Crocodottles Cry in Moonlight Scot Walker   © Copyright 2026 by Scot Walker

Photo courtesy of Kirandeep Singh Walia at Prexels.

My Auntie Em was born and christened Anita Barker Baker, into the richest family that ever existed—three of them were not billionaires but trillionaires, so Anita was born, not with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, but with the entire set of Sterling crammed so far down her gullet that the family joke was that her first words (at age five) were “Take out the gosh darned silver; it’s choking me!”

As the scion of the rich and powerful Baker Family and originators of Baker’s Cocoa, Baker’s chocolate bunny creams and Baker’s chocolate Santas and whose family fortune currently exceeds one trillion dollars, Anita was educated at the remote and secluded Briarcliff Manor Finishing School for Young Women. After graduating number 17 of the 18 in her class, she was then accepted at Smithfield College, famous for their hams and their Olympic weight-lifting champs—and please don’t fall for that old rumor that those broads lifting weights were somehow related to those Smithfield acorn and honey smoked hams in any way shape or form because that is a litigious lie.

At Smithfield, Anita excelled at sports and co-founded Smithfield’s first annual deadweight lifting event for women, ultimately coordinating it among coeds at Vassar and Wellesley until her triumphant victory, dead-lifting six hundred twenty-three pounds, garnered her a lifetime supply of Nike sneakers and a gift certificate for ten flimsy but otherwise glorious leotards in both tiger and leopard skin pattern.

At the culmination of her sophomore year, Anita Baker was chosen to represent the United States in the Ushuaia Olympics where she became the first female to win a Gold Medal in weightlifting. Immediately after that victory, she dropped out of Smithfield and became a representative for the Welder Weightlifting Company and within two months and as the results of a barroom wager at the Empty Rail Grill in White Plains, New York, she entered the Miss New York State Beauty Pageant; and a week later, outlasting forty-seven flat-chested bimbos, she become Second Runner up in the Miss America Contest. True, it was rumored that she had had a brief affair with emcee Bertram Parkfield the night before the crowning and some contestants they heard him singing Puccini’s Nessun Dorma, but the scandal only added to her Lady Ga Ga-like reputation, propelling her into unequitable stardom and accenting her blossoming acting career. Then she studied briefly with Constantin Stanislavski and appeared on Broadway with Maureen Stapleton, Elaine Stritch and Marlon Brando in The Boys from Syracuse where both Stritch and Stapleton played male roles to critical accolades. Anita, however, played an overly endowed teenaged girl and was virtually unnoticed, which left her aching to find the fastest track to Hollywood stardom.

Yet, after turning down a marriage proposal from Brando, she eloped with William “Billyboy” Tecumseh Sherman Baker, a New York lampoonist and would-be-screenwriter. Billyboy, however, was a womanizer, bar-brawler and Avant-guard Mad Magazine cartoonist, who ultimately slithered into the muck trodden debt of the Las Vegas gambling syndicate, and Anita’s family promptly disowned her, donated her final resting place in the prestigious Baker Mausoleum, located next to Bunker Hill Memorial Park, across the street from the Wal-Mart, in Boston, Massachusetts, to charity and literally pounded every pair of those dreaded Nikes Anita left in their Hampstead Long Island cottage into smithereens, adequately shaking Anita Barker Baker’s dust from their shoes, slippers, and Nikes—all of which were burned in a Guy Fawkes Day celebration later that year. The Baker family has subsequently made no efforts to contact Anita Barker Baker or any of her ilk.

Despite an unconsummated beginning to her marriage because Billyboy, although surreptitiously a womanizer, had a non-retractable prepuce and as the old saying goes, a mouth much bigger than his penis. It was then that Anita pulled herself up by her Nike shoelaces (and yes she had ripped out all the Nike laces the moment she heard she was being denounced and disowned by her family), shoved them deep inside her bra, leaned out of the third story window and climbed down the rose trellis to freedom, before sobering up her husband with a huge funnel and sixteen gallons of Welch’s grape juice, forever cured Bill of the vine and giving him a lasting distaste for anything resembling a funnel for the rest of his life. That evening while spitting out bits of funnel plastic, she kicked his ass out of bed, tossed him a fresh, though thoroughly un-ironed, pair of boxer shorts, had him pack all their non-breakable, non-perishable belongings in two cardboard suitcases and together they took the Sky Chief high-speed Amtrac Railroad to Hollywood, to remove him forever from the wanton women he so adored.

