Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (41 page)

I told Veronica all that. And I told her
about my experiences with Alice and those other girls I had met.
Veronica was offended. Or pretended to be. She said: "Don't compare
me to those other whores. Can't you tell I'm totally different? I
would never do to you what those other girls did to you. I will
never ever hurt you the way Alice hurt you."

Of course I knew that a con artist will
never admit that they're conning you. But I really believed that
Veronica was being sincere. I believed that she really hated being
a drug addict, that she really hated what her life had become, that
she really hated the things she had done for drugs, hated herself
for doing them, and that she genuinely had feelings for me and
wanted to have a better future with me.

Everyone who has ever dealt with a drug
addict knows that they lie all day long. Lying is their most
important tool, when they try to con people into giving them money
or drugs, or trying to hide the true extent of their addiction.
They are so used to lying, sometimes they don't even realize
they're lying. It's just habit. And old habits die hard.

So I already knew I would catch Veronica in
lies occasionally, and that that didn't necessarily mean that she
didn't love me. Becoming a sober person and living a sober life
required her to not only stop doing drugs, but stop living like an
addict. Stop hustling. Stop cheating. Stop conning. Stop lying.
That's a pretty big, difficult change, if that's all you know.

When Alice and I went to Florida together
for the first time, her friend Becky called her and asked where we
were. Alice told her we were in Canada. Afterwards I asked her why
she lied to one of her best friends. She replied: "I don't know.
I'm just so used to lying every time I open my mouth, sometimes I
can't turn it off. Lies just slip out for no reason at all."

I was willing to give Veronica the benefit
of a doubt, if I caught her in a lie. I knew she had a difficult
life and that the transition to a new life with me would not be
easy for her. But I really believed she genuinely loved me. She had
told me a lot of things about herself that I didn't think she ever
told anyone else. Like the fact that she had been sexually abused
by her mother's boyfriends ever since she was a little girl. It was
very difficult for her to talk about that. I believed it was a good
sign that she was able to tell me things like that. It showed me
that she was not a completely broken human being yet. Despite
everything she had been through, there was still hope that she
might be able to develop a deep, meaningful bond with me. And
that's really all love is.

During the first few weeks in jail, her
letters were long and thoughtful. She wrote about the things she
wanted to do with me once she got out. She wrote about our future
together, and that she wanted to get married and have a baby with
me, and live happily ever after. I felt the same way. For the first
time in my life, I actually wanted to have a baby with someone. She
drew hundreds of little hearts along the top and bottom of her
letters.

Then her letters changed. They looked and
sounded different. Sloppy. Like she wasn't really putting all that
much effort into them. Or like she was writing them hastily, maybe
while trying to hide the fact that she was writing me from some
other inmate. Maybe a girl she was dating in there? I found out
later that my instincts were right again.

A week or two later, Veronica told me that
she had a fight with some other inmate, and that the other girl
threatened to write me a letter, to tell me what Veronica was up to
in jail. Veronica was clearly worried that I would be upset about
the letter, and she swore that whatever the other girl was going to
write me, was all lies.

I told Veronica that if there was anything I
should know about what she was doing in jail behind my back, it
would come out sooner or later, and that it was better if I hear it
from her, rather than from someone else.

In her next letter, Veronica wrote that she
had made a friend in jail. Her name was Theresa. She said she
didn't mean for it to happen. Right there she gave herself away
again. People only say that kind of thing if they cheat, not if
they simply make an innocent friend.

She wrote that she needed a female companion
in her life to be truly happy, but that I didn't have to worry
about it, because she still loved me and wanted to be with me, but
she was going to do things with Theresa, that she couldn't do with
me.

Apparently she really thought that was an
acceptable thing to write, and didn't even realize how badly it
hurt me. When I'm in a relationship with someone, that girl is the
center of my world. She's not just my lover, but also my best
friend and confidant. She is closer to me than any other person in
the world. There is nothing I could do with someone else that I
can't do with her.

And here Veronica was telling me that she
was gonna do all the things with Theresa, that she couldn't do with
me. That obviously implied that she felt closer to Theresa than to
me. I was always going to be the third wheel.

Rather than trying to explain that with a
million words, and risk being misunderstood, I decided to show
Veronica exactly how I felt when she wrote me that stuff about
Theresa.

I wrote her a letter back, and wrote pretty
much exactly the same stuff she had written me. I wrote that I had
met a new friend, and that her name was Faith. Faith didn't really
exist. I made her up. She was simply a mirror image of Theresa. But
of course I didn't tell Veronica that. I made her believe Faith was
a real person.

I told Veronica that I didn't mean for it to
happen, but that I needed a friend like Faith in my life, because
with her I can do all the things that I can't do with Veronica.
Veronica and Theresa had been living together in the same dorm for
weeks, so I told her Faith and I had been spending a lot of time
together every day for the past few weeks.

Veronica had asked me how I would feel about
her "occasionally" having sex with Theresa and if I would be ok
with that. The concept of being faithful to someone seemed foreign
to her. So when I wrote her back, I asked her if it was ok if I had
sex with Faith every now and then. I wrote that it would work out
perfectly, because then I could do all the things with Faith that
Veronica may not want to do with me. Like, if Veronica didn't like
going to museums, I could do that with Faith. And if Veronica
didn't like anal, I could do that with Faith, too.

When Veronica got my letter, she freaked
out. She was livid. She threatened to beat the shit out of Faith.
"I'm gonna drag a ho!" she screamed on the phone. She was sooo
upset and jealous about Faith moving in on her man. Then I told her
that Faith didn't really exist, and she was really just an
imaginary mirror image of Theresa that I had created to show
Veronica how her letter made me feel.

