I just turned 28 years old this Monday, and I would like to think that I’m firmly into adulthood here. Older, maybe a little wiser and more mature. If you ask my 13 year old brother I am an elderly woman, I’m sure. But every time I start to feel like an adult, something like last night’s events happens and I start to really doubt myself.
So, last night was really fun, and as it wound down I found myself at the club I like to call Fangtasia because it is about 3 floors underground, dark and dungeon-like and has a crowd that’s alternative by Israeli standards. It’s the kind of place where everybody does their own thing, lets their freak flag fly a little bit, and nobody cares. Plus, the DJ is always great. I’m there with a very cute guy I met — note to the women of the world, if they look all cute and innocent, they’re not. Really, who’s innocent anymore, anyway? So, cute guy starts trying to eat my face and I decide that it’s already after 4am and I should make my escape home.
So, I walk home for 40 days and 40 nights through the streets of Tel Aviv and finally make it home. The sky is starting to brighten so I close my blinds and set up my bunker for the night aka morning, shutting off alarm clocks and cell phone ringers, chugging mass quantities of water, and making a snack so my head doesn’t explode the next day. I walk into my room to change into PJs when I encounter The Lizard.
I should preface this with the fact that I’m generally not one of those girls (ugh, women) who are scared of living creatures. I’m fine with garden snakes (i don’t recommend messing around with the ones in the desert here), I’m okay with spiders, mice don’t scare me. Okay, I admit I scream every time a jook scurries across my floor (to those of you unfamiliar with Israeli wildlife, jookim are cockroaches the size of mice.) But then I kill the mofo and all is right in the world. For some reason, The Lizard scared the crap out of me, I totally panicked. This thing wasn’t very big, but it was this gross opalescent pink color and had these gross beady little eyes. My bedroom is literally the size of a shoebox, my furniture hasn’t arrived yet and i’m sleeping on an air mattress, I really don’t have space for a roommate. Plus this thing isn’t paying rent anyway. I grab a dustpan and try to capture it and it scampers into my closet with my clothes. I am officially grossed out. I grab a broom, empty my shelves of clothes, and I have a pile of clothes on the floor and no lizard. So I clean my mess and admit defeat.
What did we do before the internet? How could we convince ourselves we had every disease on WebMD? We had to pick up books to do that, how tedious. So, I consult every friend who is online who will listen and set upon googling what kind of toxic wildebeest this thing might be. Suddenly, I regret not going home with the guy that kept begging me to go home with him (note to the guys of the world — it is so hot when you beg a chick to go home with you, keep doing that). Maybe him eating my face would be preferable to The Lizard doing it? Nah.
I am totally unfamiliar with the reptiles of the world apparently. Google tells me that salamanders secrete poison and i’m like OH GREAT. I find a report on species of lizards living in Israel and I sift through pictures of various lizards trying to find The Lizard’s family. Then, my friends fill me in that this thing is a gecko. I never would have known that, he didn’t offer me a good deal on insurance or anything. So, I do some more in depth investigative work and find out that it’s a Mediterranean Gecko and it’s pretty common to find one in your house in a hot or tropical climate. So, at 6am, I finally determine that this thing probably won’t kill me in my sleep, and even though I’m really not fond of the idea of waking up with it crawling on my face, I lay my head on my pillow and pass out.
Now night arrives with her purple legion
Retire now to your tents and to your dreams
Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth
I want to be ready
An Israeli-American in Tel Aviv 
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