Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (5 page)

But what if she had cancer? Do I really want
to get attached to someone who has a terminal illness and who may
die soon? I thought about that saying, "it's better to have loved
and lost than never to have loved at all." That made a lot of sense
to me. None of us really know how long we have left to live. You
may be perfectly healthy, and then get hit by a bus tomorrow.

It doesn't make any sense to say no to love,
just because it may end in a few months. Every day with that
special someone in your life is a gift. If it ends up lasting a
lifetime, that's perfect. But even if it only lasts a few months or
years, nobody can ever take those days away from you afterwards.
They will forever be a part of you and your story. So I decided
that even if Donna has cancer and she's going to die soon, I won't
let that stop me from loving her and spending as much time as
possible with her now, for as long as possible.

But what if she used to be a prostitute? No
matter how liberal I may be about most things, when it comes to
love and sex, I am pretty traditional. I'm not into free love. I'm
not into fucking around with just anybody.

Love is really just a word we use to
describe a deep bond between two people. And the thought that the
girl I love has sex with someone else is unbearable to me. I think
of sex as the most intimate thing two people in love can share.
It's the ultimate bonding experience. I can't have sex a bunch of
times with a girl and not bond with her or care about her. And I
can't handle the thought of the girl I love having sex with someone
else and sharing that kind of intimacy with another person besides
me.

So if Donna had been a prostitute while she
and I were talking to each other on the phone every day, I wouldn't
have been able to handle it. I would have told her to stop doing
that or I wouldn't be able to talk to her any more, because it
would hurt me too much to get attached to her any further, while
she is having sex with other people.

But if she had been a prostitute in the
past, before she and I met, I figured I would be able to deal with
that. I wouldn't be happy about it. It would bother me a lot that
every guy in town had his dick inside the girl I love. Disgusting!
But as long as it's in the past, and she's loyal to me now, and we
have a strong bond that nobody else can break, then I would be able
to forget about it and focus on a future with her instead of
worrying about her past.

While growing up in Germany, I read a book,
called Zoo Station, about a teenage prostitute. It was a true
story. Her name was Christiane F. She had grown up in a broken,
abusive home. She started doing heroin at 13 and ended up as a
teenage prostitute at 14, tricking on the streets of Berlin, near
the Zoo subway station.

That book was a huge hit. It sold millions
of copies and was made into a movie that ended up being one of the
highest grossing films in German movie history. Christiane F made
so much money off her life story that she ended up being a
millionaire. Her book was required reading in most German
schools.

Growing up, that book was the only thing I
had ever known about drugs or addicts, until I moved to the States
years later and met actual drug addicts in person. I think I was
14, when I read Christiane's book. And I felt really bad for her. I
could relate to her, because my childhood wasn't all roses either.
I was just lucky that there were no drugs around me while I was
growing up.

My father was a violent alcoholic. What's
your very first childhood memory? Blowing out the candles on your
birthday cake? Playing with your favorite doll? Your toy truck?
Well, my very first memory is sitting in the backseat of the car.
My mother was behind the wheel, as usual, and my dad was sitting
next to her. He didn't have a license. They were arguing about
money. She earned a lot more than he did. He wanted money from her
to get drunk. She told him she couldn't give it to him, because she
needed to pay the rent and bills. Suddenly he grabbed her by the
back of her head and slammed her face into the steering wheel.

During my childhood, it was normal to me
that my parents always argued and that my dad would disappear on
drinking binges for days at a time. My mother knew that he was not
just out there getting shitfaced, but that he was also cheating on
her with barflies. Even as a little kid, I understood how much the
things he did hurt her. She wanted to leave him, but he always
threatened that he would kill her and me, if she ever tried to
leave him.

Finally, after years of emotional torture
and physical abuse, she had the courage to tell him that it was
over. I guess she figured he was going to kill us sooner or later
anyway, so she might as well take her chances and try to escape
while she still can. She told him he had to move out. He actually
did! He moved in with my grandmother. But the daily terror didn't
end there. It just got worse.

Whenever my mother and I watched a movie in
the living room, we cringed in fear, if we heard the front gate at
the end of the driveway creak in the wind. We thought it was my
dad, opening the gate and walking up to the house to kill us.

One night it wasn't the wind that made the
front gate creak. It really was my dad coming to kill us. He opened
the gate, walked down the driveway and banged on the front door. My
mother had changed the locks, but that didn't stop him for long. He
broke the glass door on the back patio and got into the house. We
just quietly sat on the couch, holding our breaths, until he walked
into the living room. We were in shock.

My dad was drunk out of his mind, and gave
this big speech about how he was going to make my mother watch
while he kills me, then he was going to kill her, and then he was
going to kill himself. He seemed proud of himself for having come
up with this grand plan. It was the perfect crime in his head. He
kept repeating himself, relishing every detail of how he was going
to kill us one by one.

I was just a little kid. What could I
possibly do to stop a grown man from trying to kill my mom? I
remembered that I had a Swiss army knife in my room. I decided to
make a run for the knife and try to stab my dad to death before he
could kill my mom.

I jumped off the couch and ran out of the
living room. My mother was terrified and yelled, "Don't leave me
alone with him!" and came running after me. We locked ourselves in
my bedroom.

In Germany, doors are solid wood. Not the
hollow crap doors they have in the States. So my bedroom door put
up a pretty good fight, while he was trying to break it down. After
a few minutes of throwing himself against the door, everything went
quiet. We thought he might have given up and left. But then, after
the longest minute ever, we heard his voice, right there, on the
other side of the door: "Oh come on, guys, I was just kidding. Open
the door. Everything is fine."

