Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey Read online

Once I knew Jennifer was still living with Ron, I kinda stopped seeing her. But every now and then, when she and Ron were breaking up yet again, or he hit her again, or she called the cops on him again, she would call me, and we hung out and had sex.

  She would tell me what a horrible person Ron was and we'd make plans for a future together, even though I knew that next week she'd be back with Ron anyway. And deep down I knew that no matter how incredibly hot she was, and no matter how much I enjoyed having sex with her, I really didn't want to be with her, because she was obviously a cheater and a gold digger.

  One time, when she told me how great things would be once we live together, she said that she would hire a personal trainer for me, and a stylist, and she'd pick out a fancier car for me.

  Obviously she didn't really like anything about me, except my wallet. She didn't like the fact that I had gained weight after my divorce, because I eat too much junk food when I'm depressed. She didn't like that I dress casually and wanted me to look more like a high roller. And she didn't like that I drove a Durango, and she wanted me to drive a Cadillac or Mercedes or BMW or Porsche instead. She was utterly shallow and empty inside. All she cared about was looks and money. She was beautiful on the outside, but ugly on the inside.

  Then I met Linda. She was 30. She had dark hair, a nice figure and a pretty face, even though her nose was a little too big. She was a single mother and had a 2-year-old son. She told me that she had just lost her job as a receptionist in a doctor's office and that she was struggling to make ends meet.

  After we had known each other for a week or two, and we had sex a few times, she asked me if I could maybe help her out with her electric bill. A few days later she supposedly needed help with her phone bill. Then she needed groceries, because her kid was starving. And so on and so forth. Every time we got together, she supposedly needed money desperately or her world was going to go up in flames.

  Being the oblivious space alien that I was, it took me a while to catch on to the fact that she was just playing me like a fiddle.

  One day she called me and told me she didn't get her period. She said she was pregnant and I was the father. She said we really didn't know each other well enough yet to have a child together, so she wanted to get an abortion and asked me to pay for it. I gave her a couple of hundred dollars, when she came over later that day.

  A few days later, when she came over again, and I asked her how she felt and how the procedure went, she told me the abortion didn't take. She said her cervix hadn't dilated enough, and that's why they couldn't perform the abortion, but since the doctor did start the procedure, they still took her money. She said now she was still pregnant, but had no more money left, and needed to go for another abortion. Naive as I was, I believed her, and gave her another couple of hundred dollars.

  A few days later she told me that the second abortion didn't take either, because her cervix still wouldn't dilate enough. That's when I finally put two and two together and realized that she was constantly asking me for money. I wasn't sure if she really was pregnant or not, but I sure as hell wasn't going to give her any more cash ever again. I told her I would call the abortion clinic and pay over the phone with a credit card. She tried to make excuses for why that wouldn't work and why she needed me to give her cash: "They won't even talk to you if you call them, because you're a guy."

  "Well, then tell them it's ok to talk to me," I said.

  "I can't. They won't talk to you over the phone. Patient confidentiality," she replied.

  "OK, then I'll take you to the clinic myself, and I will pay them with a credit card in person."

  "They don't take credit cards."

  "OK, then I'll give them a check."

  "They don't take checks."

  "OK, then I'll hand them cash. But I'm not giving the cash to you. I'm going to give it to the receptionist at the clinic."

  "OK, fine," she said. "I'll go for the abortion next Tuesday."

  On Monday night I tried to call her, to ask her when I should pick her up and take her to the clinic. No answer. I tried to call her a few more times on Tuesday. No answer. Then I gave up. She never called me back. I guess once she realized I wasn't going to give her one more dollar, she lost all interest in me and moved on to her next victim.

  For a few weeks after that I worried about her really being pregnant, and that once she had the baby, she'd try to come after me for child support. But she never did.

  Then I met Liz. She was 24. She was going to college to become a school teacher. But she hated her job, and really wanted to be a yoga instructor. She was obsessed with weed. Eeeverything revolved around weed. It was almost like a religion to her.

  The college town New Paltz, NY was about half an hour away from my house in Pennsylvania. I met Liz for the first time at a Sushi restaurant, and we ended up talking for hours. She was very short and petite. One inch away from legally being a midget, she said. She had dark hair, nerd-chic glasses and a pretty smile.

  We ended up hanging out every weekend for a few months. We went out to eat, watched movies together, went to art museums, spent a weekend in Atlantic City, and saw shows like Cirque du Soleil and Blue Man Group in Manhattan. We visited the Bronx zoo, and got massages at the ritzy Mohonk Mountain House spa.

