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.