Four days later, while munching a hamburger with mustard, ketchup, mayo, half a dill pickle and a slice of Spanish onion, at the Hollywood and Vine Street R&W Root Beer Stand, Anita was spotted by a Hollywood talent agent and instantly signed by Paramount, where she was acclaimed to be, “the new Ingrid Bergman without that dreadful Swedish accent.” Anita turned down all “B” movie offers, and when dressed in one of her leopard leotards, had the gift of knowing which “A” movie roles to decline and which ones to pounce upon like a starving leopard.

Within three years, she was nominated for four Academy Awards (garnering Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress nods her first time out) before winning the ‘little man’ whom she renamed “Oscar Little Bouy” because she’d use it on her 80 foot long yacht as a marker. Anita won that “Little Bouy) by the way for her performance as Elvira Widget in the blockbuster comedy-murder-musical mystery “Revenge” and her acceptance speech is considered among the wittiest of all time (only Sally Fields’ "You like me, you really like me," ranks higher.) Anita’s speech, in part, is recorded here: “I want to thank the Academy, my pedicurist and my proctologist for giving me the fortitude to struggle through the vale those of us in the biz fondly refer to as Hollywood, and, on behalf of this little imp whom I’m renaming Billy Bouy after my recently divorced womanizing philandering scum bag of a husband so I can toss it in the ocean and remind me that my yacht is far better than his shall ever be (here, Anita Baker dead lifted the Oscar nine glorious times over her head to ever mounting applause) I thank you, the people of America thanks you and little Oscar, who adores us all, thanks you.”

The movie “Revenge” is one of Hollywood’s most sought-after blockbusters and has become a late night cult film, ranking number four, just behind The Night of the Living Dead, The Wizard of Oz, and The Rocky Horror Show, partly because of the fine writing, but also because of Anita’s over-the-top Mae West-like style of atrocious acting.

Unfortunately, Bill Baker hit the bottle heavily during the filming of Revenge and became involved with a long list of promiscuous Hollywood sex starlets so flagrantly that Anita decided to sell their Bel Air mansion and motor East (yes…she had the money to fly, but she had the time to see the country and, besides, Route 66 was inundated with hamburger stands and Dairy Queens—what better place to spend a holiday than eating your way across country!)

Moments before she packed up the van to drive east, Anita read about Virginia’s upcoming Abandoned Castle and Haunted House Foreclosure Sale and put in the ridiculously low bid of $9,215.73 to buy a castle in the Chesapeake Bay, and in Lawrence, Kansas, while eating her third Big Mac of the day and squigging her fourteenth Coke (refills are free, you know), she read in the Lawrence City Examiner that her bid was accepted and she was now the proud Lady of the Manor and full owner of the McDougall Castle, including its two moats, four turrets, fully stocked dungeon, twenty-seven bedrooms, nineteen bathrooms, a football field sized gourmet kitchen (with granite counters and stainless steel appliances), a 75 foot long 40 foot wide grand ballroom, a fully stocked wine cellar, and the Irish soil upon which it stood. A dozen years later, while performing a perfunctory Goggle search looking for Best Supporting Directors, she discovered, to her chagrin, that she was the only bidder for McDougall Castle, which she renamed the Baker Castle, and realized she could have bid a mere pittance, and still have walked away with the prize, but she picked herself up and devised a new mantra by uttering, “There’s no use crying crocodile tears. I’ll just have to cut back on the broccoli budget and bake fewer rhubarb pies,” one way or another, she pictured Scarlet O’Hara inundating her soul, as she raised her fist to the ceiling and yelled. “I will never be castle less again.”

