Alligators in my bathtub

The little fucker was giving me the evil eye! I could sense his little reptilian brain planning his attack. His evilness was palpable, he was pretending to look forwards, oblivious of my presence, but I knew, I knew! The bastard was just waiting for his moment to pounce.

I was approaching from behind, cautious yet determined, like the great white hunter that I was in my head. My weapon of choice for this occasion: an old, tattered t-shirt, scoff all you like but it is the tried and true method when you are hunting alligators.

I threw the shirt over the vile reptilian and followed up with a manly eighteen year old dash towards it to wrestle it into submission but the beast was wily and wickedly quick, it jumped, flipped 180 degrees in the air like some scaly ballerina, snapped its powerful jaws, almost ripping my face off! Well, alright, maybe not my face but at least the tip of my little finger. But I was quick too, I let out a decidedly unmanly scream and jumped back, scared shitless of the prehistoric predator. Never mind that the thing was tiny, it was a baby caiman about 40 centimetres in length, but don’t let its size fool you! They are still ferocious, fearless, fiery beasts.

I had now lost my secret weapon the shirt and that really put me at a disadvantage. There is, supposedly, a safe way to grab small reptiles so they can’t bite you, with thumb and forefinger right under their ribs, that is, between the front and rear legs. I had seen my dad do it a couple of times in the Llanos* but I had tried and failed to reproduce it with this particular brute and had the bite marks on my fingers to prove it.

Undeterred by the malicious stare of the saurian I darted in again into the tub (just my left arm, the non-dominant one of course, I had to preserve the good one) to try to position the shirt over its scaly back, the beast snapped at me again and I couldn’t get close enough, time for some sophisticated tactics. I distracted it by offering my left hand as bait, making it lunge for it, then reaching in with my right to drop the shirt on top of it. Success! Brain had triumphed over brawn. Now I wrestled (bundled really) it into the shirt and quickly dropped the writhing and snapping bundle of tyrannical teeth into a previously prepared receptacle (a common bucket).

With that heroic feat our to of the way, I could start the chore that had brought me into its dangerous den in the first place: changing its bath water.

Now, the more eagle-eyed amongst you might have observed that an alligator, even a juvenile Caiman Crocodillus, known locally as Baba like this one, beautiful dark gray-green colour with mesmerising, golden reptilian eyes, is not commonly found in city bathtubs, this was not even a special type of tub or terrarium, just an ordinary white ceramic bathtub in my house in the city of Caracas, Venezuela. So what the hell was this one doing here? That’s a good question. To answer it, I will need to talk about a more dangerous and ferocious animal: my sister.

My sister is a biologist, she had acquired this alligator as a favour for some friend or other and had agreed to keep it until a suitable home was found for it. She had also volunteered my bathtub, without my knowledge, approval or even a courtesy consultation, as a temporary dwelling for the specimen, alleging that hers was too small for the comfort and wellbeing of the patient. Then she had buggered off to India for six months and never told me that she had parked a bag of scales, teeth, bad mood and evil disposition in my bathtub! The first I knew about it was when I came home one day, went to have a pee in my bathroom, noticed there was water in the tub, some idiot had left the plug in I thought, went to remove said plug and almost lost three fingers from a fucking alligator attack! In my fucking bathtub! Not your typical Sunday, even in my family.

When I noticed the unwelcome guest I yelled “What the fuck is an alligator doing in my bathtub?” To which I didn’t get much of a response. I was affronted. The indignity! The audacity! The stink! It was just too much. I went in search of the obvious culprit but then remembered that she had snuck off, like a thief in the night, to longitudes unknown, so I went to ask Carmen our maid, she knew everything. This was Venezuela in the late 80s so it was very common to have a maid in your house, it’s not like we were posh or anything like that. Carmen calmly explained everything to me. Dani, my sister, had left the alligator in the tub (that much I had already astutely deduced on m own), but fear not, she had left instructions! I was to feed the little invader ham or raw chicken and change the water in the tub at least once a week or more often if it got too dirty. “What… how… bitch!” Was all I could muster as answer.

