I moved back to Cleveland. Back to Cleveland? I’d never really lived in Cleveland before, not in any sort of semi-permanent sense, although growing up I’d spent most summer vacations and winter holidays there, plus all the sketchy transitional times when being shunted between boarding schools I’d go stay with one pair of grandparents or the other, so in some sense moving to Cleveland was, as Marty McFly might say, my “manifest density” – both my mother and father were born and raised there, she a country club kid with beauty queen green eyes and flipped hair half-heartedly taking golf lessons when not lying poolside out in Chagrin Valley, he a schoolboy sandlot baseball phenom and class valedictorian whose proud parents started him at age thirteen driving the delivery truck for Miles Park Floral Shoppe the family business at 9308 Miles Avenue near Broadway with the apartment atop the wood-shuttered shop which all got torn down the year before I was born to make way for a Chirpy’s Chicken that eventually became a drive-thru package store and is now a burn-scarred vacant lot.

I moved back to Cleveland to live with Granny Mikic, my last living grandparent, a tiny 89-year-old Croatian woman with silver eyes, bottle-brown hair and a great love for Sinatra (in fact she kept in her top dresser drawer a commemorative gold medallion with Sinatra’s picture embossed on it from the concert opening night at the old Cleveland Coliseum) who in her day was a fantastic floral designer (for many years the most sought-after designer of funeral floral arrangements in Cleveland, all the big businesses downtown kept her card on file), but she had recently fallen on her cellar stairs, fractured a vertebrae and pinched a nerve in her back and could no longer get around too good, hobbled further by trying to walk with a cane made for someone twice her size, so as soon as I got to Cleveland I sawed her cane down and got her a sporty blue tripod walker with wheels and hand brakes and she took right to it. Soon she was whizzing all over the house, reclaiming rooms she hadn’t visited maybe in years, dusting the Cuthbertson and whatever other old country’s tchotchkes gather in corners over the course of a lifetime.

I moved back to Cleveland to help look after my grandma, but it was no hardship, Cleveland’s a pretty nice place, I could tell you all about how nice it is but “stop trying to justify Cleveland” my friends all tell me, the ones who are too caught up in the rubbishy Apple to ever get out here for a visit and see for themselves and believe and anyway this isn’t about how nice Cleveland is, it’s about my grandma, devotionally, and lizards, provisionally.

When I was maybe five my grandma would take me on the Rapid Transit cable car bouncing on its overhead wires downtown to Higbee’s department store cafeteria for lunch. I’d get the chicken pot pie and with my fork in my fist, fiendishly mash up the puffy crust of that delicious goopy pie and afterwards she’d take me by the hand up the escalator to the toy department and let me pick out a wind-up toy for my Sunday bath when we got home. “Did you clean behind your ears? It’s important to clean behind your ears. You are a very handsome boy, especially behind your ears.” My grandma checking up on her little hunsut (which means “rascal” in Slovak) there splashing tidal waves, watching his new wind-up turtle paddle around in the roaring, soapy tub.

My grandma still lived in the same cozy two-story blue home on West Belvoir Oval with the pingpong table in the cellar where I used to stage huge round robin tournaments by myself with the table pushed up against the cinderblock wall and the elimination brackets marked off on the blank side of a sheet of wrapping paper taped above the table. I’d give all the entrants made-up names and often exotic countries of origin and play them all myself, giving them each character quirks or distinct playing styles, although the winner would always be (against impossible odds and a forbidding injury, like in an early round he’d cut the skin webbing his thumb and index finger and out of necessity would invent a wild new grip resulting in an unreturnable original fandango spin serve) Seishu Ubangus the champ (who in my running commentary I noted came from an oral-only society in west Africa somewhere near Burkina Faso who have for unknown reasons never committed to writing).

The Belvoir Oval house had wall-to-wall sky-blue soft cushy carpet with a bouncy-bunny happy-baby womb-warm kind of feeling that coursed with childhood memories of being in the house and eating a Croatian sweetbread made with walnut and cinnamon called povititsa whose scent seemed to hang forever in the air. This particular warm summer morning I was lying on my back, tucked beneath a handknit rainbow diamond blanket, there in my favorite sleeping spot beneath the ancient club-footed dining room table when the doorbell rang. I didn’t move. My grandma loved answering the door and was on her way there, so I lay back lingering in an inspiring half-dream about a redheaded girl I knew in the Apple, the city I’d needed to get out of anyway, having been wrung headfirst through the Apple press and come out on the backend of four years feeling like an overturned ashtray, but let me tell you, when you finally lay off the gear and the delirium tremens rattle comes up from your gut and you sweat out the glut of the muck in your blood and the cloud cover lifts, your dreams come back in widescreen lucidity. So there I was lying there in a state of dozy half-dream picturing the pretty redheaded girl, the faux fur collar dappling her soft neck, the opal in her nose, the perspiration glistening on her chubby cheeks, the way she looked above the glowing bowl of gazpacho the final velvet morning before the taxi crash, thinking about our last kiss while on some parallel plane listening to my grandma opening the front door saying, “Well hello, I’m so glad to see that you’re here! Do come in…”

