Hail, Caesar!
One thing my father and I both learned the hard way was to never ask my grandmother for something we didn’t really want. In my case, it was an Indian squaw costume, which I realize is wildly inappropriate now, but in the 70s was de rigueur. Being 4, I had no idea that such a costume would be incredibly difficult to find, but my grandmother persisted, apparently crossing the Great Smoky Mountains until she found a “real” squaw costume made of suede.
When she gave it to me, I had forgotten I had ever asked for it and began howling at the suggestion that I put this leathery smelly item of clothing on my body. In the picture my mother managed to take, which I sadly do not have, I am in the costume, in full blown meltdown, my hair only recently having grown back in so as to make me look like a little boy. My poor grandmother.
My father’s case happened before I was born, but had more dire consequences. His mistake was off-handedly asking my grandmother to bring him an alligator back when she was leaving for a trip to Florida. This may sound like a joke to some of you younger folk, but in the 60s and 70s, one could easily procure tiny baby alligators at roadside markets where they also sold “Florida Oranges” and “Florida Grapefruits.”
He, of course, forgot all about this comment until my grandmother came back home with an alligator.
What I have since learned and what they did not tell you at these roadside markets at the time was that those tiny baby alligators grow up to be huge fucking alligators. Like the kind you see on TV and in movies. This is also probably why you have to settle for citrus fruits and boiled peanuts at those markets in the 21st century.
There was a lot of lore about these alligators in my childhood. People would supposedly flush them down the toilet when they started to grow, leading to rumors that the New York City sewer system was full of giant, mutant alligators that had grown huge on city pollution and leftover slices of pizza. There was even a made for TV movie about these supposed creatures. I don’t know why they only lived in New York and not in Nashville or Atlanta. Maybe they preferred a city that never slept.
At any rate, my father’s alligator would not suffer the fate of the flush. No, my father’s alligator would be given a name, Caesar, and would become something of a legend in our home. The story of Caesar is also a great lesson in never truly knowing what was fact or fiction in the Wall household.
I tell this story as a legend, as Caesar and I never met. This was before my arrival and during a time when my father, who was fond of drinking, was more likely to drink at bars and at home. The story goes that when Caesar was about a foot long or so, my father, who was working in downtown Nashville at the time, was fond of sneaking him into bars inside his London Fog raincoat. I imagine the exchange went something like this:
Dad: “Would you buy me a drink if I show you my alligator?”
Other Dude: “Man, you sound like you’ve already had too many.”
D: “Just tell me if you would.”
OD: “Sure, man.”
Dad plops the alligator onto the bar. Other Dude either buys him a drink or drops dead. Either way, my dad won and had a good laugh. Also, who is going to fuck with a 6’4” guy with an alligator in a bar? Not me.
I also once heard my dad tell a story about how he would start a betting pool around who could guess his alligator’s name. My dad could start a betting pool around anything. He started one in the hospital waiting room while he was waiting for me to be born (He won. I was born 7 lbs, 11 oz. Seven come eleven!).
At this stage, my understanding is that Caesar was mostly all fun and games. However, he was still growing and living in our garage. It’s at this point in the story that my mother’s version takes over and my father’s narrative gets lost.
My mother, it should be mentioned, has a phobia of reptiles of any kind. I share this aversion with her, but hers is stronger than mine. I’ve seen her freak out at the sight of a rubber snake. I don’t like them, but they also don’t make me jump a foot in the air. This phobia made Caesar living in our garage a problem for my mother, as you can imagine. It also makes me doubt everything I’m about to tell you.
When he was raincoat smuggling size, Caesar was apparently not that problematic. Mom could easily come and go and he didn’t threaten her. It was when he got a little too big to sneak into the bar that shit got real. Hanging out in the garage, he supposedly started guarding the deep freeze, which was an integral part of our meal planning. That’s where all the Swanson’s frozen fried chicken and pot pies lived.
