Audrey went on protesting her fierceness until she saw something that lifted her out of her seat. “Oh, my God.” She was looking at the television set hanging on the wall above the bar. “Oh, my God,” she said again. Her companions looked at the television and saw the image of a man walking down a wooden pier in Panama. Audrey shouted over the noise of the busy lunchroom to the bartender. “Turn it up! Turn up the television!” Whoever the dashing, handsome fellow being escorted down the pier by a contingent of soldiers was, he was obviously making quite an impression on her. “It’s Nick! Oh, my God, it’s Nick!”
Lucy thought her friend might be having an episode. “Who’s he? Who’s Nick?”
Audrey gazed dreamily up at the set. “My college sweetie! Look at him. He looks so handsome on TV.” Then her expression corkscrewed into a natural-born reporter’s look of curiosity. “I wonder what he’s doing in Panama.”
The answer to her question was about to arrive in Manhattan.
Everyone who laid eyes on the creature has a story to tell. In the short time since these events transpired, a million anecdotes, stories, and jokes have been told and passed along. As they circulate, each storyteller adds his or her own touches, gently reshaping the tale and turning it into a legend. A whole new urban folklore is emerging based on the creature’s visit. The following section is based on one such story I heard the other day. I have no idea how much of it is true, but like many of the lizard tales I’ve listened to recently, it captures something of the heart-stopping shock of seeing the beast for the first time. It goes like this.
A group of bums was hanging around under the FDR Drive down by the South Street piers. Another bum, about sixty years old and known to the others as Shaky Joe, came walking from the direction of the Fulton Fish Market with a fishing pole he’d found. Tucked under one arm was a loaf of rye bread he intended to use as bait.
The minute they saw him, the other bums broke out laughing. “Hey, Joe, you gonna catch one of them delicious East River fishies?”
The old guy turned and waved to his friends. “You never know,” he said. “Sometimes you get lucky.” And off he shambled down to the end of the pier, where he baited his hook with a piece of the bread. He cast his line into the water and not ten seconds later got his first nibble. “What do you know,” he said to himself. “Today must be my lucky day after all.”
But then the line yanked hard and his reel started spinning madly as the line paid out into the river. The thing was rotating so fast, Shaky Joe didn’t dare reach down and try to stop it. Though alarmed, he managed to turn and wave to his friends again. “I think I got one!”
When the fishing line ran out, the pole snapped out of his hands and disappeared into the brown-green-gray water. “What the hell kind of fish takes a man’s fishing pole away from him?” he wondered.
Then something started coming toward him. It was under the water and Shaky Joe couldn’t tell what it was. But it was big and fast enough to create a five-foot-tall bulge in the water. It looked like a submarine, except that it had a big pair of fins sticking twenty feet out of the water.
When he saw this, Joe turned tail and started running back toward shore. He ran down the wooden pier as fast as his shaky old legs would take him. When they saw what was happening, his drinking companions yelled at him to hurry. He pushed himself to the limit of his speed, afraid to look back. Behind him he knew the fish, or whatever it was, had reached the end of the pier, because he could hear it shattering, plank by plank, behind him. Whatever was chasing him was beginning to force its way under the pier with incredible strength. It gained on him, moving supernaturally fast. It looked as though Shaky Joe was a goner, but he jumped ashore just in time. He dove headfirst behind a concrete piling and trembled in his hiding place as he listened to the giant thing lifting out of the water. Joe was afraid to look, but he had to. When he finally did take a peek, he was sorry he had. He saw a giant eyeball staring down at him. It was honey yellow and had a dead white pupil. The creature stooped down for an even closer look and brought its eye right up to the terrified old man.
“I am very sorry,” Shaky Joe supposedly told the giant animal. “I was only trying to catch something small.”
The scale-covered leviathan turned back to the river and lifted a couple of fishing boats out of the water, anchors and all. Then, without another thought about Joe, he stepped up onto the FDR Drive, where he proceeded to cause one monster of a traffic jam on the expressway before stepping down on the other side and following the smells to the Fulton Fish Market.
“Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!”
Inspired by thundering applause, the portly mayor of the world’s most glamorous, most dangerous city—New York, New York—sidestepped away from the microphone and fell into a dramatic, nearly Shakespearean bow, as though he were some chubby Hamlet being slain by the adulation of the crowd.
It was the kind of thing reporters ate up like popcorn. The kind of thing the dailies liked to carry on the front page. The kind of thing his strategists said he would need to do a lot more of if he was going to have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning reelection after four years of pissing off every single person in the five boroughs at least once. Mayor Ebert, justifiably famous for being the loudest man in New York, came back to the microphone and started to speak—which is where his troubles usually began.
“I’d like to thank you all for coming out on this beautiful New York City day!” he shouted into the sea of black umbrellas. Only a few people chuckled, so candidate Ebert felt it necessary to explain that his previous comment had been a sort of joke, what with the weather being what it was. The same people chuckled again. He turned around to consult with his chief advisor, Gene.
“Gene, don’t we have some of our own people in the audience?”
“Well, yes, I thought we—”
“Because that was not unfunny, what I just said.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. I—”
Ebert turned back and pounded his fist hard on the podium. “When I came to office four years ago, people didn’t think we could reduce crime. But I did!” The crowd broke into roaring applause, strong enough to let Ebert ignore the first rumblings. “When I came to office four years ago, people didn’t think we could improve city services without raising taxes. But I did!” The second time the ground shook, a woman in the crowd came unglued. She screamed, and everything came to a stop.
“Gene, what the hell is that noise?”
The aide was befuddled and could only shrug. He didn’t know that the city’s fish market had just been gutted of most of its merchandise. Semitrailers had been lifted high into the air, emptied out, and then tossed aside. Two-story buildings had been stepped on and crushed flat.
The next time they heard it, the sound was more distinct: a ground-rattling thud accompanied by the sharp crack of concrete breaking apart under five hundred tons of weight. At an intersection a few blocks away, terrified pedestrians ran screaming into the street as if something was chasing them.
Everyone at the rally sensed something large and frightening was about to appear around the corner. But they didn’t have to wait for it to arrive at the end of the street because they could see its head moving past the tops of the buildings. It was brownish gray and the size of a railroad car. Behind the blunt snout, a bright honey-yellow eye was set deep between ridges of armoring scales that seemed to glisten with an opalescent blue sheen in the rain.
The moment they saw it, everyone who had come to hear the mayor’s speech took off running for cover.
In the dry, temperature-controlled comfort of WIDF, Charles Caiman strode the decks of the newsroom like a pint-sized Captain Bligh speaking on a cordless phone. He was complaining to one of his field reporters about how bad weather inevitably kills news. Light news days always made Caiman nervous and irritable. It wasn’t just that he would have to stretch out the transitions between segments with lots of small talk during that evening’s broad
cast. It went deeper than that—some people said he was a news vampire who would begin to starve unless he got his daily quota of juicy stories. But the truth was that even though he had been a fixture at the station for almost two decades, he was terrified of losing his job. His reason for living was to be in front of the cameras every night. He loved being a celebrity—especially in New York. It gave him the sense of making history instead of merely talking about it all the time. Earlier in his career, he’d entertained hopes of jumping up to one of the network stations and becoming a national figure. But now he was hanging on to the Big Apple by his fingernails, realizing that in a year or two he could be shipped off to an affiliate in Boise or Milwaukee or Pittsburgh.
“That’s not a story,” his secretary remembers him complaining into the phone. “Why should I give a rat’s stinky ass about a war in a country whose name I can’t even pronounce? We’re going live at five with nothing to goddamn talk about! Now give me something we can use on the air. We need a story!”
