feel
really good. Then, after a few weeks, your body gets used to it,
and shooting up just one bag won't do anything for you. So now you
need to shoot up two bags at a time, to get the same effect one bag
used to give you. And then, after a few more weeks, you need to
shoot up three bags at a time. And so on and so forth. And the more
heroin you shoot each time, the sicker you get when it starts to
wear off. It's a vicious cycle.

I hated throwing away $200 a day, but I
would rather do that than see Alice go back to escorting or staying
with some abusive dope boy. But every chance I got, I tried to talk
her into going to rehab. But any time I brought up the topic, she'd
get very defensive: "You promised you wouldn't push me to get clean
if I come live with you! I'll get clean when I'm ready. But I'm not
ready yet!"

It had been a long time since we had been to
Hawaii together. She had told me a few months ago that Hawaii
seemed so far away now, like it was all just a dream. I hoped,
maybe if I refreshed her memory about how happy she was, it would
encourage her to get clean. We went on a two week trip to Florida,
so I could show her the condo in Bonita Springs. She smuggled 280
bags, $2800 worth of heroin, on the plane between her legs. I'm
sweating bullets just thinking back about it now.

She absolutely loved Florida. It was like
Hawaii, but everything was cleaner, newer. We went to the Miromar
Outlet Mall, the Coconut Point Mall, Coastland, Mercato, Sanibel,
Captiva, Fort Myers Beach, Barefoot Beach, 5th Avenue in Naples,
the pier, Matlacha, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, South Beach, Orlando,
Disney World, and a bunch of other places. She felt just as happy
as she had been in Hawaii.

I told her we could live here forever,
instead of the tiny condo in Liberty. For the first time, she
really seriously talked about going to rehab, and starting a new
life in Florida with me.

When we got back to Liberty, it seemed so
gray and inhospitable. It was getting cold and the trees had lost
their leaves. The difference between Bonita Springs and Liberty
felt like the difference between District 1 and District 12 in The
Hunger Games.

We were in Liberty for just a week or two.
Then we flew to Tennessee, to surprise her grandma Gina. They
hadn't seen each other in over 5 years, ever since her mother had
ripped her out of her home at her grandma's house. We pulled a
similar stunt like what I had done to Donna, when I showed up at
her door unexpectedly, while she was waiting for me on the
phone.

Alice talked to Gina in the morning and
mentioned how good the bagels in New York were. Gina said she
really missed those bagels. She used to live in the Bronx as a
child.

Then Alice and I bought a bag of fresh
bagels for Gina, got on a plane and drove to her house. Right
before we knocked on Gina's door, Alice called her on the phone.
They started to talk about bagels again. Then she said: "You know
what, grandma, let me give you some."

She knocked on the door, with the phone in
one hand, and the bagels in the other. Gina opened the door, still
talking to Alice on the phone. She looked right at Alice, but
didn't recognize her at first, and said into the phone: "Hold on,
Alice, there's someone at the door."

Alice started to laugh and said: "It's me,
grandma!" She gave her a hug. Gina was shocked! She was ecstatic,
she didn't even know what to say. She just kept hugging and kissing
Alice. They both started crying. Then Gina started hugging me and
kept saying: "Thank you, thank you, thank you." I started to tear
up, too. It was just really touching to see how happy this reunion
made them. We spent about a week in Tennessee and took Gina to
Nashville. She had always wanted to go to the Grand Ole Opry.

When we got back to Liberty, life seemed
like it was in black and white. It just felt so drab and dreary,
even though we tried to make the best of it, and we went to shows
in Manhattan or to a spa for massages. But now Alice was starting
to realize how much better life could be. She asked if we could go
to Florida again.

This time we drove, because I did not want
to keep taking our chances at the airport, smuggling thousands of
dollars worth of dope between Alice's legs.

Alice actually began to feel at home in the
condo in Bonita Springs. She started thinking of ways to decorate
it. We spent my birthday and Thanksgiving down there. She made a
fancy turkey dinner with brownies for dessert. The things she had
been through with Curly and Papi and that guy who treated her like
a sex slave, and all those guys on Backpage, seemed like nothing
more than a bad dream now.

She really wasn't crazy about going back to
Liberty at all anymore. But we had to, because that's where her
drugs were. At this point I had no idea yet how easy it is to find
drugs in Fort Myers.

When we were back in New York, she talked
more and more about going to rehab so we could move to Florida. I
was so happy to hear her talk like that. She even wrote some of her
friends on Facebook, that she wasn't going to be in New York much
longer, because we were moving to Florida for good. Everything
finally seemed to come together.

Through the grapevine Alice's mother Tory
had heard that Alice and I had visited Gina. Tory didn't like that
one bit, because she was jealous of their relationship. Alice was
her daughter, but Alice kept acting like she was Gina's daughter.
And Gina had even started referring to me as her son-in-law while
talking to a waiter, when we had been at the Ruth's Chris Steak
House in Nashville together.

Tory started calling Alice and asked her and
me to come over and spent time at her house. Their relationship was
strained at best. They were more like sisters than mother and
daughter. And they had a weird rivalry, just like Patty and Rita.
Tory always seemed to be in competition with Alice, and always
wanted to have better things than her. She wanted to be prettier
than Alice and made her feel ugly and fat, even though that wasn't
true at all. Alice was beautiful. But her mother Tory wanted to be
more beautiful. If Alice told her mother she was happy about a new
pair of earrings, Tory told her they were tacky. If Alice told her
she was happy about having eaten at a nice restaurant, Tory said
she had eaten there, too, but she didn't think it was that good.
She had better.

I really didn't like her. She was a toxic
person in Alice's life. She was the reason why Alice had started
taking drugs in the first place, and her parenting skills had not
improved one bit. Tory had another daughter, more than 12 years
after she had Alice. Alice's little sister Brianna.

Tory spoiled Brianna rotten. She got
whatever she wanted. She could do no wrong. Meanwhile everything
Alice did was always wrong. Tory made no secret out of the fact
that Brianna was her favorite, and Alice was a huge disappointment.
Tory kissed Brianna on the mouth all the time and was loving and
affectionate towards her. But she never wanted to kiss Alice on the
mouth. Alice told me she thought it was because Tory kept thinking
about all the dicks Alice had sucked. I could tell how much it hurt
Alice, to feel like even her own mother didn't love her.

While going through these years of turmoil
with Alice, I read whatever I could find on the subject of drugs
and addiction: Psychological profiles, medical reports, studies,
statistics, interviews, and whatever else I could find. I figured,
in order to try to help Alice, I needed to know as much about what
goes on in her brain as possible. And I probably knew just as much
about addiction as Patty at this point. Maybe more.