The Iguana In Momma’s Closet
A Tale of two Closets
I was born in 1950 and grew up in the suburbs of Ft Worth Texas.
As a baby boomer I suppose my surroundings …… and therefore my life, would be defined as the slightly upper middle-class variety. I had what would probably pass as a happy childhood filled with a wide assortment of interests and diversions, adventures, and of course misadventures. But then, happy childhoods are rarely happy…… however, that tends to be another subject.
For a time, animals and their care took a central position in the ongoing melee of life that I called my youth. And about the same time the sciences were offered to me as a viable pursuit. From time to time it was also suggested that I get busy pursuing them. I took classes at the planetarium, and had a microscope and a telescope and some weekend I built kits that came from Radio Shack.
I saw myself more as a potential inventor than a biologist, however. And, although I found delight in animal behavior, the animals themselves tended to require more care than not….. and it was considerably close to what I call work.
Science that involved animals merely hovered on the edges of my consciousness, along with any number of other worthwhile things. Still, I thought long and hard about the possibility of being a veterinarian, and a good number of frogs did meet their maker via my quest to follow Dr. Frankenstein down his misbegotten path. Fortunately, there seemed to be plenty of frogs around.
Mostly, however the animals that I got to know were not a part of any sort of experiment or zoo. They just seemed to show up and be participants in the family life for a while. There was always a dog or two around. Cats appeared and disappeared as well….. then rabbits, snakes, horny toads, fish, pigeons, ducks, chickens, parakeets, crawdads, turtles, and two raccoons could be found roaming about the house as well.
I had an older brother who seemed able to intuit just when an animal had worn out its welcome. At that point he would sell the animal to me. Unfortunately, I rarely saw it coming. But as soon as the money changed hands, an announcement would soon follow, made by our parents in a formal setting. The jest of the announcement was that it was now time for what had just become MY animal, to depart.
Because of some particularly rude behavior, one of the raccoons named Gertrude met this desperate fate. I was forced to go to the zoo with Gertrude in tow, and it was understood that from that point on she would abide at the zoo. I imagined she was happy as she was going to live in a raccoon pit roughly the size of Denver. When leaving, I waved goodbye forlornly at my pet raccoon, went home, and demanded my brother give me my money back.
An iguana dropped by one day. I cannot remember much about the iguana…. where it came from, or why it was invited. Much of that is still a mystery at this point.
But I do remember it was a formidable beast. He/she (I did not ask) looked as if it was in what must be an iguana’s late twenties, or early thirties. It appeared as if it had been working out at a gym, and was therefore quite large and robust.
For a child an iguana was quite exciting. It may have been docile, but it looked extremely menacing, and that was good enough.
However, I spent very little time with the iguana and we failed to bond, because almost as soon as it had arrived, it also disappeared.
A hunt ensued and the whole family looked everywhere for the iguana. This lasted at least a week, maybe even two. Then gradually, like most lost iguanas, it was forgotten. Time stands still for no iguanas. Soon it was as if an iguana had not even crossed our doorstep. Nor did I ever anticipate that I would meet another. Time stretched into a month, then two…then three. And not a word was heard from the iguana.
Then, on what must have been a weekend, or perhaps it was spring break (I remember being home from school in the mid-morning). I heard a blood-curdling scream coming from the kitchen.
In my youth I was a connoisseur of blood curdling screams. Raised on horror movies, screaming had been elevated and had all the attributes of high art.
However, the screams I knew in movies and even those that occurred in the audience during a Saturday matinee, were at least partly artifice. Serious and weighty perhaps, these screams were still somewhat detached from reality. They were often accompanied with a sly internal smile.
This particular morning however, the scream I heard -- yes, from my mother -- was real.
There was not a bit of doubt about it. It brought forth an immediate and chilling response.
I did not run to the kitchen. I was simply instantly transported there. And along the same lines, it was as if nothing in my life preceded this event. I was instantly aware that I was there in the kitchen and no thought or movement whatsoever was evident. Whatever I had been doing simply vanished and I was then looking directly at my mother in the kitchen, her face contorted by some unspeakable horror. She slammed the door to a small closet that was near the refrigerator.
I was immediately cognizant that high drama was afoot. A blood curdling scream and a slamming door is something which is hardly ever witnessed. Usually you get either the scream or the slamming door, but the combination of the two was exceedingly rare …. and both profound, and unsettling at the same time.
Also, that particular closet, which had ignited my mother’s scream, had in my book long been categorized as malignant, and on the other side of evil.
Why would a child decide that a closet was evil? I cannot say exactly. However, I was convinced that 2 closets in that house were evil for as long as I can remember.
Perhaps architecture played a role in this verdict, although all closets to some extent are similar. I do not remember that the bedroom closets, which I used daily, were considered particularly malevolent. Yet it seemed clear to me that closets as a whole had a somewhat sinister bent, and were not to be trusted. For whatever reason I had determined that all manner of mayhem was trapped in both of the two closets I had marked as evil.
spent my days religiously avoiding the two of them. My survival depended on it.
.
The kitchen closet must have been a pantry of some kind, yet it also held a ménage of brooms and mops and various odds and ends.
I was capable of ignoring this particular evil closet for the most part, partly because I was only near it in the light of day. Light seems to act as a counterweight to evil. The other closet, which so ominously vexed me, was located at the end of a long dark hallway where my bedroom stood, and awaited. The closet and the dark hallway had become entangled, at least in my mind. Out of necessity I always saw that closet door in the dark of night. This helped to establish its bona fides as the worst of the two.