Of course my mother didn't fall for it. With
a shaky voice and tears in her eyes, she begged him to go away.
That only pissed him off more again. He went and got a hammer or a
crowbar or something and started smashing the door with it.

In the Stephen King movie The Shining, Jack
Nicholson plays a custodian who spends the winter taking care of an
empty hotel in the mountains. His wife and kid are with him, and
they watch in horror, as he slowly loses his mind, until he tries
to kill them. At one point the mother and her kid lock themselves
in the bathroom, while Jack Nicholson's character is trying to
break down the door. After he broke a splintery hole in the door,
he sticks his crazy-eyed head through it and says in this really
creepy voice: "Here's Johnny!"

I lived through that exact scene in real
life. My dad even kinda looked like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
He bashed my bedroom door until there was a hole and any minute now
he was going to be able to reach through it and unlock the door and
kill us.

Suddenly all my fear was gone. I just sat
there on my bed and watched what was happening at the door, as if I
was watching a movie. Nothing seemed real.

Years later I found out that that's pretty
common when people go through traumatic experiences. When their
mind can't handle what is happening, during a horrible rape for
example, the mind shuts down and just goes away, to some safe place
somewhere else. Suddenly the world around them, and the horrible
moment they are in, doesn't seem real anymore. Psychologists call
it dissociation, depersonalization, or derealization. Those are
symptoms often found in people suffering from Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder.

While I was sitting on the bed, perfectly
calm, my mother grabbed my arm, opened the window and dragged me
out. We ran to the nearest phone booth and called the cops. My mom
got a restraining order against my dad. A few days later he hung
himself from the big cherry tree in my grandmother's backyard. It
was the best thing he ever did for me. Otherwise he would have just
continued to terrorize or even kill my mother and me.

If someone had told me back then that
swallowing a little pill or snorting some powder would make my
problems and worries seem less important for a little while, and
would make me feel better for a little bit, of course I would have
tried it. And then I probably would be an addict now, too. That's
why even now, many years later, I don't judge addicts or look down
my nose at them. I know that I could have just as easily ended up
in their shoes.

Christiane's book Zoo Station did a really
good job explaining what it's like to be a drug addicted hooker,
who hates her life and feels like she is all alone in the world,
because not even her own parents really care about her. And she
felt that if her own parents don't even love her, why would anyone
else ever really love her? It seemed so obvious to me that drugs
were just a substitute for love. She had been abused and abandoned
as a young child, and that left a huge gaping hole in her soul that
she tried to fill with drugs.

I felt so bad for her when I read her book
at 14, I wished I could get in touch with her and just let her know
that she's not alone, and that someone does care about her and the
shit she had been through. After reading her book, I told myself if
I ever met Christiane, or someone like her, I wouldn't make her
feel like shit, but be kind to her and treat her nice and with
respect, because it might actually make a difference in her
life.

All these things were going through my mind,
while trying to figure out how I would deal with the situation, if
Donna told me she had been a prostitute in the past. I decided I
wasn't going to let that stop me from loving her. We have all done
things in the past that we are not proud of. It's not fair to judge
someone for who they used to be. Everyone deserves a second chance,
and to be treated for who they are today.

Finally I told Donna that I couldn't stop
thinking about her deep dark secret. I explained that I had come up
with 3 worst case scenarios, and that none of them would be a deal
breaker for me. She was touched, but she said it wasn't any of
those things. It was worse. Wow.

Meanwhile I had heard rumors in the hacking
scene that Donna was not who she claimed to be. I had asked her
about it, and she said that the stories I had heard about her were
lies that had been spread by her enemy Tammy, the other famous
female hacker who ran the competing online board in California.

The rumors I had heard about Donna seemed so
silly, I didn't pay any attention to them. She was really hurt by
the things people were saying about her, but I was used to people
in the hacking scene talking shit about each other on online forums
all the time, and hating me for the things I wrote in Sex and
Crime. It was called ragging or waging an online flame war. Since I
was famous under two different names, I was a big target. Members
of other crews always tried to get under Goliath's or Lucifer's
skin. Especially since some people suspected, despite my best
efforts to keep it a secret, that I had not really retired from the
scene in the past, after those FBI raids, and that I had been using
two different hacker names all along, and that I was really Goliath
and Lucifer.

I had gotten so used to people trying to get
under my skin, that I became an expert at defending myself in these
online flame wars. Once I had realized that online bullies have no
power except the power you give them, I became impervious to their
attacks. There was nothing anyone could say that would hurt me,
because I knew that if I didn't allow them to get to me, they had
no power.

Attack is the best defense, as they say, so
I became a notoriously vicious online bully, or "flame warrior."
Every time a competing hacker tried to pick an online fight with me
or my crew, or tried to spread rumors about my girl Donna, I would
relentlessly barrage them with hatefully sarcastic diatribes, until
they ended up crushed and defeated, with their tail between their
legs.

All that happened many years ago, but some
of those people still hate me to this day, 20 years later, because
my words cut so deep and left permanent scars, and their feelings
were genuinely hurt after I berated them online.

For example, when one of the old scene mags
on paper interviewed me as Goliath, they published a photo of me
along with the article. In the photo, I was at the historic Piazza
San Marco in Venice, Italy, with my hands in my pockets, squinting
off into the distance, like I was doing some sort of Robert DeNiro
impression. It was a pretty good picture.