THE LIZARD OF OZ
Home: Marbella 2, MALATE


(photo courtesy of delish, taken from
Mec's Long and Windang Road.)


"Ay butiki..."
"Ay lizard..."
"Ay Lacoste!"

So goes the famous punchline of a TV spiel from the "Champoy" of my High School days. It featured a lizard suddenly falling from the ceiling, and the varied reactions of three girls: one masa, one edukada, and one sosyal.

I found it quite funny when I saw it on TV, yet if the same thing ever happened to me, I wouldn't be quite as stoic. In fact, I would've probably bolted straight to the stratosphere the minute that wretched thing landed.

Yes, I'm terrified of lizards. I don't like the way they look, I shudder at the way they feel and I startle at the sight of their wriggly, jerky movements. Even their trademark clicking noises raise a primal fear within me, a fear borne out of countless encounters during my childhood.

Indeed, how many times have I been roused from slumber by a dull thud on my blanket, only to find a panicked little gecko trying to battle its way out of the covers? And how many times have I been trapped in our bathroom because a lizard was stuck on the door, refusing to leave?

And my most terrifying memory of all...the day I came home from school hungry, spying a paper sack of pan de sal on the kitchen table. Somebody else had been eating before I arrived because there was still a jar of Cheez Whiz beside it with a butter knife perched on the lid. I was just about to put my hand in the sack when a flesh colored butiki jumped out and headed straight for me, its soft, rubbery body just grazing the tips of my fingers.

By the time my heart rate went back to normal, there were sinister shards of glass, a big, lonely lump of Cheez Whiz, scattered pieces of pan de sal and a lone butter knife on the floor.

With such unfortunate experiences, it's no wonder I avoid encounters with the little beasts. Oh, I can hold pet iguanas with no problem, but my tolerance level of other members of the lizard family corresponds with their size.

In other words, the smaller they are, the higher the fear factor.

But I was born and bred in a tropical country, where lizards are a necessary evil. In fact, when I moved to Florida, I discovered to my dismay that they had a thriving population there too, except here in the United States, geckos are considered cute enough to act as mascots and spokeslizards for large insurance companies.

But, from Miami, we moved to Cincinnati, then to Toronto, then to the Netherlands, which was the farthest from the tropics I'd ever been. And even when we moved back to the Philippines, we lived in five-star hotels, where the closest encounter you got with the lizard kind was sharing the same room with men wearing crocodile leather belts and women bearing Hermes alligator handbags.

And so, by the time we moved into our Roxas Boulevard condo, my harrowing memories of gecko encounters were shadowy things of the past. Oh, I was still terrified of them, but I was living in a building with a snooty clientele who didn't mind paying for security, hot running water, and monthly fumigation, which effectively rendered the building pest and vermin-free.

And there, warmly enveloped in First World comforts, I lived happily under the delusion that I was safely cocooned from terrifying monsters such as lizards and frogs. After all, our condo was on the second highest floor, just one floor below penthouse level. Marauding frogs and lizards would have to battle their way through the ground floor guards, figure out a way to operate the elevator, and make it all the way up sixteen floors in order to attack me.


But one such lizard did.

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a Sunday afternoon. Belen, Sam and Regan had the day off, and Lorenzo and I were enjoying the langorous weekend together. I was lounging on the bed, already pregnant with Lance, when I saw a quick movement by the bedroom door.

I didn't know what to make of it, since we were never really plagued by insects and pests in that building. It was hard to see what the thing was against the dark parquet flooring. I immediately assumed it was an ipis and told Lorenzo about it, unalarmed. Cockroaches don't bother me. Even the huge, fat, flying ones don't send me into a panic. I just wait for them to alight somewhere and squash the living daylights out of them with my trusty slipper.

And so I confidently got out of bed to go to the bathroom. It was when I was halfway there that I saw it on the floor. A scrawny little lizard with dark bands around its tiny body.

I screamed and ran back to the bed, half-hysterical in fright. Lorenzo calmly tried to soothe me, but I was pregnant, hormonal, and needed to go to the bathroom FAST. I was also terrified half out of my wits, refusing to leave the bed until I knew the lizard was at a safe distance away from me.

Lorenzo threw a slipper at it so it would go away. The scrappy little thing disappeared under my shoe closet. When I had finally reassured myself that the coast was clear. I set foot on the floor only to scream once more. For indeed, there it was again, in the same spot, this time with its mouth wide open, as if to scare us into submission.

It was a feisty little creature all right, and this show of defiance was quite admirable coming from such a diminutive animal, but my partner had had enough. Lorenzo was already concerned about my pregnant bladder, and was getting quite impatient, both with me and at the lizard. He grabbed a broom and was about to swing at it when he heard my voice behind him:

"Don't kill it..."

Despite the fact that I was dead scared of the little thing, I didn't want its life on my hands.

By then, I was already crying, my pregnant hormones pushing me on the verge of hysteria. I could feel my fiance's exasperation, but I couldn't help myself. I could not, for the life of me, stop the tears from falling. The situation would've been comical if I didn't have a painfully engorged bladder to empty.

When he saw the tears, Lorenzo's look became murderous. I could see he wanted to chop that lizard into little pieces already, but he demonstrated great restraint, calmly sweeping the lizard out through our bedroom door and into the hallway.

I fairly jumped out of bed and ran to the bathroom, finally emptying my bladder with a great sigh of relief.

Lorenzo was gone for quite a long time. i was wondering if he had somehow lost sight of the butiki. For a single panicked moment I imagined it, hiding outside my bedroom door, waiting to ambush me. And then the door opened, and my future husband walked into the room, tired but victorious.

He had swept the luckless little thing down the stairwell, where it was safely esconced more than two floors down.

He must've been a sight to the two people who got off the elevator on the fourteenth floor. Imagine this handsome, hunky model-actor, wearing a tank top, wielding a broom like a golf club, swatting at a hapless little lizard, blocking its progress hither and thither in order to check its course, making sure it was headed the opposite way from his unborn child.

Sure, it was harder going about it this way, but it was the humane thing to do.

And I appreciated him all the more for it.


Ironically, to this day, I still scour the perfume places I visit for a hard-to-find scent, my favorite of all the fragrances I've smelled on Lorenzo so far.

It's name? Booster by Lacoste.

Whose trademark logo is a crocodile the size of a common house lizard.

With its mouth wide open.


(PLUGGING: "The Forgotten Five" in The Prada Mama Chronicles.)