Finding Happiness in Los Angeles

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  Oh well. Life is too short to worry about trolls. If these sadistic losers couldn't get their dopamine kick unless they hurt others, I felt sorry for them.

  Meanwhile Jenny decided she wanted to help me find love, to make up for getting me banned. She sent me links for online dating sites. And she told me to go to the library to meet a smart girl there. She also told me about a site called MeetUp and said people who shared a common hobby met regularly and it was a great way for me to meet new people. And I should volunteer, she said. She sent me a bunch of websites. I actually thought about volunteering at a local dog shelter. Why not? It couldn't hurt.

  "I'm gonna help you find your Lady Love," she said. I couldn't help but smile. She was trying so hard to help me. It was really sweet.

  BELLA

  "Compassion is the basis of morality."

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  "When given the choice between being right and being kind, choose kind."

  Dr. Wayne Dyer

  I was getting a lot of fan mail from female readers. Women love to read romance novels.

  I didn't think of my book as a romance novel. It was just my story. I guess if I had to classify it, I'd call it a coming-of-age novel. Or a non-fiction autobiography, since all I did was simply wrote down the crazy stuff that happened in my life. But I guess in their eyes it was a contemporary romance novel, because I talked about my quest for love.

  I think a lot of women like to read about love and romance because they feel like they're missing it in their own lives. So they escape into a fantasy world. A lot of girls on Goodreads gush about their "book boyfriends." Imaginary male characters in the books they read.

  Most romance novels are written from a female point of view, and the girls reading these books put themselves in the shoes of the main character and develop a crush on their book boyfriends. They almost feel like they're dating the imaginary guy they're reading about. They're getting their dopamine kicks from a book boyfriend rather than a real life boyfriend.

  And now a lot of female readers were looking at me as their book boyfriend. Except, I wasn't imaginary. I was real. I think that made it even more exciting for some of them.

  One girl from Holland wrote me that she wanted to meet me in person. She told me to hack her, get her info and meet her in Amsterdam. I thanked her for her email. I told her that I couldn't meet her because she was too young for me. Then she claimed that she just wanted to meet me in person because she had a thousand questions. I replied that she could ask me anything she wanted in email. I didn't hear from her anymore after that. I think it startled her that a character from a book she read replied to her in real life.

  A woman from Iowa wrote me and we started talking. We chatted for a few weeks and eventually she sent me naked pictures. I stopped talking to her after that. Not because there was anything wrong with her pictures, but because I didn't want to give her the wrong idea and lead her on.

  There were a lot of similar stories like that. It felt good to get mail from all over the world, from girls who liked me. Not because they wanted me to do anything for them. They didn't want to use me to get a ride, or to get drugs, or money, or a place to stay. They liked me for me. They read about me and my life, and they just thought I was a nice person. Someone they wanted to get to know. That felt really good.

  And then there was Bella. She said she loved the book and could relate. In her youth she was just like the girls I wrote about. She had run away from an abusive home. Then some drug dealer got her hooked, made her work in strip clubs and eventually tried to force her to have sex with a bunch of guys on a dirty old mattress in an abandoned warehouse.

  She said she wished she could have had someone like me in her life back then. She wished someone would have cared enough about her to take her in and try to help her get clean.

  When I wrote the book after I landed in Germany, I never really thought about other people reading it. I just wrote it for myself. As a coping mechanism. I figured if I write it all down, it'll help me get over it. Help me move on. I think if I had thought about other people reading it, I would have been less open. More guarded. There are things you just don't want anyone to know about you.

  But the more I was getting into writing it, the more I thought about Veronica reading it. I imagined how embarrassed she would be after she and her inmate friends read about what had really happened between us. I wanted to set the record straight, because I knew she had been talking shit about me in jail. I wanted them to know that she wasn't the bigshot player she pretended to be. I wanted them to see the real her. Basically it was gonna be my way of having the last word.

  I didn't even think about actually publishing the book and putting it on Amazon, until my original target audience, the inmates of LCJ, weren't allowed to read it in jail. That's when I figured, if I wanted them to read it, they'd have to be able to get it somehow.

  The thought that random strangers all over the world would be interested in reading my crazy stories one day never even occurred to me while writing them. Trust me, I definitely would not have shared so freely what kind of blowjobs I like and stuff like that. That is none of your business.

  But now I was getting mail from girls all over the world, who knew everything about me. Every private little detail. My whole life story. It was strange.

  Bella started flirting with me. She kept asking me to tell her secrets about myself. Something that wasn't in the book and that nobody else knew. It would be our little secret. Just between me and her. I told her there were no secrets left. She knew everything there is to know about me.

  Then she wanted to know what turns me on: "Tell me your kink!"

