Agile Tortoise
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From the Vault, Eiso You’re Killing the Lizards
While I was in college at NYU, one of my roommates was a Japanese-American goth rocker by the name of Eiso. He had long hair, wore boots up to his knees everyday and didn’t own any clothes that were not black. Eiso was a very nice guy but a bit of a dingbat and was terribly unorganized.
About midway through the school year (my junior year), a friend of Eiso’s left to spend 6 months in Africa or some other far away place. Eiso agreed to take care of his lizards for him during his absence. This was no small undertaking. There were about 15-18 lizards of different sizes and shapes — mostly geckos and chameleons. I think the biggest was about 10″ long. Their home was a 100 gallon aquarium. This aquarium was also accompanied by a 10 gallon aquarium for the crickets that the lizards ate.
After a month or two, the lizards became a bit of an issue around the apartment. The first couple of escapes were entertaining diversions…but pretty soon it became a real pain trying to track these guys down. We removed all the posters from the wall because they loved to hide behind them. We actually had to clean up some…which was no small feat for us.
But the biggest problems surrounded the crickets, both when there were none of them and when there were too many. First of all, you simply can’t contain crickets. You buy them by the dozen, and those lizards ate quite a few of them. Even if you tried to be careful, the whole process of transferring live ones from the pet store bag to the 10 gallon aquarium, and later on to their doom, always resulting in a few escapes. Also, crickets croak. And by croak, I don’t mean “make a frog-like sound.” Dead crickets stink.
I’m sure you’re thinking, why not throw away the dead ones? Well, that’s a good idea, until you try to figure out how to separate the dead ones from the lives ones without a complete containment breakdown.
Crickets also make a lot of noise in the dark. Which is all the time when you keep them in a closet. Oh, and shoo’ing them off your pillow in the middle of the night is a pain. They are basically athletic roaches.
More to the point of all this, we did kinda like the lizards and grew attached to them…but the crickets were a problem. Due to this, Eiso largely divorced himself from involvement with the crickets — meaning he pretty much stopped feeding the lizards. After watching this torture for a month or so, my other roommate Steve and our other practically live-in friends decided that something had to be done.
You might think that meant we started feeding the lizards. No, that would have been the high road. We felt it was more important to make our point by constantly harassing Eiso about his inability to live up to the responsibility he had taken on.
My contribution to this effort is the following song, which we played over and over and over whenever Eiso was around. I think we even inserted in the middle of some of his favorite cassettes so he’d be subjected to it on his walkman also. Without further ado, I present:
Eiso, You’re Killing the Lizards
