When I was still in high school, a distant relative sent me an alligator, parcel post, in a cardboard box with two small holes and a printed sticker that read, Happy Graduation! And, honestly, what did this person who my mother told me was her second cousin on her mother’s side, which means he was my second cousin once removed I guess, a person I’d never met, and who my mother barely remembered from the time his family visited when they were both small children… Well, what did this person expect me to do with an alligator?
We, my family and I, made a home for it in an open-topped fiberglass box that my dad bought at an army-navy surplus store, and we poured in an inch or so of water and later we added a rock. The alligator had a turned up snout and big greenish-yellow eyes with pupils like a cat. I’d hold it in one hand while I fed it hamburger with a cocktail fork with the other, and the alligator seemed to be quickly getting bigger and this led to a family discussion about it. It was my alligator, the box had arrived with my name on it, and during our meeting my mother said, “I think the best thing to do is to flush it down the toilet, Stan.”
“How can you even say such a thing?” I asked. “She’s a living being!”
The reason I used the pronoun, she, and not he, was that all three of us had taken to calling the alligator, Ali MacGraw, which was something I think my dad started because there was an old movie he liked that had an actress in it with that name, and even after a lot of searching on the internet I really wasn’t sure if my Ali really was a she, (though I did manage to confirm it a couple of years later). But Ali did seem like an appropriate and obvious name for an alligator regardless, so I dropped the MacGraw part and simply called her Ali.
My dad was an eighth grade teacher who unfortunately was really into “the courage of your convictions,” and “setting a good example for young people,” and he kept a We Believe sign in the rear window of our car with, you know, the usual stuff on it like: Women’s rights are human rights, Facts are facts, Love is love, We’re all immigrants, and all that sort of jazz that seems so quaint nowadays, and my mom kept telling him to throw it away. She didn’t like getting all the hostile looks when she went shopping, but dad wanted to keep displaying it in the school parking lot, so he finally fixed it so Mom could take the sign down when she went out in the car. But on the night of my graduation we forgot to do it I guess, and Dad was set on taking us to a barbecue joint he’d read about in the Knoxville Herald, and it was on highway 19 just past Bedlam that we got forced off the road by a black F-Two-Fifty lifted pickup with tinted windows and our car went tumbling sideways into a ravine, smashing and shattering and twisting all along the way, like about hundred yards down, and it came to rest upside down in a pile of coal tailings and rusted iron beams and both my parents were decapitated and I didn’t even get a scratch from it. So that was just the opening act of a nightmare that went on for weeks and months, and you can probably imagine how painful and disorienting my life became at that point, and it turned out my dad was intestate, and the house was mortgaged to the hilt, and both my parents were estranged from their extended families, and I soon discovered I was completely on my own—I’d just turned eighteen—and my only true and unassailable desire was to get the hell out of Tennessee forever.
I got a one-way rental car and crammed in all our stuff that would fit in it, along with Ali who was almost fourteen inches long now in her fiberglass box, and I made a beeline to the far-away Left Coast where I’d never been before, but was a place where I’d heard people were likely to be less narrow-minded or prone to violence, and I carried Ali up to our new apartment in a suitcase so no one would see her. I’d found the place online the very first day we arrived. It was a studio apartment with a dingy bathroom and kitchen in an ancient-looking building owned by the city, a fourth-floor walkup, and its single window had a view of a municipal parking lot.
The alligator was a secret, and there were all kinds of rules that the city housing office gave me on a sheet of paper that included the no pets policy, and this worried me enough that I shied away from my new neighbors. If I ran into any of them in the halls, I tried not to make eye contact or offer any kind of greeting. I don’t know why I thought that by merely saying hello to somebody, they’d find out about my alligator. But the truth was, I felt very protective of her, she was the last vestige of my deceased family, and I sensed that the average person would naturally be afraid of alligators and wouldn’t want to have one in the building, and over the first few weeks in our apartment I’m fairly sure the other tenants came to consider me as an unkind and unfriendly new arrival, and after a while they didn’t even look at me when we passed in the hallway or on the stairs. But when I think of it now, since this was the first time I’d ever lived in a dense urban environment where people naturally tend to develop an obligatory tolerance for others, I may have simply imagined that my neighbors had a negative view of alligators. It was a cheap apartment in a downtrodden section of the city after all, and after I’d lived there for a while, I realized that I probably wasn’t the only person who was keeping a secret. There were all sorts of marginal and strange-seeming people here, the sorts of people who my mom and dad, who always strived to instill an upstanding and responsible character in me, taught me to be respectful of.
My immediate neighbor to my right, a skinny Asian lady, who I saw coming and going frequently, dressed in the most revealing, lascivious attire imaginable which, to my way of thinking, was far too lewd to be seen in public. I took her to be a prostitute, though I’d never actually seen a real prostitute before.
And, in the apartment on the other side of me, was a scruffy-looking dude with dreads and huge big muscles and a dagger with a pair of handcuffs tattooed on his neck who, when I passed him on the stairs, always had his pork pie hat on with splattered gold paint on it, and he’d usually be carrying his saxophone case which was also splattered with gold. He thankfully only practiced this musical instrument in his room for short stints, but unfortunately some of those stints happened around three or four in the morning and, based on my impression of his friends that I often saw waiting outside his door, I figured he was more of a drug dealer than an artist. It seemed like the whole building, and in fact the entirety of my new neighborhood, a place that I found out was known as The Tenderloin, or sometimes just The TL, seemed to be filled with all sorts of wayward, not to mention sketchy, individuals.
