At Bill Chase’s, Heyward and I befriended another animal dealer, Ben Johnson. Since he was confined to a wheelchair, we offered to lend him a hand anytime he needed to move big animals. He wasn’t comfortable with venomous snakes, which he would ask us to hold until he found a buyer.
Once, we housed a fourteen-foot reticulated python for him, the first I’d ever handled. The young chap who worked for Ben had it at his house. While cleaning the cage, he turned around and the snake struck his back. The four rows of long, sharp teeth in its upper jaw and the two rows in the lower jaw left a perfect pattern. We were amazed it could open its mouth 180 degrees wide. His girlfriend refused to entertain it any longer, so we kept it. From a distance, it seemed calm, like my pet Indian python at Kodai, but it was quick to snap when we approached it. We treated the irascible snake with an abundance of caution.
One morning, I woke up on hearing a scraping sound. The python was shedding its skin as it crawled around the bed. Without waking Dottie, I tiptoed into the living room, where its box stood open. Merely latching it hadn’t been enough. I ought to have known better since my Indian python, which had been much smaller, also escaped from his box. I set the container on the side, propped the lid open with a hook and draped a rug over it. I pondered what to do next. If I grabbed it, it would bite, and we’d wake up Dottie. I poked its body more than halfway down its length, standing away from its head so that it wasn’t threatened, and it started making its way across the smooth floor.
Whenever it paused, I prodded to keep it moving. The hassled snake made straight for the only dark corner in the living room—its box. Once it was inside, I closed the lid, and this time I locked it with a padlock. Dottie slept through this episode. Ben sold the snake soon afterwards.
The python’s skin had sloughed in one long, intact piece. When I went to the Everglades next, as a prank, I draped it on some palmettos to freak out an unsuspecting snake hunter. I never heard if anyone came across it. Ironically, decades later, Burmese pythons would rule the wetland.
When Ben had a big consignment arrive from Bolivia, he called Rick, Heyward and me for help after hours. At the airport cargo terminal were two crates labelled ‘LIVE REPTILES—KEEP OUT OF THE SUN’. We loaded them on to Ben’s pickup truck and drove over to his animal shed. While Heyward and Rick worked on one crate, I pried the lid off another and peeked inside. A bag bulged as if it were stuffed with watermelons.
‘Careful, Rom,’ Ben said. ‘I think a huge anaconda is in that one.’ I opened the sack and at the bottom was a huge snake with small, sleepy eyes at the top of its wide head. An anaconda this big must be a female. I reached in to secure a neck grip when she struck like a lightning bolt. A dozen razor-sharp teeth slashed my right hand. I wasn’t about to lose face with my friends, so without reacting, I wiped the blood on the bag and continued with the job. This time I pressed her head down through the cloth with my left hand and then gripped her neck with my right. She reacted instantly—all twelve muscle-bound feet of her poured out of the sack. Her coils groped for a hold and found me. Wrapped up in anaconda, I staggered over to the enclosure where she was to live. My pals, meanwhile, stopped working and were beside themselves with laughter. Neither Rick nor Heyward offered to help.
‘Will someone unwrap this goddamn snake?’ I sputtered. I unravelled the fat, muscular tail from my neck and felt a sudden rush of warm, sticky liquid. She had showered me with shit. I was a stinking mess from head to toe, with a few hairballs sticking to my shirt.
After getting the monster into her box, I washed as best as I could, but my so-called buddies made me ride in the back of the pickup. About ten months into my job, Bill finally allowed me to extract venom from moccasins in front of visitors on days he was away or preoccupied with other work. Until then, he refused to allow me to handle any venomous snakes, even though I was catching them in the wild every week. I must have passed some competence test and felt proud of myself.
Even though the visitors to the serp were scared of snakes, I could tell they were interested and enjoyed seeing them. Most of them didn’t have a clue about reptiles and only came because their kids dragged them in.
Once the older people saw what Bill was doing, they became fascinated. Bill put on a good show too. If only I could do this in India! An idea to set up a serpentarium in India began to take shape. The country was full of cobras. No one there was doing anything like Bill. The only people involved with snakes were snake charmers, who were a bunch of charlatans, sleight-of-hand experts. They played on people’s fear and superstitions, and used snakes to attract crowds before performing their magic tricks and selling bogus snakebite remedies. Perhaps a serpentarium would be a hit.
Excerpted with permission from Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: My Early Years by Janaki Lenin and published by Harper Collins.
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