The Time I Turned Into A Shape-Shifting Reptilian

This one got me kicked out of school…

In times of great stress, via periods of not sleeping, possibly as the results of various…factors, some people can experience momentary bouts of…unwellness.

I am apparently one of those people.

The first time it happened in full, I was living in Oakland, and visiting Berkeley on a daily basis. We were in between jobs as a domestic couple at the time. Domestic couples generally run large private estates together. But we had tired of Orange County and decided to check out the San Francisco area.

Probably a mistake.

I remember we took two hippie kids to a Dead show that they needed a ride to. We were appalled that they referred to us as “yuppies”. It was certainly not our view of ourselves. We did have a brand-new jeep, and I had taken to wearing two rather ostentatious gold nugget rings, so I guess it was understandable. Most of our clothes came from Nordstrom’s.

Berkeley is a wild place, and I invite everyone to check it out. Get on a plane, go there, experience it. Then get back on a plane and leave. I swear, they pump crazy gas into the air, there. Everything is graffitied in Berkeley. The street signs are all bent and twisted. It’s a psychedelic experience even while sober.

While we looked for a new project, I had taken to street theater, to a degree. As was the fashion of the time. I wore a big leather top hat that had a Mad Hatter style label on it that said “Da Mayor’. And declared myself Mayor of Berkeley. This is utterly commonplace behavior, there.

I mostly hung out on Telegraph Avenue, ping-ponging between two CD stores that are big in the area. I would buy CDs from kids going in to sell them, offering them $3 each. They would reject my proposal, then come right back after the stores offered them something like $1 each. I would then get a weekend booth at the Oakland Swap meet and sell them for $7 each.

It was a good hustle, and one we ran again later in Louisiana, opening the third used CD store in the state, and that was even more successful.

Still, it was a bit of a culture shock, northern California. One weekend I had some books on display. Not to sell, but as conversation pieces. The Emperor Wears No Clothes, which Jack Herer had signed for me in Newport Beach, and The Anarchist’s Cookbook.

“Ooh,”, a kid said. “Anarchist Cookbook! Someone stole mine. Want to trade some herb for it?”

Sure, why not?

At that point, he opens a large manila mailing envelope, and pulls out a handful of sacks. In front of literally hundreds of people. To us, it was freaky. It felt like waving it around at the mall or something. But no one batted an eye.

I soon took to selling CDs during the week, as well as buying them. By setting up a folding table on the sidewalk. I based my actions on a recent court ruling that declared that speech related items didn’t require a business license to sell, as it was a restriction on free speech. Good luck discussing court rulings with police.

So they shut me down, and I went to the library to do some research on the laws. What I learned was that Berkeley has this law on the books from the 60s or 70s: “The Police In Berkeley Shall Make Marijuana Smoking Its Lowest Possible Priority.”

Which explained why people would smoke a joint on the streets and wave at cops, who would wave back. Jaywalking was more serious. A dog pooping on the sidewalk was more serious.

But the existing laws, despite the recent ruling, only allowed people to sell hand-crafted goods on the street, and then only with a street vendor’s license. And there were only 200 of those in existence, most given to people who had disappeared.

Hippies, amirite?

Things got progressively weird for me. Or, rather, I did.

This culminated in me staying up all night as I read “The Library Policeman” by Stephen King to my wife in full. It probably took eight to ten hours. She went to sleep. I did not.

Another odd thing about northern California is the lack of air conditioners. So, while the only sound in the apartment was the occasionally cycling of the refrigerator motor, I looked outside to see an entirely silent car slowly going down the street, with one person going through all the open vehicles to steal stuff. I made eye contact with the driver.

By dawn, I was pretty spun.

There was a construction dumpster across the street, and it started making noises. A bum came out of it, white-faced, looking quite like death itself. Naturally, I confronted him about his presence. And he said the strangest thing to me. At least I think he did, I can’t be sure.

“Anything in the streets is fair game.”

Which was actually more or less true, and innocuous, but it didn’t sit well with me.

He left at my request, but I was amped up. I took a 2 x 4 piece, and wacked a few street signs with it. It sounded very much like gunshots. And although this wasn’t East Oakand, it was Oakland. G-rides started driving by. I gave them the universal t-pose “You motherfuckers want some?” gesture indigenous to the west coast.

They in fact did not want any.

Two Jehovah’s Witness types walked up.

“Are you guys FBI?” I asked them.

