Backstories: “The Unspoken Price For Unorthodox Knowledge”

How Your Humble Narrator Knows That Savannah Monitor Urine Looks Exactly Like Crack Cocaine

(Backstory: Originally published in the online newsletter The Hell’s Half-Acre Herald in 2001, this essay comes up occasionally on why I know such terrible things. In the quarter-centruy since it first saw publication, I know so, so much more. I now have a whole list of people, particularly in day jobs, who ask the same question that Laurie did in 2001, and some of them got point-blank offended about my knowing things that didn’t directly apply to the job in question. If you want to have the same reason to offend me, ask me about the life cycle of the parasitic barnacle Sacculina one of these days.)

An old ex-girlfriend of mine recently got back in touch after an 11-year hiatus, and we spent quite a bit of time relating our general travels since then. Laurie had been all over New York for a while, and had recently moved back; I’d bounced over to the West Coast, left Portland apparently about the time it was starting to get nice again, and now found myself in a city now turned into a nonstop live rendition of Triumph of the Will. She initiated contact after coming across some of my gibberish online, and she then spent a fair amount of time perusing the material I’d written since we broke up in 1990.

One of her big questions, and one everyone asks me, is “How do you know all of this stuff?” The obvious answer, “Booklarnin'”, really wasn’t so obvious. Admittedly, I’ve been able to read since I was three, and I honestly cannot remember a time when I wasn’t able to read at least at college-level (I drove a first-grade teacher to a nervous breakdown over my palaeontology addiction back in 1972, and part of that was due to the fact that I was reading these books, not just memorizing what others read to me), but that wasn’t all. Some of the most important lessons require head-first immersion: as Mark Twain used to put it, picking up a cat by the tail will impart lessons that will stick with you for the rest of your life. And if you take pains to live a reasonably exciting or interesting life, you’ll find lots of cats that seem to be begging to be picked up and swung.

Now, it’s not as if I deliberately decided to uncover some of these disturbing nuggets of information. Almost all of the really disturbing ones come from looking for something different. Just as most of the protagonists in an H.P. Lovecraft story discover their sanity-blasting revelations by trying to expand the limits of their knowledge, and usually by discovering too late that a little knowledge is an incredibly dangerous thing, I discovered most of my nodules of wisdom ore because the thought of settling down and living the stereotypical American suburban lifestyle as abhorrent as carrot juice to a vampire bat. With some, I still shriek at night over how I found this in the first place.

For instance, back about a year ago, the Discovery Channel hosted the first American broadcast of the BBC miniseries Walking With Dinosaurs. While the palaeontologist in me kept wincing over whole recreations of dinosaur and other prehistoric animal behavior on animals known from incredibly fragmentary material, the 10-year-old I was went gaga over the reconstructions. However, I made mention to a few people about one sequence being a little, well, inaccurate, and they asked me how I knew this. The scene involved two Postosuchus (big predatory reptiles from the early Triassic of Texas that were fairly closely related to the dinosaurs but actually a lot more closely related to the crocodilians) involved in a literal pissing match, and it just kept bothering me.

The book Goanna: The Biology of the Varanid Lizards by Dennis King and Brian Green (University of New South Wales Press, 1993) relates how no reptile can pass urine more concentrated than blood. For those unfamiliar with tetrapod physiology, urine consists of ammonia and other metabolic wastes that the body cannot use, and since ammonia is extremely soluble in water, the solution for land vertebrates is to convert it to urea and uric acid. The kidneys of reptiles and birds cannot produce urine with a higher concentration of these wastes than the blood, so urine is dumped into the cloaca, the one-stop orifice for elimination and reproduction, where excess water is resorbed into the body. The urine at this point is usually a white paste, with very little water waste: the next time a seagull craps on your car’s windshield, take a moment away from the anti-aircraft guns to look at the white splat and marvel at how both birds and reptiles manage to work their way around a relatively inefficient design flaw.

