The Mystery of the Dead Alligator Hanging from the Street Light One Foggy Night on 2nd Ave

I wanted to write a memoir but the connective tissue of the memoir didn't interest me. I wanted to render memories that would pop up like mushrooms and quickly vanish. I owe much to where I was raised, in a black neighborhood where people talked to each other and spent time on the porch and on the corner, as did my brothers and their friends as they smoked weed, drank Mickey Big Mouths and Heinekens, and talked all the time about the insanity of Vietnam, nuclear war, and H.P. Lovecraft, and from there they'd segue into the adventures of the many memorable characters in the neighborhood. I tried to do that here. A new installment will appear here every Saturday this and next month.

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One night a dense fog rolled onto Second Avenue, so dense that we couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of us. Onla and I were giddy with excitement that no one could see us though we couldn’t see anything either. It was freaky being enveloped in a cocoon of darkness as though we had stumbled into a horror movie. We walked deeper into the fog that had transformed the neighborhood we knew better than anything else in the world into something weird and scary. Then a moment later we both jumped back shouting into the fog as we sprinted away. After we calmed down we cautiously returned and saw that it was still there, and we looked at each other in disbelief; a four-foot-long alligator hung above us. When we stopped shouting and running around in circles, we warily approach the alligator ready to haul ass if it tried to land on our heads to eat our brains or our eyes or both. The alligator hung from fishing line wrapped around its head and tied to the light post.

“Who’d do that shit?” I said to Onla, not really expecting an answer. Then everything made sense, more or less. I remembered Mark, the diabolic mastermind of the neighborhood sitting on the fire hydrant under the branches of the big pine tree, smoking weed and drinking a Mickey Big Mouth with my brothers and the rest of the fellas. I tried to be invisible when they were on the corner drinking and smoking weed because they were always talking about something interesting, from how fucked up and stupid and racist the Viet Nam war was, to how good the Lakers were, and how hard it was to find good weed and how the police were mad dogs and that H.P. Lovecraft wrote some scary and all and that was cool, but he was still a racist creep with his Niggeruth, the blind deaf and dumb elder god. Weird shit would happen too, like once I was lucky enough to see Mark nonchalantly open a large leather bag and pull out a two and half foot long alligator on a little leash. He lit a joint and passed it around and after a few more hits he blew smoke in the face of the alligator and the alligator stopped twisting about and chilled. Unless Mark had a bunch of alligators hanging around his house this had to be that Alligator.

“So maybe it ain’t dead?” I said to Onla.

Onla shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe it’s sleeping.”

We both kept looking at it like it was going to spring back to life and attack us, but it hung there motionless.

“What are we going to do?” I asked Onla.

“I’m going to get it.” he said.

Unlike me Onla could climb his ass off. He crawled up the light post and quickly reached the alligator. Onla always carried a pocketknife with him, and he cut the string that had the alligator suspended in the air and it hit the ground with a thud. He lifted it up by the string around its neck and walked away into the fog carrying his trophy.

 If you grew up in real neighborhood you had to have a Mrs. Washington around to keep everybody in check. She was the eyes and ears of the block. Nothing could happen near her house without her knowing and commenting on it and she had a voice that was not just loud but paralyzing so. Once my brother and his friends decided to smoke weed in a car in front of her house, she shouted “I’m calling the police on you boys smoking the weeds. And she would keep shouting with her big boom box of a voice until the only choice was sitting fire to her house or giving in and smoking the weeds a few houses down from hers. So, an accommodation was made, nobody got high in front of Mrs. Washington’s house and she wouldn’t start shouting and bring down your high. She was still annoying as hell though she did have some very pretty nieces and occasionally she’d yell at us to come get some of her sugar cookies. Once we decided she wasn’t trying to poison us, we kept going over to get those cookies.

Onla had a plan. He ran almost immediately to Mrs. Washington’s house and put the alligator down her mail slot and ran home. I forgot about the alligator until the next day when I stepped outside and heard Mrs. Washington’s bombastic voice rip into my ears as though she was standing right next to me shouting into my ears.

“Jervey, why you do that! Why you put a torpedo down my mail slot! You almost killed me. How could you put a torpedo down my mail slot!”

“I didn’t do that. I don’t even know what a torpedo is!” I said, with conviction.

“You did! I saw you!” She shouted so loud it hurt my ears and I couldn’t help laughing and backing away.

“I didn’t!” I said a/'s I disappeared around the corner where I saw Googie watering the lawn. He had a black eye.

“What happened?

Googie looked me up and down before responding.

“Some man knocked on the front door and when I opened it, he asked me did I put an alligator down his auntie’s mail slot.

I said hell no, and he said, “Yeah, she said it was some fat light skinned low life kid and it’s got to be you,” and that’s when he punched me in the eye. Nobody would believe it was you because nobody would believe that your bookish ass would do anything bad.”

I looked down at the ground. “It wasn’t me. it was Onla. I was just with him.”

Googie looked pissed for a second and then laughed.

“Where you guys get that dead alligator from? I want one.”

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Jervey Tervalon was born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles, and got his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine. He is the author of six books, including Understanding This, for which he won the Quality Paper Book Club’s New Voices Award. Currently he is the Executive Director of “Literature for Life,” an educational advocacy organization, and Creative Director of The Pasadena LitFest. His latest novel is Monster’s Chef.