Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey Read online

  I couldn't ask my parents for help, because they thought I was the black sheep of the family and I was nuts for moving to New York. I didn't even talk to my parents at all for the first two or three years after moving to the States. Donna was worried that if I talked to them, they would try to talk me out of being with her and convince me to move back to Germany, so she didn't want me to talk to them at all. And we didn't want to ask Donna's parents for any more help, because they were already helping us out by charging very little rent, and they thought I was some sort of nutjob for trying to make a living drawing silly little pictures.

  Donna and I usually didn't eat anything during the day, and when I got off work at 2 am, I stopped by a 24-hour grocery store on my way home. I picked up two cans of Dinty Moore beef stew and that was all we ate. Occasionally Donna's mom gave her $20 to babysit her senile grandmother for a few hours. Those days were like Christmas, because we used that money to buy a family bucket of fried chicken and french fries. On those days we feasted like kings!

  Whenever I came home with almost no money after work, we tried to find quarters between the couch cushions or in the change jar her parents had in their apartment above ours. If we were lucky, we could find enough quarters to buy two cans of stew. We didn't want her parents to know how bad things really were, because we were ashamed and embarrassed. And we didn't want to hear them lecture us.

  One night there were no quarters left between the couch cushions or in the kitchen drawer. And Donna had already taken the last few quarters her parents had lying around upstairs a few days earlier. So we literally had no money. Zero. But we were starving. This situation would be unthinkable in Germany, because they have a much better social safety net over there. Nobody ever goes hungry.

  I looked through the kitchen cabinets to find anything edible. I didn't care if it was stale Doritos, or dried up old bread. I just needed something to eat. Anything. There was nothing. And then I found a few cans of dog food in the bottom cabinet. I grabbed one of the cans and stared at the picture on the label. I was so hungry, the picture of dog slop started to look a lot like beef stew. And the dog in the picture looked pretty happy with it. I figured, hey, meat is meat, so how much worse than Dinty Moore beef stew could this can of dog food possibly be? Turns out it can be a lot worse. A lot.

  When I told Donna I was going to eat the can of dog food, she started to laugh, because she thought I was kidding. Then, when I pulled a can opener out of the drawer, she laughed even harder because she knew I was serious. She just kept staring at me, from across the kitchen, hysterically laughing, while I opened the can and let the gooey slop slowly slide out of the can onto a plate. The chunks of meat really did look like stew. Kind of.

  I held each chunk under the faucet to wash off the gelatinous goo. Then I put a bunch of those chunks onto a cookie tray and put them in the oven, as if they were chicken nuggets. After I heated them up, I pulled out the tray and looked at my meal. It really didn't look all that bad. I put one of them my mouth. The first thought that went through my head was: I made a terrible mistake.

  Apparently dog food meat is really just some ground up dead animal, bones and intestines and all. When you chew one of those chunks of pressed, processed meat, the ground up bones in it feel like sand between your teeth. It's disgusting. I couldn't even swallow that one chunk in my mouth and spit it out. We went to bed hungry that night. The next day, Donna went upstairs into her parents' apartment and ate a can of Ravioli while they weren't home. I was too proud to go upstairs and beg for food or steal cans out of their cabinets. She brought down a can of Ravioli for me. I was so hungry at that point, I didn't care about my pride or my principles anymore and ate the Ravioli.

  Anyway, let's get back to the bag of drugs I found on my backseat. I was thinking about selling it, because we could have really really used that money. But I was too scared, and I just ended up flushing it down the toilet. The thought of returning it to the guy who pissed all over my car never even occurred to me.

  One of the regular customers who called the taxi service I worked for had Tourette syndrome. I picked him up a few times. He was a nice, quiet guy. He was into martial arts and said he wanted to move to Hollywood and become a martial arts trainer for actors or a fight scene choreographer for action movies. I honestly didn't see that happening, because of his condition. He would quietly talk about something and suddenly FUCK! SHIT! FUCK! FUUUCK! he would blurt out all kinds of obscenities out of nowhere. And his arm would begin to twitch FUCK! COCKSUCKING FAGGOT! FUCK! and he'd hit the inside of the car door as hard as he could while shouting things that would even make a hooker blush.

  And then there was this guy who lived right around the corner from the base. I don't remember his name, but let's call him Tony. Tony suspected that his wife (or girlfriend?) was cheating on him. He stormed into the base and demanded to get a ride so he could look for her. It was a slow night, and Jim the dispatcher wanted to help me out, so he gave me the call even though it wasn't my turn.

  Tony told me to slowly drive up this block and down that block. We must have been driving around for about an hour. He didn't see his girl anywhere. So finally he told me to take him back home. When we got there, he was just going to get out of the car, without paying me or even tipping me. Yes, he was black.

