A Little Monitor Lizard Called Liora

An iceberg story about how I chose my baby lizard’s name.

When I arranged to get a baby lizard, I initially thought I was getting a boy. I was going to name him Seamus.

I hadn’t picked him out from the babies that were available. I transacted with the breeder through text message and the pictures and video he sent were of a very sweet and social baby monitor, one of two boys that was available. He was very curious about his surroundings and ready to develop confidence.

Given that Kimberley Rock Monitors hail from Australia, I was urged to pick an Australian name. One of my Twitter mutuals even sent me a list of popular baby names in Oz, proclaiming he looked like an Archie or Dale. With many Australians coming from Irish stock, and my recent travels to the Emerald Isle that surprisingly revealed a thriving reptile hobby, I was gravitating towards an Irish name.

“S” names were standing out to me for some reason along with “L”. Which may have been a strangely subconscious thing: both my late biological mother and living stepmother have L initials and my father has S. My middle name even sounds phonetically close to the name I initially picked: Shaina.

Eastern European Jewish traditions often use necronyms for naming children and this dates back to Biblical times. Per oral history in my family, our shtetl had several families who had lots of children because they often didn’t survive due to the harsh weather and starvation. To say nothing of the privation that occurred on the Pale of Settlement with cholera epidemics ever-present. When a child died, their parents used the first letter of their name when naming the next child. About 100 years later, that’s how I got my name: my late brother’s name was Robert.

When my toad Yael passed away, I thought about doing a twist on this tradition and going for an L name when I got another amphibious baby. Instead, I moved to California six years later and got a monitor lizard.

Was choosing Seamus for a boy’s name conscious move based on recent experience and discoveries, or a subconscious thing given that I’d had quite a few Irish and Irish-American lovers in the past?

That’s the part of the iceberg you see. Far more lurks beneath the surface and neither a colossal ship nor Celine Dion could reveal it right away.

It all began at a little Irish pub in Queens.

I always felt this odd sense of identity in Irish culture despite not having any Irish heritage. Perhaps because they don’t tolerate oppression, which both of our people have endured heavily, but also because most of my friends in NYC’s punk, hardcore, and metal scenes were second or third generation Irish. A majority of the punk scene at the time reflected the largest ethnic communities that formed our very city: Irish, Italian, Russian and Polish Jews, Puerto Rican, Dominican, or some combination of the latter as was the case with me. Jewish girls in The Bronx and Queens hooking up with Irish boys was simply a fact of life.

And I oft reflect on coming of age at the turn of the millennium and life in the third wave of New York Hardcore, particularly how many couples I knew who got married after meeting through a one-night stand.

It is one such story along with the diametric opposite, an older punk couple I knew who frequently hosted Irish punk bands in a small pub on Queens Boulevard, that had suddenly come to me as they’re connected by this one place.

McGuire’s on Queens Boulevard was where the magic happened at various points of my life. It may have seemed indistinguishable from the captivating blend of other Irish pubs, taquerias, low-rise apartments, and small neighborhood businesses throughout bucolically retro Sunnyside that were hugged by fading scaffolds and lettering old enough to run for President. But I remember seeing Blood or Whiskey in this particular tiny pub with the same boys I got [consensually] drunk and handsy with in East River Park when we weren’t old enough to go to bars yet, and friends who I felt knew me better than my own family. Then it blew my mind to attend Wasted across the pond in 2005 and thousands of people tore it up when they hit the stage.

McGuire’s is long gone just like all of my other old haunts from that beautiful time I’m glad I got to witness. As I write this, it also hit me that almost everyone I went to McGuire’s with is either dead or simply hasn’t been in my life in well over a decade at the time of writing.

Including the aforementioned older punk couple. One passed from a drug overdose and the other from cancer barely two years apart.

Their own kids had estranged them and I was a found-family daughter of sorts, especially given that my abusive mother had died just a few years prior. Ultimately, I’d learn that having kids didn’t guarantee they’d be there for you when you’re old and I suppose this was one of the first dominoes that fell in affirming my choice not to have kids.

They had an amazing apartment near the Woodside stop that absolutely no older couple subsisting on SSI benefits could afford today. This couple had been through so much together; they were role models for me yet I could see much addiction had shredded their lives just like the tights we wore to shows.

Because of wires that had gotten crossed due to things that were thought to be said or done while on drugs, I eventually spent less time with them until the regular calls and visits just came to a halt. It was especially palpable after the death of a mutual friend which was the first time I experienced gut-wrenching grief as a community. They hadn’t attended his funeral and it congealed the loss of respect that fermented within me.

