The Assassin uncovered

Killing is the ultimate intimacy.

No, not that button-push bomb dropping, or anonymous spray-and-pray murder with shrapnel and stray shots, but the kind where you look the person in the soul, and know that you are about to extinguish a life with the force of your own.

For the virgin killer, that first notch is a dark, blood-stained rush of emotion. It's like the carnal gravity between a pair of smoldering loins, only the consummation is more final than any earthly vow. The afterglow is like that warm, slow burn of falling in love, only its swaddling blanket of satisfaction is sopping wet with a swarthy muddle of illicit pleasure or un-scrubbable guilt.

And surviving an attempt on your life, evading death, denying that other control over your body, your destiny, your future, is a pupil-spreading orgasm of fear, anger, and vendetta. At that moment of confrontation, when you are staring down that being who aims to take everything from you, the adrenaline-addled flare of visceral panic takes over. Muscles tense, claws bare. You fight, or you flee.

So even a carefree facsimile, a murder and assassin game played with squirt guns and smiles, is an exercise in blasphemy, a lust for domination, a test of primal instinct, the will to survive.

Last night, I became the hunter, and the hunted.

The Double-Mocha Non-Fat Caramel Frappachino

During the day, the coffee shop here is pretentious enough, replete with the self-styled cognoscenti of south Tampa hipsterism. It's Hyde Park, mind you, SoHo. Yes, South Howard Avenue.

But now that night has descended and the twinkling lights have been switched on, this dandyish house of organic cigarettes, man purses and latte-sipping twiggies has entered the full thrum of material ego and designer passion.

The Frenchman writer burrowed deeply into the velveteen couch hasn't stirred from his brow-furrowed staring in nearly an hour. His American Spirits and pink bic have been there the whole time too, clasped between his hand and the armrest. He doesn't get the reward until he makes a breakthrough.

Ah... To hell with it.

He leaves his canvass bag behind, and goes for the little snack anyhow. Maybe inspiration will come about that way, as the white carcinogenous tendrils slither from his nostrils and into the chatter-rattled humidity outside.

Bleary-eyed and addied up, the chemistry and anatomy and engineering textbook zombies shakily turn the pages, Blackberrying after every half-paragraph, glancing up only to lazily scope the latest change in the chair clusters outside the plate glass windows.

The bi-xenon headlights flicker past on the other side. The bourgeoisie is coming to play. More are arriving every minute. The parking may be getting out of hand about now.

A curly-haired Persian with the calculus on his screen tch tch tchs at a tiny moth, and flaps his hand at the thing. The white fluttering bug, so small it's almost a figment of his binary imagination, annoys the student to the point of lashing out with a full-force slap. Perhaps the figment-moth is merely a violent metaphor for the same polynomial he's been staring at for two hours.

And then a pair of muscle-chested rainbow boys walk in, their sunglasses shielding the public from their anticipating eyes.

What, you're not here to see and be seen too?

Indiscernible chatter and notes of nicotine spill in from the open doors behind them. And the barristas' third-shift wit spills out:

"Don't you need an I.D. to have caffeine at this hour of the night?"

No, but you need one to be anywhere else.

Battle in the dark

It was dark. I was alone in my room. The lights were off.

The inherently vulnerable setting made the scrapes against my windowpane that much more primal. Even in full daylight, though, the noises would have been unmistakable.

They were the sounds of a furious struggle, like something stuck and trying to escape from a lonely death, or an animal injured and trying to flee.

At first I thought it may have been a raccoon stuck in the gutter, or trying to climb onto the roof from a tree branch. But the continuous clicks and scrambles against glass and metal had a desperation to their cadence that seemed somehow beyond just a mischievous backyard critter.

With my body stiff from the nascent flow of adrenaline, the kind of defensive pick-me-up a fight or flee would evoke, I put on my sandals, picked up my MagLite, and walked into the pitch-black back yard. I was in my underwear.

As I rounded the corner and shone the light along the edge of the roof, I kept my shoulders rounded and my eyes wide. And then, I heard the noise again -- this time, louder, and right next to my face. The flashlight beam jerked upward. And then I saw the implausible source of the commotion.

A little gecko had clamped onto a huge palmetto bug and was trying to devour the thing head-first, despite the fact that the insect was nearly as large as the lizard itself!

The roach-like insect was running its legs like a machine in overdrive, scraping against the glass and metal, trying to claw its way in reverse out of the gecko's jaws. The gecko, head sagging from the weight of the bug, suspending its prey seven feet above the ground, was doing what it could to hang on, and somehow fit the chitinous mass of spines and antennae down its soft, nearly transparent throat.

I looked around to see if there could be any other possible cause for the noises.

Nothing.

Escape or die. Eat or starve. Despite the tiny size of the combatants, the ruckus raised by this battle for survival was loud enough to rouse me into the dark yard in the middle of the night.

This little scene of nature unfolding outside my window shows that even from the humblest creatures, the drive to survive, to live, is a force stronger than most of us will likely ever know.

A small gecko attempts to devour a giant palmetto bug. Their struggle was far louder than they were.

