Bad Choices
Make Good Stories
The Heroin Scene in Fort Myers
How The Great American Opioid Epidemic of The 21st Century Began – Volume 2
Copyright © 2017 by Oliver Markus Malloy.
All rights reserved.
Published by
Becker and Malloy
www.BeckerandMalloy.com
A shocking glimpse into the crazy lives of drug addicted prostitutes. You'll never look at heroin addicts the same way again.
Oliver moves from New York to Florida. Battling with depression, he gets sucked into the seedy underworld of Fort Myers, where he encounters a number of female drug addicts. He empathizes with them because of his own traumatic past. Oliver feels compelled to try to help them escape the addict lifestyle, but learns the hard way that he is in way over his head.
"A truly fascinating and unexpected look at the darker side of addiction."
★★★★★ - Goodreads Review
"I've never read anything so powerful."
★★★★★ - Goodreads Review
"A mesmerizing, dark ride into a world most never see."
★★★★★ - Amazon Review
"A fantastic read and one of my favourites of the year. Right from the first page I was hooked and it never let go."
★★★★★ - Goodreads Review
"Totally unputdownable. One of the most honest and entertaining books about heroin I've ever read."
★★★★★ - Amazon Review
"If you are easily offended, stay away from this book. If you want a view of what drug addiction, prostitution and rock bottom look like, run and buy this book."
★★★★ - Goodreads Review
Table of Contents
WELCOME TO FORT MYSERY
HUSSY
PLENTY OF FISH
MORE OF HUSSY'S LIES
THE BIG LIE
HALEY
GARY THE VIDEO GAME ADDICT
BROTHERLY LOVE AND SISTER WIVES
VERONICA
LCJ: FORT MYERS' BIGGEST WHOREHOUSE
HALEY'S EMERGENCIES
SALVATION ARMY REHAB
MORE OF HALEY'S EMERGENCIES
THE ESCAPE
HURRICANE SANDY
MY BEST FRIEND GEORGE
REVENGE SEX
LUCY
BABY FEVER
LOTS OF BABY MAKING
LUCY AND VERONICA
BACK TO JAIL
LCJ SOAP OPERA
NICOLE
LUCY AND NICOLE
THE END
NO MO HO
Dear Reader,
what you're about to read is the bizarre true story of my life. This is the second book in a trilogy.
The first book, Going To New York, is about growing up in Europe as a teenage hacker, and my life as a comic artist and self-made Internet millionaire in New York.
This second book, The Heroin Scene in Fort Myers, is about my years in Florida, during the Great American Opioid Epidemic. It was the lowest point of my life. After my divorce, I was struggling with severe depression and was trapped in a self-destructive cycle of codependence with not one but several drug addicts.
The third and final book, Finding Happiness in Los Angeles, is about my new life as a writer in California.
But first: the Florida years. This book is not for the faint of heart. It's not a pretty story. It involves lots of sex, drugs, and really bad choices. We Europeans are not fans of censorship. We don't have a habit of bleeping words on TV, like Americans do, or blanking out words because someone might be offended. So there is no flowery language. No harmless euphemisms. It's the unvarnished truth in all its brutal ugliness.
The first book ended, when my drug-addicted girlfriend Alice ran away from rehab, and I decided to move to Fort Myers without her. And this book continues exactly where we left off.
Oliver
WELCOME TO FORT MISERY
"You come to Fort Myers on vacation, leave on probation, and come back on a violation."
Local Saying
Alice and I had planned to renovate the condo in Bonita Springs together. She loved the way I had decorated the mansion in the Poconos, so we planned to recreate the interior of that big house in the condo in Florida, only on a smaller scale.
But when I arrived in Florida, I was so heartbroken, miserable and depressed, the last thing I wanted to do was start some big renovation project. Especially not all alone. I didn't feel like doing anything. Nothing seemed to bring me any kind of joy. I tried cheering myself up by going to the beach. But when I got there, I couldn't wait to go home and wallow in misery in the privacy of my own home. Movies couldn't hold my attention, and video games seemed boring and pointless. Nothing I used to enjoy could cheer me up.
I spent hours lying on the floor or on the bed, just staring at the ceiling. I wasn't even thinking about anything. My mind was blank, and I just stared at nothing. And before I knew it, the day was over. This went on day after day. Life was painful. I felt like I was never going to be happy again. Like there was no point to even go on living. I wasn't really suicidal. I wasn't thinking about killing myself. But continuing to live and be this miserable seemed so pointless.
As a child, when all that stuff with my alcoholic father was going on, I often felt trapped by my problems, like a bird in a cage. When things were really bad, I thought about killing myself, and ending all my problems. I began to look at suicide as an emergency exit from my cage. I told myself that if I really couldn't take it anymore, I could leave the cage at any time. Suddenly I didn't feel so powerless anymore. Now I had a choice.