  Liz always smoked weed when we hung out, and kept asking me to try it. She knew I had never tried any alcohol or drugs. Her argument that weed wasn't really a drug but a natural herb finally convinced me to try it at least once. She was so excited that my first time was going to be with her. She told me that we would have to go buy me my own glass pipe first. We went to a little smoke shop in New Paltz, that had a huge selection of weed paraphernalia.

  Then we went back to my house and sat on the kitchen balcony, overlooking my back yard. It was dark. She showed me how to stuff a pipe, light it, hold the carburetor, how to inhale and how to hold in the smoke. Since I had never even smoked a cigarette before, it made me choke so bad, I felt like I was going to cough up a lung. Being so inept at this made me feel like a total space alien again.

  She told me to take 3 hits. I did. Then we talked about God knows what. After a few minutes she asked me if I felt anything yet. Nope. Nothing. A few minutes later she asked me again. Nothing.

  Then she told me that weed doesn't work on everyone. Some people are immune to it, and they don't feel anything no matter how much they smoke. She said apparently I was one of those people. She was clearly disappointed.

  Suddenly I had the biggest chipmunk cheek grin on my face. For no reason. I felt like I looked like The Joker. I tried to push my cheeks down with my fingers, to stop that stupid grin. But it wasn't working. "I can't stop smiling," I said. She started to laugh and asked me how I felt. The weed had finally kicked in, and within a few minutes I was high as a kite.

  We decided to go upstairs, into the master bedroom. Walking up the staircase wasn't easy. Everything was spinning like a kaleidoscope. I could barely even stand, never mind walk up the stairs.

  After we finally made it to the bedroom, we were lying on the bed, watching Futurama. My whole body felt tingly, and the colors in the cartoon were hilarious to me. I thought purple and cyan were the funniest things ever. I was so high, colors were making me laugh. Liz told me later that the stuff I had smoked was called Diesel. She said it was pretty good.

  Since I was getting more and more involved in real estate investing, I flew to Florida a couple of times. Usually to Fort Myers, because the Southwest Florida metro area was the second hardest hit area during the real estate bubble, after Las Vegas. So there were a lot of incredibly cheap brand new houses for sale at real estate auctions.

  I asked Liz if she wanted to come with me to Florida for a week. She did, but she was afraid she wouldn't be able to have a good time without weed, and she was scared to take a big bag of weed on the plane with her. I told her my friend Sheila in Fort Myers might be able to hook her up. Sheila was from Iran. She had been a lawyer and then decided to move to the US and became a rea
ltor in Florida. She was really cool. Very smart. And a progressive liberal, just like me. Since we were both immigrants, we had a lot in common, and a lot to talk about.

  Once Liz and I landed in Fort Myers, I rented the most luxurious BMW they had at the airport and we stayed at the Waldorf Astoria in Naples. There was really no need for that gaudiness. I guess I figured it would impress Liz. But she wasn't the kind of girl who was impressed by money.

  Sheila really did come through. We met her at the 711 on College Parkway and Route 41 and she gave Liz a bag of free weed. Liz had also baked some weed brownies before we left New York. She had taken those with her. She ate most of them, but I tried some, too. They didn't do anything for me.

  During the week we spent in Florida together, we explored Naples, Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel, Matlacha, etc. We had a lot of fun.

  A few weeks after that trip, she told me that her uncle worked as an instructor at a yoga school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The school had an opening, so she decided to leave New Paltz and move to Chapel Hill to pursue her dream. I never saw her again after that, but we still keep in touch on Facebook.

  She gave me a little good bye present: my very own bag of Diesel. It probably would have only lasted her a weekend. But it lasted me several months, because I hardly ever used it. I just tried it a few times while I was relaxing in the hot tub. But it never really did much for me. My head would feel heavy, and I might get sleepy, but that was it. No funny colors and no spinning kaleidoscope. I never got as high again as that first time.

  When the bag ran out, I threw away my glass pipe. I had no need for it anymore, since I really wasn't interested in weed.

  After Liz left for North Carolina, I met this girl Raven. She was only 19. She had seen my online ad, and asked me if I'd be interested in a mutually beneficial relationship. She told me her dream was to become a porn star in Los Angeles, and she needed to come up with some money to move to California. Alrighty then.

  After the shit I had gone through with Linda, I figured that an arrangement like that wouldn't really be all that different than what Linda had been doing to me. Really the only difference was that Raven was perfectly honest and upfront about the fact that she was simply looking to make some money.

  Raven had long flowing black hair, a beautiful face, huge brown eyes, and a very nice body. But she was nowhere near as sexy as Jennifer. We got together a few times. Raven was cute, but she was a total ditz. She was such an airhead, it was impossible to have a conversation with her about anything other than her moving to California soon, to break into the porn industry. That's all she cared about.

