Leaving Orlando

I now believe the woman was one of 'them.' I also suspected her at the time. She may even have been describing the stalker himself when she referred to her former husband as 'a cruel man.' It is not impossible that she was his ex-wife (this queer, it turns out, was once a married man). She may have mentioned the affair with the pastor in order to give me the impression she had been in Orlando for some time. On the other hand she may have been a local; I remember her having a local accent.

After I had been in Orlando a couple of months the hangup phone calls began again. After the first few such calls I stopped answering that phone, but started counting the rings. I got a consistent reading of 32 rings, which suggested to me that a computer was being used to do the dialing. I gave out my other phone number to people who needed to contact me. That other phone stayed free of hangup calls until the last week (tap)  in Orlando.

The fact that the hangup caller had found me again, combined with the bitch in Orlando, and other indications, tended to dampen my enthusiasm for life in Orlando. I stopped searching for a job and made plans to return to Denver. I must have been in Orlando for six to eight months when I pulled up stakes. The departure was memorable (delayed tap): I rented a small trailer from a national rental firm. The local operator seemed to be very unfriendly, which was somewhat strange. He led me to a trailer with a bald tire on it. The tire was so bald that the threads were showing. He suggested I take that trailer. I asked him whether he thought that tire would last all the way to Denver. He replied in the negative, then took me to one with good tires. I accepted the new trailer and he clamped it to the ball on my bumper. It seemed to me that he did not screw the thing down tight enough but I let it go. Bad idea. About half way to Denver the thing jumped out of the socket. Only the safety chain prevented an accident. I'm pretty sure 'they' paid the son-of-a-bitch to try and fuck up my trip in some way. If so, it was, and con(BOOM)tinues to be one of their MOs.

The 'vacation' in Orlando was not a waste. I got a lot of work done on my programs, had some fun at Disneyland, and gained additional insight into the mind of the S.O.B. who was harrassing me. I returned to Denver intending to 'hunt the bastard down' (boom). Which I did.