Finally it sunk in, and she said I really
fucked with her head. She said she understood now why all that
stuff with Theresa was not ok. She told me she would never cheat on
me with Theresa or anyone else. She said she was 100% faithful to
me and I had nothing to worry about. Later I found out she was
lying to me the whole time, and that Veronica and Theresa were
officially a couple and had been dating in jail for months.

But at the time I didn't know that yet. I
did get more and more suspicious though, because I caught Veronica
in more and more lies and keeping secrets. Kayla had told me a few
months earlier that girls in jail date each other and have sex with
each other all the time.

I didn't tell Veronica I knew that was going
on. I just asked her, if girls in jail have sex with each other.
She said: "No of course not. Don't be ridiculous. This isn't a
youth hostel. It's jail. You can't have sex here."

She was clearly lying. And why would she lie
about that, unless she was having sex with someone in jail and
didn't want me to know about it?

Kayla always told me the latest gossip that
was going on in jail, about who was making out with each other, who
got caught writing love letters, who was taking showers together,
and so on and so forth.

But Veronica kept her jail life completely
secret. I realized later that she was afraid she might accidentally
let slip out a bit of information that would reveal that she was
dating Theresa. So she figured the less she told me about what was
happening inside the jail, the better. But the more I realized that
she was purposely keeping things from me, the more suspicious I
got.

While she was cheating on me all this time
with Theresa, I really had been 100% faithful to Veronica. I had
never cheated on Donna in over 15 years of marriage, and I wasn't
going to cheat on Veronica either. I completely stopped talking to
any other girls. I wouldn't even answer the phone when Haley or
Crystal or any other girl tried to call me.

A lot of people say Romeo and Juliet is the
most romantic love story every told. I disagree. I think seeing an
old couple who has been married for 40 years is way more romantic.
They truly are each other's best friends and soulmates. They truly
have grown together as one, like one soul in two bodies. That's
beautiful.

That's the kind of relationship I want to
have. I want to grow old with someone. I want to go through life
together, face storms together, enjoy the happy little moments
together, and be there for each other always. But in order to have
a loyal partner, you have to be a loyal partner. You can't expect
someone to be loyal to you, if you're not loyal to them.

Unfortunately people who have abandonment
issues don't grasp that simple concept. People like Veronica, who
have been abused and abandoned by their parents at an early age,
believe that if their own parents don't love them enough not to
leave them, then nobody will ever love them enough, and everyone
will leave them eventually. And being abandoned or betrayed like
that hurts terribly.

Nobody has ever killed themselves over a
broken arm. But every day, thousands of people kill themselves
because of a broken heart. Why? Because emotional pain hurts much
worse than physical pain.

When someone you love leaves you or betrays
you, it hurts like nothing else in the world. I know, because I
went through it with Alice. Queen Elizabeth II of England once
said: "Grief is the price we pay for love." So true.

People who have been abused or abandoned
during early childhood, people like Veronica and all the other drug
addicted inmates in LCJ, are so scared of being abandoned and hurt
again that they are afraid of real relationships. Many of them
prefer to be in shallow, meaningless, fake relationships, because
they think those relationships can't hurt them. Someone you don't
really care about can't really hurt you all that bad when they
leave you or cheat on you. But those meaningless fake relationships
leave you empty inside. You will never find real love like that,
because you will never develop a deep, meaningful bond with
someone.

They all want to find someone who will truly
love them and never leave them, but they don't even realize that by
acting slutty, and bouncing from one shallow fake relationship to
the next, always cheating, never faithful, they're sabotaging
themselves. Nobody will ever take you seriously as a potential life
partner, if all you ever do is cheat on people and jump from one
shallow relationship to the next.

And yet that's all the love-starved drug
addicted girls in LCJ do. They're afraid to put all their eggs in
one basket and really commit to one person. One day they profess
eternal love for this person, and the next day they proclaim they
are madly in love with the next person. And they constantly cheat
on everybody with everybody else. They really have no idea what
love actually is, because they don't know how to really bond with
another human being. They confuse sex with love.

And that's exactly what Veronica was doing,
just like all her so-called friends. They all had dated each other
in various combinations. And most of them had dated the same guys,
usually dope boys, at one point or another. They all supposedly
loved each other, and then cheated on each other 5 minutes
later.

Veronica wasn't just cheating on me with
Theresa. She was cheating on Theresa with a dyke (or a "stud" as
dykes in jail like to call themselves) who was known as Snickers. I
guess she liked those candy bars a lot. She had short blonde hair
and she liked to say she looked like Justin Bieber. Everyone in
jail knew Snickers. She had gotten arrested so often, she had spent
more time of her young life inside of jail than out. She looked
like a boy. She had dated pretty much every girl in jail at one
point or another, because she was just as love-starved as everyone
else in LCJ. And now she and Veronica were dating, too. Behind
Theresa's and my back.

Snickers thought Veronica had broken up with
Theresa. But then she realized that Veronica was still cheating on
her with Theresa. Theresa and Snickers both got really pissed at
Veronica, and decided to date each other to make Veronica jealous.
It worked. She was really upset about it and wrote me letters about
how depressed she was. But she didn't tell me what exactly she was
depressed about. I didn't find all this out until much later. At
the time I thought she was simply depressed about being in jail, so
I tried to cheer her up by sending her funny postcards every
day.