Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey Read online

  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 Str
ess 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.

  A hacker from the competing crew Legion, who was loyal to Tammy's online board, and hated my guts for the things I had written about his crew in Sex and Crime, began to spread the rumor that that wasn't really me in the picture. He claimed that it was a picture of a male model from a fashion catalog. He didn't even seem to realize that he was actually flattering me in his attempt to insult me.

  He had some kind of heart condition, and he had received a heart transplant. In retaliation for him trying to spread rumors about me, I spread the rumor that his new heart was actually a pig's heart. He died a few years later, at a pretty young age. And to this day the one thing many sceners still remember about him is that he was the recipient of a pig heart transplant.

  Not one of my finer moments.

  Anyway, since other hackers couldn't get to me with their online insults, they attacked Donna instead, and tried to get to me that way. Things got really ugly, but I always stuck up for her.

  Then one day Donna told me that the rumors they were spreading about her were actually true. I was speechless. As it turned out, her deep dark secret was that Jeff wasn't really her roommate. He was her husband. And she wasn't really 22 like she had told everyone in the hacking scene. She was actually 32. Twelve years older than me!

  MY FIRST STREET FIGHT IN NEW YORK

  "I am never proud to participate in violence, yet I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves that we can be ready and able to come to our own defence when and wherever needed."

  Maya Angelou

  It took me a couple of days to digest the fact that the girl I had been talking to on the phone for a year wasn't who I thought she was, and she had been lying to me this whole time.

  But then I remembered those three worst case scenarios I had contemplated earlier. Was the fact that she was 12 years older than me really worse than her being in a wheelchair or having cancer? No, of course not. Her age really didn't make any difference at all. She was still the same Donna I had been talking to for a year. She was still the same person who knew everything about me at this point, and who could always make me smile.

  At this point we still had not met in person yet, and now I understood why she had been hesitant about meeting. But now that her secret was out, I figured we finally needed to meet. I decided to surprise her.

  I told her I was going to work, like every morning. And, like every morning, we were going to stay connected on the phone until I get home from work.

  But I didn't really go to work that morning. I went to the airport, got on a plane and flew to New York for the first time. I rented a car and drove to Donna's house. I got there about 8 hours after I had told her I was going to work. So she was expecting me to get home from work and say hello on the phone any minute now. Instead I knocked on her door.

  She didn't answer. I kept knocking. Finally she poked her head out the window and saw me standing there, wearing my new round John Lennon sunglasses that I had told her about on the phone a day earlier. She looked at me like I was a ghost. At first it didn't register in her brain who I was. How could that possibly be me standing in front of her door in New York? She thought she was connected to me on the phone in Germany and that I was going to get home from work any second now. Then she yelled I should wait for her in the car and she'd be right out. She had to get dressed first.

  I sat in the ca
r for about half an hour until she finally came out. She got into the car and didn't know what to say. She just stared at me. Then she said that after talking to me on the phone for a year, finally seeing me in person felt like she was looking at a movie star. It felt unreal. We were both nervous. Then we hugged and kissed.