Danny Rolling butchered five of my neighbors. My reaction was to take note of how surreal everything became as the whole town emptied of students and filled up with news reporters and camera crews from all over the world.
I was a UF student the same age as the 5 victims, one of whom, Christa Hoyt, lived 2 streets over from me. I lived by myself in a small apartment building from the 1940s that sat at the end of a d**d-end road, backed up against the forest. The big, screenless windows in the apartment opened with a crank and had no lock. The rickety wooden staircase attached to side of the building led up to my door and was the only way in or out.
The other students in the building went home, and every night my mother would call me on the landline -- the only phone there was -- to beg me to do the same. "You're all alone there," she'd say, "He could be walking up your stairs right now. He could be crouched in those woods, waiting for you to hang up."
My poor mother. There was never any question that I would stay there. This was such an unusual situation that I saw it for what it was -- an unusual situation -- at the time, when normally you only understand that kind of thing in retrospect. But I knew that what was happening would be something people would be talking about long after it resolved itself, and I wanted to be there to see it.
The things I remember most from that period are:
Walking up to my completely empty classes in a completely empty town. I was a sophomore and was very very serious about my studies, so I had close relationships with my professors. Because I was only 18, it didn't strike me as weird that my teachers kept having "classes" even though I was the only one who showed up. It didn't occur to me that they kept having those classes BECAUSE I kept showing up. I wonder what they thought about me. About why I didn't go home. Didn't anyone love me?
I remember that, when I would show up to class, my professors and I would not talk about academics. Instead, they'd come sit in a student desk next to mine and we'd chain smoke cigarettes, which was a novel thing to do with a professor inside of a classroom. My religion professor brought in beer one day and we sat in the classroom and drank it until it was gone; my Russian professor, who had just moved to Gainesville from the USSR, brought his wife to class with us and she brought little pastries for us to eat. We sat in the classroom and ate pastries while they asked me to explain what was happening. Is this the kind of thing that goes on in America? Is this what you do?
I remember sitting in the Plaza of the Americas outside of the main library, normally a vibrant field of grass full of hackey-sack players and Hare Krishnas spooning out the free daily lunch. But each day as more and more bodies piled up the Plaza emptied of students and filled up with reporters and camera crews. I'd watch them as they scurried around, setting up their sh*ts, checking their levels, their makeup melting in the late August central Florida humidity.
The funniest thing about them was that, to a man, all of them would be dressed in a full suit coat and tie on their tops, but their bottoms would be Ocean Pacific surf shorts and flip flops. It was so funny to watch all of them jockeying for the best position in the Plaza, the best establishing sh*t, while completely ignoring the 50 other major media outlets doing exactly the same thing all around them.
It reminds me today of the YouTube videos I've seen of an underpass in a city in China, where influencer hopefuls line up by the hundreds with their ring lights, each in their own little bubble, each trying to out viral the other. The newscasters would approach me, one of the few students still sitting there, to ask me how I felt about my classmate's head being found on that bookshelf. Bad? Good? I'd respond the way I still do when someone asks me questions: with my own questions for them as a deflection and defense. Aren't you hot? Isn't this weird? Do you have a lighter?
I remember the building horror, the absolute terror that even I as a jaded and cynical punk rock teenager had to acknowledge of waking up in the morning to it happening again. And again. It was crazy, it was madness, the idea that something so bad had happened that we'd all be wishing to return to two days ago, when all we had was two bodies. We thought that was bad? We had no idea how good we all had it two days ago.
The thing I remember the most, though, was the pizza delivery guys. As the week wore on and the contours of the nightmare we were mired in became more clear, everyone who was left in town ran out and bought g*ns. What kind of g*ns? How many g*ns? Yes.
They bought all these g*ns and then brought them home and leaned them all around themselves like a teepee as they turned on the evening news and waited for the pizza they'd ordered to arrive. By the end of the epically horrible news update they'd forgotten everything, including the fact that they'd ordered a pizza, so when they heard the footsteps on the walkway outside, they did the only reasonable thing and threw open the front door and took that Gumby's or Five-Star man down.
In my memory, there were a total of eight pizza delivery guys who were k****d during the week it took them to charge the wrong man and falsely reassure us while the k**ler camped in a tent on the outskirts of town, playing his guitar and going to the Walmart to shop for victims. Eight innocent pizza guys, 3 more than the k**ler had claimed. But surely that can't be true. Eight pizza guys is a lot of pizza guys, and it was so long ago. So much of what happened is in there, but hazy.
