Friday, December 9, 2011
snake pit
It was 1:21 in the afternoon when I first began noticing the snakes moving beneath the dangling tassels of my mother’s couch. I was certain I was imagining them at first – after all, how could a fifth-floor apartment suddenly be crawling with serpents, in this miserable urban black hole neighborhood of the Mission, especially on a day like today? It made no sense. It was cold, grey, gloomy, rainy. I had had the foresight to leave all windows open, partially to air out the perpetual cloud of smoke in which I dwell, and partially because I am a strange person who enjoys grim dampness. A layer of condensation, left by the settling fog, was emulsifying with the dirt left from a thousand footprints ago. The tip of my nose and my cheeks flared red. No, this was not a suitable snake climate.
And how would the bastards have entered? The thought of ten thousand diamondback rattlesnakes creeping on their bellies all the way from a desert in Mexico, across highways and through forests and into this particular building in this particular neighborhood, up five flights of stairs because the elevator doesn’t work – or, God forbid, slithering right up the side of the goddamned building – just to find themselves all inexplicably trapped within the confines of the spaces between my wall and the piece of furniture that holds my TV and movies, hell-bent on retribution – no, that’s irrational. Things like this don’t just happen.
The idea of the legless poison-tubers coiling up just under the couch, mere feet from my feet, glowering up at my body heat and mouths agape in twisted, primordial anticipation, made me feel ill. I began to see diamond patterns sliding across the walls, and the carpet took on a scaled texture, writhing and rubbing in a sea of blunted daggers that snagged my jacket, dragged it across the floor, and tore it to shreds. And oh, the sound of it all – a demented, angular hiss that floated across my senses on any and every unseen layer of space, an abyss of white noise punctuated by the death rattles of fallen civilizations and every hiker unlucky enough to plant a foot in the brush and receive a fangful of dynamite cocktail for his trouble. My mouth tasted like sand and rot – I feared I might puke.
Why? Why would such a thing happen to me? I stayed on the couch for a period of time that I could not determine, imagining my death. The snakes will bite me all over, I thought, on my Achilles tendon first, and my legs. I’ll fall to the floor, maybe my hands will instinctively try to stop my fall and be bitten as well; my chest, my arms, my god damned face, all over. I’ll be lying in a pool of sweat and puke and terror, feeling the neurotoxins seeping through my veins, being fully conscious as the venom begins to break down tissue, collapsing into a vegetable world of deadly, unstoppable hallucinations as my brain cells are dissolved, finally sinking into a putrid, half-liquefied toxic waste puddle-
No! I forced myself to remain calm – what would happen in the animal kingdom? Panic is a thing for desperate mice who fear death – this is my home. I will not be driven away by snakes! I laugh aloud, assuring myself that this has all been some kind of delusion brought on by the drugs, and think for a long, dangerous minute about where to place my bare foot on the carpet. It looks like carpet again, though I can still vaguely hear a hiss. Do I? I’m not even sure. My feet have not moved. I am paralyzed with fear. Move your foot, you coward. Think hard – have I actually seen a snake for sure? I’ve seen patterns and scales and heard sounds and can feel them crawling through the couch cushions and I’m seeing the fucking carpet move, but have I actually seen anything?
I light up a cigarette and wait. The time is now 1:54 in the afternoon. It will be dark in about three hours, maybe a little longer. With the windows open and the weather like it is, the bastards will freeze in the evening chill. I’ll just wrap myself up in this blanket and wait. I’ve got all night, fuckers. This is a good idea. Wait. Fuck. I put out my cigarette and stand up on the couch. Fuck this. This is stupid.
I’m going to step off of this couch and prove to myself that there is nothing in this apartment.
There’s nothing on the floor. I’m just being mental.
Put your god damned foot on the god damned floor.
Snakes cannot crawl up the side of a building. Verticality is an impossibility for them; God has cursed them to the ground and the ground only. There are no cottonmouths in my couch. There are no rattlers behind the TV. The walls aren’t slithering and vibrating at me. I’m sick. I might need help in a hell of a lot of ways, but I sure don’t need it getting away from imaginary reptiles.
Put your god damned foot on the god damned floor.
