2005-9-7 - 10:21 a.m.
So Thailand. I've had stories.
Jen and I stayed in a small one room bungalow with a concrete bathroom right on the beach, right? It was nice to just sit on the porch and look at the ocean for a while before I got bored of water and wanted to know where they were selling cute bracelets. One night Jen and I came back from a bar quite late and began to get ready for bed. In the midst of Jen brushing her teeth, I look around the room semi-drunkenly and notice a change in decor: a plastic lizard the size of my forearm and hand on the wall right above the foot of our big bed. I thought it was an odd choice of decoration, especially since I hadn't seen it before.
And then it blinked. It. Blinked.
I thus calmly (which is a shock, given my intense distaste for any living creatures in my bedroom while I sleep) inform Jen that I believe a large living gecko is on our wall. Jen, in a rather drunken and semi-high state, points at it, laughs, and says, "Oh well. Put up the mosquito net and we'll be fine." Images of me sleeping peacefully in the mosquito quickly turn into an image of the gecko cutting a delicate square hole in the netting with one fine claw, climbing through, and sitting on my sleeping face. Put up the mosquito netting? No thank you.
I decide to seek out the advice of people at the bar next to our bungalow. One Australian man tells me, "Just grab the guy by the middle and throw him outside. Yeah, that'll do it!"; his British compatriot, more along my lines of thinking, exclaims, "Are you mad? You could get rabies from it if you touch it [or lest I remind you, readers, of the EBOLA VIRUS???]! Tap the wall and chase it out the door that way." So I go back to the room and find Jen taking pictures of it and holding a lighter in front of its face. Which wasn't working. We try the tapping. No success.
So I go back to the bar and try to enlist the help of some strapping young muscular Thai men with our man-sized lizard. Unfortunately, the Thai bartenders only know enough English to give tourists the alcohol they want and sadly enough, the name of our gecko is not "Pina Colada" or "Mai Tai with a hamburger." A pen, a bar napkin, and a million different pronunciations of the word "gecko" later, I have a crowd of young, also very high, Thai men screaming, "YESS!!! TEE-KO! TEE-KO, TEE-KO!" Whatever it's called. Get it out.
They had over the bungalow and one man swiftly tries to make a leash to put it on. Another one is cowering on the far side of our porch. The third is really, really high and once he hears that I'm from Ohio, he tells me that Ohio has "good hookah." A minute later, he ran away screaming and giggling into the surf to hide from the raptor in our room. The one boy is having success getting the gecko to move but in an action inspired by both a fear of the lizard and a desire to tame him, he puts the loop around the gecko's neck and flings him to the other side of the wall right by our heads.
Great. Now the lizard probably spit little lizard egg babies all over my pillow in fear. And now no one can find the gecko. He's under the bed they guess. They grab a flashlight. They find the gecko. They promptly tell us, "Stay here. We get gun."
They come back drunkenly with, what looks to me like a rocket launcher, but is actually a pellet gun and start waving it around drunkenly and arguing over who will use it. I imagine I got shot in the face in the midst of the brawl. Another great image: having to call the PC Medical Officer in T-stan, Dr. Judith, "Um...Dr. J? Steve got shot in the face with a pellet gun when some local Thai men were trying to shoot a lizard in our room." It sounded so great, part of me was sad when it didn't happen at all.
But now the men can't find the lizard. They look outside. Oh, look! There he is! On the inside of the roof on an overhang! When I look closer, I see that it's not him. He's too small to by the man-of-war who hunted me in my own room an hour beforehand. They shoot the baby lizard in the head and the front half of him just droops to the ground but the back half of him just still hangs on the room. They poke him with a stick, scream when he hits the sand, and ask for our permission to keep the lizard. Yes, fine. Please get that out of my face.
After the men evacuate, Jen begins to get really paranoid and upset about the gecko: "We took a hit out on the lizard! WE TOOK A HIT OUT!" and "I can't believe we just poached a gecko. WE POACHED IT!" I tried to explain that we didn't use it's teeth for piano keys, so I don't think it counts as poaching. Also? I'm sorry. If there is a creature in my room who might potentially attack me, I don't care if it's the most tender last unicorn in the history of the world--I'm going to bash it in the face with a bat so that I know it won't gnaw my limbs off.
My prediction that we actually took out a fake gecko, a stand-in, turned out to be true. As Jen and I slept, I hyperventilated and sweat for hours as I heard it's distinctive call from inside the room, THREE FEET FROM MY HEAD. Jen kept getting annoyed that I was crowding her side of the bed, but I was in no mood to live it indepedent and free all the way over closer to the tyrannosaurus. Thankfully, there was no more spotting of the gecko in the remainder of our time on the island but I know he still haunts me. He'll be back.
