Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (49 page)

When an inmate absconds from the Salvation
Army rehab program, it takes a few days before their probation
officer files the paperwork that leads to a new warrant.

It took over a week until there was a
warrant out for Veronica's arrest after she left rehab. As soon as
the warrant came out, I hacked her phone, got her location, told
Crimestoppers that she was staying at the Days Inn in North Fort
Myers and gave them her phone number. A cop called her to set up an
escort date. She and Kim were arrested the same day. I finally felt
better. Balance had been restored to the universe. After all the
pain she had caused me, now she was going to rot in jail again.
Good. Fuck her. Karma is a bitch.

As soon as Veronica was back in jail, she
started to call me again. She told me how sorry she was for running
off like that and cheating on me, and that she loved me and she
hoped I still loved her. I told her to lose my number and go fuck
herself, and that I wanted nothing to do with her anymore. I hung
up on her.

Then I wrote her a really vicious postcard,
telling her that she was a lying, cheating crackwhore sociopath
with no conscience, the scum of the earth, and that no matter how
pretty she thought she was on the outside, she was ugly on the
inside. I told her she was the worst human being I had ever met in
my life and if she dropped dead tomorrow, the world would be a
better place.

Then Hurricane Sandy hit New York, right
before Halloween. The streets were flooded. Almost every block had
one or more huge old trees that were uprooted by the storm and
knocked over, blocking the road. The power went out. The cell
phones didn't work anymore, except in a few rare spots. The gas
stations had no more gas. It was horrible. The chaos reminded me of
the days right after 9/11.

It took my postcard over a week to get to
Fort Myers. In the meantime, Veronica kept calling me. When I
finally had a signal for a few minutes, I answered the phone. She
told me she had heard about the hurricane on the news and she hoped
I was ok. She said she knew I wanted nothing to do with her
anymore, but she had to tell me something: she was pregnant, and I
was the father.

Considering she just fucked every guy in
town a few days earlier, I had a hard time believing she was so
sure I was the father, if she was even pregnant at all. She replied
that she had used a condom with all those guys she met on Backpage,
and I was the only guy she let cum inside of her without a condom.
And she told me that if it had been any of those other guys, it
would be too soon for the jail pregnancy test to be positive
already. She said the baby could only be mine.

Veronica had lied to me so much, I didn't
believe anything at all she said at this point. And since Linda had
already lied to me about being pregnant with my baby a year or two
earlier, this all seemed oddly familiar again.

But what if Veronica really was pregnant?
What kind of a horrible guy would I be if I left her hanging,
broke, homeless, all alone, and in jail... and pregnant? I decided
to give her the benefit of a doubt. I still loved her, despite all
the fucked up things she had done to me, and I still wanted to have
a future with her, because I believed that deep down, under all
that grimey drug addict bullshit, she was a sweet, kindhearted
person, who had been through a lot, and needed someone to love her.
So we made up.

She called me every day, and I figured out a
spot where my cell phone worked, even though the power was still
out in Brooklyn. I went to that spot every day and waited for
Veronica's call.

Donna started to wonder why I was always
leaving the house around the same time of day. She finally began to
suspect that I wasn't celibate after all, and that I was seeing
someone. She kept telling me that I was keeping a secret from her,
and she demanded to know. But I still didn't tell her anything. I
knew it would only cause problems.

A few days later Veronica got the vicious
postcard I had sent her after her first call. She cried on the
phone and told me the card really hurt her feelings. I told her I
was sorry and that I had written it before I knew she was pregnant.
I really felt bad. I meant every word when I wrote it, but I knew
how deeply my words cut her already wounded soul.

Veronica had been sent to dorm 4 when she
got to jail, while Kim was sent to dorm 3. Suddenly I saw on the
Sheriff's website, that both of them were now in dorm 2, the rehab
dorm. I asked her if they had purposely signed themselves into that
dorm so they could be together. Veronica denied it and said she
wanted nothing to do with Kim anymore, and that they were on
opposite ends of the dorm and not even talking to each other
anymore. She said she really didn't give a shit about Kim. When she
ran away from my house, she just wanted to have a drug buddy she
could get high with. It could have been anyone else, besides
Kim.

Later I found out all that was a bunch of
lies. They really did sign themselves into dorm 2 to be together,
and Veronica and Kim were dating the whole time they were in jail
together. Veronica cheated on me day after day, while telling me on
the phone how much she supposedly loved me and how faithful she was
to me. She went so far as to act all insulted that I hadn't noticed
how much progress she had supposedly made in the rehab dorm. How
much she had grown as a person. How much different she was now,
compared to the last time she had been in jail.

But all that was just bullshit. Nothing had
changed. She still was the same old lying cheater she had always
been. While she told me that she wanted to have a future with me,
get married and have a baby together, she told Kim that she wanted
to have a future with her, and raise Kim's baby with her. Kim
really was pregnant in jail, because she had sex with a dope boy in
rehab. He called himself Lay-Z. In the past, Erin had sex with him,
too. Kim was the 6th girl he got pregnant. Ahh, family values. It
reminded me of the joke about Father's Day being the most confusing
day in the hood.

But Veronica didn't just cheat on me with
Kim. She also cheated on Kim with other people. She had absolutely
no loyalty to anyone.

While Veronica had been in rehab, and her
mother Rachel was hitting on me during those 2 weeks when Veronica
and I weren't talking to each other, Rachel had told me that she
felt her daughter was a sex addict. To me the term "sex addict"
just seemed to be a lame excuse for being a slut. Hey, I can't help
it. I have a problem: I like sex. Well, everyone likes sex. But
that's no excuse to be a lying cheating whore. So cut that shit
out, slut.