Photo | Dominick Tao

The quest for gasoline

I was the estro-charged mom freezing her toes off and trampling the less rabid mother-kind outside Wal-Mart the day after Thanksgiving. I was the squirrel hard-wired to horde and hide. I was black and white and wearing a fedora, rabbling outside a bank in October of 1929 and waving a withdrawal slip high into the air.

The realization and necessity fell upon me in an instant. Panic.

I needed to get some damn gas.

I'd been tuning out the Hurricane Ike media jabber for the past few days. It would be the same blunderbuss peppering of stories about devastation and slow evacuation, rescue efforts and a bold woman named Shirley too stubborn to leave Mr. Percival Fluffmonger the French poodle behind. Just swap out cities and stills of folks clinging to their rooftops, add some floodwater and wind, and you'd have yourself a week's worth of prime-time TV.

Then I noticed the bit about gas prices. In an instant, I started to care. It's a callous thing, and I'm ashamed -- that despite all the weather-induced suffering out there, the one story to reach into my primal innards and pinch that nerve ending that regulates apathy and fear had to be about oil.

I threw on some pants, put on a shirt, grabbed my keys, and jumped into my SUV. Hell, the canoe was still strapped to the roof from the river trip the day before. But there was no time to take it down! I felt as if I was racing against some invisible clock, that in an instant, gears in some far-away arcane mechanism would click and tumble, and gas prices in Gainesville would double.

I had about a quarter tank, and was planning to drive about 300 miles sometime in the next week. I had to act now! And act fast! An extra half-dollar per gallon tacked on to a tank of gas would come out to be something like a whole day's food budget for a poor college student like me.

I got halfway down the street and realized I'd forgotten my wallet. In the dark, you'd see my brake lights flare a bright red, and my car barrel in reverse back down the street. I ran inside, grabbed my debit card, and ran back out.

Once I got driving, I felt better. Almost there. Almost to a whole strip of petroleum fountains.

Then I saw the first illuminated sign. A Shell station. Regular: $4.09. No! Was I too late? My limits were set. I'd refuse to pay a cent over $3.99 for a gallon of explosive dino-bones.

I continued north on 13th Street. Bingo. A Gate. $3.89. I pulled in, ready to sidle up to the pump and gas up. Fill my guzzling black beauty with the noxious tonic she needed to ride and roar.

But then I saw the plastic bags over the pump handles, and the crudely penned signs on printer paper: "Sorry, out of regular and mid-grade."

The madness had already begun to creep into the city.

This night was turning into a hell of burning gas simply to find gas. I had to try at least one more place. I started off for the big Kangaroo on Main street and 16th Ave.

My left leg jittered the whole five-minute jaunt across town. Then I pulled up to the intersection. Out of the darkness, the aura of glowing, humming fluorescent lights emerged from the humid night. The Kangaroo's LED sign was burning red, presenting its numbers for all to see: Three dollars and eighty six cents for pure, simple unleaded. Well, with 10 percent ethanol, but who's keeping track?

Success.

I swiped my card, and felt elation as the gasoline gushed into my truck, and the fumes rose in a smear of vapor from the nozzle and into my nostrils.

The smell of victory. Hopefully it will be many days until I will again need to harness this hollow ring of success.

Gainesville

Dominick Tao, right, paints a section of the 34th Street Wall. The eventual message left behind: "Our years together seem so brief because there haven't been nearly enough."

Every time I move to a new city, I write a few words about it -- its vibe, its color, its feel. But moving back to Gainesville this August prompted more than just a few quick stanzas. Returning to the place I've spent most of the past four years enchanted me on a whole new level. So I wrote a little something about the city for the Alligator.

Here it is:

"Gainesvile is for Lovers"
By Dominick Tao

The place is an alcoholic and a hippie, a scenester and a sports star, a handbag–crazy nature freak at ease in the library same as a disco.

It’s a town of around 100,000 that fills a stadium holding nearly as many weekend after weekend every fall.

It has an indefinable essence, the kind of easy charm that has seduced artists of every chord, from our era’s folkie giants, like Bo Diddley, Tom Petty and Sister Hazel, to the cutthroat flashpan of top–40 fame, like Less Than Jake and Against Me!

It’s a mecca for a religion of pigskin and Heisman heroes, with roots in a tiny place called Hogtown, once upon a time just a little railroad stop skirted by Civil War skirmishes.

The city runs on a fuel of human experience, year after year of fresh–faced teenagers, a late–summer bloom of new minds ready or not to plunge into a place that becomes, for many, more than a degree factory.

Somehow, four years on, the city and its surroundings stop feeling like an inanimate municipality.

It becomes an old friend, a love, a study partner and a drinking buddy.

It’s a cradle for so many firsts for so many people, a place where grandpa and grandma grads can go on for hours about their alma mater and the city it couldn’t do without.

For others, it’s where they find their husband or wife, where they experience first keggers, toe–curling orgasms or nights away from home.

They’ll never forget the smell of those first dorm rooms, the sight of an underwear run or the endless sea of game–day orange and blue.