The reason the secretary remembers this exchange so clearly is because of what was happening through the windows of the nineteenth-floor office, just behind Caiman’s back. First an enormous mass of wrinkled flesh came into view. It was the creature’s snout. The jaws were closed, but the teeth protruded like jagged pieces of broken yellow glass. The entire street quaked as the enormous animal stomped past the windows. Somehow the self-described “Sherlock Holmes of News” managed to remain focused on his phone call, missing this phenomenal occurrence completely.
“Mr. Caiman,” the secretary sputtered, “I think your story just walked past.”
Sherlock spun around and studied the windows carefully for a second or two before deciding the woman was either crazy or stupid or both. He turned away from the windows and gave her a dirty look before returning once more to his phone conversation.
A second later a muscular tail, gray-brown with a luminous blue sheen, whipped silently past the windows, but Caiman didn’t see.
Near the front doors of the crowded diner, Lucy pulled on her coat while Animal stood in line at the cash register waiting to pay the bill. “So, Audrey, this Romeo of yours, did he have a name?” Lucy asked.
“Nick,” she replied. “Nick Tatopoulos.”
“That why you dumped him?” Lucy sniggered, even though there’s nothing especially funny about my name.
“No, Lucy, I just couldn’t look five, ten, maybe twenty years down the road and see myself with some scientific egghead who spends his life picking apart cockroaches.”
“What, is he in the pest control business? Those guys make a pretty decent living. Anyhow, you must be ecstatic that you dumped him so you could move up to the exciting and glamorous life of being Caiman’s assistant.”
“Very funny.”
Through the soles of their shoes they felt a pounding rumble. The sound was distant and they ignored it, assuming it was one of those giant pneumatic jackhammers used so often at construction sites around the city.
“How long were you and this Nick guy going around, going steady, or whatever?”
“Four years. Well, three years and nine and a half months, to be exact. And everything was going along great and then, kaboom, it all just fell apart in a couple of days. I think I got a little nervous.”
“Four years is a long time, girl.” Kaboom. “I’m surprised he didn’t ask you to marry him.”
“Actually, that’s what makes it so sad. He did.”
Kaboom. Lucy and Audrey looked at each other. Kaboom again. The windows of the restaurant began to rattle. The demolition machine was moving closer. Lucy was saying how she hoped it wasn’t another one of those damned parades when she looked outside just in time to see another kaboom move the whole street. Taxicabs and delivery trucks shook and swayed from the shock waves.
“That ain’t no parade,” Animal said, listening for the next rumble. Sensing something camera-worthy was about to happen, he started moving toward the door. Through the plate-glass windows he saw a giant foot smash down on the street and, kaboom, flatten a parked car like a pancake. It was long and sinuous and three-toed like a chicken’s foot. But the skin covering it was a drab gray-brown and covered with scales like a snake’s. The restaurant shook so hard, pictures fell from the walls and plates skittered across the lunch counter.
Lucy gaped at Audrey, who gaped at Animal, who gaped at the size of the foot. Everyone in the restaurant was stunned by what they saw. As the crowd backed away from the windows Animal bolted toward them. He hurried toward the door, wanting to get a look at this thing. Before he made it outside, Lucy yelled at him, “Victor, don’t do anything stupid!”
“I don’t think it’s dangerous,” he called back to her, trying to ignore the obvious danger the huge animal presented. He stopped in the doorway and watched a slab of limestone crash to the ground just outside. Looking up, he saw the beast’s hindquarters and tail soar by overhead. Held parallel to the ground, the tail was two hundred feet long and armored with rows of serrated bone along the top or dorsal edge. It glided past the front of the restaurant like a thick flying eel. As the very tip moved past, it twitched involuntarily to the side and ripped through the diner’s big plate-glass windows, shattering them onto the screaming patrons.