Mom claimed he would stand in front of the deep freeze and make an alligator style hissing noise. I think this mostly involved opening his mouth and showing his teeth, but I’m just going by what I’ve seen on TV. He was about three or so feet long at this time and getting big enough that anyone with sense would be afraid of him.
In my mother’s version of events, my father thought this was funny and didn’t take her fear seriously. This may very well be true. He was out drinking a lot and he and Caesar had had a lot of laughs together. He probably wasn’t home during meal prep time and definitely didn’t have the phobias my mother had.
I’m going to pause the narrative here to answer questions I’m sure you have, because I have them too. What did Caesar eat? Probably bologna and Vienna sausages, if my father was tasked with feeding him. How and where did Caesar go to the bathroom? I have no idea how alligators do this, but I imagine they have to and aren’t easily potty trained. This one remains a mystery. Finally, what the hell did my parents think was going to happen to Caesar once he got just a little bit bigger? Or maybe the better question, what did they think would happen to them, their three children, and their neighbors?
I don’t have a good answer to that last question. I’m guessing my father wasn’t thinking about it at all and my mother was splitting her time between raising three boys, taking care of the house, worrying about where my dad was, and not getting eaten by an alligator. I don’t think the long view was being taken into consideration.
At any rate, my mother’s narrative continues on a night when my father was gone. Whether he was out of town, which he often was, or out drinking, I do not know. It was the middle of winter and it was below freezing outside. Mom went out to the garage to get some dinner and there was Caesar, up to his old alligator tricks. Mom said she just couldn’t take it anymore and she “snapped.”
Again, I will pause to say that this is the point at which my mother’s narrative and the truth probably part ways. It is definitely the point at which sane reaction got thrown out in favor of insane overreaction, because it was at this point that my mother says she “blacked out” and somehow managed to pick Caesar up, despite his size and her aversion to his very being, put him in a cooler, put a concrete block on top of him, and fill said cooler with water. Outside. Where it was below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. All night.
My father picks the story up here and says when he came home, you could have picked Caesar up by the tail like a “damn alligator-sicle.” He would also get a little misty eyed at this point, often commenting, “I loved that damn alligator.”
I have a lot of thoughts here, as an adult. First, I don’t know if there is really any way my mother did what she said she did, but my father does back up her story about the frozen alligator.
Second, in what world would you not call animal control/the police/the SWAT team, if you had a live alligator over three feet long in your house, even in your garage? Who puts up with something like that for that long? I’m assuming it was a few months, which, to me, is a few months too long.
Finally, this seems like one of our “funny” family stories that isn’t really funny at all. Caesar was cold blooded, but he was still an animal. I guess freezing to death isn’t the worst way for an alligator to go, but still. Second, what the actual fuck was my grandmother even thinking, bringing that thing back from Florida in the first place? I can only imagine she thought my dad would flush it and it would be a good story and over in a few days.
I called my oldest brother to ask him about Caesar and he has no memory of him. This could either be because we have both conveniently forgotten a lot of things about our childhoods, or, more likely, the whole story was greatly embellished from the get go. I know it will be hard for you to believe, gentle reader, but the members of my family do tend to exaggerate.
The story of Caesar is like so many stories and events of my life: part fact and part fiction, part action and part reaction. My father’s drinking would lead him to make bad decisions which would then lead to my mother, the sober one, to make equally bad, if not sometimes worse, decisions.
Caesar was, purportedly, a casualty of this push and pull dynamic that took place between them even after my father got sober decades later. Alcoholism is a crazy disease in this respect and passive aggressive or just plain aggressive aggressive behavior usually wins out with family members over any type of healthy communication.
I think the lesson here is be careful what you wish for, or at least what you ask your loved ones for. You might get it and it might not want you to have your frozen food. And if you really don’t like what people are doing or how they are behaving, maybe have a conversation with them before you freeze their fucking alligator.
