Patty told me that they really can't feel love the way a sober person does, because the drug disrupts their brain chemistry to the point where they can't bond with another human being, the way sober people do. But they get really good at pretending to love you, because it gets them what they really want: drugs.
A drug addicted hooker will tell some random guy after having sex with him two or three times that she loves him, because she knows that if he believes it, he will end up being her braindead goon who will do almost anything for her, like give her money if she claims she is about to get evicted, or her cell phone is about to get shut off, or her baby hasn't eaten in two days, or she needs to get bailed out of jail, or she supposedly needs an abortion.
Not every guy is stupid enough to fall for the big love lie. But if a hooker tells enough guys that she loves them, one or two lonely guys are bound to fall for it. It's almost like going fishing. Or phishing. Phreakers used to play the same game when they tried to get people's credit cards. Not everyone fell for the big lie, that the hacker was an employee at the credit card company's fraud department and needed the victim's personal information to examine some unusual activity on their account. But there always were a few gullible people, so if the hacker kept calling enough people, and kept repeating the same lie often enough, eventually he ran into someone who fell for it.
I like to believe that Alice really did love me. But who knows. Maybe I was just another sucker.
Anyway, I did what the officer told me: I searched for her on Backpage, in case she had posted an escort ad. Nothing. I contacted all of Alice's friends. Nobody knew where she was. Not even Becky or Mary. I even called Kat. Then I called Enrique, her drug dealer. I guess I should have started with him.
He seemed nervous when he heard my voice: "Look man, I want no trouble with you. And I don't want to get in the middle of this."
"Don't worry," I replied. "I just need to know if you have seen Alice or you know where she is."
"Uhh, yeah, she's been coming around every day, buying dope from me. Look, even if I didn't sell it to her, she would get it from someone else. At least I know my stuff is good. She's staying with some old lady she met in rehab."
Once he told me that, I hacked his phone and got Alice's new number. Then I hacked her new phone and saw who she had been talking to and where she was staying. At the Super 8 in Newburgh.
She had called all her old "clients" and went right back to escorting, even without posting on Backpage. She was in some sort of weird relationship with that old lady. Maybe she felt that the old lady was a substitute for her mother, and giving that lady drugs would make her love Alice the way her mother never loved her. I don't know.
I called Alice's new number a bunch of times. She kept ignoring me. Then, finally, after a few days, she answered the phone. I tried to convince her to let me take her back to rehab. No chance. Then I asked her to at least come home with me. Nope. Wasn't gonna happen. When we were together, she had been the sweetest girl in the world. When we said good bye at the rehab admission office, everything was ok between us, and we were about to move to Florida after she got out of rehab, and we were going to live happily ever after.
But now she was suddenly acting like a total bitch. Like I was her worst enemy. Well, in her drug-crazed mind I was. I was the guy trying to get inbetween her and what she loved most in the world: her drugs. That made me the bad guy in her eyes. The way she talked to me reminded me of a dog growling at me because I'm trying to take away his bone.
Alice's friend Becky was worried about her, too. So she kept calling me to find out if I had found her yet. I told her that I had talked to Alice, but she didn't want to come home. Becky asked for Alice's new number, so maybe she could talk some sense into her. But Alice wouldn't answer the phone for Becky either.
Becky and I started talking every day, and we ended up hanging out a few times. Becky was really nice, but of course it didn't take me long until I realized that Becky wasn't just concerned about her missing friend Alice, or trying to cheer me up because I was so heartbroken and needed a shoulder to cry on, but that in the back of her head she figured it couldn't hurt to get on my good side now that I was unexpectedly single.
Oh, and guess who I found on Backpage while searching for Alice. Linda, the scam artist who had conned me into paying for her fake abortion not just once but twice about a year and a half earlier. Apparently she had moved from answering personal ads and scamming unsuspecting guys, to placing escort ads. Aaand she now had a new baby girl! Just a few months old. At first I thought I suddenly had a baby daughter. But Linda said it wasn't mine. Once I did the math, I found out that Linda had already been pregnant before I met her. She told me she was sorry for scamming me into giving her money for an abortion by pretending it was my baby back then. She said she really had planned to get an abortion, but then she changed her mind.
When I asked her about what made her start escorting on Backpage, and whether she was on drugs, she said she wasn't. I didn't believe her. She was way too squirrely to be sober. She told me that she wasn't proud of being an escort, but she just couldn't find a regular job, so she did what she had to do. "It is what it is," she said. I hate when girls who escort use that phrase as if it justifies everything.
She told me she hated doing that stuff, because no self-respecting guy wants to be in a serious relationship with a whore, so it was a very lonely life. And most of the guys who tricked with hookers made these girls feel like shit.There were even online forums, where guys rated girls on their looks and their "skills." I had found some reviews of Alice. It broke my heart to read what a bunch of random strangers had to say about having sex with my little Alice.
Linda agreed that a lot of these guys enjoyed being cruel in their reviews. They liked the sense of power they got from talking about a girl like she was a piece of meat or a toy. Linda told me she tried not to let her bad reviews get under her skin, but that wasn't easy, because she was ashamed even of her good reviews. She told me that after getting too many complaints, she had even learned to allow random guys to cum in her mouth and swallow. Something that had always made her gag and throw up in the past.
I had called her, just in case she might know where Alice was, because Alice and Kat had told me a long time ago that most of the girls on Backpage know each other. But Linda didn't know Alice. She hadn't been in this "business" long enough yet.
Like Becky, Linda also figured it couldn't hurt to get friendly with me again, now that I was single. So Linda started calling me almost every day, acting concerned and offering me her shoulder to cry on. She had a lot of insights into the mind of an addict and told me that I shouldn't take what Alice did to me personal, because that's just what addicts do. I told her she knew way too much about drugs and the drug mentality for a sober person. She finally admitted that she "used to" smoke crack and had been in rehab for it. I was pretty sure she didn't want to admit that she had relapsed, and her crack addiction had made her resort to escorting. I felt bad for her young son and baby daughter.
I had bought and sold about four or five condos in the Grandview Palace in Liberty. I decided to sell the last one, the one Alice and I had been living in. I made up my mind to finally end things for good with her. Well, actually she had made up my mind for me, since she was the one who broke up with me and refused to come home. Anyway, I got rid of that condo and moved to Florida.
Bonita Springs, and the whole Southwest Florida metro area, from Fort Myers to Naples, had seemed like paradise, the few times Alice and I came here together. We thought it was the perfect getaway to escape the drugs in New York. We had no idea that Fort Myers has a drug problem that is probably even worse than in New York.
Everything that had happened so far was about to seem like child's play, compared to the bizarre things that were about to happen next.
"The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always."
R.D. Laing
"Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, a
nd the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes; this is partly because it gets unobstructed hold of the hearer’s mind without his being distracted by secondary thoughts, and partly because he feels that here he is not being corrupted or deceived by the arts of rhetoric, but that the whole effect is got from the thing itself."
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Find out what happens next:
Bad Choices Make Good Stories 2
The Heroin Scene in Fort Myers
Now available at
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Going to New York Page 20
