September 28, 1990

It’s time we came out of the closet.
We’ve been reluctant to make this announcement, fearful our few friends would find excuses for not visiting, afraid the neighbors would plop For Sale signs in their front lawns, concerned we may become neighborhood pariahs. But having quietly carried around this secret for three months, it’s time we unburdened ourselves. It’s time we unburdened ourselves. It’s time we confessed, allowing the confessional to cleanse our sullied spirit.
We have a lizard loose in our house. More precisely, we have a gecko roaming free, scurrying on its suction-cup feet across the walls and ceilings.
There, we admit it. We feel better. In fact, we’ve felt somewhat better since the little critter became part of the extended family last summer. While theatres across the nation were showcasing Arachnophobia on the big screen in July, we were confirming that art imitates life by being overrun with brown spiders. The dirty brown, angular, poisonous, nasty demons were everywhere-hiding in socks, in sheets, and (worst of all) in underwear.
In the past we have responded to such invasions with chemical warfare, unleashing deadly poison around baseboards, in closets and down hallways. But, as Saddam knows, chemical warfare is not discriminating; the good die with the bad.
So this summer we determined to use nature to vanquish nature. We bought a house gecko and set him free in an upstairs bedroom.
Now, to quickly dispel the image of a dragon lizard prowling the home, putting children and pets at risk, let us say the gecko is smaller than your hand (unless your hand is bigger than a gecko), it’s dull green, it’s nocturnal, and people in Japan have been using them as residential bugeaters for centuries. Although we know he (or she) is on the job because the spiders are gone, we haven’t seen it for several weeks.
Once you get over the uneasiness of expecting to step on it while walking barefooted down the hall, or having it leap onto your face as you sleep, it’s like having a benevolent reptilian friend waging battle against evil forces.
While our uneasiness about the gecko has calmed, our uneasiness about those other reptilian crime-fighters, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, continues. When the Turtle rage began we attempted a psychological understanding of the peculiar fad. We came to understand that young people relate to the mutated creatures because every adolescent thinks of himself as a mutated creature. The Turtles are tutored by a sagacious Ninja master, a noble archetypical father figure. That several mutants could join together and use their unique talents and powers to undo the wrongs perpetrated on society by a virulent gang seemed commendable activity for mimicking. Many of the same elements existed in our childhood heroes-The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Lassie and Rin Tin Tin.
It all seemed harmless as a gecko. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles seemed just another Madison Avenue creation designed to sell pizza, Halloween outfits, plastic toys and cassette tapes.
But then we started reading some of the legend which surround the Turtles. For example, one Turtle toy includes a “Portrait of Michelangelo, The wild and crazy Turtle,” which describes him as a “party reptile.”
“Even though the sinister Shredder may be slicing his way through the manhole cover, Mike stays cool,” the “Portrait” explains. “Cool because he’s the master of the whirling nunchuckus. It takes eight pounds of pressure per square inch to break bone. The nunchukus generate ninety! In the midst of the most perilous of battles, Mike can be seen swinging his deadly nunchukus in one hand while dangling a wedge of pizza in the other.”
If the bad guys were really despicable and all other options had been exhausted, Roy Rogers would pull out his trusty six-shooter and nip the desperado in the shoulder or thigh. The Lone Ranger would do the same and even Lassie, when all else failed, would bare her teeth and bite a hardened criminal in the butt. But none of those heroes enjoyed wreaking havoc. Lassie never smiled and barked that her teeth were powerful enough to break wrongdoing bones. Roy Rogers never nonchalantly munched on a hamburger while wielding his deadly weapon.
The message of the Turtles is that casual violence is acceptable, that dispassionate force is justified. The Turtles are to heroes what drive-by shootings are to righteous quests.
So, now that we’re out of the closet, keep your nunchukus-swinging Turtles and give us a spider-chomping gecko. The gecko is more heroic. ~T.Stucky