I can’t bring myself to step off the couch. I had always envisioned myself perishing violently in a traffic accident, or perhaps overdosing quietly on a noseful of some crushed-up medication, tucked warmly into my bed with Kind of Blue on the turntable, or, if I had been feeling frisky, perhaps some Herbie Hancock – not like this, not bloated and swollen with filthy, corrosive poison, a quivering heap of biotoxic gelatin found soaking into his mother’s old couch. The weather would stay the same and I would slowly decay in the moist, cool air – it would probably take a few days. God, the smell would probably be so bad. The crime scene forensics team would arrive and suck up little pieces of me with eyedroppers and put thin slices of what used to be my body into sterile evidence bags. Those investigators with weaker constitutions would probably vomit, and nobody would know what to make of this. Police would speculate that I had committed suicide on an overdose of something and gone long undiscovered, or perhaps that I had been murdered in a drug deal gone wrong with some small-time Filipino gangster with access to strange poisons. My murder would never be solved because the snakes will have gone, slunk back to Mexico or wherever, or crept across time and space and physics to claim yet another unsuspecting victim, and nobody will ever know what happened. I will be buried next to my mother, and my cause of death will be listed as “Turned to Slime by Toxins Unknown.”
No fucking way. That’s not how I’m going to die.
I leap from the couch, springing from the left-hand side seat a full six or seven feet across the room, landing on the tile in the kitchen, slipping on the damp floor and landing on my side with a terrible pain in my ankle. I’m absolutely, positively, 100% certain that I have been bitten, but I am not going to fall to my knees and let myself be swarmed by cobras and asps. The poison pumps deeper into each extremity with every heartbeat - I grab the big meat knife from the knife set and a can of WD-40. I ransack my own apartment, stabbing wildly into the fluff of the couch cushions, tearing the carpet from the floor, kicking over the piece of furniture that hold my TV and movies and putting a foot through the glass coffee table. I trip over the bong and am absolutely, positively sure that it was a six-foot solid muscle Reticulated Python, and in a blind, poisoned rage, I kick back at it. The blown glass explodes against the wall, splattering my pant leg with blood and bong sludge. I look down at my leg and see nothing but decay. I am being eaten away at record speeds. I beat my chest and bellow like Sasquatch.
I flip over the couch and throw my body on top of it, trapping the snakes beneath. Giggling, I soak the fabric on the back with the aerosol and set it ablaze with my cigarette lighter. I suffer some minor burns, but nothing compared to the violence wreaked on my endocrine system. My heart hurts. My eyes are on fire and so is the couch – and now the curtains, now the carpet. My skin is beginning to turn the color of a really old dollar bill, and I have lost a lot of blood, and there is probably ten thousand milliliters of assorted venoms coursing through my body, but the snakes are dead, all of ‘em dead. Smoke erupts out the window, blackening the skies over the Mission. The time is now 2:11 in the afternoon.
I collapse on the floor just as the firefighters break down the front door; I guess I had pretty bad smoke inhalation, which didn’t help considering the drugs, but the doctors managed to save all my tissue. They found no bite marks and no signs that any snakes had been in my apartment, but I nearly died from all the rattler venom in my veins. They say any other person would have had limbs atrophying off and hallucinations hippies would kill for. The first doctor crossed himself and recommended I thank Christ that I still had any hands at all. I’m now a medical anomaly. My case is required reading in first-year medical textbooks, right next to the man with the screws in his heart and the Immaculate Conception of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
And how would the bastards have entered? The thought of ten thousand diamondback rattlesnakes creeping on their bellies all the way from a desert in Mexico, across highways and through forests and into this particular building in this particular neighborhood, up five flights of stairs because the elevator doesn’t work – or, God forbid, slithering right up the side of the goddamned building – just to find themselves all inexplicably trapped within the confines of the spaces between my wall and the piece of furniture that holds my TV and movies, hell-bent on retribution – no, that’s irrational. Things like this don’t just happen.
The idea of the legless poison-tubers coiling up just under the couch, mere feet from my feet, glowering up at my body heat and mouths agape in twisted, primordial anticipation, made me feel ill. I began to see diamond patterns sliding across the walls, and the carpet took on a scaled texture, writhing and rubbing in a sea of blunted daggers that snagged my jacket, dragged it across the floor, and tore it to shreds. And oh, the sound of it all – a demented, angular hiss that floated across my senses on any and every unseen layer of space, an abyss of white noise punctuated by the death rattles of fallen civilizations and every hiker unlucky enough to plant a foot in the brush and receive a fangful of dynamite cocktail for his trouble. My mouth tasted like sand and rot – I feared I might puke.