So there I was, alligator in tub, me cleaning the tub, picking up the rotting meat that the finicky bastard wouldn’t eat (it didn’t care too much for ham, seemed to prefer chicken), scrubbing the scum out, rinsing and refilling the tub for its royal scaliness. My task done, I unceremoniously dumped the gator back in the tub where it quickly scurried off to its previous position at the deep end, staring at the plug as if waiting for some morsel to materialise from it. 

In truth, I couldn’t blame the poor thing its unfriendly disposition, I mean it was trapped in a bathtub with no company and no distractions of any sort. It must have been bored out of its wits. My sister, on the other hand, I could definitely blame, and blame I did. I repaired off to my room to sulk and plot my vengeance against the offensive animal. My sister of course, not the saurian.

Days passed, my sister didn’t come back and I forgot about vengeance and just got on with my life and servile chores, I fed the alligator, changed its bath water and generally looked after it. Though I had to wrestle it a few more times, I can’t say I ever got the hang of it or even became proficient or looked forward to doing so. I don’t think we became friends, an alligator is not something you can really have as a pet, they just don’t acknowledge your existence except to try to bite you if you represent a threat, but I suppose I got used to it. I did learn what foods it liked best, I was surprised that it preferred raw to cooked chicken for example when, after days, I’d find the cooked chicken rotting away uneaten. It may sound obvious to you but you try taking care of a caiman in your bathtub for weeks! You probably wouldn’t be so smug, now would you? I also learned that it ate surprisingly little when presented by the evidence of the chicken and ham offerings rotting in a corner of the tub and attracting all manner of insects to its ecosystem. To my chagrin it didn’t seem to care for cured ham very much, the posh bastard preferred free-range chicken and wouldn’t even look at anything else. A bit fussy in my opinion and I started to wonder how these things had survived for more than 150 million years old, essentially in the same form they have today, just smaller, if they were such fastidious gourmets. Not only had they survived but they managed to avoid the mass extinction 65 million years ago that took the dinosaurs with it. Sharks and alligators are apex predators, unchanged for millions of years because they don’t need to change, they are the perfect killing machines. This one was letting its race down I thought, its ancestors were probably looking down at it from Crocodilyc Heaven shaking their heads and clicking their tongues in disappointment at this city slicker, pampered individual living in a bathtub in the capital with a personal valet to feed it and change its carefully climate-controlled water.

One day I came home and went reluctantly to check on the scaly invader, to see if its majesty needed feeding, and found the tub empty. Oh no! I panicked, had something happened to it? Had I fed it the wrong type of chicken, where there even different types of chicken? Or been too rough wrestling it into the dirty shirt, broke a rib which punctured a lung? I went in search of Carmen for answers of course, Carmen knew everything. She didn’t fail me, she informed me that my sister’s friend had been over to pick it up, apparently said friend had found a more suitable environment for the little beast. “Oh, OK.” I said, “Do you know where?” I asked. “No.” She said. It was evident that the future fate of alligators was not high on her list of priorities. “Oh, OK.” I said again and went back upstairs to stare at the empty tub. 

The thing had been a nuisance, it made the tub scummy and stinky, tried to bite me every time I took it out to clean its domain, didn’t acknowledge my existence or even seem grateful when I fed it, I couldn’t use my bathtub, not even to take a shower, had to brush my teeth in a stinky, miasmic bathroom. But, for some reason, I actually missed the little bugger. Back then, I always found it easier to make connections with animals than with people, animals seemed a lot more sincere and transparent to me, they had no hidden agendas or deceptive plans, they were a lot less complicated and easier to get along with. Like the missing saurian I was not the most social of creatures.

Eventually my sister came back, I gave her a half-hearted bollocking but only as a prelude to ask where the reptile had ended up. Turns out a friend of a friend had a farm somewhere and he kept alligators there, as you do, it would be the perfect place for this one. That was good, that was a happy ending… 

Though I wondered if it ever missed our wrestling matches.