The South is a sea of unsophisticated proteins, northern Florida a regular primordial stew. The heat alone makes one wonder how water-breathers could have seen anything so promising on the nearby beach that they wanted to evolve their asses up onto it. As a New Jersey high school punk I had been fully indoctrinated into the evils of the South, with its Bible-thumpers, snake churches and inbred psychosis. The Dead Kennedys had convinced me of Winnebago warriors and the goons of Hazzard, and hell I was still traumatized by Andy Kaufman getting his neck split open by a Tennessee wrestler. So when I moved to Gainesville in August of 1991 to study fiction writing at the University of Florida, I had my guard up and was ready to fend off any hints of backward southern living.

I arrived in Gainesville soon after the student murders, but before authorities had a culprit to denounce. I had walked into a herd of wild filet mignon who detect a slight hint of carnivore in the air they stir themselves not into hysteria but a dull foreboding of what they consider their fate. Only evolution allows us anxiety and a sense that we have a place in the universe that will be fulfilled barring some goddamn bad luck. But in Jurassic Gainesville, we were back on the food chain, and the predator was out there, so all we could do was hope that we wouldn’t get caught limping by the water hole. I hung in the folds, too new to the area to chance grazing the fields alone. Anything strange got immediate attention from the press, but in Gainesville it was hard to find something that was not strange. This was home of the Grand Poobah (whatever) of the nation’s largest chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. This was a land void of manifest destiny, where bugs of the most alien sort pretty much dictated whether you got to finish your box of Kix or had to throw it out and let the larvae grow. This was gator country. Not only had alligators managed to inhabit every natural body of water in the area, but a local town had a gator horn they sounded when an indigenous thirteen-foot bull made its monthly round through the town’s main drive, the citizens cooped up in their trailers hoping they didn’t smell too much like pork rinds. The University of Florida crew team practiced in a creek that had the highest proportion of gators to water in the entire state, effectively reducing the occurrences of the rowers tipping their shells. Gainesville was in easy walking distance of at least four state penitentiaries. If you were anything less than a sociopath, anything but stereotropic in heart and vision and killer instinct, you were lunchmeat.