Along with the illumination during the daylight hours, there was another reason that the kitchen closet was the lesser evil of the two. Another door stood right next to the kitchen closet, which, when open, completely covered the closet door, hiding it from view. This fortunately was most of the time, and once hidden, both the kitchen closet door and the kitchen closet itself were completely out of mind.
Standing there looking at my mother, I could not fathom what could have possibly happened. Yet I knew to the depth of my being that this had something to do with the evil closet. My mother could say nothing as she stood shaking for a good long while. Not being overly empathetic at that point in my life, I failed to offer her a drink, either alcoholic or non-alcoholic. and stood there mute, along with her, waiting.
Then, as she began to regain her composure, she said “th…th… the… ig… uana…....” and with that she started to both point at and move even further away from the closet door.
Hearing the word “iguana”, I seized the moment, and opened the evil closet door. Sure enough, there, on a high shelf laden with various goods and sundries, stood the iguana looking pretty much as it had the last time I had seen it. In fact, if anything, it had gained in muscle mass and size while gone. Perhaps finding plenty of time for workouts in the intervening months The iguana had also changed at a much deeper level. It now personified evil as it glared down ominously from its perch. Making a strange hissing noise, and looking as if it would attack at any moment, it was now the embodiment of evil itself. To me, it had become akin to, and perhaps even a very close relative of, the pure definition of evil….., the Devil .
At the time, finding a relative of the Devil in an evil closet made perfect sense to me. I did not question it for a moment. But I was struck at how unusual it was for such a powerfully evil being to be living in a Ft. Worth suburb.
The iguana no doubt, had simply acquired a good deal of the closet’s flagitious aspiration. Iguanas are well known for their ability to absorbing either good or evil, simply from exposure to their environments. So. perhaps I had downplayed the level of toxicity that enveloped the closets in that house as I got older. But this event had verified my early childhood judgements about such things.
In any case, I shut the door again and we left the Devil’s cousin or whatever it was, to its own devices. It was content to stay on its high shelf, remaining mute in its apparent elation at what it had wrought. My mother and I retired to the living room where we could sit for a time, recuperate, and mull over the situation.
Once recovered, we returned to the closet and the heinous iguana continued to play dumb. Even when I asked the question out loud, which had hung solumnly over the entirety of the proceedings, it said nothing…..“Where has it been all this time?”. Certainly it should have answered this question if it wanted to continue to be involved in polite society.
Maybe the Devil’s relative, whether taking the form of an iguana or not, has no answers in situations such as this.
I was at a point in my own development where I was becoming increasingly suspicious that no one, anywhere, really has the answers to much of anything.
So, the issues that the iguana had raised, seemed subdued if not by circumstances at least by conjecture.
But I was still a child and so at that point I craved a form of certainty.
All of the questions that vexed me in childhood were similar to these questions of good and evil which arose with this encounter. All were both ageless and immutable, and shadowy beyond measure.
The drama circling around the iguana was pretty well spent by that point in the game.
As usual my father was nowhere to be found. He was probably out playing games in the woods, with other animals. It rarely occurred to him that animals had much potential as pets, and that there were other things to be done with them besides shooting and eating them.
My fathers had been had been preoccupied with hunting and fishing for as long as I can remember But his self imposed absence forced us to look elsewhere for help.
So, in what was to become a pattern in the years that followed, I was sent next door to get the help of a genuine teenager, Bobby. Bobby was certainly big enough and capable enough to wrestle with the progeny of the devil. Still. upon greeting him, I held my tongue about the situation we faced, in fear that if he knew what he was about to tangle with, he might refrain from doing his Christian duty.
I simply said, “My mother needs you. Bring a net.”
No questions were asked, but sure enough, he quickly disappeared into his house and emerged with a fair sized net. Upon arrival at our house, I was allowed to hold the net, as he scrutinized the situation.
I do not think my characterization of the iguana and the entirety of this tale, has been faulty in the least. I firmly hold to all I have said. But since Bobby was able to subdue him/ her in record time, much needed to be re-evaluated and accounted for.
At any rate Bobby had gained control of the embodiment of evil and as far as I knew Bobby was now the rightful owner. Care and feeding of the beast was his for the asking.
And it seemed the neighborhood teenager was quite pleased with himself as he headed home with the iguana tucked under his arm.
And I was elated with the idea that the evil had simply moved next door. Sadly though, when I went next door to visit, a few days later, I was told that the iguana was no longer there.
So, as it turned out, that this fateful day, involving screams and an evil kitchen closet, not only reacquainted me with the beast, but ended my iguana encounter as well.
From that day on, I never saw the animal again, and worse, no one said a word about it.
Within a week the drama of this chapter in my life, lay dead on the floor.
If there is more to the story, time has completed its obligation……and many of the details which once seemed so important, have all too readily faded from my memory.
And the summation of this story has joined with that of others in the telling. Their narrations have all used something akin to shorthand.
The superfluous details fall away with time, and the story sounds as if it is told by Sergeant Joe Friday or officer Bill Gannon on the old TV show “Dragnet”.
“Just the facts Ma’am….” leaves little room for hyperbole.
It is the evil, however, lurking behind a child’s closet doors that kindles my heart and inflames my imagination …..even after these many years.
The iguanas of life come and go, but the evil that accompanies them, lasts forever…or at least for a good long time.
And at least a few of the many questions that arose from all this do deserve an answer. But answers are not easy to come by.
Yet the answer to one may be in the question itself. If not in closets, just where is it that evil does dwell…….while the rest of us are sound asleep ?