The news was spreading… There are alligators in the sewers. They have climbed all the way up into our plumbing, and every time you flush the toilet or let the water run to long or use the garbage disposal there is an alligator waiting to snatch you up!

My dad showed my friend and I a newspaper article about an alligator being found in a sewer when we were around 5 years old. At this time we had lived in townhouses, and I lived just across the street from my friend who my dad tormented just as much as me. He told us about how each time we flushed the toilet the alligator got further up the toilet and through the sound of the flush you could here the gator’s roar. He looked us in the eyes and told us to make sure that you are always looking in the toilet while you use it to make sure that it hadn’t finally made its way to the surface only to snatch your butt in it’s mouth and tear you down the toilet with it.

My friend and I were so scared, so impressionable, that for months, years even, we could not pee alone. I would walk over to her house across the street just so I could pee with someone. It became such a problem that our mothers forced my dad to sit down and tell us it was all a lie. There were no gators, and that we would be fine going to the bathroom ourselves. The moment our mothers left my dad told us girls were always the first to go because they did not listen to their fathers and that gators liked girls more than boys because we were prettier.

The panic would not leave until she and I became logical beings after going to the zoo and seeing that the alligator could never fit up the toilet. I told my father this, and he then asked me how I thought the babies got to be so big… For the longest time I either had to have someone pee with me watching the toilet or holding my hand so I could be sure I wouldn’t be taken by a baby alligator.

One day my dad finally sat me down and said, “Gotcha! There are no alligators in the toilet.”

I looked at him in complete disbelief wondering why he now wanted me to get eaten by the alligator by lying to me. He then brought me to the bathroom and flushed to toilet a dozen times to prove to me that there were no alligators. I finally believed him, but it my outrage and humiliation . I screamed and cried and made my dad show my friend that he was a liar.

We both pelted my dad with hot wheels cars and whatever else we could find and called him a liar over and over again. The other adults laughed, both at him and us. They laughed at how gullible we were (though our mothers were still upset), but mainly they laughed at me dad who had all the rage of these tiny girls coming down on him.

Never mess with little girls, because they are just as crazy as their mothers, only without conscience developed.

❤ Court