Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (46 page)

I went back the next day. She was in the
contagious disease ward, and I had to wear a gown and gloves before
entering her room, just like when I used to visit Veronica a few
months ago, when she was at the same hospital with a MRSA infection
in her leg. She had been in the same ward, in the same room. Déjà
vu.

I brought Haley candy, coloring books,
Burger King and a little laptop. I told her she could keep it. She
was so happy, she cried. She told me how much it meant to her that
I was there for her, and that with her new laptop she'd be able to
get back into selling things on Ebay. She said this infection was a
wake up call, and she would finally turn her life around now. I had
heard that one before.

I visited her every day and spent a few
hours with her each time. We watched TV together, or we'd just talk
and joke around. The swelling in her face was slowly going down. We
had always been very close, but her little adventure as a freaky
looking mutant brought us even closer.

A few days later she left the hospital
against doctor's orders, because she wanted to go smoke crack. It
all sounded awfully familiar.

The next day she called me up hysterically
crying. I couldn't really understand what she was saying, because
she was sobbing so hard again. I felt so bad for her. She was so
upset, so hurt.

"He raped me!" is pretty much all I
understood. "Call the police!"

"What?" I asked.

"He stole everything! My shoes, my bag, my
clothes, and the new laptop you gave me! And then he raped me! I'm
naked! I don't even have any clothes! If I call the police they
won't listen to me. They know I'm an addict and I turn tricks.
They're not gonna believe me. But you're an upstanding citizen.
They'll believe you!"

Maybe. But the problem was, I didn't really
believe her either. I figured this was just another one of her
stories, to make me drive all the way up there and come get
her.

"Well, I wasn't there," I said. "So I really
don't know what happened. I don't even know where you are. If you
want I'll come get you, but you're going to have to call the cops
yourself."

She told me she was at some dirty little
trap house on Ione. When I arrived, the cops were already there.
The cruiser was parked in front of the house with its lights
flashing. Haley was standing in the street, crying, while talking
to two officers. She really didn't have any clothes or anything
else anymore. She was wearing some guy's t-shirt. No pants or shoes
or anything else. Just that t-shirt. Good thing I brought her some
of her clothes, just in case. She always left some at my house.

The officers really didn't take her
seriously. They thought she was just a tweaking crackwhore who was
drunk or high out of her mind. They couldn't really understand
anything she was saying either. So I told them about the laptop,
her bag, her clothes, and that she said she had been raped. They
looked sceptical.

"Without evidence or witnesses, there's
nothing we can do," they said. They didn't seem very interested in
Haley or what she had to say. I had seen this attitude before, when
I had tried to file a missing person report for Alice, and the cop
told me to forget about her, like she was worthless garbage.

Haley obviously was used to being treated
this way by cops. "They don't give a shit," said cried. I gave her
a hug, led her to my car and handed her some clothes. She got in
and changed. She said: "They think just because I turn tricks, I
can't be raped. Any guy can do whatever he wants to me, and I'm
supposed to be ok with it. Like I'm not even a person."

She told me that she was doing drugs in the
back room of that house. Then she passed out on the bed. When she
woke up, she was naked and all her things were gone. Her vagina
hurt, and she could tell that someone had raped her while she was
passed out. I had never seen her this upset. She was ranting and
raving about setting the house on fire and killing the guy who did
this to her.

When we got back to my house, she calmed
down a little. She had asked me to buy her some alcohol at a gas
station, and it relaxed her. She told me this wasn't the first time
she had been raped. She said at least this time she was passed out
while it happened and she didn't have to go through it awake.
Somehow that made it better in her head.

The next morning she asked me to drop her
off at another trap house on Ione.

A few weeks later, Cirque du Soleil was
performing at the Germaine Arena, and we made plans to go see the
show together. I made her promise not to stand me up, because the
tickets were expensive. She promised she wouldn't. But of course
she stood me up anyway. Drug addicts are so damn unreliable, you
can't make any plans with them at all.

But we did spend my birthday and
Thanksgiving together. We went out to eat at Golden Corral, her
favorite restaurant.

A couple of days after that, she called me
up with yet another emergency. She was hysterically crying again,
and I couldn't understand anything she was saying, as usual. At
some point I gathered that she was in Cape Coral somewhere and had
a court date, and if she wasn't going to be there, they would issue
a bench warrant for her and she'd go to jail. She asked me give her
a ride to court.

I drove all the way to Cape Coral, and when
I got there, she wouldn't answer the phone. Great. If she made me
drive all the way out here for nothing, I was really gonna be
pissed. But after a few minutes, she finally came out of the house.
She was either totally drunk or high as a kite. I don't know, but
she wasn't wearing a shirt, just a bra. And she didn't have her
glasses on. Without them, she was blind as a bat.

"If I take you to court like this, you're
gonna get arrested," I told her.

She started crying again, really bad.

"What the hell happened to you?" I asked.
"Did you get raped in that house or something?"

I couldn't understand anything she was
saying at first, but then I think she said that a bunch of guys
were in that house and they had sex with her and they wouldn't let
her leave.

"Wow. So do you want me to call the
cops?"

"No," she cried. "They don't help girls like
me anyway. Just take me to court, or I'll get arrested."

"Ok, but can you at least put a shirt
on?"

She went back in to get a shirt. I waited
for about 10 minutes, but she didn't come back out. Suddenly some
black guy walked out and approached my car. Great. Now what?

He seemed scared, and said: "Look, I don't
know what Haley told you, but this is not a trap house. This is a
family residence. Nobody did anything to her. There's children
here, and she's running around the house naked. You need to get her
outta here."