I was a UF student the same age as the 5 victims, one of whom, Christa Hoyt, lived 2 streets over from me. I lived by myself in a small apartment building from the 1940s that sat at the end of a d**d-end road, backed up against the forest. The big, screenless windows in the apartment opened with a crank and had no lock. The rickety wooden staircase attached to side of the building led up to my door and was the only way in or out.
The other students in the building went home, and every night my mother would call me on the landline -- the only phone there was -- to beg me to do the same. "You're all alone there," she'd say, "He could be walking up your stairs right now. He could be crouched in those woods, waiting for you to hang up."
My poor mother. There was never any question that I would stay there. This was such an unusual situation that I saw it for what it was -- an unusual situation -- at the time, when normally you only understand that kind of thing in retrospect. But I knew that what was happening would be something people would be talking about long after it resolved itself, and I wanted to be there to see it.
The things I remember most from that period are:
Walking up to my completely empty classes in a completely empty town. I was a sophomore and was very very serious about my studies, so I had close relationships with my professors. Because I was only 18, it didn't strike me as weird that my teachers kept having "classes" even though I was the only one who showed up. It didn't occur to me that they kept having those classes BECAUSE I kept showing up. I wonder what they thought about me. About why I didn't go home. Didn't anyone love me?
I remember that, when I would show up to class, my professors and I would not talk about academics. Instead, they'd come sit in a student desk next to mine and we'd chain smoke cigarettes, which was a novel thing to do with a professor inside of a classroom. My religion professor brought in beer one day and we sat in the classroom and drank it until it was gone; my Russian professor, who had just moved to Gainesville from the USSR, brought his wife to class with us and she brought little pastries for us to eat. We sat in the classroom and ate pastries while they asked me to explain what was happening. Is this the kind of thing that goes on in America? Is this what you do?
I remember sitting in the Plaza of the Americas outside of the main library, normally a vibrant field of grass full of hackey-sack players and Hare Krishnas spooning out the free daily lunch. But each day as more and more bodies piled up the Plaza emptied of students and filled up with reporters and camera crews. I'd watch them as they scurried around, setting up their sh*ts, checking their levels, their makeup melting in the late August central Florida humidity.
The funniest thing about them was that, to a man, all of them would be dressed in a full suit coat and tie on their tops, but their bottoms would be Ocean Pacific surf shorts and flip flops. It was so funny to watch all of them jockeying for the best position in the Plaza, the best establishing sh*t, while completely ignoring the 50 other major media outlets doing exactly the same thing all around them.
It reminds me today of the YouTube videos I've seen of an underpass in a city in China, where influencer hopefuls line up by the hundreds with their ring lights, each in their own little bubble, each trying to out viral the other. The newscasters would approach me, one of the few students still sitting there, to ask me how I felt about my classmate's head being found on that bookshelf. Bad? Good? I'd respond the way I still do when someone asks me questions: with my own questions for them as a deflection and defense. Aren't you hot? Isn't this weird? Do you have a lighter?
I remember the building horror, the absolute terror that even I as a jaded and cynical punk rock teenager had to acknowledge of waking up in the morning to it happening again. And again. It was crazy, it was madness, the idea that something so bad had happened that we'd all be wishing to return to two days ago, when all we had was two bodies. We thought that was bad? We had no idea how good we all had it two days ago.
The thing I remember the most, though, was the pizza delivery guys. As the week wore on and the contours of the nightmare we were mired in became more clear, everyone who was left in town ran out and bought g*ns. What kind of g*ns? How many g*ns? Yes.
They bought all these g*ns and then brought them home and leaned them all around themselves like a teepee as they turned on the evening news and waited for the pizza they'd ordered to arrive. By the end of the epically horrible news update they'd forgotten everything, including the fact that they'd ordered a pizza, so when they heard the footsteps on the walkway outside, they did the only reasonable thing and threw open the front door and took that Gumby's or Five-Star man down.
In my memory, there were a total of eight pizza delivery guys who were k****d during the week it took them to charge the wrong man and falsely reassure us while the k**ler camped in a tent on the outskirts of town, playing his guitar and going to the Walmart to shop for victims. Eight innocent pizza guys, 3 more than the k**ler had claimed. But surely that can't be true. Eight pizza guys is a lot of pizza guys, and it was so long ago. So much of what happened is in there, but hazy.