  "Hey, wait a minute," I said. "You have to at least pay me the $7 for a round-trip."

  "For what? I didn't go anywhere. You dropped me off right where you picked me up. I never even got out of the car."

  "Are you kidding me? I just drove you around for like an hour, dude!"

  He didn't give a shit. He was just gonna get out of the car without paying and go inside his house. I was sooo pissed. How could this asshole do this to me?

  I grabbed a crowbar and got out of the car, too. I shouted: "Look, you gotta pay me $7. And really you owe me a lot more for all that driving around, because that wasn't just a regular short round-trip. But at least pay me the $7."

  He wouldn't. I walked up to him, and got in his face, until the tip of my nose was only about 2 or 3 inches away from the tip of his nose. We screamed at each other. Neither one of us was willing to back down or give in. I was about to bash this guy's head in with a crowbar for lousy $7. Crazy!

  One of the reasons I usually don't get into these kinds of situations is because I always anticipate what is going to happen next. And what will happen after that and then after that, like a chess player plotting his next five moves.

  When people get into a fight, whatever the reason is, it may seem important at that moment, but in the grand scheme of things, it is utterly meaningless. Nobody will remember or care about the reason for the fight in a week or a month or a year from now, because it's really not that important at all. Usually fights happen because two chest-thumping, knuckle-dragging idiots can't agree on who has the bigger dick. But if you go to jail for battery with a deadly weapon, or you suffer a permanent injury during that fight, those consequences will be with you for the rest of your life.

  Was I really ready to go to jail for bashing this guy's head in over stupid $7? No, of course not. I'm smarter than that. But here I was, nose tip to nose tip with this guy, with no way out, without looking like a total pussy. Luckily that guy wasn't a complete retard either, and the same thoughts were going through his head, and we were both looking for a way to end the stand off without looking like wimps.

  He screamed at me: "Look, I'm gonna go in the house now. I'll call you back later, for a round-trip to McDonald's. And then I'm gonna pay you for that round trip, and for this one. Deal?"

  "Alright then!" I screamed back at him, like I got my way. But really I was just glad that this gave me an excuse to stand down and walk away without getting hurt or going to jail. I walked back in the base and figured I was never going to hear from that guy again.

  But a few hours later Tony really did come back into the base and specifically asked for me to give him a ride to McDonald's on the other side of the neighborhood. I was p
retty tense in the car on the way there, because I felt really stupid driving this guy around again, when he was probably just going to try to stiff me again.

  We didn't talk at all at first, until he said in a conciliatory tone: "You remind me of me when I was younger."

  "Uhh, thanks," I said. I didn't really know how to respond to that.

  When we got to McDonald's, he got out of the car and went inside. I waited for him while clutching my crowbar. If that motherfucker was going to play games again, I was gonna bash his damn head in! No, I wasn't. Deep down I knew I would just leave and chalk it up as a learning experience.

  But Tony did come back out after a few minutes. I drove him back to his house, and he really did pay me for both round-trips. Still no tip though. But I was glad I got paid and left it at that.

  A few hours later it was the middle of the night and it was slow again. I was sitting in the room in the back of the base. Suddenly Tony came in and asked to speak to me. Since Tony was a regular customer and Jim had known him for a long time, Jim opened the door and let Tony into the back. Tony sat down on a chair next to me, and pulled out a piece of paper. It was a love poem he had written for me! WTF?! Seriously. What. The. Fuck?!?

  A few hours earlier I was ready to bash this guy's head in. And now I had this 40-year-old black man reading me a love poem about how he was like me when he was younger and we met for a reason and so on and so forth. Bizarre. He was gonna hang out at the base with me, but I told him it was time for me to go home. After that I told Jim never to give me a call with that guy again.

  Another weird guy I still remember was this huge white guy with a big booming voice and a thick Brooklyn accent, who never went anywhere without his large German shepherd. This guy was pretty intimidating. He was the size of a refrigerator. I had to pick him and his dog up from bars a few times. He was always drunk or high when he got in my car, and he was very talkative.

  I hate being around drunk people, because of what happened with my dad, so I was really uncomfortable with this guy in my car, even though he was always very nice. But I always felt that drunk people are totally unpredictable, and at any moment this guy could turn on me and try to pick a fight with me for no reason. And considering his size and the size of his dog, that fight would not have ended well for me.

  He loved talking about drugs. He told me that LSD is a miracle drug and that I have not lived until I have had a vision on LSD. He said it enlightens the mind and broadens your horizon. I just nodded politely and agreed with whatever he was saying.

  He always joked about my shitty old red car and the intense smell of exhaust fumes in it. He knew that even during the winter, I had to drive around with the windows rolled down, if I didn't want to end up with carbon monoxide poisoning. And he was ok with it, even though he was freezing in my car. He was just happy that I didn't mind having his dog in my car.

