I had never known Whit to be a prankster, but nothing else explained why there was what appeared to be a medium-sized snake hanging limply in a very conspicuous place in my apartment. Very funny, Whit.
Admittedly, I hadn’t known Whit awfully long. I had moved in near the end of the previous year, and I mostly kept to myself for a lonely few months. I’ve never been great at meeting people, so I hadn’t made any friends outside of work. I had a girlfriend in grad school in another state, so I wasn’t in bars trying to hook up.
This was likely a missed opportunity, as a college town is one of the few places where it would be okay to bring a girl back to an apartment so sad. I had picked up the lease from a first-semester dropout, and the place was dim, dingy, and damp, as the mold I found when I eventually moved out would testify. But, the pay for my first post-college job was embarrassingly low, and for now, this was the best I could do.
All the basement apartments faced a patchy strip of grass that ran parallel to the building, a long, rectangular brick hulk so unremarkable in design that the structure itself looked something like a brick magnified to a megascopic scale. Each unit had a concrete slab porch, and I was standing on mine one evening when a tall, nice-looking guy shouted a friendly hello from a few doors down.
Whit was a graduate assistant writing his doctoral dissertation on the Philippines’ participation in multinational military operations on the Korean peninsula. Everyday, popular-interest stuff, really. Eventually, we would become close enough that he would ask me to keep a sizeable stash of girlie magazines when his research took him to Manila. In the event that he was killed or kidnapped, he didn’t want his family to find it when they came to clean out his apartment.
But at first, we hung out only occasionally because he was usually inundated with lesson plans and research. We would grab a beer when time allowed, but most of our conversations were limited to a few minutes a week on the porch. That was before we started the band.
We both had guitars, and some loose post-drinks jamming had, by the summer, turned into a weekly rehearsal and songwriting session. We called ourselves Boat. There were some vague but ambitious plans to blow peoples minds at a popular Monday open mic event downtown, but eventually reality would intrude.
As it turns out, we both played badly. And, our tastes weren’t simpatico in the least. I was in the middle of a long infatuation with lounge music, and Whit was still a die-hard Guns ‘n Roses fan, even in those long years leading up to the completion of the, at that point, still-mythical “Chinese Democracy.” Most of our so-called band practices devolved into drinking beer and talking music while one of us strummed the few chords we knew.
I’m not sure how the subject of snakes presented itself. I think we may have been talking about Slash from G’nR, and his affinity* for boa constrictors came up. This was the one element of Slash’s ineffable coolness that eluded Whit, who confessed to a deep-seated Indiana Jones-level herpetophobia.
I certainly have my own irrational terrors. When I was young, any number of children’s stories instilled in me a fear of large, anthropomorphic wolves on the prowl for tasty kids; you tend to take a lot of fairy tales personally when your name is Jack. When I came out of my room in tears one night to tell my parents that I was afraid of a wolf outside my window, my mom told me that there were no wolves where we lived. They were in places like North Dakota. This reassurance pacified me at the time, but even today, I get a little bit of a cold shiver when I see North Dakota on a map.
But, while I have the sensible fear of snakes that any sane adult possesses, I’ve never had an overwhelming anxiety about them. Whit, on the other hand, seemed genuinely terrified, so I may have expressed an empathetic kinship along the lines of, “Oh yeah. Snakes are scary.”
A few days later, there was one hanging at eye-level, lazily entwined in the Venetian blinds next to my bed. My girlfriend, Michele, and I had just returned from a weekend trip, and she rushed into the bathroom without noticing anything odd. I was checking my answering machine when I saw it.
Upon first glance, it looked a bit like my black leather belt, and I wondered how or why I had managed to leave it in the blinds. Then I realized I was wearing the belt. Clearly, Whit had stuck a two-and-a-half foot rubber snake in a place where I was likely to see it as I emerged from the bathroom, and it would scare me, presumably, more shitless. This is what fake empathy gets me, I thought. Like I said earlier: very funny.
I wasn’t sure how Whit had gotten it into my apartment while I was away, but other questions immediately came to mind when I got closer and saw the snake’s body expand and contract with breath. I still hadn’t gone beyond thinking this was a prank, so I tried to understand how Whit had suppressed his phobia long enough to weave a live serpent through my blinds. Had he been lying before? Was it just part of an elaborate set-up?
My more immediate concern was getting the snake the hell out of my apartment, preferably before Michele saw it and definitely before it decided that it also needed to use the bathroom. It seemed to be a black snake or something similarly non-venomous, although in retrospect, I probably should have been a bit more certain before proceeding as I did.
