'See?' Ned continued, 'A few years back, it was like a big fad back in New York. Al the pet shops were selling these little baby crocodiles, you know? You bought them for about a dollar fifty and put them in these little fish tank kind of things, like he used to do with turtles. And he'd feed him mealworms and little bits of hamburger and things like that. And it was kind of neat, like having a miniature dinosaur for a pet. You know? Only trouble was the cute little things got bigger and as they got bigger, they stopped being so cute. Started to look more like crocodiles, which is what they were, of course. And they started to get teeth. Lots of sharp little teeth that could inflict a pretty painful bite. People didn't think, you know? I mean, it looks like a cute little lizard but you'd think people would realize that they grow up to be crocodiles. Only they didn't. And like I say, it got to be a fad. All these little kids had had to have them because their friends had them.

'And like that and as they got bigger, they started to get nasty and bite the kids. And so the parents just took him and flushed him down the toilet like you would a dead goldfish. Except the baby crocodiles didn't die when they got flushed down the toilet. They went down into the sewer system under the city streets where it was warm and there was all sorts of garbage floating around for them to eat. And they just kept on getting bigger until there were these full-grown crocodiles down there, living in the sewer system, surviving on the garbage down there. The way people found out about it is that several workmen who went down there to work on the sewer pipes got killed. They'd be standing there in their waders, working on a pipe or something. And all of a sudden this log would come drifting up, only it wasn't a log. And the next thing they knew, it had a hold of them and was dragging them down underneath the filthy water. And that would be the last anyone would ever see of them. It got to be such a problem that the unions went on strike because none of the workmen wanted to go down there. The sewers being infested with full-grown crocodiles who would take your leg off with just one snap of their jaws, you know?