  I told her that it's all in the book. But she wouldn't let it go. She obviously wanted to talk about sex.

  She sent me some erotic pictures on Facebook Messenger. Black and white images of a couple kissing. The curves of her breasts were barely obscured by the shadows surrounding their embrace.

  "Do you like that?" she asked.

  "Yeah, I guess. It's a nice picture," I said.

  She sent me another one. Another artsy fartsy nude that barely showed anything. And another one.

  "Does that get you hard?" she asked.

  I was honest: "Not really. This softcore wishy washy stuff doesn't really do anything for me."

  "Hold on, let me ask my sisters," she replied.

  I hope by sisters she didn't mean her actual sisters but her female online friends.

  "Done and done. They're on a mission now. They're getting me some hot pictures for you," she promised.

  Oh God. What the fuck was happening? Did she just ask a bunch of women online to find pictures that would get my dick hard? Seriously?

  A few minutes later, she sent me more softcore porn. This time the pictures were a little bit more explicit. And in color. Better. But it still didn't really do anything for me.

  "You like that, don't you?" she teased me. "You can play with yourself if you want. I won't be mad. Send me a picture of your hard cock!"

  For some reason I pictured Molly Shannon's over-acting when I read that. I politely declined.

  She sent me another softcore picture.

  Okay then. Did she think I had never heard of Pornhub? Did she think I needed her to send me porn? Like I couldn't find my own?

  "Thanks, but that really doesn't do anything for me," I explained again.

  "Show me what makes your cock hard. Show me what makes you wanna cum!" Molly Shannon demanded.

  Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Well, I had asked her to post a review for my book earlier, and I didn't want to hurt her feelings now. I still wanted that review. So, fine, if she really wanted to know what kind of porn turns me on, I'd show her a sample.

  I googled some porn images, found one I liked and messaged it to her.

  "There ya go," I wrote.

  It was hardcore porn. Explicit and close up.

  "Oh my GOD!" she shrieked. "Have you ever heard of foreplay?"

  Foreplay?<
br />
  Waaiiiit a minute.

  She thought we were having cybersex! She was cybersexting me! That's what this was. She was probably going to town on herself this whole time!

  I felt a little violated. I was having a little #metoo moment there for a minute.

  I didn't know this woman at all. I didn't even know if this was really a woman, or a man pretending to be a woman.

  I didn't want her (or him?) to think that we were gonna masturbate together now, so I just closed the window and ended our chat.

  When I checked my Messenger again a few hours later, there were a bunch more unread messages from her.

  A picture of a growling tiger. That was her idea of an angry smiley face. She was letting me know that she was pissed.

  She wrote a couple of snippy oneliners that were getting more hostile with each new comment:

  "If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen."

  "I guess you ran to one of your whores."

  "I knew you couldn't handle a real woman like me."

  And so on.

  Alrighty then.

  A few days later she texted me again. More mean comments. She tried to psychoanalyse me. And she tried to use things against me that she had read in my book.

  Low blow. Not cool. So I turned it around on her and gave her a taste of her own medicine.

  I looked at her Facebook page. There was not a single real picture of her on her entire page. Most girls love to post selfies on social media because they crave the attention. They crave the likes and compliments. If a woman doesn't post a single real picture of herself, it usually means she doesn't like the way she looks.

  But she posted all sorts of erotic softcore porn images and posts where she tried to sound like a sexy vixen. Making it sound like she had so much sex, she had to fend men off with a stick.

  I wrote: "Ok, now it's my turn to psychoanalyse you. You think of yourself as ugly. Either because you feel like you're too fat or too old, or both. You're single. Your husband left you. You haven't had sex in a long time. You love romance books because they allow you to escape into a fantasy world. You're not happy with your real life. You post sexual images online all the time, because you want people online to believe you're sexy. But your online personality is just an avatar. A mask you hide behind. Everything about your online personality is fake, because you think nobody is gonna like the real version of you."

  She didn't reply for a few minutes and then she wrote: "Congratulations! You made me cry. Are you happy now?"

  "I'm sorry. But you kept pushing me," I replied.

  Then she told me I was right about everything. She was in her 50s. Men like young women. She had been in an accident and couldn't walk for months. While she was confined to a wheelchair, she gained an enormous amount of weight, and her husband left her. Eventually she was finally able to walk again, and lost a little bit of weight, but she still had a long way to go. She hadn't been in a relationship in five years. She said none of her online friends had ever seen her real face, because she felt so ugly, and she didn't want others to make fun of her.

  I felt bad for hurting her feelings and apologized again.

  Now, if I had made fun of her for being fat or sitting in a wheelchair, I would be a heartless monster, right? If I had a selfie of her and made fun of it and called her ugly, that would have been brutal, right? I'd be a horrible cyberbully.