Why? Why would such a thing happen to me? I stayed on the couch for a period of time that I could not determine, imagining my death. The snakes will bite me all over, I thought, on my Achilles tendon first, and my legs. I’ll fall to the floor, maybe my hands will instinctively try to stop my fall and be bitten as well; my chest, my arms, my god damned face, all over. I’ll be lying in a pool of sweat and puke and terror, feeling the neurotoxins seeping through my veins, being fully conscious as the venom begins to break down tissue, collapsing into a vegetable world of deadly, unstoppable hallucinations as my brain cells are dissolved, finally sinking into a putrid, half-liquefied toxic waste puddle-
No! I forced myself to remain calm – what would happen in the animal kingdom? Panic is a thing for desperate mice who fear death – this is my home. I will not be driven away by snakes! I laugh aloud, assuring myself that this has all been some kind of delusion brought on by the drugs, and think for a long, dangerous minute about where to place my bare foot on the carpet. It looks like carpet again, though I can still vaguely hear a hiss. Do I? I’m not even sure. My feet have not moved. I am paralyzed with fear. Move your foot, you coward. Think hard – have I actually seen a snake for sure? I’ve seen patterns and scales and heard sounds and can feel them crawling through the couch cushions and I’m seeing the fucking carpet move, but have I actually seen anything?
I light up a cigarette and wait. The time is now 1:54 in the afternoon. It will be dark in about three hours, maybe a little longer. With the windows open and the weather like it is, the bastards will freeze in the evening chill. I’ll just wrap myself up in this blanket and wait. I’ve got all night, fuckers. This is a good idea. Wait. Fuck. I put out my cigarette and stand up on the couch. Fuck this. This is stupid.
I’m going to step off of this couch and prove to myself that there is nothing in this apartment.
There’s nothing on the floor. I’m just being mental.
Put your god damned foot on the god damned floor.
Snakes cannot crawl up the side of a building. Verticality is an impossibility for them; God has cursed them to the ground and the ground only. There are no cottonmouths in my couch. There are no rattlers behind the TV. The walls aren’t slithering and vibrating at me. I’m sick. I might need help in a hell of a lot of ways, but I sure don’t need it getting away from imaginary reptiles.
Put your god damned foot on the god damned floor.
I can’t bring myself to step off the couch. I had always envisioned myself perishing violently in a traffic accident, or perhaps overdosing quietly on a noseful of some crushed-up medication, tucked warmly into my bed with Kind of Blue on the turntable, or, if I had been feeling frisky, perhaps some Herbie Hancock – not like this, not bloated and swollen with filthy, corrosive poison, a quivering heap of biotoxic gelatin found soaking into his mother’s old couch. The weather would stay the same and I would slowly decay in the moist, cool air – it would probably take a few days. God, the smell would probably be so bad. The crime scene forensics team would arrive and suck up little pieces of me with eyedroppers and put thin slices of what used to be my body into sterile evidence bags. Those investigators with weaker constitutions would probably vomit, and nobody would know what to make of this. Police would speculate that I had committed suicide on an overdose of something and gone long undiscovered, or perhaps that I had been murdered in a drug deal gone wrong with some small-time Filipino gangster with access to strange poisons. My murder would never be solved because the snakes will have gone, slunk back to Mexico or wherever, or crept across time and space and physics to claim yet another unsuspecting victim, and nobody will ever know what happened. I will be buried next to my mother, and my cause of death will be listed as “Turned to Slime by Toxins Unknown.”
No fucking way. That’s not how I’m going to die.
I leap from the couch, springing from the left-hand side seat a full six or seven feet across the room, landing on the tile in the kitchen, slipping on the damp floor and landing on my side with a terrible pain in my ankle. I’m absolutely, positively, 100% certain that I have been bitten, but I am not going to fall to my knees and let myself be swarmed by cobras and asps. The poison pumps deeper into each extremity with every heartbeat - I grab the big meat knife from the knife set and a can of WD-40. I ransack my own apartment, stabbing wildly into the fluff of the couch cushions, tearing the carpet from the floor, kicking over the piece of furniture that hold my TV and movies and putting a foot through the glass coffee table. I trip over the bong and am absolutely, positively sure that it was a six-foot solid muscle Reticulated Python, and in a blind, poisoned rage, I kick back at it. The blown glass explodes against the wall, splattering my pant leg with blood and bong sludge. I look down at my leg and see nothing but decay. I am being eaten away at record speeds. I beat my chest and bellow like Sasquatch.