Using a broom to tip the snake into a paper bag seemed like a long shot from the outset, but I didn’t really have a better idea. Even if it was ostensibly non-dangerous, I didn’t want to touch it. As I’ve already established, I’m not Slash. My plan, such as it was, unfolded as one might realistically expect, and the suddenly-very-alert snake bounced off of the window sill and hit the ground wriggling, taking refuge under my dresser.
I think I would have been more consumed with panic had I not been so stricken with regret. After some deliberation and much ambivalence, I had renewed my lease for the apartment just three days earlier. It was now very clear that this had been a mistake. As I considered my options for both the snake and the leasing office (why it never occurred to me to call them and make the snake their problem, I don’t know), Michele came out of the bathroom to find me holding my makeshift reptile gear.
“I don’t want to alarm you,” I began in the way one generally begins statements that will, nevertheless, be very alarming, “but there’s a snake under the dresser.”
She gasped and took a few steps back as I began to explain what I’d found and my general lack of effective action thus far.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I paused. “I guess I should probably poke around under the dresser with the broom handle.” Obviously, the break in action had allowed me time to expertly refine my strategy.
Still with the paper bag in one hand, I swept the broom back and forth where I’d seen the snake disappear. While he, of course, didn’t flee directly into the bag as he had in my fantasy plan, the flushing-out part worked remarkably well. The snake zipped out from under the dresser, rounded the corner into the living room, and slithered under the futon. Without tactical consideration of my next step, I pulled the futon back from the wall.
Up until now, I had been more creeped-out than scared; who knows which of my belongings the snake had slithered over? I’ll bet he licked my toothbrush. Considering all the possibilities made me a little queasy, but I didn’t feel like I was in any real danger. Until the snake hissed and struck at me, mouth wide open and fangs exposed.
I was just out of range, but I yelped like a nervous little terrier and smacked the broom head down, pinning the snake against the carpet. In my mind, the zany, slap-sticky music soundtrack playing during the madcap, sped-up chase stops with an abrupt record scratch at this point.
The snake’s head poked out from under the straw, its tongue flicking in and out. I was still fairly sure it wasn’t poisonous, but I certainly didn’t want to be bitten. I had read how the Komodo Dragon kills its prey not with venom but because its filthy maw is so septic that lethal infection sets in nearly instantaneously. I definitely didn’t want any part of myself to come in contact with this snake’s mouth, even if it had recently used my toothbrush. It looked like it was still pretty angry, although, admittedly, I’m no herpetologist and am not qualified to judge the facial expressions of reptiles.
“Maybe we should go get Whit,” suggested Michele.
I had reservations about this on a number of levels. First of all, I was just barely past the point of still suspecting his involvement. Then there was the fact that he was, theoretically, more terrified of snakes than me, even when not face-to-face with one. I was currently face-to-goddamn-face with one, managing a stalemate as best as could be expected with only a broom to protect myself, and it wasn’t particularly helpful for my girlfriend to suggest that my tall, charming, good-looking neighbor might better handle the situation. And anyway, bringing Whit into the same room as the snake could end badly for at least one of them.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Unfortunately, I had no good ideas of my own. If I lifted the broom, the snake would strike again, and now I was within reach. I didn’t want to just grab his head with my hand, because see above re. not Slash. I could try to grasp him securely with something else, maybe my corn-on-the-cob tongs, but ew. I mentally went through the rest of the kitchen.
“There are pliers in the drawer under the microwave. Could you bring them here and then open the front door?”
This seemed feasible. I could grab him just below the head, carry him outside, and drop him in the grass. I tested gingerly and found that the pliers fit snugly enough to grip the snake securely, but not so tightly that they would crush anything vital. This was working just as I’d hoped.
I did not, however, anticipate him wrapping around my wrist in defensive panic the second I removed the broom. As I ran across the living room screaming, arm held straight out in front of me while the snake frantically writhed around my hand, I jettisoned any intention of putting him gently into the grass. When I got within a few feet of the front door, I flung the pliers, snake and all, outside. The tool hit the edge of the porch with a clatter, and the snake, flailing about, skidded across the sidewalk into the grass where it took off to the right in the direction of Whit’s apartment.
Serves him right, I thought, and quickly slammed the door, as if that solved a problem. Serves them both right.
*I wanted to use the stronger “herpetophilia” instead of “affinity” here, but apparently this is more commonly understood to mean someone who likes to have sex with people dressed as reptiles. While I would not have put this past Slash in his sex-addicted hedonistic heyday, any aspersions cast upon his love for snakes would be purely speculative.
Some proper nouns were changed. The song below, “Wayne,” is the only surviving musical artifact by Boat and was later recorded by the author.