Every time I faced another situation that made me miserable, I asked myself if it was so unbearable that I should just leave my problems behind by escaping through my emergency exit. But now that I had a choice, and I no longer felt like the powerless victim of circumstances that were beyond my control, my problems really didn't seem all that bad anymore.
Was a bad grade on my math test really worth killing myself over? No, of course not. In a few weeks or months from now, this math test would be long forgotten. The thought that I could commit suicide if I really wanted to, was actually comforting to me. It helped me put trivial little problems into perspective. Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's all small stuff. In the grand scheme of things, almost nothing that happens ever really matters in the long run. I still have the same laid back attitude today. I guess once your own dad tries to kill you, nothing else seems all that scary anymore.
So I didn't really want to kill myself after losing Alice. But I didn't really want to go on living either. I didn't eat for 8 days. Not because I wanted to starve myself to death, but because I just wasn't hungry, and I had no interest in food. My world was not ok without Alice.
Have you ever played Silent Hill? Your game character explores a haunted village, cut off from the rest of a world by a mysterious fog. Every now and then your character falls into a different dimension, where the same village now looks grotesque and evil. Like the whole world has cancer. That's how I felt without Alice. It was still the same world, but somehow everything was different.
When I had been hanging out with Liz the yoga pothead about a year or two earlier, she was very self-conscious about her body. She was so short that even just a few extra pounds made her look like a chubby garden gnome in her head. As a teenager she had been anorexic, and even when she was in her 20s, she still struggled with her body image.
One day she told me that she was going to go on some kind of new age three day cleansing fast. She was going to eat nothing for three whole days. She claimed it was good for the body and the soul. Plus it's a great way to lose a few ex
tra pounds. She asked me if I wanted to go on the three day fast with her. Well, she had already talked me into smoking pot for the first time, so why the hell not go on some silly three day hunger strike, too? Who knows, maybe I'd like it. (Yeah, right.)
I was fucking STARVING by the end of the first day. I thought each day the hunger pains would get worse and worse. But they didn't. Once your hunger reaches a certain level, it maxes out. It doesn't get worse. You're just really hungry all the time.
After completing the three day fast, I was proud of myself. I had accomplished my goal and resisted temptation. I had cleansed myself. And I had not given into the urge to shove some food in my mouth, no matter how strong that urge was. And when you haven't eaten in three days, a chocolate donut starts to look an awful lot like crack, believe you me.
When Liz and I met at the Sushi restaurant in New Paltz, to celebrate our victory over food, I proudly told her how I had kept telling myself, "food is an addiction, food is an addiction," every time I felt tempted to grab some food and break my promise to myself.
She was suspiciously quiet. Finally she fessed up and admitted that she had relapsed after just one day of staying off food. She hadn't told me, because she felt stupid, and because she didn't want to discourage me. So, like an idiot, I had starved myself for three damn days for no good reason.
Now I was so hungry that I ordered 2 full meals at the Sushi restaurant. When I weighed myself the next morning, I weighed more than before I had started the fast. So starving myself for three days had actually made me gain weight. Go figure.
Anyway, back to my deep dark vortex of depression, after I moved to Florida without Alice. I didn't eat for eight days in a row. And it didn't even bother me. My depression was so intense, it was even stronger than extreme hunger.
And I had nobody. No support network. No close friends who could come over and pat me on the back while I whine about how much I miss Alice. For several weeks, I was a shut in. I didn't want to go outside, because there was nothing out there that interested me. The only two people I talked to on the phone every day were Alice's friend Becky, and Linda the con artist turned hooker. Both were 1200 miles away, in New York. Both of them listened to me whine on the phone for hours every day. That couldn't have been easy. But they called me back every day to comfort me. (And to get their foot in the door.)
After a few weeks, I told myself it couldn't go on like this. If I ever wanted to be happy again, I needed to go out there and meet some new people. Make some friends in Florida.
But I had no ambition to go out on a blind date with some stranger and try to force myself to make small talk. I didn't have the strength to be witty, charming or amusing. And who would want to go out on a date with a sullen, bitter, dull, totally depressed sad sack? Nobody.
It was a vicious cycle. I didn't want to go out and meet someone new, because I was depressed. And as long as I didn't meet someone new, I was going to continue to be depressed.
Finally I had an idea. It seemed like the perfect solution at the time. I was going to approach this like any other problem I had tackled in the past, and take the path of least resistance. I was going to take the easiest shortcut to reach my goal. At this point, my goal was simply to get laid. (Shut up. Don't judge me.)