"Well, I'm trying! She said she wants me to
take her to court. Can you get her out here?" I replied.

He went back inside. Then nothing. I waited
for about another 10 minutes. Then some fat girl came out. She also
looked nervous and told me the same thing he said: "I don't know
what Haley told you, but this is not a trap house. This is a family
residence. There's children and she's running around naked. She
needs to leave."

"I'm TRYING! Can you please get her out here
and make sure she has a shirt on?"

Then Haley finally came back out. Still with
no shirt or glasses. Still totally blitzed.

The fat girl brought her a shirt. Haley was
so fucked up, she couldn't figure out how to put the shirt on. Her
head and arms kept getting stuck in the wrong holes. I tried to
help her, but even then she couldn't get it on until the third
attempt.

She told me the black guy was a dope boy who
had just been released from prison, so he got himself 3 hookers and
he kept feeding them crack and fucking them.

Then she called her lawyer to ask him what
was going to happen at court. She was still sobbing, and he
couldn't understand her, so I took the phone and told him she was
in no condition to go to court right now. What did he want me to
do? He said I should take her back to the house and leave her
there. Then the judge would order a bench warrant and she'd go to
jail and get help. He said that's the best thing for her right now,
or she'd end up dead. I agreed. Haley overheard the conversation,
and threatened to kill herself if she had to go back to jail. She
insisted that I take her to court. Alrighty then.

As we were going over the bridge from Cape
Coral to Fort Myers, she suddenly started taking her pants off.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I gotta pee," she said.

"Do not pee in my car. DO NOT PEE IN MY
CAR!!!" I yelled, while she was getting ready to relieve herself on
the passenger seat.

"I can't hold it in. I really gotta go," she
said.

Luckily there was a McDonald's right after
the bridge. "Look! I'll stop there and you can go pee in there," I
said.

When I pulled into the parking lot, she got
out of the car and said: "Don't leave me here."

That thought had never even occurred to me,
until she said that. Normally I would never dream of just leaving
someone behind somewhere, but that was the perfect solution right
now. Someone would call the cops, and she'd get arrested for public
intoxication. They'd take her to jail and then she'd go to rehab.
Perfect plan! So I drove off without her.

A few hours later Haley called me from jail.
The plan worked, I thought. She was confused: "How did I end up in
jail? I don't remember anything."

I looked up her charges on the Lee County
Sheriff's website a few minutes later. She didn't get arrested for
public intoxication. She got arrested for grand theft auto! What
the hell?! When I left her at McDonald's, she decided to steal a
car. She spent the next year in jail.

"She goes from one addiction to another. All are ways
for her to not feel her feelings."

Ellen Burstyn

"Romantic love is an addiction."

Helen Fisher

When Veronica told me that she was really
going to run away from the Salvation Army rehab this time, I
thought she was going to change her mind again, like the first
time. But she really did run, together with 3 other girls.

It was dark. I was parked in the back of the
building, as agreed. Veronica was carrying a big garbage bag with
all the clothes and stuff I had bought her, when she ran out of the
back door of the rehab dorm and jumped into my car. A second girl,
Alexis, followed her. Veronica asked if Alexis could come home with
us, until she could figure out where to hide from the police.

The two other girls, Kim and Sandra, got
into someone else's car. I later found out the other driver was
Erin. Small world! All the drug addicts in Fort Myers know each
other. And Kim, Sandra and Erin had grown up together in Cape
Coral.

Veronica and Alexis were totally hyper,
talking a mile a minute. When we got to my condo, Alexis called her
baby daddy, a 40 year old black drug dealer. When he heard that she
had run away from rehab, and now had a new warrant, he told her he
wanted nothing to do with her. She called her back-up boyfriend, a
latin drug dealer who lived in Lehigh Acres. He agreed to pick her
up at the Miromar Outlet Mall and let her hide at his house.

After we dropped Alexis off at the mall, we
went home. Veronica said she really wanted to smoke some crack. I
tried to talk her out of it for hours. I told her she was just
nervous and excited right now, but in a day or two she would calm
down, and then the urge to do drugs would pass.

But she wouldn't take no for an answer: "I
just ran away from rehab. Now I have new charges. There's no way
I'm not gonna do drugs now. Either you let me smoke crack here, or
I'm gonna run away, fuck some dope boy for drugs, and smoke crack
in some trap house. Is that what you want?"

I replied: "If you smoke crack even just
once right now, you won't be able to stop. You'll be back in
full-blown addiction in a matter of days, and you'll end up on the
streets or tricking on Backpage again. Is that really what you
want?"

I was trying to appeal to her common sense.
But her prefrontal cortex wasn't home right now. There was only her
midbrain, screaming for drugs. Right now there was not a single
part of her brain capable of considering the consequences of what
would happen after she smoked crack. I felt like I was talking to a
mentally challenged person. Someone with advanced Alzheimer's
maybe, who couldn't understand even the most basic logic.

She pleaded: "I'm just gonna smoke crack
tonight, and then I won't even touch any more drugs at all. I
swear! Let me show you! Let me prove it to you! Just let me smoke
some crack tonight so I can get it out of my system, and then
tomorrow I'll be clean. I'm not saying I'll never smoke crack
again, but I won't touch that shit for at least a week. I swear!
Let me show you! If I ask you within the next 7 days to let me do
drugs, you can even call the cops on me and have me put back in
jail. I'm serious. Let me show you! Just let me smoke some crack
tonight. Please? It'll make me really horny. You'll love it. When I
smoke crack, I just want to fuck all night."