But then I read up on sex addiction. It
often affects people who have been abused or abandoned. When a
young woman's childhood lacks a healthy connection with a parent or
she is sexually abused, she may develop a misunderstanding of the
words love and sex. These girls will confuse sexual abuse, neglect
or inappropriate sexual behavior for love and seek these
destructive behaviors in relationships later on in life, because
they never learned the correct meanings of love and intimacy. The
abuse or abandonment they suffered in early childhood was deeply
traumatic, and sex addiction is one of the ways they try to cope
with their PTSD.

I read that therapists have noticed a
significant link between sex addiction and sexual abuse. When
sexual abuse occurs at a young age, the child often becomes
dissociated between what healthy and non-healthy sexual
relationships are.

Some people, who have been sexually abused
during their childhood, reenact what has been done to them, to
somehow gain control over it. I wondered if what Veronica did with
the girls in all her fake relationships was a replay of what had
been done to her by her mother's boyfriends. Did they finger her
when she was a little girl? Is that why she was so obsessed with
doing it to other girls now?

Other people use sex as a substitute for
love. Everything I read about sex addiction fit perfectly in
Veronica's case. I came to the conclusion that Rachel was right. I
sent some articles about this stuff to Veronica later, but she
never wanted to talk about it.

Anyway, while she was in dorm 2 with Kim, a
whole bunch of people tried to warn me that Veronica was cheating
on me. I just didn't want it to be true.

Remember Nancy? She was Veronica's roommate
in rehab. She had been holding Veronica's phone and read my text
messages to Veronica, and they were both laughing at me, because I
was so upset after finding out that Veronica was cheating on me
with Dee.

Now Nancy was back in jail, too. She was in
dorm 2 with Kim and Veronica. And she ended up writing me a letter,
telling me that Veronica was lying to me the whole time, that she
was fucking Kim almost every day, and that she was not really
pregnant.

Nancy wrote she wished she had a guy like me
in her life, because everyone in jail knew I was taking good care
of Veronica, putting money on her books, talking to her on the
phone every day, visiting her twice a week, and sending her funny
postcards every day.

So Nancy decided to make a move on
Veronica's man, and tried to get me on her team. What else is new?
Like I said, drug addicts do that sort of thing all the time. There
is no love or loyalty among them.

Altogether 14 different people reached out
to me to warn me that Veronica was lying and cheating on me, and
that she was not really pregnant. Several of them suggested that
they would be a better girlfriend, if I gave them a chance. Not
just Nancy. Another one of them was Veronica's ex-girlfriend Lola,
who was now in prison. She wasn't gay, but she had dated Veronica
for a few months, because she kept giving Lola drugs.

Lola wrote me dozens of long letters from
prison. She had nobody else. Many of them were more than 10 pages
long. One was even 17 pages. She wrote almost every day, even
though I didn't even write her back at first. They became more and
more intimate. At first she told me a bunch of horror stories about
what a lowlife Veronica was. But then she started writing me love
poems and explicit sex letters.

After I had found all of Veronica's love
letters in my closet, she acted like it was no big deal. "So what?
It's just letters," she scoffed. She obviously didn't grasp what a
betrayal it is to send someone else love letters, when you're
supposedly in a relationship.

So I decided to show her what it feels like,
just like I had done when I invented Faith. I started writing Lola
back. Almost all the drug addicts in Fort Myers know each other,
and gossip travels fast. Even though Veronica was in jail and Lola
was in prison, I figured it wouldn't be long, until Veronica found
out that her ex-girlfriend and I were writing each other pretty
steamy sex letters. But Veronica never did find out, so eventually
I told her myself. She was really upset. Now all of a sudden she
realized that writing letters to someone else was not nothing.

I told Veronica about each letter or phone
call I had gotten from those 14 girls. And each time she claimed
that they were only saying those things about her, because they
were jealous of her, or they wanted to get with me, or they hated
her, or they didn't want to see us happy together, or whatever.

Haley was happy when I told her I wanted to
have lots of revenge sex with her, because I was done with Veronica
after she ran off with Kim. But then, when I told her a week or two
later that Veronica and I were talking again, because she was
pregnant, Haley got really angry: "That's the oldest lie in the
book! Veronica is just trying to manipulate you! She knows you had
enough of her shit, and she thinks by pretending to be pregnant,
she'll be able to make you stay with her. Don't fall for it!"

I told Haley that I was giving Veronica the
benefit of a doubt, because I didn't want to leave her hanging, in
case she really was pregnant.

A few days later, Haley called me and
claimed that now she was pregnant, too. Supposedly I had gotten her
pregnant when we had all that revenge sex. I didn't believe her for
a second, but she insisted that it was true. Later, when I was back
in Fort Myers, I made Haley pee on a pregnancy test right in front
of me, so she couldn't fake it. It was negative. But she continued
to pretend she was pregnant anyway: "The test must be broken! I
know my body! I know I'm pregnant!"

I had anticipated that reaction, so I had
bought 2 pregnancy tests, just in case. I made her take another
one. That one was negative, too. She was definitely not
pregnant.

Anyway, Veronica always had some kind of
excuse, why what the other people were telling me about her
supposedly wasn't true. And every single time I decided to give her
the benefit of a doubt, because I didn't want to face the
possibility that I had been wasting almost 2 years of my life with
a worthless piece of shit who was really just playing me and using
me.

I stuck with her through thick and thin,
because I believed that's what you do when you love someone. I told
myself a long time ago I wouldn't abandon Donna, even if she was in
a wheelchair. And Veronica was crippled right now. Maybe not
physically, but mentally and emotionally. I don't want to be the
kind of person who leaves someone when they are most vulnerable.
There's an old Swedish saying: "Love me when I least deserve it,
because that's when I need it the most."