Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (62 page)

After Veronica had made several other girls
lie to me in the past, I had no intention of asking the people she
told me to ask. I figured if I asked Cassidy anything, Veronica
would bribe her with some snacks to tell me whatever Veronica told
her to say.

I decided to pick my own two girls in dorm 2
and ask them what was really going on between Veronica and Wendy
now. One of them was Morgan, the girl who used to be Kayla's best
friend. I hadn't talked to her in two years, ever since I had
dropped a garbage bag with her things off, after she had cheated on
me with her baby daddy for some heroin.

Morgan had violated her probation a few
months ago and was now also in jail. Even though I hadn't talked to
her in ages, I hoped she still cared about me enough not to let
Veronica keep hurting me like that, and that she would tell me what
was really going on behind my back.

Then there was Greta. She was one of Haley's
best friends. Since she knew Haley and I were very close, I
believed she would tell me the truth as well.

I wrote both of them a letter, asking them
to please be honest with me and not let Veronica play games with my
heart anymore. I told them how much she had hurt me for the past
two years, and that enough was enough. Neither one of them wrote me
back. Instead they gave my letters to Veronica. Traitors! She
called me up and bragged about it.

A day or two later, Greta was released from
jail. I contacted her on Facebook, and now she told me that
Veronica was cheating on me with Wendy the whole time.

Then, a few days later, Wendy screamed at
Kathleen, because she found out that Veronica was still writing her
love letters. The officers sent Wendy to D pod. It's the jail
within jail. Usually the inmates are allowed to roam around in a
large dorm, but if they break the rules, they get locked up in
small cells in D pod.

I just couldn't lie to myself anymore.
Veronica was still the same old lowlife, still lying and cheating
on me. She really was never going to change, no matter how many
times she swore she was going to be faithful to me from now on.

I sent Veronica one final letter. I told her
what a pathetic lowlife piece of shit she was. And then I decided
to give her a taste of her own medicine one last time.

I had sex with a couple of different girls
over the next few days, and I took a picture of each one of them
sitting on my bed. Then I printed each picture as a postcard, and
mailed them all to Veronica. On the back of each postcard, I wrote
a spiteful little comment, about how much sexier this girl was than
Veronica, or how much better that girl was at making me feel good.
And behind each comment, I drew a carefree little smiley face. I
wanted her to picture us laughing at her, because we were.

Veronica had written me a while ago, that if
she ever found another girl in "our" bed, she would kill me and the
other girl. So I figured it would get under her skin to see all
these girls on "our" bed.

And while looking at each picture, she would
know that each of these beautiful girls had been naked in "our" bed
and spread her legs for me.

Each of the girls I asked was happy to
participate in my little revenge plot, because none of them liked
Veronica, and they all knew what a lying, cheating lowlife she was,
and how much she had hurt me and many other people with her
psychotic games.

Later some girl called me from dorm 2, and
told me that the whole dorm was laughing about Veronica behind her
back, because she had been bragging that she was a master
manipulator and that she controlled me like a mindless little puppy
who would do whatever she said. So those postcards kinda cramped
her jailhouse swag a bit.

And every time another one of my postcards
arrived, and the officer yelled Veronica's name across the dorm
during mail call, her face got beat red with embarrassment on her
walk of shame, to go get the card. Everyone knew it was another
picture of another girl I fucked, while thumbing my nose at
Veronica.

I had learned during my hacking days, how to
really get under someone's skin, if I wanted to. And it worked. I
heard from other inmates that Veronica's jaw dropped to the floor
when she started getting those cards from her "obedient puppy."

I heard that she was ripping them up in a
fit of rage, as soon as she got them, and then pieced them back
together afterwards, to get another look. When I sent her a picture
of Lucy, she couldn't rip it up fast enough with her hands, because
the glossy photo paper was too strong, so she tore it to pieces
with her teeth.

I heard that even inmates who usually didn't
get involved in petty jail house drama thought it was great that I
put Veronica in her place with my entertaining little stunt.

How ya like me now, bitch?

Veronica continued to throw herself at
Wendy, Kathleen, a girl called Moira and a bunch of other girls in
several different dorms, telling each of them that she supposedly
loved them oh so much. It was just sad. She was making a spectacle
of herself. But that wasn't my problem anymore.

I was done with her. Really, really, really
done this time.

"We accept the love we think we deserve."

Stephen Chbosky

"A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in
her life to be thankful for a good one."

Mae West

"Everyone says that love hurts. But that's not true.
Loneliness hurts, rejection hurts, losing someone hurts. Everyone
confuses these with love, but in reality love is the only thing in
this world that covers up all the pain and makes us feel wonderful
again."

Unknown

When Lucy's aunt Nicole was released from
prison in April 2013, she swore she would never touch drugs again.
She moved into a halfway house, started her own little lawn care
business, did tattoos on the side, and went to church and NA
meetings regularly. She was determined to never go back to her old
life.

When I met Lucy in June 2013, she had told
me to keep in touch with her aunt, because she knew she was headed
for jail soon. She wanted me and Nicole to be able to update each
other about her situation.

Lucy's mother was a drug addict, who had
abandoned her as a baby, and her dad Dick was a drug dealing
scumbag. It was Nicole who raised Lucy, almost like her own
daughter. Nicole was the one holding Lucy in all her baby pictures.
She taught her how to walk, how to talk, and how to take drugs.
Later Lucy's grandma Gloria took over for Nicole.

Nicole and I friended each other on
Facebook, and while Lucy was in jail, Nicole and I started chatting
with each other at night. I told her I loved Lucy, and that I was
hoping to be able to show her that a sober life was worth
living.

