Getting Rid of a Python
Welcoming the year of the snake by remembering my weirdest pet
The following is the first chapter of a memoir I have been writing about my doomed attempt to co-found an internet game company in Singapore in 1995. It is snake-themed and, with the year of the snake arriving this Wednesday, I thought I’d publish it here.
1995
I had to get rid of a python.
This was not straightforward. The snake was thirteen feet long and weighed as much as a Rottweiler. You couldn’t just tape up a note with a bunch of tear-away phone-number tabs in the Peets Coffee down in the Castro. Home wanted for large snake. Loves baths. Eats live rabbits monthly. Hazardous to pets and small children. Or put her in a padded box on the corner like you would a litter of kittens. None of my friends had any business caring for a Burmese python. I had no business caring for a Burmese python, but I’d been doing it since my then girlfriend, Michelle, had gifted it to me.
That conversation, three years previously, had gone like this:
Her: “Hey, my friend’s son has a Burmese python that he can’t take care of any more. I know you like snakes. Do you want to adopt it?”
Me (trying to recall how big Burmese pythons get and playing for time): “Can I think about it?”
The next day I came home from grad school and the snake was in my apartment, in a much too small enclosure, with an infestation of some kind of snake lice and an unshed scale obscuring one eye.
I took the BART train from San Francisco across the bay to Berkeley, where there was an exotic reptile store, and bought a paperback guide to Burmese python ownership. The first paragraph boiled down to, “You, an idiot, should not own this snake.” I also bought a brick of frozen rats, stuck together like miserable, furry burritos, and lugged it home. I was still not the weirdest person on BART.
Michelle dumped me three weeks later because she had correctly determined that I wasn’t marriage material. She did this in her car at four in the morning as she dropped me off for my internship at a radio morning show. It was as gentle as a 4AM curbside dumping could be. Who could blame her? I was an overweight grad student with rock-and-roll hair and no discernible income who rented a discounted apartment from his father along with two buds. And I owned an absurd snake.
The snake stayed. I eradicated the lice, removed the old scale obscuring her eye, and, in a masterstroke of improvised carpentry, designed and built a new enclosure. This was eight feet long, four feet wide and two feet high, with sliding plexiglass doors and electric light and heating. This was my first carpentry since Mr. Eckstein’s woodshop class in seventh grade. It was my masterpiece.
For all her size, the python was docile. Mostly. Feeding time was the exception. In the rat days, I would chip a frozen rat off the block in the freezer and thaw it in a pot of warm water on the stove. I did not have a dedicated pot for simmering rats. Occasionally the rat would break in half coming off the block, and I would thaw two halves trailing rat innards. By the time the rat was soft and warm, the python could smell it coming, and she transformed from dozy and inert to fast moving, gimlet-eyed predator. She bit me twice, both times in feeding accidents.
Here is advice. When a ninety pound snake has plunged dozens of razor-edged, backward-curved teeth into your hand and is trying to squeeze the life out of your arm, the trick is to not freak out. There isn’t much to do but wait the snake out. Eventually, she will figure out her mistake and let go. You can speed this up a bit by hauling her to the bathtub, affixed to your arm, and running cold water over her head.
Having learned the hard way, I duct-taped a plastic spatula onto a six-foot broomstick and used this to shovel thawed rats into the enclosure from a safe distance. I named this contraption the “ratula”. When the snake graduated to live rabbits, the ratula was no longer an option. A rabbit will not sit still at the end of a ratula while you ladle it towards a colossal serpent. It was back to waiting for the python’s attention to wander, then quickly opening the enclosure, hurling the rabbit in, and slamming it shut as fast as possible while the snake tried to determine which moving object was food and which was a hand, or if there was even any meaningful difference.
Rabbits do not go quietly.
Did you know that Burmese pythons can grow up to 18 feet long and 200 pounds? You, an utter idiot, should not own this snake.
When my father moved back to his four story Victorian after a year in New York, I and my surviving roommate, Jose, were cast out from the top two floors with the deck and the expansive view of San Francisco’s Castro and back into the subterranean gloom of the one-bedroom basement apartment. This was fair, and what I could actually almost afford. Jose was more reliably employed, so he got the bedroom. I slept in the living room, on a futon on top of the snake enclosure.
Having your bed on a giant-snake enclosure is a powerful sorting mechanism for potential romantic partners. The reactions were binary. There were women I never heard from again, and there were women who were strangely fascinated. God knows what they thought it said about my psyche. While still living upstairs we had a transient roommate named Duncan, whose girlfriend (French) was entranced with the snake. She persuaded Duncan to have me photograph the two of them nude on the couch with the snake draped around them. This was before Instagram, so my father still owns that couch.
Sleeping on a futon top of the snake cage was mostly fine. The snake would sometimes get restless in the middle of the night and push her log around, which was noisy. But the real problem came when she relieved herself. As a python, she only ate once a month, and she shit on about the same schedule. This usually happened during one of her regular bathtub soaks. But every now and then in the middle of the night a torrent of concentrated snake urine and a couple of pounds of thoroughly digested rabbit would gush forth.
This was a mood killer. Python turds are like something you would shovel out of the slag layer of a reactor that ran on a mix of bunker oil and roadkill. There was no leaving it until morning. It didn’t matter how late it was or how stoned or hung over or having sex I was. If the snake let it rip, it was lights on, haul the snake out and throw her in the shower (which she loved), grab a trowel and bucket and get to work.
You, a complete idiot, should definitely not own this snake.
Now, three years after Michelle had ambush-gifted me the python, I had to get rid of it because I was moving to Singapore.
The snake had more business in Singapore than I did. Pythons are indigenous to Singapore. I was indigenous to San Francisco. A few weeks previously, my only exposure to Singapore had been Singapore Airlines ads on TV. (“Singapore Girl, you’re a great way to fly!” It was the nineties.) I couldn’t have located Singapore on a globe. Something something Asia something. Didn’t they whip that American kid for spray-painting a Mercedes?
I poured the snake into a green “Brute” garbage can and drove back out to the exotic reptile store in Berkeley where I’d bought the book that had warned me that I, a comprehensive idiot, should most definitely not own this snake. Since then, she’d grown fifty percent longer and I’d discovered from an animal control officer that I had interviewed for the radio that it was illegal to own Burmese pythons in San Francisco. Don’t worry, she said, I won’t report you.
I took the lid off the can and showed her to the man at the reptile store. She was coiled placidly in the bottom. “Moving to Singapore to start an Internet game company,” I offered in my defense. I’m sure that was a new one. Or maybe not. I don’t know. I was evidently not the first person to show up trying to offload a surplus mega-snake, and they accepted her.
The snake did not care. Snakes do not pine. A snake will not fight its way across the wilderness to find its long lost owner.
There was no guidebook for moving to Singapore to do a startup on the shelves of the reptile store, or any other store. If there had been, I am sure the first paragraph would have boiled down to, “You, an idiot, should not move to Singapore to start an Internet game company.”
I’ve been working on and off on this memoir for the past few years. It’s provisionally titled “Renegades: Adventure and catastrophe at the dawn of the Internet boom.” My ambition has always been to try to publish it as a book. But if I get sufficient readership here, perhaps I’ll publish it on Substack. I suppose this could be interpreted as a threat.
I wish all readers a prosperous year of the snake!
Absolutely womderful. Challenge accepted. I'll read the memoir in whatever form.
Great story!
Mr. Eckstein's woodshop class. I remember making the lamp, because it's still on my mom's night stand. And I remember the term handburger - don't touch the power sander when it's on.