Oliver Markus Malloy - Bad Choices Make Good Stories: The Heroin Scene in Fort Myers

Bad Choices

Make Good Stories

The Heroin Scene in Fort Myers

How The Great American Opioid Epidemic of The 21 st 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

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 extra 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.