Nicole and I became pretty close, and we
often chatted all night long. She started telling me about herself.
She said she had tried to kill herself many times, because she had
been through some really traumatic stuff in her childhood.

She told me her brother, Lucy's dad Dick,
had raped her ever since she was 4 years old. They weren't related
by blood. Nicole's father had married Dick's mother Gloria.

While Dick raped Nicole night after night,
his brother raped Nicole's younger sister. Nicole often heard her
sister cry and choke in the bathroom, while Dick's brother shoved
his dick in her mouth.

Dick was more than 10 years older than
Nicole, so he was a teenager when she was still a toddler. He raped
her for years, until she was 15. He was in the car with her, and
tried to force her to have sex with him again. She floored the gas
pedal and headed straight for a tree. She wanted to kill him and
herself. The car hit the tree at 80 mph. He was lucky and didn't
get all that hurt. But her right leg was shattered. She wasn't able
to walk from the age of 15 until she was 18. That's when he finally
stopped raping her. But he continued to make nasty remarks to her
all the time, saying things like: "What color panties are you
wearing?" or "Remember, I was the first to fuck the shit out of
you." She hated Dick, but never told Lucy what her father had done
to her.

I felt really bad for Nicole, because she
seemed like a nice person, but all her life she had been used and
abused by guys. Her brother Dick wasn't the only one to rape her.
And all her boyfriends were the same type of guy: some drug-using,
violent redneck who treated her like shit and frequently beat her.
That's all she had ever known. She thought that's all she deserved.
No wonder she tried to kill herself so many times, and was addicted
to drugs. To her, life was pain.

At the NA meetings, Nicole met Johnny. He
was the same type of guy as all the other guys she had dated before
him. He was some drug addicted lowlife with a long criminal record,
who had spent his entire adult life in prison. He just got out.

They hit it off and started dating. It
didn't take long before he relapsed. Of course that made her use
drugs again, too. She stopped going to the NA meetings, because her
sponsor and the other people she had met there and looked to for
help, had all relapsed as well. Now they were calling her for
drugs.

That didn't really come as a surprise to me.
The more I read about the AA/NA 12-step program, the less impressed
I was. Ask any drug counselor, and they will tell you that the
relapse rate for drugs like crack or heroin is about 98%. That
means the current gold standard of addiction treatment, the
12-step-program, fails almost 100% of the time to keep people off
drugs. In other words, it's clearly not working. Ask any addict,
and they will tell you a dozen stories about their addict friends
who went to a rehab program, and relapsed as soon as they got
out.

But imagine if any other medication or
medical treatment had an almost 100% failure rate. That medication
would not only be taken off the market, the makers would be sued
for medical malpractice or land in jail. And now imagine if the
patients who didn't get any better after the treatment were being
blamed for the treatment's failure. That's exactly what happens
when an addict fails to recover after being in a 12-step-based
rehab program.

The AA program was originally based on God
as a cure for addiction. Only after people complained that this was
akin to faith healing (Which also doesn't work. Nobody in their
right mind would choose prayer instead of Penicillin when they get
a bad infection.) was the word God replaced with the term "Higher
Power." But it's still a thinly disguised religious program with
religious terminology throughout. And since I don't believe God
exists, to me it's no surprise that a treatment program that is
based on something that doesn't exist is doomed to fail every
time.

At one point I spoke to a lady who had been
running a halfway house for 17 years. She told me how strict her
house rules were, and that the girls in her house had a curfew, had
to attend an AA/NA meeting every day, etc.

A little while later in the conversation,
she told me that in those 17 years, she had only seen one single
addict come through her halfway house, who truly got clean and did
not relapse anymore afterwards. I thought it was funny that somehow
she didn't connect the dots in her head, that what she was doing
was clearly not working. But of course she blamed the addicts for
their failure to get better. They just didn't want to get better
bad enough. Imagine if you had an infected appendix, and instead of
surgery or antibiotics, the doctor told you to attend prayer
meetings every day, and when your appendix ruptures and kills you
anyway, the doctor says: "Well, I guess you didn't want to get
better badly enough."

The magazine Free Inquiry published a very
thorough article about AA, written by Steven Mohr, called "Exposing
the Myth of Alcoholics Anonymous." Mohr characterizes AA as nothing
more than a religious cult.

Bankole A. Johnson, chairman of the
Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the
University of Virginia, wrote in an article for the Washington
Post: "For decades, Americans have clung to a near-religious
conviction that rehab - and the 12-step model pioneered by
Alcoholics Anonymous that almost all facilities rely upon - offers
effective treatment for alcoholism and other addictions. Here's the
problem: We have little indication that this treatment is
effective. When an alcoholic goes to rehab but does not recover, it
is he who is said to have failed. But it is rehab that is failing
addicts. The therapies offered in most U.S. alcohol and drug
treatment centers are so divorced from state-of-the-art medical
knowledge that we might dismiss them as merely quaint - if it
weren't for the fact that addiction is a deadly and devastating
disease."

He concludes: "There is little compelling
evidence that the AA method works, inside or outside a rehab
facility. Although AA's emphasis on anonymity makes it difficult
for outside researchers to determine its success rates, some have
tried. What they have found doesn't inspire much confidence in AA's
approach. A recent review by the Cochrane Library, a health-care
research group, of studies on alcohol treatment conducted between
1966 and 2005 states its results plainly: "No experimental studies
unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or TSF [12-step
facilitation] approaches for reducing alcohol or drug
dependence."