It was only three years later when one of their lives was lost, his ever-faithful partner following not much longer after. It was a jarring loss for our community and I wished I had a chance to make amends and say goodbye. Not to mention forgive them for missing that funeral: one of my close friends didn’t arrive until after the memorial service ended because of work. Perhaps they didn’t make it because of the rotting MTA or simply being too consumed with grief.

There were scant shows and nights out at McGuire’s since, but it felt hollow without them there and knowing they weren’t around the corner anymore. This pub eventually stopped hosting punk shows altogether several years before closure. I went with friends sometimes when there wasn’t anything exciting going down in the city as it was a cozy neighborhood pub that didn’t turn alternative people away (but especially alternative women).

There was this gaping void where this couple once laughed and joked with us and all the bands, telling stories of hanging with The Slits, Richard Hell, and Murphy’s Law when they were fresh new acts. Yet when I looked at the side of the bar where she always sat when bands came on, it was as if their ghosts were about to raise a bottle of the cheap beer of the night and tell us to check out this band from some far-flung province of Eire who were beyond stoked to be in New York.

Seamus was a friend of a friend’s husband.

Picture this: the Lower East Side, 2011.

It was one of those nondescript tacit Saturday nights where the air feels slightly heavy. You’re not intensely bored, not feeling restful, but not overwhelmed with stress either. The atmosphere is sucking up this inert ennui. You could pass or take with going out for the evening, but a friend calls you at the last minute to go out so you decide to just go.

We hit one of our favorite vegan joints in the Village. A harbinger of the bleak future to come for our beloved third places, there weren’t any shows going on that night and no one else we knew was out at the first bar we hit. The streets were crawling with irksome frat bros who couldn’t hold their liquor and it was like playing a bumpy sidescroller trying to dodge them all.

She said, “The night is young and this sucks. Want to do something else?”

I pondered our options. “We could go to Lucky 13 in Brooklyn?”

“It’s kinda far though.” She snapped her fingers. “Hey, how about we hit up McGuire’s? It’s closer to my house and we can just go for one drink then see where the night takes us.”

“I’m game!”

Well, the night took her to her Irish husband of 11 years and counting.

I witnessed a total fluke. The sheer simplicity of being annoyed with douchebags ruining our beautifully weird stomping grounds led us to a small Irish pub in Queens where local punk shows occasionally took place, and this unexpected drunk hookup ended up being the love of her life.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t really interested in dating or meeting anyone at the time. I was a grad student with no money, no autonomy, and navigated the world in a cinderblock suit crafted from severe depression and anxiety. Normally a total horndog who lived for hooking up and mostly lived a punk and hardcore version of the Samantha Jones thing, the life changes I was going through and post-recession hopelessness just made me completely revolted by almost every man who tried to get with me. I practically regrew my hermetic seal.

I’d proceed to be sexually dead for the next couple years until I was liberated from the financial industry and wage slavery altogether, and went back to normal in this respect then I also wanted a real relationship by my early thirties. Nevertheless, I was happy for my friend and had a great time that night regardless.

Her future husband had a friend named Seamus. He was a nice and rather charming fellow who was far more into me than I was into him. The night that we met and his friend was instantly making out with my friend, he said to me, “You’re just so mysterious. I must know more about you.” Every time he saw my friend, he asked about “the Bronx bombshell”.

I appreciated his earnestness when men who send me mixed messages are going to cause my fucking death one day, which is why I don’t hold space for that crap anymore. But between our age difference and the burdensome years-long situational depression that arose from poorly managing my C-PTSD was making it difficult for me to even have a social life let alone be functional enough to date, I was patently disinterested. Seamus was a nice guy who didn’t go off when I politely turned him down. As I just typed that, it’s making me incredibly depressed that 11 years passed and this is STILL the incredibly low bar we’ve set in modern dating.

But it was only about a year after the happy couple had met that suddenly, she texted me that Seamus had OD’d.

I hadn’t spent much time around him, so I couldn’t infer that he, like many people in my life who were closer to me, also struggled with addiction. But unlike the visible physical symptoms and discord I had observed with others, Seamus was rather covert with his battles. Since he was friends with her husband and she saw him far more than I did, my friend never even picked up on it despite having the same familiarity and personal history with addiction.

Seamus always had a kind word for her, went out of his way to help when she eventually moved in with her husband, had a respectable carpentry job with no history of absenteeism, and his own apartment. He didn’t display any of the telltale signs we’d seen throughout our lives that indicated trouble with substance abuse.

He didn’t undergo the demonic transformations I had seen usurp people I knew and loved. People who were friends, spouses, musicians, artists, someone’s children, and beloved community members whose stars that had burnt out before they had a chance to illuminate.

I hardly knew him but was nevertheless saddened he was gone so quickly.

