“What do you mean you’ve never heard of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?” I shouted at the stupid girl in the pet store. It was all I could do to keep from knocking her down and stepping on her.
How could she not have known?
“There were four of them! Mutants! Turtles! Christ, the whole thing was based on a true story!”
The next three hours in that dank little hole of a pet store would be a deep dive into all of the gritty details of the mega-franchise, what the media got right and what it got wrong, which parts had been made up or embellished for your television screens.
See, the whole thing started back when a bunch of mutant turtles cleared out a tenement of particularly rowdy Italians on the lower East Side. No one wanted the Italians around, and the ninja turtles took care of them. Some at the time called their methods extreme, but that isn’t really the point, and it is all the more reason you’d think people would have remembered it.
Of course they never ate pizza; the real turtles hated Italians, which is why so much about their portrayals in popular culture remains inaccurate and frankly disrespectful to their legacy.
In the mid 1980’s, when the TV show was in development, the studio heads, fearing the negative PR about the real turtles’ well-known bias, decided to take things as far as they could in the other direction. So now not only did the turtles love pizza, they even had Italian names.
And as far as them being teenagers, their true ages remain hotly disputed. Some theorize that the real life Donatello was actually in his mid sixties, which to be fair is still pretty young by turtle standards. And of course his name wasn’t really Donatello. It was Roger Mondale.
But Roger wasn’t just a ninja, or a turtle. Much like his fictional counterpart, Roger truly was a renaissance man. He was a scholar, an inventor, and he was also, in his later years, a practicing neurosurgeon. Roger pioneered the use of several radical surgical procedures that have since become the standard, taught today in medical schools throughout the world.
I screamed all of this and more at the girl in the pet store until she asked me to leave. “And please put the turtle back,” she said.
“I’m not finished with this turtle,” I said. “And I’m not finished with you.” The whole thing probably came off as more menacing than I’d intended, but I was determined to see my plan through. I opened the jar of toxic waste I’d made and spilled it onto the turtle’s slippery back.
“Sir,” the girl said. “You can’t do that.”
“Shut up,” I told her. “I’ll teach you what’s possible.”
By now I had earned the attention of several nervous onlookers, among them a young couple just out looking to buy a cat for some ungodly reason, and an old man fucking around with the birds. Two little kids, sans parents, were watching me through the other side of a fish tank.
The turtle in my fist remained calm. “There,” I said. “You see? The turtle doesn’t mind. And neither should any of you.”
“What the hell is that stuff?” the girl asked, referring to the greenish slime I’d just poured onto my little reptilian friend.
“Jesus,” I said. “Don’t you know anything? It’s ooze. Mutagen. For Christ’s sake, how old are you?”
“Sixteen,” she said.
“Sixteen is old enough to know about your nation’s history. What the hell are they teaching you morons these days?”
“We mostly have study halls.”
“When I was your age all I wanted in life was to be a ninja turtle. It was the only thing that made sense to a young man with severe mental problems, and it still is.”
“I’m calling the cops.”
“You know the government started the project, don’t you? Rumor has it they were trying to create a super weapon… out of turtles…”
“I’ve just dialed the 9…”
“Just you wait,” I said, holding the turtle above me now, tilting it under the fluorescent lights, sliding it this way and that, letting the ooze spread over its every scaly inch. “I reckon we got about a half hour with this baby before you really start to see some magic.”
“Hey lady,” the old man at the birds said. “Where the fuck are the iguanas?”
“In the back,” the girl told him.
“HEH?!” the old man said, as old men often do, and generally before the other person has even had a chance to finish. It is irritating.
“The iguanas are in the back,” the girl repeated, louder this time.
“HEH?!”
“Excuse me,” I said to the codger in the plaid red jacket. “But we were in the middle of a transaction. Go now to your iguanas.” And I made like a shooing gesture.
“Hey,” the girl said to me. “I don’t need your help, you lunatic. Now wipe off that turtle and get the hell out of here.”
I grinned, shaking my head at such an obvious bluff. “My dear, if you really had any intention of calling the police, you’d have done so by now. Admit it,” I said, admiring the turtle’s slick oozy surface. “You want to see where this goes.”
Now the old man, let’s call him Earl, said, “I have to walk all the way to the back of the store for a fucking iguana?”
“What do you want me to do?” the girl, let’s call her Emma, said. “Bring all the iguanas up here to you? In one big box or something?”
“No. I’d like to be carried.”
“We don’t do that,” Emma said. “We have a policy.”
I said, “You have a policy about carrying elderly people to the back of the store?”
“Yes,” Emma said. “Over the years we have had to adapt.”
“Jesus,” I said. “How long have you worked here?”
“I was born here,” she said. “And I will surely die here. But in the meantime, you two lizard lovers can get fucked.”
“How much for a goldfish?” one of the children asked.
“A dollar,” Emma said. “It’s written right there on the tank.” It was.
“First of all,” I said, “Turtles aren’t lizards, you idiot. Christ, you work in a pet store. I really hope you hate yourself.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, I know what a turtle is. I also know a couple of lizard perverts when I see them. Tell me,” Emma said, “What was the plan? I was supposed to go to the back for some iguanas while the two of you made off with the turtles, right? Then it’s back to your cheap motel room to do God knows what with them?” She pointed at the empty jar. “And that isn’t toxic waste!” She spooned up some of the gunk with her finger and took a taste. “It’s just corn syrup and green food coloring!”
“I… what?” Okay, I’ll admit it: I was getting flustered.
This Emma bitch was relentless. “I bet you were going to feed it strawberries in an intimate fashion,” she said.
“What? No,” I said, trying to form a coherent thought. “I was–”
Emma started poking me in the chest with her pointy finger. It hurt. “Were you or were you not going to feed your turtle strawberries in an intimate fashion? Don’t lie to me!” Then she pinched my nipple through my jacket. I’ve never felt so much pain.
“Earl!” I shouted. “The jig is up!”
“Cheese it!” Earl said. He pushed his way past the young couple and fled out the door. I attempted to take the syrup covered turtle with me, but young Emma proved to be deceptively strong. She snatched it from my grasping hands and kicked me in the shin. It hurt like a son of a bitch.
“I’m never coming in here again,” I shouted, hopping out of there on one leg.
Emma kicked everyone out and closed up early. The young couple seemed particularly bummed. “We just wanted to make a Thundercat.”
Later, at the diner across the street, me and Earl collected our thoughts. Over a stack of pancakes I asked him, “What are we doing with our lives?”
“Who cares?” Earl said into his coffee. “I’m almost dead anyway.”
“Earl… is the life of a reptile pervert really worth it?”
“Hard to say,” the old timer said. “Every man has to reckon that within himself. Decide his own values in life. His own system. And he has to set his own goals. For me, I decided a long time ago that goal was to molest as many reptiles as I could get my disgusting old man fingers on.”
“It was you who set me on this path, you know,” I said, taking a stroll down memory lane. “Without you I wouldn’t have known anything about this world.”
“Is that a regret?”
“It’s a thank you,” I said. It was something I’d been meaning to tell the old man for a long time. “Thank you, Earl. You changed my life.”
Earl said, “Yep.”
Then we finished our pancakes and headed to the zoo.
This reminds me of why Haunting of Hill House is the scariest show I have ever seen. To this day I could never bring myself to watch the finale. But let’s just say it ain’t Quinn Love’s face.