“God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”
~ 2 Timothy 1:7, Letter to Timothy written by Saint Paul the Apostle
I had been working from the age of sixteen, with no time off, so I desperately wanted to take two or three weeks off before I started again.
I requested a transfer from the Service Merchandise in Pompano Beach Florida, to the one in Gainesville Florida near the University of Florida. By transferring it would mean I could stay at my same level of pay. It was better than resigning, and starting fresh in the new town. I was making almost $7 per hour in South Florida, but in a college town there’s a surplus of cheap labor. They were only paying $4.25 an hour.
When I finally went to Service Merchandise in Gainesville, they told me that they had been informed that I had quit – not transferred. They informed me that my brother, Chris (I helped him get a job there before I moved) had said that I was not going to be working up there. When I protested, and begged them to fix the mistake, the assistant store manager, a woman who I had worked for and been a great employee for many years, even winning employee of the month one time, simply replied:
“Sorry, we can’t fix it. There’s nothing I can do. Your brother said you quit and we took you out of the system.” She really didn’t give a fuck.
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There was nothing they could do. This twist of events was going to cost me $400 or $500 per month in lost income. It was a terrible blow.
My parents were helping me as best they could, given their circumstances, and paying for my basic rent and tuition fees, but I had to pay everything else out of my own pocket.
It was really hard to make ends meet. I only stayed up there for one semester. I was working 30 or 40 hours a week, while still attending classes, and after my bills I had very little left over.
It was a dark time for me.
There was another weird and morbid event that played out during this time of my life, and although it didn’t affect me directly, it’s
interesting how things are connected. Call it coincidence or
synchronicity – the events of our lives are interwoven with all kinds of destinies. There was a kind of shadowy side to all of it – and it was another reflection of the events in my personal life.
In late summer of 1990, about a month into the semester we started hearing reports that University of Florida students were being
murdered. They were later known as the Gainesville student murders. Five people were murdered by a man named Daniel Harold Rolling, the so-called Gainesville Ripper. We knew him as Danny.
He started by raping and killing two freshmen roommates - Sonya Larson and Christina Powell on August 24. He then dismembered the corpses, and left a bloody display, with mutilated bodies in sexually suggestive positions. When he was done, he apparently ate a banana and an apple from their kitchen – nonchalant and cold as ice.
One of the kids who grew up in my neighborhood was also living up in Gainesville at the time. He happened to live right next door to the two girls. He told my brother he’d heard banging on the walls next door, but assumed that they were simply hanging pictures. Little did
99 he know that Rolling was nailing their intestines to the walls. He saw the horrible scene when the police arrived, days later. It was like something straight out of a horror movie.
The next day, Rolling raped and stabbed Christa Leigh Hoyt, then he cut her nipples off and severed her head, positioning it like a bookend on a shelf to appear as though it was looking at the body.
There was widespread panic all across Gainesville for a while. An unknown madman was on the loose, hiding, and just waiting to catch his next victim unawares. Many fled from the school, including my friend, the victim’s neighbor.
The lights were left on overnight everywhere in town. Some of my friends and I actually played football in the middle of the night, after going out drinking in 30 degree weather, because the fields were all lit up at night. Of course, we didn’t like to walk back home alone. Nobody did. There was a deep feeling of paranoia everywhere. People stocked up on personal security measures and slept in shifts. Nobody wanted to be at home alone, especially at night. Classes shut down for a week.
Even so, Danny broke into the apartment of Manny Tabouda and Tracy Paules. Tabouda was a big young man, weighing over two hundred pounds, and he fought back, but Rolling eventually subdued and killed him. Then he raped and killed Tracy Paules, and like the others, he left a gruesome, perverse display.
Then the murders stopped as quickly and as mysteriously as they had started. When the murderer was finally caught, the entire town breathed a sigh of relief. It was finally over. The authorities determined that the murderer suffered from antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and paraphilia (which is an intense sexual attraction to atypical objects, like corpses). Rolling also claimed to be possessed by demons.
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So this was the kind of backdrop to my final days in Gainesville. Besides my friend, who was the neighbor of the first two victims, it later turned out there was another connection, which I will talk about later in the book, during my time working at Centex Rooney
Construction Company. The sister-in-law of one of the victims, Sonia Larson worked with me there, and was the victim of another brutal rape and murder. It’s as if there were invisible, tangential lines of connection to these dark events in my life.
Here I was, desperately trying to make something of my life, and hoping to create a better reality for myself, while all around me people seemed to be going in the opposite direction. A brutal murderer had broken with reality, and committed these horrible crimes, while back at home, my mother had broken with reality too. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to compare the two, but these kinds of things weighed on my mind. It just added to my feelings of gloom and hopelessness.
One of the last classes I had to take was Calculus, and it proved to be the tipping point for me. It reminded me so clearly of how my mother always said I was too stupid to amount to anything. It always makes me think of something I learned from Tony Robbins:
People will do more to avoid pain than they will do to gain pleasure. Calculus was pain for me, but admitting I was stupid was even more painful.
It felt inevitable, though. There was no way I was going to make it. I moved back and got my old job back at Service Merchandise.
“It is difficulties that show what men are.” ~ Epictetus
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