The McDougall Castle, built between 1387 and 1423, had originally stood on the Shannon River, but was shipped, stone by stone, to Raspberry Island, Virginia, in 1825, where the Beale family restored it, lock, stock and turret. Unfortunately, the castle subsequently had fallen into disrepair by the time Anita bought it as the rocks crumbled, the moat became filled with rotting beavers, skunks and deer, the ramparts rambled teetering back and forth like a weathercock in a tornado, the dungeon was filled with dirt a yard high and the crocodottles became so emaciated their leather hung off them like pocketbooks. Sadly, it took the remaining portion of Anita Baker’s fortune—along with a significant mortgage—to restore the castle to its Fourteenth Century Irish decadence.

During the first few years at the castle, Anita and Bill co-edited Mad Magazine cartoons and wrote three full-length screenplays, Tales of the Dungeon Yard Sale, Crocodottles Cry in Moonlight, and O’er the Ramparts We Pole Vault. Although two of the three movies were picked-up by Hollywood agents (Crocodottles Cry in Moonlight was deemed to be too maudlin, murky and sentimental and was, accordingly, never considered—even though it was Anita’s favorite), none was ever produced and Bill, in frustration, decided to buy a Jaguar with the remaining money in their last CD account, which had matured the day before. Unbeknownst to Anita, Bill took to racing Jaguars (the car, not the critter) in and around Newport News, and one evening, after a round of drinks at the R and R Nudie Bar and Auxiliary Christian Science Reading Room, he wagered with an Audi owner and a Jeep driver that he could outrun Amtrak’s 235-car Southbound Auto Train faster than they could. The Jeep was the first to climb the rutted dirt trail approaching the access of the hump that crossed the RR tracks and the Audi was a mere fifty yards behind (according to the algorithms prepared by the Statistical Department of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, three months after the tragedy), as the Jeep scraped around a newly fallen boulder. Meanwhile, Bill waited, revving the motor of his Jaguar, knowing he had an ample power reserve to leave the other drivers choking in his high-octane soot, already salivating, envisioning his split-quasi-second victory.

Moments before the Jeep could reach the crossing, Bill floored the Jag, soared past the Jeep, and reached the railroad crossing, but his car stalled the moment it hit the tracks. Unable to restart the engine, and discovering that his right shoelace, one of those Nikes Anita had rescued, was entangled in the accelerator, he fumbled, and while struggling like a monkey caught with his hand grasping a banana in a bottle and, refusing to humble himself to kick off his three hundred dollar Armani loafer, he was pushed to the border of North Carolina by the morning express. All the Virginia-North Carolina State Police ever recovered was a bent penny surmised to have popped out of Bill’s penny loafers, and a brown bloodstained tattered Nike shoelace on which Bill’s DNA was a 99.999% match. The police found no accelerator, no skin, no bones!

“It was the darnest thing I ever did see,” Myron F. Flannigan, the Jeep driver, reported, One minute the Jag was there, sitting on top the track and the next instant, it vaporized. Puff! It was gone like a bad hairdo in a blizzard.” Myron, an expert on snow and hairdos, had owned and operated the Zazu Pitts Beauty Salon and Nail Academy in Buffalo, New York, for nearly twenty years—where their internal motto was, Hair today, Goon tomorrow. No one ever totally understood the salon’s motto, but Myron and his wife got a big kick out of it, so they took an old piece of pine and used their 1960s wood burning kit to write the words themselves. Then they posted it above the men’s room john and waited for their customers’ reactions.

After the Wake (how can you give a Nike shoelace an adequate funeral) Anita, a quick-study from her decade-long stay in Hollywood, realized her life would continue with or without Bill, so she converted her showcase castle into a bed and breakfast, renting out the high and dry rooms with teeny-weeny arrow-slit window views for $319.99 a night and $199.99 to locals. She also gave dungeon tours, taught rappelling from the ramparts, and turned the South Tower into a rock-climbing wall. Later, during off-Crocodottle hours, she turned the moat into a lap pool for the local children for ninety-nine cents an hour. . And always free on Sundays.