  Raven really did end up in porn. When I googled her stage name a few months later, there were porn videos of her all over the Internet. Porn stars always seem so far away, so unattainable. It was weird to see videos of her on the web and think: "Wow, I actually had sex with that girl. I had sex with a real life porn star!"

  I met her again a year or so later, after she had moved back to New York. We got together and she told me she hated Los Angeles and the people she had been around. They all treated her like a piece of meat. Well, duuuuh!

  ALICE

  "Be careful who you trust. Even the devil was once an angel."

  Proverb

  While hanging out with Liz, and then later with Raven, I became more and more involved in buying and selling real estate online. Making web pages for each property was a tedious, time consuming task that required a lot of concentration, because if you accidentally type the wrong tax map number, you're buying or selling the wrong property.

  I placed a job ad online to find someone who could help me out with making these real estate web pages. Alice was one of the people who applied for the job. She was 24 and almost as petite as Liz and she also had long dark hair. She looked a bit like a tiny version of Angelina Jolie.

  She had been the personal assistant of a real estate broker in the past. So she had some experience in this field. Perfect! However, since I do things my own way, I was going to have to explain quite a lot of stuff to her. It was a steep learning curve. But she was very smart and a quick learner.

  I was buying and selling real estate like a realtor, without actually having a realtor's licence. You don't need one when you own the properties you buy and sell. You only need a license if you sell someone else's property.

  And I did my own closings, without hiring a lawyer. Normally people hire a lawyer to prepare the new deed. I did all the paperwork myself, because when I used to work at the newspaper in Brooklyn, I had seen that lawyers really just use the same template over and over again and then charge an arm and a leg for nothing. I saved about $1000 in legal fees every time I sold a property and prepared the deed myself.

  So Alice had to learn how to be a web programmer, a graphic designer, a realtor, and a lawyer. And she pulled it off.

  Then, after a few weeks, I started to notice that she had a hard time concentrating. Suddenly she made a lot of mistakes or just stared at the screen and couldn't remember the next step.

  By now we had spent so much time together that we were getting pretty close. We started having sex. Liz had been gone for a few months, and I really wasn't all that interested in Raven the airheaded wannabe porn star. Especially not after Alice and I started getting intimate.

  More and more, I got the feeling that Alice was hiding something from me. But I wasn't sure if I was just being paranoid. Who could blame me for being paranoid, after the crap I had been through with the last few girls I met? Within just a few months, I had sex with more girls than during my whole life before my divorce. And during those months I learned more about women, and how deceitful and manipulative they could be, than other people learn during an entire lifetime.

  I asked Alice if she was hiding something from me. She said no. It was hard to imagine that anything could be wrong when she looked at me with her beautiful eyes and gave me that pretty smile of hers. And she had such a beautiful, carefree laugh. And her laugh came so easily. Sometimes all it took was to say a word in a funny voice or to give her a silly look, and she'd just crack up. She was just the sweetest girl. I loved being around her. Just being in the same room with her made me happy.

  One day we were cuddled up under a blanket on the couch in the TV room, watching Wall-E. We were naked and we weren't really paying attention to the movie. She was about to give me a blowjob. She told me that I could cum in her mouth if I wanted to. She had given me blowjobs before, but never until I came. We always ended up having intercourse. I asked her if she swallowed. She replied, "Generally I don't."

  Generally? Wait, what did she mean by generally? That sounded to me like she gave blowjobs so often, to so many different people, she had general rules about her blowjob performance, and exceptions to those rules. That sounded like there was a whole lot of blowing going on. Someone who only gives blowjobs to her boyfriend, wouldn't use the word "generally" in that context.

  Barely noticeable gestures, secret winks, knowing looks, or the inflection of a single word, overlooked by most people, stand out to me. Sometimes I can extrapolate an entire page worth of information from just one look or one word.

  For example, imagine you overhear a conversation between two people, and one of them says to the other: "We never talk anymore."

  At face value, it's simply a statement that two people aren't talking. But when you really think about that sentence, there is a lot more to it. To me it sounds like those two people used to talk a lot more in the past, because they used to spend a lot of time together. And then something happened, and they grew apart. So they probably used to be in a relationship, the relationship went sour, they split up, and the person saying that sentence feels sad about the fact that things didn't work out between them. And the person who said that sentence misses the other person, because he/she still has feelings for the other person.

  I guess women call the ability to read between the lines "female intuition." I think women are right, a lot of men are ignorant bores, w
ho don't pick up on cues and they need to be hit over the head with a hammer to get a clue. But my intuition was always triggered by minute details. I think I have always been very perceptive, especially when I'm trying to find out something. Maybe because information gathering, and paying attention to the smallest clues, was an important part of being a hacker.