Anyway, after keeping reptiles for a while, I knew that desert reptiles produce urine with very little water: it goes beyond paste and directly into big chunks of uric acid crystals. Because of this alone, those Postosuchus literally pissing to mark their territory didn’t make sense. Any real arid-region dweller, especially something as large as these beasts, couldn’t afford to waste that much water in a territorial display. When I related this, everyone understood the whys and wherefores. What they didn’t understand was how I knew that desert reptile urine looked like crack cocaine, and I really didn’t want to go into the story at the time.

The reason why I didn’t want to go into that story was that the punchline was just too disturbing. It entailed not only knowing the limits of human knowledge, but the aftermath. Besides, people think after the Mad Shitter story that I’m fecally fixated enough as is.

The reason why I know reptile urine, or at least monitor urine, looks like crack dates from the beginning of 1989. Back then, I was one of many grunts working at Texas Instruments, and having my first full-time job with neat things such as benefits and (relative) job security made me settle down a bit and try for something approximating a normal life. Since I didn’t understand what a “normal life” was, I tried my best guesstimation, and since the pet deposits on cats or dogs were prohibitively expensive in my apartment complex, I decided to get a savannah monitor.

Now, some regular readers have already heard about Steadman, my current savannah. Representatives of the species Varanus exanthematicus are good reptiles for those looking for something a little more challenging than leopard geckos or bearded dragons: they get fairly large, but not as large as their relatives the Salvator’s water monitors or the Nile monitors. Savannahs tend to tame down as they get older, but they’re still voracious, active predators, inclined to eat just about anything they can catch. For reptiles, monitors are frightfully intelligent: I’ve never met a monitor that could figure out how to open a door or call for pizza delivery, but I had one in the mid-Nineties that was housebroken. A two-year-old monitor that knew that if he scratched on the front of his cage, I’d pick him up and put him in the bathtub so he didn’t foul his own nest: I know ten-year-old children that don’t understand that concept.

Also, following obscure fanboyish impulses, most of my reptiles have had names swiped from fiction. I tried to stay within lacertilian guidelines, so I’ve had such diverse critters as a huge bull snake named Yig, two speckled king snakes named Plissken and Madcoil, and a snapping turtle named Gamera. The housebroken one was named Afsan after reading Robert Sawyer’s Far-Seer trilogy, and I tried my best to choose names that fit the animal’s personality. That’s why I named this first savannah monitor Gwangi.

(Quick stop for those coming in late. If you’ve been hanging around and you still don’t get the reference, rent or otherwise view the 1968 Warner Brothers movie Valley of Gwangi, featuring James Franciscus and a gaggle of cowboys running across a valley full of Ray Harryhausen-animated dinosaurs. This is all I’ll say.)

To set the scene, this was back in the late Eighties, where people who kept reptiles were just plain strange in popular perception. Because of this, Gwangi was remarkably popular among my co-workers at Texas Instruments: most couldn’t even conceive of keeping a reptile at all, much less one reaching as much as two meters in length. Unlike most other savannahs, Gwangi retained his reputation as a monster: until the day he died, he was a cantankerous monster that would have taken my fingers off at the elbow at the first possible opportunity. This meant that everyone had to come over after work to watch me feed him: after he outgrew mice, I moved to chicken parts, and they’d watch him swallow chunks of meat bigger than his head whole with fear and respect.

Anyway, one night I had a couple of new visitors to the apartment. One was a guy who later became my roommate later that year: he’d never seen Gwangi before, but he desperately wanted to see what the fuss was about. The other was one of R.C’s friends: for the life of me, I cannot remember his name, so let’s call him “Gary”.

Now, life at TI was about as drug-laced as life could be in the days of Nancy Reagan trying to tell us to “Just Say No”. TI ran mandatory drug tests on new employees, but most slipped back into old habits until the middle of ’87, when the company started random tests on everyone. (The company quietly stopped the random tests after starting with management: apparently too many upper managers had half of the Physician’s Desk Reference in their bloodstreams at any given time, and some I know were so buzzed at work that you could get a proximity buzz just by using a urinal they had just vacated.) Nothing mission critical: the main lifestyle accessory was marijuana, with maybe speed or Valium, but nobody in the rank and file made enough for cocaine, and this was back in the day when heroin meant needles. Most of these guys were too vain to have track marks, so they stuck to weed and maybe a few uppers. Barbiturates never really caught on at TI, mostly because the place was enough of a downer anyway. Since alcohol was perfectly legal, we had all sorts of problems during blood tests: one of the chemicals inherent in my shop was a suspected carcinogen and a known liver toxin, and so blood tests intended to ascertain the amount of methyl-dianiline in someone’s system also let the company how close to liver and renal failure they were from the weekend and weekday booze-ups.