Anita’s life was then fuller than the moats were when she bought the castle, so she invited weight lifters, sumo wrestlers, and former Miss America colleagues for armor lifting contests on third Thursdays of each month. However, Myrtle Jean Gillespie, who knew Anita was a ringer, turned her into the Virginia Gaming Commission, which ended the practice, and confiscated the entire contents of the armory. Milton Bradley, her attorney, is contesting the decision and hopes a new verdict will be rendered when the State Appellant Court meets; however, Mrs. Baker, a card-carrying member of the National Porcupine Association (whose only aim is to replace every gun in America with a quilled porcupine) isn’t convinced the right-winged Anti-Constitutionalists will overturn the decision. “It’ll be found money if we win,” she says at her monthly Porcupines Forever meetings, saying: “There’s no use crying crocodile tears, no matter what, I’ll lead this fight to protect porcupine reproductive rights.” There were always heavy sighs after Anita’s final remarks, but the audience knew they’d be treated to lunch at the Hungry Hippo Restaurant where they served vegetarian hippo burgers and warthog cookies along with Zebra-nog. It was there, by the way, that she found a small stash of money underneath the Natalie Wood waffle iron and stuffed it, like just about everything else in her life, into her bulging bra.

Anita, however, remember that the last time she had found money was when she was nine years old and discovered a dime in her dad’s recliner. The memories of stealing it, breaking the Eighth Commandment and being condemned to eternal damnation still makes her blood run like ice floes in Norway—especially at night when she kicks the blankets off her bed in the Lady Gaga Suite high atop the San Francisco Tower in the North wing of castle.

Then, of course, there were the robberies and within a few days after her armor was confiscated, Anita Baker’s mind snapped like a walnut tree in a February blizzard. She had lived in the real world a tad too long and wanted to escape—if only for a fortnight—to a more blissful, less maniacal world, knowing her daughter, Nancy, would never be able to take over the day-to-day operations of the castle and her grandson, Alan, would, more than likely, skitter off to Greenwich Village to be with the boys…for yes, Alan was gay and everyone knew it, and accepted it, and that settled it! There is a joy in being a fundamentalist and that is accepting every spoken and written word as the literal truth of God and Anita accepted that manta: “I heard it. I believe it. That settles it!” Yes, Anita is like most creationists in that way and she also believes that mathematics is so complex it must have been created by an intelligent design. “God says if you add 1+2+3, you get 3 and if you add 1+2+3+4, you get 4. Therefore, we must all accept the Intelligent Design of mathematics.”

Thereafter, Anita secretly wished she could ensnare a boyfriend for Alan—a sweet young innocent youth who would continue the fantasy she relished—a young man who could continue her love of frivolity, while he masqueraded as a lord of the manor in her Fourteenth Century castle. Unfortunately, each evening’s games grew more and more bizarre and each time Alan brought home a cute young thing, the boy ended up diving off the ramparts and swimming the moat to safety. Tonight though, Anita’s life will change. She completed her homework regarding Alan’s latest beau and she knows that with the right tweaking and coaxing and the fact that she holds the Bob Eubanks card, she can corral the hunky young man into playing the Newlywed Game with Alan and living in the castle, or suffer the fate of being racked in the dungeon until playtime, for the next twenty years which would be long enough for her to laugh giddily over her husband’s back issues of Mad and rework her favorite screenplay, Crocodottles Cry in Moonlight because as a PETA member, Anita Baker would never harm a living creature—and that’s why she spent the next twenty years creating a herd of crocodottles to live in the moats, rivers and lakes across the globe. Crocodottles were not flesh eaters. They only ate bananas and each time anyone tried to race across a drawbridge or swim a moat or climb battlements, the only way to slow one down would be to toss him fresh bananas—otherwise the crocodottles would nibble their pants legs, occasionally ripping them off completely and leaving the perpetrators in foul banana-stained underwear.

“Yes,” I can rest comfortably tonight—America is safe. Those sweet happy crocodottles can protect us from everything.” And with that. . . Anita Baker Barker fell comfortably asleep.