In trooped a workman in a heavily padded dark blue canvas jacket and a clean-cut boyish face with muscular cheeks, concrete-reinforced chin, cinderblock jaw and a barbershop cowlick haircut, heck there must’ve been hundreds of thousands of strapping young American men who looked like this in the days before the great dissipation of our nation set it, pure football fodder physique and aw-shucks aura. My grandma brought the electrician into the blue-carpeted living room and, turning to him, said, “Are you here to see Mrs. Jones?” This gave him pause. He doublechecked his service sheet and said, “This is the Mikic house, isn’t it? You did call for an electrician, didn’t you?” Yes it is, I told him, and he almost jumped and bumped his head on the ceiling to see me suddenly crawl out and hop up from under the dining room table to tell him he’s come to the right place, and relieved he said, “See earlier I went to the address on the sheet, I mean I got the number right but I went to the other side of the Oval, and the people there brought me in and I fixed the electrical short in their kitchen and then they asked me how it was that I knew they needed an electrician. I said, Didn’t you call for an electrician? They said they hadn’t, they assumed I must have some sort of sensor in my truck that tells me when I drive by a house with an electrical problem. Makes me think I could go up to any random house and there’d be something there for me to fix.” My grandma pointing towards the hallway told him, “Mrs. Jones is right through there.” The electrician looked at me slightly confused like, Who is Mrs. Jones?

Mrs. Jones is my grandma’s code for the bathroom, like when she’s going into the bathroom she’ll announce “I’m going to visit Mrs. Jones,” and the reason I called the electrician in the first place was that Mrs. Jones’ light wasn’t working and it’s no good for grandma to visit Mrs. Jones in the dark, and I hadn’t been able to figure out what was wrong with the bathroom lighting, not like I’m adept in even the most cursory sense with any sort of home maintenance stuff.

I stepped into the narrow pink-tiled bathroom followed closely by Dan the electric man. I explained the problem, and with his thumb and ring finger he unscrewed the metal casement atop one of the fluorescent tubes bracketing the mirror and pried out a copper plug the size of a walnut. “When you flip the switch the light doesn’t come on right away, it just flickers for a bit?” I told him that was right. Dan nodded knowingly and holding up the copper walnut said, “This here’s your problem. This is the transformer plug, works kinda like a sparkplug. It’s worn out, that’s all.” He turned it over in his hard callused hand. “I don’t have any of this model in my truck, I’m pretty sure of that, but you can get them at most any hardware store. That’ll save you some money over me heading back to the warehouse to pick some up and driving back out here.” Dan the electric man gave me a nothing-to-it nod. I admitted that it seemed pretty simple and that I probably should’ve figured it out myself. “Turn counterclockwise and they pop right out, opposite direction and they fit right back in. If the hardware store doesn’t have ‘em, you can get ‘em at any pet store, and I’ll tell you why—this type of fluorescent lighting you’ve got in your bathroom is the same kind of lighting that’s used in aquariums. In fact heck, I should have some of ‘em in my truck for expressly that reason—my son has fluorescents like these in his lizard tanks at home.” I was about to offer Dan a cupacoffee – I needed one myself – but he was in stride, wiping his dripping brow with the inside of his elbow as he kept on spieling. “Yep, my son’s real into lizards. Started out as a hobby, but now he’s a breeder. He takes his reptiles to shows—last NOAH showcase he came out twenty-four hundred dollars on the plus side, and all of that is going to his college fund. Yep, as I like to say, lizards are going to pay for my son’s college education! NOAH? That’s the Northern Ohio Association of Herpetologists. Next showcase is July 14th at Berea Fairgrounds. We’re going to be visiting my wife’s people in Greencastle then, and my son’s real disappointed to miss it. Her family’s nice, a bit straight. Her brothers and cousins are either policemen or firemen. They think I’m weird for being an electrician, and I guess they expect my son to be weird, too. Some of them call him Snakeboy, but Charlie doesn’t mind. So you got something else electrical in this house needs fixing?”