Because of the fact that I never really did much along those lines, I was an unknown factor with the company for a while. I couldn’t drink and I didn’t smoke, but I didn’t complain, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to tattle to the boss about it, so everyone else guardedly accepted me as the designated driver. Of course, I didn’t drive, either, and I took more grief about bicycling to work than anything else. That was okay in its way, too: only an idiot tries to bicycle in Dallas while wasted, and any idiot who does won’t be passing on his genes to future generations. They worried more about my spending perfectly good beer money on books, but figured that it came with the territory.

Even so, I found myself immersed in drug lore, theory, and practice, and although I’d never touch the stuff, I learned through osmosis why nobody bothers to collect male pot plants. (I was the guy who explained that higher levels of UV light made pot more potent, so that explained the sudden explosion in the sale of black lights in my general area.) I learned the proper places to pick mushrooms, and how to identify them. I also learned that while most dealers and growers are exceedingly savvy (they have to be if they don’t want to spend the rest of their lives in the pokey for possession and selling to undercover police officers), the users tended to be some of the absolute DUMBEST sons of bitches on the face of the planet. Some of my co-workers knew what they were getting, but far too many of their friends were so self-hypnotized that they copped a buzz from wisteria leaves or extra Primatene tablets, and a baggie full of grass cuttings with a bit of oregano and catnip would have put them into orbit.

This was also the time when what Jeff Liles called “the marketing concept known as crack” first started to appear in Texas. Actually, like angel dust, most casual users and interested bystanders didn’t know it existed until they saw all of the hysterical news programs on the horrors of crack, but they also knew that they generally weren’t interested. Getting viciously hooked on something wasn’t their style, especially when all anyone wanted to do was relax after work and watch the tracers or just get reeeeaaaaaal meeeeeeeellllllllloooooooowwwwwww.

With this background, I introduce everyone to RC and Gary. RC was typical Oklahoma good ole boy: nothing bad about that, seeing as how he could keep up his end of a conversation with the best of us. Gary, though, apparently had a problem with being a scion of yet another white suburban family. Politically correct folks would say that he was “melanin-challenged”, while Spike Lee would use inflammatory terms such as “wigger”. Either way, it was fair to say that Gary was a fervent follower of the African experience, and to hell with the fact that his skin tone was only a shade darker than Johnny and Edgar Winter’s. At the time, I was bleaching my hair white and staying the hell out of the sun, and I still had more skin tone than he did.

Like far too many suburban brats at the time, Gary tried to compensate for having no unique family tradition by borrowing a culture deemed more exciting or more exotic than his own. Unfortunately, while he thought he was a potential Rastafarian, he went so overboard that I could have claimed my nationality as Gallifreyan with more merit than he could have claimed for Jamaican. Have you ever heard someone working so hard on a Jamaican accent that it comes out Scottish? That was Gary.

And so Gary and RC come over to the townhouse in northern Carrollton (TX), just about as far north as you could go at that time before signs of civilization were replaced by mesquite tangles and turkey buzzards. They both want to see the lizard, so I set out some chicken thighs to thaw before I left for work, and when everyone clocks out for the night, we all head on over in RC’s pickup truck to See The Lizard. We get to the apartment, tromp on in, and head upstairs to where I kept the lizard cage in a spare bedroom. This was where we got into trouble.

At the time, I had a large plant grow-light over Gwangi’s cage, which was a 75-gallon aquarium with a handmade wood and metal mesh cover, and the light was cycled to my hours, which were definitely crepuscular. They enter the otherwise bare room and look upon Gwangi in all of his glory, sprawled out on a basking rock and glaring at anyone who got too close. RC just planted himself in front of the cage and stared in rapture, but Gary pointed toward the back of the cage. “Whatchoo doin with that crack in dere?”