But a constant remains for all but the few who have a falling–out with the city: It’s the place where they grew more than they ever had before, where red bricks and old trees and a long–painted wall become more than they actually are.

That’s Gainesville.

And I’m in love with the place.

Four years ago this week, I moved into my first UF dorm room. Prior to that, I had visited Gainesville one time before college, and that was for the tour.

Since then, I’ve grown and changed. So has the city.

Then something happened. Upon my return from summertime last week, I rode my bicycle up and down streets for hours and miles just to bask in the glow of Gainesville during a semester start.

The excited clusters of freshmen wandering with maps and lanyards. The day–labor guys on street corners, waving signs advertising cheap liquor and mattresses, chicken wings and laundry service. The subtle pleasure of getting a thrill out of seeing a Gators license plate or bumper sticker and then realizing that here, that’s the natural way of things.

I also rode around to get reacquainted.

This fall is different from any other I’ve had with Gainesville. It is my last as a student, and for the past nine months, I have been out of town, gallivanting with the likes of Miami and St. Petersburg, working for newspapers.

For someone who swallowed the Kool–Aid long ago and dreams about University Avenue some nights — surreal visions of 2 a.m. bar crowds and racing to class on my Cannondale but never making it no matter how hard I pedal — nine months is an era come and gone.

So the rush I felt when I finally settled back a few days ago was like embracing a lover after too long a separation.

Then reality set in.

While distance may make the heart grow fonder, time changes all things. I’d been gone long enough that the city had gone on without me.

The feeling was like visiting home from college only to find that your parents had moved, and the new house doesn’t have a room for you.

Every day since has been a rediscovery of a friend I thought I knew so well.

While I’m still struck by reminders of why I feel so connected to this place (Burrito Brothers and the crisp smell of campus after a good downpour), I notice new things at an astonishing pace. And while these changes may be hardly earth–shattering for some, even called progress by others, for a guy like me who’s enamored with the idiosyncratic and au naturale beauty of the place, they can be unsettling.

The trail of change began far from Gainesville itself, beaming into my car over the airwaves as I drove up I–75.

I always knew I was close to the city when I could hit the No. 2 preset on my Pathfinder’s stereo and fill the cabin with the eclectic joys of 100.5 The Buzz.

This time, I got an earful of top–40 rock and teenybopper punk.

A year ago, the Buzz’s advertisements decried Linkin Park, Staind and Disturbed, bragging “We don’t play any of that dog s***.”

The station needed to broaden its audience and turn a profit, I know. But that little piece of Gainesville I loved was still gone as fast as it took me to reset No. 2 to National Public Radio.

Merging off the freeway and onto Archer Road, the theme of bigger, nicer and name–branded snapped into an even sharper focus.

I found that the Indian Cuisine mom–and–pop store on Archer was shuttered, its little strip–mall earmarked for upscale redevelopment, including a Shane’s Rib Shack, the southern cousin of Moe’s Southwest Grill.

Adjacent to the place, a Kohl’s department store — so close to opening that workers were arranging clothing racks inside — had sprung up from a vacant parking lot in little more than a semester.

Not that these new places won’t be useful to people (the spot where the department store was erected had been vacant for months, the site of a sagging old Win–Dixie, and Indian Cuisine was able to set up shop down the road), but they represented change, commercialization.

And change, especially the elimination of things that can’t be reproduced anywhere else, can be scary.

So the sight of yet another Dunkin’ Donuts — an icon for brand uniformity and conformity I’ve tasted from L.A. to Bangkok — going up at Archer and 34th Street stung me with a pang of loss, rational or not.

Then there were the housing developments.

The Bartram apartments standing pretty where the dilapidated Gatorwood once sagged. The half–dozen new condo multiplexes slowly eating away the student ghetto and its quaint houses and storied tree–lined streets. The stalled University Corners project that has left a two–block corner of University Avenue rubble–strewn and useless for two years. The concrete skeleton of University Club, also languishing in a state of construction limbo across from Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, like a tombstone for the typically old–Gainesville haunt of Dirty Birds — an always fun hole–in–the wall beer shack.

For a guy who has lived in every kind of traditional Gainesville abode — the Simpson Hall dorms, the student suburbs of Lexington Crossing, a 400–square–foot student–ghetto hovel apartment to a house with a big tree–filled backyard — this strange, new and expensive phenomenon of multi–story, multi–million–dollar condo construction is scary indeed.

Maybe it’s the authors I read — Carl Hiaasen, Jeff Klinkenberg and Thomas McGuane, all lamenters of the de–florification of Florida. Maybe it’s all the time I’ve spent lounging around the student ghetto, cycling through San Felasco Hammock and Paynes Prairie or sitting cross–legged in the Plaza of the Americas with a plate of Krishna food.

Maybe it’s just coming back to Gainesville and recognizing something that’s been there all along.

Upon my return this final fall, the development of Gainesville sprung at me like a big, loud ad for some new wonder drug or He–Man truck or sex, sex, sex deodorant body spray.

While my memories are set and safe, I wonder if the type of relationship I have with Gainesville will have a place in the lives of those thousands of students yet to meet this one–of–a–kind place.