So much for not being dangerous. A creature that size could kill you without even noticing. But Animal Palotti had never backed away from a news story before and he didn’t intend to start now. He pushed through the doors and ran into the street in time to watch the reptile, as tall as the buildings around him, walk around the nearest corner. There were a few people in the street. They had ducked into doorways or pressed themselves against the walls of the buildings as the titanic lizard had marched past. They stood and gaped in silent amazement. They must have been almost equally amazed by Animal’s reaction. He yelled after the beast, “Hey, wait up!” By the time Lucy came outside to talk some sense into him, Animal was already rummaging through the WIDF news van he was driving that day. He wanted to find his video camera and capture the phenomenon on film. The van was thirty feet from where he’d parked it. It was on the sidewalk, lying on its side. Luckily, it hadn’t been crushed flat like a lot of cars on the street. He heard Lucy running up behind him and knew he should protect himself against The Purse. But he was in a hurry and, instead of shielding himself, he grabbed the last of his equipment. He turned in time to feel his wife’s handbag come crashing down on his shoulder. “Ouch!”
“Victor, you retard, don’t you go chasin’ that thing!”
“I gotta, honey, I’m back on the clock.” And then, before she could tell him how ridiculous he sounded, he was gone. He sprinted down the block, weaving his way between wrecked cars, fallen chunks of building debris, and terrorized people running in the opposite direction. As he ran, he struggled to load a fresh videotape into the camera. When he came to the end of the block and looked in the direction the creature had gone, he saw Grand Central Station straight ahead. The beast had turned again and the only part of him that was visible was his tail.
Still fumbling with the videocassette, Animal continued to chase after the towering reptilian life form. All around him, hordes of terrified pedestrians were running in the opposite direction. Although frightened out of their minds, these people showed strong instincts for self-preservation. Victor “Animal” Palotti, on the other hand, was answering to a very different instinct, one that told him to shoot some tape of this bizarre event before some shmuck from a competing station got it first. Oof! He collided headfirst with a man large enough to play linebacker for the Jets. Both men went sprawling to the ground. Unfazed, Animal sprang back up and ran to the next corner. Smashed and overturned cars littered the sidewalks. Where a fire hydrant had been shorn away, a column of water spouted high into the rainy afternoon sky. Rubble, shattered glass, and pieces of the façades from the surrounding buildings covered the street.
At the front doors of Grand Central Station, he got some good news and some bad news. The good new
s was that his camera finally accepted the videocassette. He pushed the record button and saw the little red light pop on. Hoisting the camera onto his shoulder, he pointed it down the street and shot the first images of the gargantuan reptile. It was walking away from him. Jagged scales, like the protective dorsal shields of a stegosaurus, ran up the creature’s back. The two that erupted from behind the shoulder blades were especially large, over twenty feet each. They looked like a pair of bony blades that had tried to grow into wings. They waved back and forth heavily as the beast marched methodically forward, its wide body filling the street from sidewalk to sidewalk.
“It’s a goddamn lizard,” Animal said.
Walking exclusively on its hind legs, the lizard covered about a hundred feet with each stride. When it came into a large intersection it stopped and looked all around, trying to decide which way to go next. And that’s when Animal got the bad news.
The creature decided it didn’t want to go uptown after all, so it began to turn around. Although Madison Avenue is a large street, the lizard was larger. Including his tail, he stretched out to well over three hundred feet. A U-turn seemed out of the question. But despite its great size, the creature’s movements were well coordinated, even graceful. The tail curled tight against the body and, with snakelike flexibility, the creature wrapped his head past his hips, executing the turn with a minimum of damage to the surrounding buildings. Only the tail, as it unfolded behind, caused any damage at all—it ripped a series of lamp posts out of the ground in a single swipe.
With his head hung menacingly low to the ground and swinging side to side, the scaly brown dragon came prowling back the same way he’d come. The rain brought out a blue tint in the creature’s skin, a shimmering opalescent hue. Craggy, misshapen teeth protruded from the jaw like shards of broken glass. Animal should have made himself scarce. He should have dropped the camera and run screaming into the lobby of the closest building. But he was a man possessed.
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