get newt gingrich (or die trying)

a photo story by Tom

This Sunday I was leaving my room like it was any other day to go outside in my hobo clothes and scare the neighborhood children with my wild eyes and exaggerated hand movements when I myself saw a scary movement across the carpet in my hallway. As it turned out, the movement was not of anything scary at all, but of some small lizard. The thing scampered away under the closed door of my bathroom before I could get a good look at it, briefly snagging itself on something underneath the door with its tail squirming. Unfortunately I could not follow it into the bathroom because my roommate Armen was in there washing up at the sink.

So I knocked at the door, and told him that, uh, there is a lizard thing the bathroom. He yelped a bit and came outside, door shut behind him, for clarification. I told him what I had seen, and he went into his room to get something to kill it. No, I told him, I don’t want to deal with cleaning up a dead lizard, and besides we hadn’t considered the ethical implications. I told him I would take care of it, and then he could get back to washing up. Okay, he told me, as I opened the door.

Hiding behind our (disgusting) toilet was this:

I think it was a newt. Or a salamander. I’m not sure what the difference is, or if a newt is a kind of salamander, or if it was even a salamander or newt at all. In any case, it was small and wriggly and had a comically oversized tail and I couldn’t bear to kill it. So I needed a plan to catch it.

Unfortunately, it seems that the evolutionary history of this creature had selected it to be particularly good at hiding around and making escapes in a bathroom. So my first few plans to catch it all ended in frustration, and usually in Armen’s suggestion to drown it in a torrential downpour of RAID. Eventually, though, I collected the right variety of tools - my cardboard box of old Sports Illustrated magazines, a broom, a can of air freshener, and an old can for donations to UCI UNICEF (thanks to Kais for leaving that behind) - and got to work.

A few minutes (and no pictures) later, I managed to trap the newt in the UNICEF can against my bathroom wall. I still needed a way to get the newt, in the can, outside, and was worried it would crawl out of the can as soon as I pulled it off the wall. So I went on a hunt for a piece of material thin enough to get between can and wall, but sturdy enough that the newt couldn’t push it out of the way to escape its aluminum prison. I settled on the only thing I could find: the 19th birthday card from my parents, which has “The Man With No Name” on the cover and plays a demented drained-battery version of Ennio Morricone’s famous whistle theme. I slid it in the crevice, tilted the can, and secured its spaghetti western lid with my copy of The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. Armen wanted me to take the newt far, far away, so I took it as far as I felt like (the bushes just outside our apartment) and set him free:

Alas, alack! Had I killed the poor creature in my attempt to save its life from the Armenian genocide?

Woo! Yeah, it was alive. I saved its life. Woo! ∎