I was in the shower pretty dingy dang sure I had nothing to tell you all when I heard a flat plop. Look over to the bathroom counter and there, mimicking a panther's crouch, is an adolescent looking gecko (eyes and paws out of proportion with body, thin ribcage).
Poor guy had just slipped and fell about two yards with all the grace of a pancake. Yes, he landed with his feet flat on the counter, but with none of the midair poise of, say, a live squirrel. No, his technique was strictly dead squirrel-style.
Anyway, it sounded like he hit the counter pretty hard. I pointed at him and laughed, and this seemed to panic his adolescent gecko brain. He tried to retreat up the opposite wall. But instead of climbing up the painted concrete, he went straight for the slick, sheer tile around the bathroom mirror.
He got about three inches straight up the tile, and then he was treading water: every step he tried to take slipped right back down. The more he hurried, the quicker his paws slipped. It was emberrassing to watch, because you could see the humiliation coming, like a stuttering kid starting to lose it. He flapped his arms into nowhere until finally, mercifully, gravity took hold of him, and he toppled back down to the counter.
The violence of the pratfall was not as satisfying this time--only a few inches down--but the sheer jackassery of its execution more than made up for that. I laughed like Jerry laughs at Tom when Spike the dog is beating the blue off him. The gecko was petrified: he'd again landed right side up and feet out, but this chest was beating like crazy. This is a five inch lizard sitting across the room, and I can see still easily make out his little lungs panting.
It was the third time that made me feel sorry for him. I was leaving the bathroom, done thinking about him, when he fell off the damn wall again.
And that's the real adolescent loserdom isn't it? Any gangly kid can be picked on and humiliated by a roaming pack of bullies. But to be abandoned by your tormenters, and then, through your own incredible social incompetence, to nearly force them to again turn their attention upon you: that is what it takes to truly be a lost cause.
I'd turned off the light and was about to leave, when, for some reason, I glanced back at the far corner of the wall, eight feet up, where he'd run to. It was precisely then that he slipped, fell backward, and again took the whole full force of gravity right on the chin.
This guy is getting no gecko chicks until college.