I led Dan upstairs to my grandma’s bedroom. Above the wooden headboard of her bed hung a gold-framed needlework of the Tree of Life sewn in bright thread. Dan and I pulled the bed away from the wall and I showed him the double socket that had sunk above the baseboard. Dan drew a screwdriver from his red leather roll-up tool kit, got down on his knees and began gouging away the slathered layers of paint that bonded the faceplate to the wall. I asked him about his son. “He’s twelve now. He was six when I got him his first gecko. From an early age he knew he wanted to take care of lizards. I’d ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up and he’d say he wanted to work at the zoo. I’d kid him, like, ‘Doing what, shoveling elephant poop?’ He’d get real serious and say, ‘No, I want to be with the lizards.’ He didn’t know the word for it then, but he does now. ‘I want to be a herpetologist,’ he says.” Dan was pouring sweat that ran down in stripes through the paint dust in his eyebrows. Paint chips were flaking off the wall and flying everywhere. He tipped the head of the screwdriver in behind the faceplate and pried it away from the wall. He looked up at me and grinned for a moment. “Now are you interested at all in lizards? Because you seem like you are.” He dropped back down into his work but kept talking. “Thing is, you might be interested in lizards, but you might not get one unless there’s someone to help you get into them. My son sells bearded dragons for forty dollars a piece. Very same lizard would cost you a hundred fifty dollars at a pet store, and probably not be in as good a shape as if you bought it from a breeder. A lot of times at pet stores, the kids who work there just open the drawer, throw in the food, close the drawer. They’re not handling the lizards. Point of fact, there’s a license whereby you can go into a pet store and if they’re not treating a lizard correctly you can show them this license, give the store whatever you consider to be a fair price and take the lizard. Other day a friend of mine was in a pet store and saw a chameleon where they’d had the light way too close to it and had actually burned the top of the chameleon. My friend said, ‘Look, you burned this chameleon. I’m going to give you ten bucks for it and I’m going to take it.’ And the pet store owner couldn’t say nothing but ‘Go ahead.’” Dan pressed a new pink plastic faceplate in place and screwed it in flush against the wall. He plugged back in my grandma’s bedside lamp and clock radio. Paint chips covered the carpet. Clean it up later.

We grabbed opposite sides of the bed frame and humped it back up against the wall. Dan rolled up his tool kit and slid it into the plastic tacklebox where he kept his miscellaneous parts. I asked him what was the craziest lizard his son had. “Nothing too crazy, really, and that’s because I had to lay down the law, lizard-wise. When he got started I set two rules: Nothing venomous, and nothing that can grow so big that it’ll kill you. But I’ll tell you, my son has a boa constrictor that is now extinct in the wild and exists only in captivity. Yep, he’s one of only maybe fifty people in the world who has a Hog Island boa. That’s right. And doesn’t hardly anybody know about it, because my son likes to keep a low profile. He wouldn’t want the neighbors to know what all he’s got in our house. See, some people just have a natural fear of lizards and snakes. I say it’s a natural fear, but if they were exposed to ‘em over time they’d come around. When those lizard eggs start hatching at our house it’s like Christmas. A bearded dragon lays 20 to 30 eggs every 30 days, isn’t that something? It ain’t just bird and bees, it’s lizards too!”

We headed downstairs into the living room. My grandma was in the lounger, legs propped up on the corduroy footrest, fast asleep. I thanked Dan for his work and he said the office would be sending out a bill. We shook hands at the door. “Personally I think you should start with a leopard gecko. They’re easy to keep, they live off half-inch crickets and small superworms. Get yourself a gecko, see how you like it. But I’ll tell you now, lizards are like potato chips – once you get started you can’t have just one! They’ll change your life around whether your life needs changing or not, and I’m not saying yours does. But if you can make space in your bedroom for an aquarium, you should definitely consider it. I built my son a nice bedroom down on the first floor of our house with a whole wall of recessed shelves in it for his aquariums. My wife said, ‘Why in Salem’s lot are you putting all those shelves in for?’ I told her, Better put the shelves in now than have to redo the entire room later. You know?” Dan the electric man shook my hand again and I closed the door behind him. My grandmother was still sleeping peacefully, her head tipped back, mouth open, hands folded in her lap as the morning light through the picture window glinted off the silver cross around her neck, her reading glasses suspended on a chain beneath her chin.

It was still early so I crawled back beneath the dining room table and tucked my shoulder blades in against the floor right beside the heating vent. I pulled the blanket up under my chin and let myself drift through the glowing portal to lucid dreaming. The redheaded girl from the Apple was there, and as she smiled and leaned in to kiss me, her nose flared outwards into a prehensile snout, spiny ridges began popping up along her throat, her forehead flattening and chin sharpening to a point so that her whole face looked like a shriveled orange triangle, her skin glowing like it was catching late afternoon sunlight light reflected off of red limestone rock. And because I am interested in lizards, and I trust the arena of dreams to never lead me astray if I don’t throw those dreams away, I escaped into a world where a redheaded girl could really be a bearded dragon.