  One night, when he got out of the car, the leg of his pants got caught on the jagged edge of some rusted metal right by the door frame. It ripped his pants from his ankle all the way to above his knee. Luckily he wasn't bleeding. I thought he was definitely going to lose his temper about it and fight me. But he just laughed and said: "Buddy, you need a new car."

  There was this famous actress in the 60s or 70s. Her name was Karen Black. She was in a bunch of horror and disaster movies. When I was a kid, I watched some of those old movies with her, and for some reason I couldn't stand her from the first time I saw her. I'm sure she was a lovely lady, but there was just something about her face that I couldn't stand.

  And she looked annoying enough even when she wasn't doing anything. But when she cried in the movie (and she always did, hysterical bitch) I just wanted to punch her in her stupid face all day long. I couldn't even concentrate on the damn movie, because she was that annoying to look at.

  I never felt this annoyed about a complete stranger again, until I moved to the States and started to drive a cab. Every once in a while I had to pick up this woman who was so unbelievably obnoxious, it made my skin crawl. Literally. She gave me goose bumps. She was a skinny white girl, and ugly as fuck, with warts all over her face, and a hook nose. She had these stupid ghetto cornrows in her hair. It just looked so retarded.

  And she had these 3 mixed kids. They were from 3 different black guys. And she constantly, constantly screamed at these kids at the top of her lungs, threatening them with beatings and cursing them out: "What the fuck did I just tell you, you stupid motherfucker? If you fucking piece of shit don't shut the fuck up I WILL BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF YOU!"

  That's the kind of stuff she screamed at her kids nonstop. And they were so used to it, they weren't intimidated by it at all. Having her and her kids in the cab was so stressful, it just made my skin crawl. I think if that woman had lived a few hundred years ago, she would have been burned at the stake as a witch, because she just had this horrible, evil, negative vibe about her that made you want to run away from her.

  This whole ghetto cab service I worked for was totally illegal and all the drivers were unlicensed. We always had to be careful not to get caught driving around as illegal taxis, because the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission had cops that were hunting people like us.

  Whenever possible, we asked our passengers to sit on the front passenger seat instead of the backseat, because when people pick up a friend, the friend usually gets in the front. When someone gets in the back, that's usually a sign that the driver is a cabbie. And undercover TLC cops were staking out malls and supermarkets and looking for people getting into the back of cars that looked like they were illegal cabs.

  One day I left the base to go pick up some lady at a nearby supermarket. She got in the back with a bunch of grocery bags. Suddenly an uncover cop car pulled up right in front of me, blocking my way. They had followed me from the base, but I didn't know that at the time.

  Two TLC cops, wearing bulletproof vests under their plain clothes, jumped out of the car and pointed their guns at me and yelled: "GET OUT OF THE CAR! GET OUT OF THE CAR!!!"

  The woman on the backseat and I were shocked. We got out of the car, and the cops asked the woman a couple of questions about me, wrote up my license, and then impounded my car on the spot.

  Now the lady and I stood in front of the supermarket without a car, and I had to try to explain to her what just happened. It was so embarrassing. Then she called another cab and one of my buddies came to pick us up.

  Without my Flintstone mobile I couldn't work for that car service anymore, so I applied at a different taxi company. They were a little bit more legit. They actually had a fleet of their own cars. They were old, crappy retired police cruisers. The first night I started working there, the dispatcher put me in the oldest, shittiest car that none of the other drivers wanted.

  This was a bigger company, with more long distance trips. The dispatcher sent me to a neighborhood on the other end of Brooklyn that I had never been to. I had to take the highway to get there. As the highway was bending into a curve, my driver side door suddenly swung wide open. The lock was broken, and whenever the car was leaning into a curve, the door just opened up all the way. I felt like I was gonna fall out onto the highway. I had two or three more calls that night, until the car broke down, and I spent the rest of my shift waiting for a tow truck.

  Canarsie, the Brooklyn neighborhood Donna and I lived in, had been all Italian and Jewish before I moved there. But right around the time that I moved there, the neighborhood began to change. More and more black people from Haiti and Jamaica moved in, and over the course of just a few years, the whole neighborhood had turned from almost all white to almost all black. We were the only white people left on our block.

  I'm not racist. After World War 2, the German school system was set up to never allow another Holocaust to happen. German children are being taught to be tolerant of all people and to never judge a person by the color of their skin or their religion.

  But of course there are some right-wing extremist racists in Germany, ju
st like anywhere else. Like those skinheads that started using computers to spread their message of hate online for example. Even one of the members in my hacking crew had been a skinhead. At first I thought it was just a poor fashion choice, but later I found out he really was a hardcore racist. He ended up in prison for arson. He had set fire to an immigrant shelter full of Turkish families seeking asylum in Germany. Psycho.