I can’t recall her name, but I remember she had red hair and
was wearing a green dress. Mark, one of my college roommates in our apartment on
Arrowhead had offered to let her sleep on our couch and then abruptly went to
his room to pass out. He didn’t care. The house had only one communal space, and
I was currently occupying that. He didn’t care. This girl had never met me or
any of our three other roommates. He didn’t care. Sure the others were all out
or asleep, but their presence wouldn’t have increased her conversation options.
I had a night of video games planned in lieu of studying, but did he care? No. “Here
Chris, take care of Miss Bzzzt while I go catch some sleep. Oh, did I mention, she’s
got an iguana?”
That’s right! Perched upon her shoulder, shivering in fear,
but desperate for the warmth of her body, sits a tiny, baby iguana. Nearly
invisible against the green of her dress, Bzzzt strokes it periodically with
her hands to ensure it stays put as we talk. And we talk…
I’ll admit it was the iguana that drew me in, at first. I
had always fancied the notion of an exotic pet. As a child, I dreamed of owning
a hunting falcon, then a boa constrictor, maybe a tarantula. Okay, not that
last one, really. I put on a brave face, but those furry legs really freak me
out. I can’t say an iguana was on the list before this night, but afterward, it
moved to near the top, not for the creature’s own merit, mind you. It was the
girl.
The night which started out with the standard iguana
questions: “Where did you get him?” “What does he eat?” “How do you know if it’s
a boy or a girl?” Quickly morphed into a very different discussion. “Are you
going to school here?” “Are you and Mark… No?” “How long will you be staying in
town?” And more than that, she was fascinating. The kind of girl who would buy
an exotic lizard and hang out discussing it with a total stranger for hours.
Sure, I hadn’t been planning on going to class the next day anyway, but that
didn’t matter. She was laughing at my jokes, responding to my gambits, sharing
funny bits of her own. I would’ve stayed up talking to her all night, and did.
With the morning come the trains which thundered through our
backyard. “Oh my god! What is that?” she exclaimed, clutching the lizard tightly
to her shoulder, though he didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word panic.
“What’s what?” I asked honestly. If you live next to a train
for more than a month, you cease to hear it. It’s amazing what one can get used
to. “Oh! The train. Yeah they come by about six times a day. Don’t worry about
it.” But it was too late, the spell of the night had been shattered. With the interruption,
Bzzzt noticed the light spreading slowly outside the window. Morning was coming
on. She decided to call her friends, see if someone can come get her. They can.
We talked until they arrived, and then she, and her lizard, were gone.
I’m certain at the time, that I will see her again. Mark
will invite her by, or she’ll call to tell me how her pet is doing settled into
its new home. The idea that we would only have that one perfect night, feels
like tragic poetry, but so it is. Mark tells me, he doesn’t really know her all
that well, and throws in some disparaging language to boot. For a while hope
lives, but school crushes in. Days become weeks, and before I know it, she’s a
30 year-old anecdote, and I can’t even recall her name.
It would be years before I’d have my own iguana, and it wasn’t
even really mine. Technically, Rex belonged to my friend Karl, but he had fucked
off to California and left the lizard to the tender ministrations of The Pit.
We did what we could. Tony built her an amazing cage and correctly determined
her sex as female. We changed her name to Regina and cared for her, until necrosis
got into her tail and she wasted away. During that time she did little but sit
on a stump, sun underneath the heat lamp, eat candle and leave an amazing
number of tiny poops to clean up. Needless to say, the dream of owning a lizard
turned out to be far more pleasant than the reality.
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