I figured that having sex would make me forget about how miserable I felt. At least for a little while. And who knows, maybe I'd meet a nice girl, have sex with her a bunch of times, and we'd actually get to know each other, like each other, and we'd end up in a real long term relationship.
In hindsight, that was obviously the dumbest plan ever. But at the time it seemed like a valid approach to ending my depression. (Obviously my cognitive abilities were a little impaired at the time.) So I was going to try to meet a girl that's wife-material by posting an online ad looking for a hoe. What could possibly go wrong?
HUSSY
"Don't trust a hoe, never trust a hoe..."
3OH!3
I posted an online ad, looking for a girl who might be interested in a mutually beneficial relationship. Rrright to the good stuff! She'd get what she really wants, and I'd get what I was looking for, without the tedious hassle of getting to know each other on awkward dates first.
Several girls responded to my ad. Hussy was one of them. Of course her name wasn't really Hussy. But it's my book, so I'm going to call her whatever I want.
Hussy was a short, petite 27-year-old with blonde hair. She wasn't exactly the most beautiful girl in the world, but she wasn't all that bad looking either. She had been in a bad car accident as a teenager, and she was self-concious about the big, noticeable scars on her pale forehead. About a year or two later, after we had gotten so close we had planned on moving in together, she revealed that she had lost all her teeth in the accident as well and was wearing dentures. She said only 3 people had ever seen her without her false teeth in: her mother, her baby daddy, and me. Apparently I really did have a way of making girls feel comfortable around me.
Anyway, let's start at the beginning: I had finally mustered enough energy to hire a handyman to renovate my condo. When Hussy came over for the first time, my place looked like a war zone.
We went straight into the bedroom, sat on the bed and talked for a few minutes. She told me she was taking care of 4 small children all by herself and needed to make money. Then we had sex. She had no boobs at all, except for dark nipples that poked out of her flat chest like two large peas. After seeing Hussy's nonexistent boobs, I realized how spoiled I had been with my ex-wife Donna's boobs. She had really nice 36 Ds, and during all our years of marriage, I had just taken them for granted.
Hussy was very shy and soft-spoken. We felt comfortable around each other and we started hanging out every day. At first she only stayed for a few minutes of chatting and then sex. But after a few days she stayed longer, and we often ended up having sex a second time, after taking a break for about an hour and talking, or getting something to eat at Bice, my favorite restaurant at the Coconut Point Mall.
Hussy opened up to me about her sad life and told me that her father had raped her for years when she was just a little girl. Then she ended up in several abusive relationships with guys who beat her regularly. It was a familiar story that I had heard many times before by now, and would hear many more times from other girls I met after Hussy. It was pretty obvious that it's really true: people who grow up in abusive households often end up in abusive relationships.
She told me she was trying to get away from her abusive ex, Dick, so she had recently moved back in with her parents. But she was afraid her father might rape her baby daughter, just like he had raped Hussy when she was younger. I found out later that pretty much every word out of her mouth was a lie, so I'm not sure if her father ever even really raped her.
I found out two years later that Hussy really hadn't moved in with her parents, and never really left her ex Dick, but that she and Dick had moved in with Dick's sister Nicole for a few weeks, until I offered Hussy to stay at one of my rental houses for free, because I felt so bad for her after all the sob stories she had told me about her life.
At one point she claimed the tires on her truck were so bald, it was dangerous to drive around in it. Especially with her kids in the truck. I ended up giving her $400 for new tires.
When she moved into my rental house, a duplex in Lehigh Acres, she needed new furniture, and told me one of her friends was about to sell everything in their apartment for only $400, because they were moving up north. Supposedly she had to act fast, or the furniture was going to be sold to someone else. So I gave her another $400.
Hussy had a restraining order against Dick, and wanted to lift it, but one of the requirements was that she had to take domestic abuse counseling classes first. Those classes teach battered women how to recognize early warning signs of dangerous situations and things like that.
I asked her why in the world she would want to lift the restraining order, if Dick is such an abusive asshole. She said so he could visit their b
aby daughter. Later I found out that it was really because they were actually living together.
One day, when I picked her up after one of those classes, she told me that in a weird way, getting hit made her feel loved. That blew my mind. But after thinking about it for a while, it started to make sense. Girls who grow up in abusive homes see violence as a normal part of life. And they start to believe that they deserve to be hit, if they step out of line. They tell themselves that if their man hits them, it's because she did something to upset him, and he'll say things like: "Look what you made me do!"
They tell themselves that their man only hits them, because his feelings are so strong for her, he just can't control his anger and frustration. And somehow their brains translate violence into love. I guess it's a coping mechanism, like Stockholm syndrome.
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