So I could already see the whole dynamic developing. This apprehensive person I’d become was not the sort of person I really was, but the main reason I felt the need to create this aloof and unfriendly persona was to protect my alligator, or crocodile—whichever she was, I hadn’t had the chance to do the research yet—but it was a defensive sort of attitude that I fell into, and it took me some months to work out how to navigate my situation, and confirm that she was an American alligator who lived in my bathtub now, and when I wanted to take a shower, I’d place her in the kitchen sink temporarily.
After a surprisingly painless search, which I attributed to the fact that I was such a clean-cut, fresh-faced southern boy with proper manners, I found a job as a sales rep in a small printing company. It was on the third floor of a massive building in the warehouse district, but mainly I spent my working hours going around town in taxis, with a big portfolio of printing samples, visiting businesses like real estate offices and advertising agencies who needed to have lots of stuff printed on paper, and of course I needed to wear a suit and maintain a professional appearance and the trick, my supervisor who was a very nice gay man named Horace had impressed upon me, was to build relationships. He gave me a company credit card so that I could invite prospective clients for coffee or drinks, or even lunch, and the company supplied me with a list of bars and restaurants in every neighborhood, but as I sat with clients in these tony places speaking about paper stocks and varnishes and my company’s commitment to quality, I frequently found myself worrying about poor little Ali who must be feeling very dejected, all alone in a strange bathtub in the Tenderloin and, one evening, on the way home, I climbed over the chained entrance to a public park and removed a flat rock about the size of a shoebox from a flower garden. It barely fit into my dad’s old ACLU shopping bag and when I got home I set the rock in the bathtub so Ali could get up out of the water if she wanted to.
Through trial and error I figured out Ali really liked to hang out on the windowsill. That was becoming her favorite spot where she could soak in the rays of the sun and stare down into the parking lot behind the old building. But I began to worry that someone would see her and so I taped newspapers over the lower half of the window and cut a small hole in just one strategic spot so she’d be able to peer out with one eye without exposing her entire form to the people whose windows faced us from the other side of the parking lot. I could tell, from the way she’d crane her neck and flick her tail, that she was very interested in the goings on outside, in the pigeons that flew by, or whatever other activities she noticed, cars coming in and out, people yelling and the occasional gunshots which, when I think of it, taken all together contributed to a sense of a bigger world outside the apartment, a place of movement and freedom she could dream about. Still, I was very worried that somebody would notice her and I tried taping a sort of cardboard cylinder around her viewing spot to keep her eye farther away from the glass, but it was too flimsy and she immediately knocked it down.
Then, one morning as I was leaving the apartment, I noticed how hesitant I was to step out onto the street even when the light was green, and I suddenly realized that practically every car had tinted windows which was why I couldn’t get a sense of whether the oncoming drivers noticed me or not, and it dawned on me that window tinting was a very big thing in this city, that the vast majority of people did not want to be seen, and of course this was the answer to my problem. I coated the window in my apartment with cosmic black window film that I ordered from Amazon, so now Ali was able to lay her whole body right up against the glass and stare outside to her heart's content.
And our life together had become a predictable ritual. She was twenty-three inches long now and, while I was gone, Ali stared out the window or lay on the cool kitchen linoleum, or climbed up the ramp I’d built that went up over the side of the bathtub where I always left about six inches of clean water, but the bigger she got the more guano there was to deal with. It tended to be long and crusty stuff and in the beginning I simply scooped it into the toilet, but then I started worrying about it getting clogged and not being able to call a plumber for obvious reasons. Some of her excrement was quite gravelly, made that way I suppose from the splintered KFC bones, and so I got one of those heavy duty Tupperware tubs with a lid that closed, and broke up the long skinny turds with my hands and flushed what I was able to flush, and put the crunchy stuff in garbage bags and tossed them into the dumpster in the alley. I thought her poop stank pretty bad at first, but over time it seemed like I got used to it, or maybe the meat I was buying was of a better quality, and I almost didn’t notice the smell at all.
This story has sucked me in already. Your writing style is so clean and dense. Almost like poetry. You never waste a word. Unlike most writing on Substack! Most of it is so wordy and repetitive that I quickly give up. But I'm invested in this story. I'm worried about Ali getting enough sun now that the window is tinted. Looking forward to Thursday.
Very strong piece. I look forward to reading the remaining chapters. The windows of the lethal pickup truck are tinted, then later the narrator tints the windows of his apartment as well. It's a symbol of the world closing in around him. All he has left is that damn alligator, sent to him by a distant cousin no less! The details and digressions draw the reader deeper into the story rather than obfuscate. I couldn't find a single wasted word. My only comment is I wonder whether the alligator should be inside the cabin of the car during the accident. It might enhance the bond between narrator and alligator if they share that near-fatal experience. On the other hand, it would be strange to bring an alligator to one's graduation.