I flip over the couch and throw my body on top of it, trapping the snakes beneath. Giggling, I soak the fabric on the back with the aerosol and set it ablaze with my cigarette lighter. I suffer some minor burns, but nothing compared to the violence wreaked on my endocrine system. My heart hurts. My eyes are on fire and so is the couch – and now the curtains, now the carpet. My skin is beginning to turn the color of a really old dollar bill, and I have lost a lot of blood, and there is probably ten thousand milliliters of assorted venoms coursing through my body, but the snakes are dead, all of ‘em dead. Smoke erupts out the window, blackening the skies over the Mission. The time is now 2:11 in the afternoon.
I collapse on the floor just as the firefighters break down the front door; I guess I had pretty bad smoke inhalation, which didn’t help considering the drugs, but the doctors managed to save all my tissue. They found no bite marks and no signs that any snakes had been in my apartment, but I nearly died from all the rattler venom in my veins. They say any other person would have had limbs atrophying off and hallucinations hippies would kill for. The first doctor crossed himself and recommended I thank Christ that I still had any hands at all. I’m now a medical anomaly. My case is required reading in first-year medical textbooks, right next to the man with the screws in his heart and the Immaculate Conception of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
the skull of our beloved Mr. Creek
“It’s named after a real guy,” insisted Pat.
“How do you know?” I asked. “You don’t have the internet. Who told you this?”
“It’s just something I know, pal. You’re just going to have to trust me on it.”
I really had no reason to doubt poor Pat. I felt as though I owed him my trust – after all, it had been no fewer than five minutes prior that I had been convinced of his intent to poison me. But here I stood beneath the Goodwin Street Bridge, very much alive and surrounded by swooping bats, desperately trying to believe what this man was telling me: that Granite Creek, the two-mile stretch of green belt than runs through downtown Prescott, was named after a real person – a person named Granite Creek.
“He came into town like a hundred years ago, and set up his business. The townspeople loved him and he did good work for the community, so they named the creek after him. He even built this bridge.” He passed me the joint. Moments earlier, I had been sure it was loaded with PCP or animal tranquilizers. I was now more concerned with being infected with whatever spit-borne mental illness Pat carried with him, but I hit it anyway. Medical science is advancing quickly, I thought. I’ll be all right.
“What did he do for the community? Anything I might know about?”
“Well, come on. How am I supposed to know that? I just got into town. Probably built the courthouse or some shit.”
Pat had arrived in Prescott (possibly) only days earlier. He had (possibly) come for a final visit with a dying relative – who was, according to Pat’s explanation, some vague combination of his father, his grandfather, and nobody at all – and possibly also to find work and enjoy the mountain weather. He had (possibly) come from an undisclosed location in Florida, and had made the trip in a mere three months – possibly on foot. His shoes were immaculate. The rubber on the soles was very white – I wondered if I had indeed been tricked into smoking foul hallucinogenic chemicals.
“How long did it take you?” I asked.
“What?” Pat swatted bats away from his face. They were growing bolder.
“To get here. Did you take a bus at all? Trains?”
“Three months, about. Nobody rides trains anymore. It’s a dead technology. They’ll start tearing up the rails any day now.”
“So you walked?”
“No, I had a bike. I walked some, though, when I got tired.”
“Did the dog walk too?” A white pit bull, her feet wrapped in little bundles of canvas and leather, huddled beside me, growling at the bats.
“No, I carried her in my backpack.”
“Ah. That makes sense.”
Nothing was said for several minutes, until I finally stood up, crushed out my cigarette, and said goodbye. Pat lunged toward me and vigorously shook my hand.
“Hey, man, good settin’ with you! If you ever need to find me, just look around by the square – you can’t miss me. I’m the guy with the bike!”
“Don’t forget the dog. Not many dogs in town with shoes,” I laughed.
Pat looked at me as though I had condoned rape. He turned and left wordlessly, snapping his fingers to summon the dog, who sighed as she got to her feet and gave me a quick glance as if to say “Well, I thought that was a little funny.”
I never saw Pat again, but I did see his dog once not long after the encounter at Granite Creek. She didn’t seem to remember me.
-MJ
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