  And yet, the cyberbullies on Goodreads think nothing of it to destroy an author's hard work and trample all over his feelings. It's their idea of fun.

  Who the fuck decided that authors are the only people online who can still be bullied with impunity? An author pours his heart and soul into his book. It's a part of him. And then people think it's perfectly ok to be viciously cruel about it and mock him and ridicule him and give him an undeserved one-star-rating. Replace the word book with the word selfie and ask yourself, would that behavior be ok then? No of course not.

  It's never ok to comment "Damn, bitch, you're ugly!" under someone's unflattering selfie. You don't know what that person has been through, or whether your cruel comment is the last straw that breaks the camel's back and makes her kill herself. And that doesn't just apply to selfies. It applies to books, too.

  Most authors nowadays aren't bigshots like Stephen King or E.L. James. The vast majority of authors are regular folks like you and me. And when you trash an author, you're hurting a regular person.

  Creativity takes courage. It takes courage to bare your soul for the world. It's like taking off your armor, although you know people have pointy sticks that they love to jab into soft flesh.

  You know what I do when I see an ugly selfie? I scroll on by. I don't make it a point to hurt her feelings just to amuse myself.

  You know what I do when I read a bad book? I move on to a better book. I don't make it a point to hurt the author's feelings just to amuse myself.

  Like Plato said: "Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

  CARMEN

  "I have made plenty of mistakes. The key to life is to learn from them. I have been a little too introspective, but I think that stemmed from insecurity or shyness. I took a long time to grow up."

  Richard Gere

  "You can be lonely even when you are loved by many people, since you are still not anybody's one and only."

  Anne Frank

  Carmen was one of the girls who wrote me after she read my book. She lived in the San Pedro neighborhood of Los Angeles. At first she just said hi and told me she liked the book. I thanked her.

  Two days later she wrote me again and asked me for a photo. I emailed her one. She said it was nice to be able to put a face to my stories.

  Then she sent me a picture, too. She was a pretty, young Latina. The picture was very revealing. It looked like the kind of photo you'd find in Playboy. She wore a fur coat, with nothing underneath, except a maroon silk lace bra and panties. She had a very curvy, sexy body, and her huge boobs looked like they were gonna spill out of her bra any second now.

  American women tend to wear more make-up than German women. Nothing wrong with that. Make-up can do wonders. I've noticed that a lot of Latinas like to wear tons of make-up, like cats eyes and bright red lipstick. Carmen wore so much make-up in that picture, it reminded me of this old lady I used to know in Brooklyn.

  Everyone knows, women should wear less and less make-up as they get older. But some women didn't get the memo. They keep using the same amount. Day after day, year after year. But one day it doesn't look right in the mirror. Something is off. Oh, I know... needs more make-up!

  Time passes and one day something doesn't look right again. But it's nothing a little more make-up can't fix. And so the years go by.

  This 70-year-old lady I knew had a straight up clown face. Her face was three shades lighter than her neck. Her cheeks were sooo red. And her eyebrows looked like thick black caterpillars. Her lipstick was bright cherry red. Her face looked kinda scary.

  And no one ever told her. No one ever told her she looked funny and she needed to take it easy on the paint job. She went through her entire life, 70 long years and counting, not knowing that she looked like a fucking clown and the whole world was politely avoiding to stare at her.

  Carmen wore almost as much make-up as that old lady from Brooklyn. But of course I didn't say anything. I didn't want to hurt her feelings. I thought she got all dressed up for a glamour shot and the photographer's assistant put on Carmen's make-up a little too thick.

  I complimented her photo. She sent me a few more. They were regular pictures. Selfies and stuff like that. But in all of them, her make-up was extreme. The first thing I thought was: I wonder what happened to her, to damage her like that. I figured either she had been abused as a young girl, or someone made her feel really ugly, and now she felt so bad about herself, she thought she needed all this make-up to be pretty. I felt bad for her.

  She asked me for my number, and she called me. We spent hours on the phone every day and
got pretty close.

  She said my book hit a nerve with her, because she knew how those poor girls in my stories felt. I asked her if she was an addict, and she said: "Not really. Well, I used to smoke meth, but not anymore."

  "That's great! I'm happy for you," I said. "When was the last time you smoked meth?"

  "A few days ago. I used to do it all the time, but I quit."

  Something about that story didn't sound right. Either she was lying about quitting and she was still smoking meth, or she never smoked meth and was just saying it, because she thought I only like girls who do drugs.

  She told me that she lived with her mother and her mentally challenged teenage brother. (Is that the right term to use these days? Or did the political correctness police decide that's the wrong word now too, and now we're all supposed to use a different word for it again?)