“Yes,” they said, straight-faced.

Oh, dear. This was not a good Saturday.

A few hours later, I had convinced my wife to drive us back to Louisiana. I wanted no part of California. So I dumped a few thousand dollars’ worth of books in the garbage, we packed what we could fit into the jeep, and left.

In broad daylight. With no air conditioner. This is an important detail because we always drove back and forth at night. It’s unbearably hot, otherwise.

I woke up in Bakersfield, after getting a tiny bit of what I really needed, sleep. My mind was ablaze with delusions regarding car colors, symbolism, and all manner of wrongthink.

This episode culminated in me punching out the windshield. Throwing my rings out the window, along with some music I had recorded and lost forever.

Then jumping out and stripping naked, running down the Bakerfield highway barefoot. I jumped on semis. Threw up gang signs. Four lanes of traffic as far as the eye could see were backed up. Military vehicles, everything.

And no one did anything about it for 30 minutes or so. But when you get .45s pointed at you, you can kind of come back to reality a bit.

A bit. All this is just prologue to the real story, here.

It happened again, years later, at University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

I woke up on the couch one day, butcher knife under my pillow. That’s odd, I thought.

The next thing I knew, I was sleepwalking across campus, clad only in blue Adidas shorts. Looking not unlike a young Charles Manson.

I made it almost all the way across the entire university, which is sizable, and was accosted by the school security. Who pepper sprayed me. I hadn’t actually done anything illegal. But whaddaya gonna do? Ultimately, I ended up missing too many classes to finish the semester. But I still had my campus apartment.

Understandably, the school wanted me out. But had no actual standing to evict me. So they talked to my neighbors and devised a plan. We were called into some chancellor’s office, where they raised an indiscretion that was so absurd, we actually laughed, thinking it was some sort of joke.

“Your daughter came outside, put a dildo on her forehead, and said, ‘I’m a unicorn’.”

Erm, no, we didn’t own any dildos, thanks.

But it was enough, railroading or not, to cause us to have to leave.

So we moved into one of my wife’s family’s rent houses about 30 miles north of Lafayette. As we were unloading our stuff, along comes this girl named Sandra. Sandra was an ex-stripper turned crack smoker. And she was with some guy with a bandaged hand. As wild coincidences go when this sort of thing is happening, he was the father of the girl who had colluded with the university to evict us. At the same time we were in the offices getting thrown out, he got his hand crushed pretty badly. And someone shot his German Shepherd that he had had for ten years.

As Sandra was leaving, she leaned over and said in the voice of my boss from work at school, “You take care of yourself, okay?” It was a little unnerving. She had the mannerisms of Deborah as well. Just for that few odd moments. This is all perceptual, of course. Or so I would prefer to think.

I went into the bathroom. Looked in the mirror. For a half-second, I not only looked like Deborah, but I had scaly green skin, and reptile eyes.

Okay…

That night, my wife and daughters slept at her parent’s, as I was pretty out there. That night I had a dream. A nightmare, I guess? I was chased through some dark city projects at night by a reptilian Stephen King the size of a refrigerator…

But I started getting better, and the next day they were back. The next week, we drove by campus.

And got pulled over. Separated. Questioned.

“Where were you a week ago?”

She explained that we were at our house, far from Lafayette.

“Okay. You guys can go.”

“Hol’ up. Why did you do this?”, she asked.

“Because a girl got her head cut off in the campus apartments the night y’all left…”

Um, wow. Okay.

So, people used to ask me later, “You were a pretty promising UL student, and you just disappeared one day. What happened?”

“Well,” I would say as a joke. “They claimed I bit one cop and punched the other in the stomach, but I distinctly remember turning into a dinosaur-type thing and eating them.”

Haha.

The kicker of all this is, it all happened *years* before David Icke and the shape-shifting reptilian phenomenon swept the internet. The best I can come up with is that it was partly influenced by the movie Species. A reptilian classic.

And, as I like to say now, “There is no such thing as shapeshifting reptilians…but if there is, I probably am one.”

Here's my "Haha, Reptilians" website Reptilian Watch that I ran many years later, when David Icke became a phenomenon. On archive.org. Kinda haha, anyway. Half-haha?

I write sci-fi and fantasy, among other things, often loosely based on real-life experiences I've had. Check out Hurricane Regina, narrated by Kenneth Lee. It has some pretty good high weirdness.