“Beg pardon?” I thought he meant that the back of the tank had cracked while I was at work, but no fractures could be seen.

“Naw: dat.” He pointed to a big pile of lizard crap in the back corner: Gwangi had apparently decided to relieve himself just before I got home, and there was a huge dump the size of a birthday cake. The stench was horrible, and I was already heading to the spare bathroom to get paper towels to clean it up.

“That’s just lizard shit.” What was the big deal, aside from the fact that most Americans never deal with reptiles capable of throwing out a big pile of scat? I told him to be thankful: savannah monitors have a tendency to spray feces when disturbed or angry, and I could swear that Gwangi could aim when he wanted to do so.

“Naw: DAT.” He was pointing off to the side, where, sitting right next to that slowly collapsing fewmet, was a chunk of savannah monitor urine about the size of a shooter marble.

“That? That’s more lizard shit.” No reason to go into particulars, I thought. It’s all going into the toilet in about five minutes anyway.

“Don’t tell me dat. Dat’s a rock.”

“No, THAT’s a rock,” I said, pointing to the slab of slate Gwangi used for his basking perch. “This is lizard crap.”

“C’mon, maaan. Why you keeping crack in dere?”

“It’s not crack. I don’t do crack. That’s lizard crap.”

Gary kept on: RC ignored it all. He was obsessed with watching the lizard wander back and forth across his cage, flicking out his tongue and generally looking upon the scene in disgust. The lizard was flicking his tongue: RC was just sitting there, mouth an easy landing strip for insects. Gary, though, was getting more animated: he apparently thought that I was keeping my stash in the cage so that the attack lizard would protect it from anyone armed with less than a machete or a MAC-10. In retrospect, that was actually fairly understandable: Gwangi was so pugnacious that I had to wear welder’s gloves just to pick him up, and anyone trying to swipe a drug haul from that cage would have pulled back a stump.

This being then, though, I was rapidly losing patience, and the stink from the cage was starting to burn out my nose hairs. “I’m telling you: it’s not crack. Now just stay here, and I’ll show you, okay?” I broke free for just a minute to get my gloves and paper towels. As I snagged the towels and a wet sponge to clean the mess off the aquarium glass, I suddenly hear a crash, running feet, and a slammed door. I poke my head out to see RC still tabula rasa in front of the cage, with the top ripped off: that’s what caused the crash. Gary was gone: the slammed door was the front door, and I can just hear sneakered feet running as fast and as far as they could go.

It still didn’t make any sense. “What the hell just happened?” I asked RC.

“Aw, Gary just grabbed that rock and ran out. Say, ya gonna feed the lizard, or what?”

I just sighed, cleaned out the crap, and regaled RC with the wonders of feeding a savannah monitor. Namely, with long chicken tongs, and Gwangi still grabbed them out of my hands and flung them across the cage. I figured that Gary was long-gone, and he’d never come back. Besides, what was I going to do, call the police and say “Hey, this guy just stole about ten grams of lizard piss that he thought was crack, so could you bring him in for observation?” I just let it slide. Life’s too short to go after inadvertent fecal freaks.

Well, nearly 13 years later, that disturbing knowledge still haunts me. Not the part of how lizard urine is about as white, crumbly, and porous as a standard rock of crack, at least to people who don’t really know any better. It’s the idea that Gary probably ran home as fast as he could, pulled out a pipe, took about five or six good hits, and deluded himself into believing that he had a good buzz going, telling everyone within the vicinity “Man, dat’s the real shit.”

The worst part of it is that I could take that knowledge and use it for profit. I mean, Steadman is almost twice the size Gwangi was at that time, so I could probably get him to produce about twenty grams every two weeks or so. And if peyote allows the user to see the world from the perception of a cactus and cane toad venom to see the world from the mindset of a toad, how many people would line up for this sort of high? And how long would I go before someone realized what they were smoking and decided to take off my fingers one knuckle at a time?

No, it’s better to keep such knowledge secret after all. The repercussions are just too frightening for words.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Backstories and Fragments crack savannah monitor urine