NON-FICTION : Alligators / Lauren C. Johnson
Lauren C. Johnson submitted this piece - Alligators - to The Racket Journal many months ago and we grabbed it up and published it in Issue Thirty. It was, and continues to be, a haunting piece of non-fiction.
We moved on to new issues of the journal, but somewhere, deep in the folds of our grey matter, this recollection of family, adolescences and large scale reptiles in Florida just kept hanging on.
Unable to shake it, we reached out Lauren to see if she’d record it for the website and she very kindly did.
“Alligators”
by Lauren C. Johnson
When you’re a little girl in Florida, you stay out of the palmettos. You learn how to distinguish a coral from a king snake. You learn that running from alligators in zigzags is a myth. Sinkholes open beneath Hillsborough County, and you learn that’s caused by acidic groundwater eating the limestone bedrock.
You can’t anticipate a sinkhole, so, you watch Bay News 9 and hope those tragedies keep happening to other people. Like the tornadoes in the trailer parks in Land O’Lakes. Or on the cover of a tabloid, Satan’s face in the sky while Hurricane Andrew sweeps Miami. How on Bearss Avenue, by the railroad tracks, seedy, neon lights in a nightclub say Girls! Girls! Girls!
—
On the cusp of my adolescence, my great Aunt Mimi had a stroke and all that remained of her voice was a phrase she repeated like a prayer: “So pretty, so pretty, so pretty.” Eventually, “pretty” became the only word she could tell me.
I was beginning to grow self-conscious, aware of the social hierarchies that sprung from beauty, and I never felt pretty enough. Aunt Mimi had me hooked on her adoration; my self-esteem hinged on compliments.
Aunt Mimi had a soft, smooth face despite her eighty years and thin, penciled-in eyebrows. Sometimes, in my memories, she recedes into Aunt Nita. Aunt Nita’s arms were covered in sunspots and she smelled of cigarettes, but she didn’t care. Once, I accidently kicked her under the table at Red Lobster and she bled from the bruise. Once I asked her, “Why don’t you quit smoking? Don’t you want to live to one hundred?”
Aunt Nita only laughed. “Now, why on earth would I ever want that?”
—
I still remember the Florida panther a veterinarian brought to my elementary school. It paced the stage where we held our choir performances and Thanksgiving pageants. We watched the glide of muscles beneath the cat’s tawny coat while the vet talked about deforestation.
There are less than one hundred Florida panthers living in the wild. We Floridians love our wildlife, but we’re so bad at sharing the land.
—
The year I turned 18, I started going to the nightclubs in Tampa. Get Low on the radio. Give me your money and shut your mouth. It was 2003 and we went out every night. Rolling the windows down on the drive back home, the scent of rain and grass. We ashed our Black & Milds.
That summer, I met Eric. He didn’t go to college because he sold used cars and made money. We drank too much on the Fourth of July and I passed out in his room, though at some point, he woke me up to mess around. I was half awake. I don’t know if he bothered with a condom. I didn’t stop him. My hips responded accordingly.
“Yeah, I had sex with Eric,” I told Tamara and Nicole the next day.
I didn’t tell them it had happened in a twilight bordering blackout. I would have said yes had he asked me. I was going to do it with him anyway.
—
I smile a lot, especially when I’m uncomfortable.
You know what else smiles a lot?
Alligators.
Alligators have 80 teeth and each time they lose one, another grows in to replace it.
—
My mother used to water ski over the backs of alligators. She was a kid, maybe nine or ten. Mid-century. A central Florida town called Lake Alfred. In the memories my mother gave me, I see my grandfather, too. Suntanned and guiding the motorboat. I have to wonder if he heard warplanes in the humming engine. In hospice care, he gestured toward the ceiling, watching jets crisscross his bed. I sat beside him and refused to look, too absorbed in a book to see the contrails.
But that’s beside the point; I love to think about the lake and my mother trusting the tow rope—sparkling, laughing—waterskiing over alligators.
—
In Tampa, near the neighborhood where I grew up, there’s a highway with marshes wild on one side and gated communities on the other. There’s a trail along the water where I like to walk when I’m home. I like the great blue herons and sandhill cranes. I like the alligators, too. I see them swimming close to the embankment, their eyes just visible above the waterline, and I remember how someone once told me that if apex predators can survive, the ecosystem is still healthy.
Lauren C. Johnson is a writer living in San Francisco.