In coming to California and seeing so many of my dreams come true, holding my scaly baby made me feel as if this was a rebirth where I could finally have real chances to attain what I strove for, unlike for the dreams that died back home along with the old New York.

Chances I wasn’t given in spite of fighting like hell.

I’m not saying I would’ve given Seamus a chance to date me if I went back in time or if he was still alive today: you may be puzzled why I chose the name for my lizard when I didn’t give this guy a chance after lamenting not being given chances for other things in life.

But as the brilliant Shani Silver puts it, we don’t have to settle for a man who’s merely nice if we don’t feel anything or he’s got some deal breaker. Like the fact that I was only 25 and he was about 40, not to mention everything below my neck was basically dead until I was almost 30 so I just wasn’t into anyone then before we even dove into compatibility semantics.

Rather, Seamus’ namesake represented wanting something he couldn’t attain. Then suddenly he was gone.

And…it was that very concept that spurred me to leave The Bronx. I knew that moving to LA wouldn’t be a panacea for everything I was lacking in my life. But I could close the circle on a dream more than 30 years old — move to California and create tons of weird shit, namely games — and attempt to start over. That life was too short to spend it constantly drowning in grief, frustrated by living in a shitty old building, and mourning everyone and everything I’d lost.

I had to make peace with the dreams that were impossible to fulfill now, with such massive shifts in culture and subculture alike, technology, and our hallowed grounds now blighted with vacancies and the same five bank, drugstore, and shitty sandwich chains that colonized the homeland.

Nine months into life in central Los Angeles, I concluded that part of me is still just always going to grieve what New York was and the dreams I didn’t get to fulfill. The thriving punk scene and alternative quarter. Friends, bands, lovers, and would-be paramours who succumbed to addiction and poverty.

And it’s okay to hold space for that grief and air it out once in a while. I come from a culture where we have this intense duality about dying and grieving: Jews get the funeral over with ASAP, but we set aside specific prolonged mourning rituals. We’re sticklers for dredging up memories of the dead, with necronyms being so common and yahrzeit calendars.

But I look at how much happier I am in California. I have a higher standard of living than I ever could on the east coast which makes me appreciate the simple pleasures in life so much more. The reptile hobby is more ubiquitous out here and it was a huge factor into why I came. I still have much to build here and these never-ending plagues aren’t helping. (And the pandemic isn’t over just because you say it is, Joe.)

I came here for a better life and I indeed got it.

I also got a little surprise: it turned out I wasn’t getting a boy I would name Seamus. Even professional herpers can make mistakes in sexing monitor lizards, especially babies. When I found out I was getting a girl, I thought about the twist on tradition and using an “L” name. When our Lyft was going up the 110 to get her home from the breeder, I moved her to the sun whenever possible and that’s when it struck me I would name her Liora.

I am not religious, simply in touch with my heritage and culture after the duality of being ripped from it as a child while also having the stigma of Judaism forced on me in a hostile environment (Judaism itself is rife with dualities).

Liora means “light” in Hebrew. Whence I came from a dark and cold land, we now live in this megalopolis full of light. And she is my light.

Adopting a giant lizard was one of my long-time dreams and now I’m going to raise this baby into a happy, thriving little dinosaur. Having a scaly family is ultimately what I want and while I can’t control the dad part? I was able to get a scaly daughter and start socializing her right away.

Then the day after I adopted her, another dream unexpectedly came true: Reptiles magazine accepted my pitch.

…about the shockingly huge reptile hobby in Ireland for their travel herping section.

The OG herptile mag I dreamt of writing for since I was 10 accepted my pitch the day after I arranged her adoption and habitat construction. (Writers reading this: don’t be afraid to send those pitches! I thought after a month with no reply that they weren’t interested, but it took just over three months where the editor thought he already responded to me about wanting to run this article. You have nothing to lose by trying, pitches don’t always get sucked up by the void.)

I took it as a sign that I’m on the right path. Working towards a goal often takes longer than you think. But when you fulfill a dream? Universe energy becomes a broken slot machine. More dreams follow. Things fall into place like they do in Hollywood. Which I’m now literally adjacent to!

I was going to name my beautiful baby monitor Seamus to represent that duality of my life and heritage: the happiness in the present moment that I got to have in my new life, exploring the strangely burgeoning reptile hobby in Ireland and now getting to write about it for a respected publication, and honoring his Australian-Irish roots as well. Choosing his name also harkens back to Irish ties in my past life ranging from friends and lovers in the punk scene to bands that were definitely not household names in the states.

But since there was a change of plans, Liora is also symbolic of the light that shines through even when things don’t turn out like you thought they would.

Where I am now making up for all of those lost chances and dreams, or at least trying to make up for them, be they professional, romantic, adventurous, and the ultimate NYC lifer dream I now live daily: having in-unit laundry.