Snake Shack

It seems no matter what the state of the world, one can never avoid the New York City dog-days of August.  It's a kind of spell that descends on everything-- a unique bio-chemical atmospheric effect, the set-up of which requires 4 consecutive days of maximum heat and humidity with no noticeable cool-down.  The scent of everything wafts together like an old bad song-- damp animal fur, sweaty humans, car exhaust, fragrant foliage and most of all garbage-- food, organic dog-waste and that indescribable stench that reaches for you from the back of every urban sanitation truck in the universe. Couple that with the image that every inhabitant of the city exhaled all at once.  

Pandemic-empty trains are a thing of the past.  We are crammed in once again on platforms, in cars, absorbing way too much intimate physiological information about our fellow riders. Monkeypox-- other nightmarish summer threats, like shingles and vicious itchy rashes... normal insect bites are relatively benign if you're lucky enough to score an outdoor gig where you watch the little buggers feed on your playing arm. 

Some people leapfrog from air-conditioned room to room-- home to office, bars, restaurants, supermarkets, theaters.  I am still without this luxury... and while older age brings with it lower body temperatures, these days can be brain-cooking and challenging.  My laptop radiates heat like a small furnace, and I hesitate to open windows which let in no breeze but plenty of exhaust from my neighbors' window-units.  

Snake-weather, our young and beautiful live-in housekeeper from South Carolina called it.  Retha slept in a room down the hall from us where the only summer appliance in those 1950's days was a huge attic fan that blew air from the roof down a flight of stairs to nominally cool things off at night.  The sound of the crickets outside was like a symphony... the windows had to be thrown open to maximize circulation.  Before we went to sleep, Retha would recount tales of life in the South... mostly snake-lore.  It terrified me.  They come up the sides of the house, she explained-- wrap themselves around the pipes and slide along the eaves.... they even break the windows with their head-- the ones that have a blunt nose like a hammer.  But we had screens... I protested.  They turn themselves into spaghettis, she said... slips right through and comes together on the other side. Same with the shower-- they comes right through the holes-- they love the water.  Baths only for me.

I could smell the snakes at night... I could hear them slithering around in the flower-beds, coiling themselves around the garden-hose.  When the lights went out, I could see shadows in my sister's dust ruffles, moving.  After a particularly vivid tale one night I vomited.  There were serpents in my mythology books--- I stuck pages together so I wouldn't see... some of them had snake-hair or human heads. It was too much.  

I guess I was 3 or 4-- I'd broken my leg in some spectacular playground feat that failed... so I was less mobile.  My mother had the brilliant idea of taking me to the Bronx Zoo snake house... the hair of the dog?  Anyway, in my cast, I was wheeled around helplessly from cage to cage, from glass cube to cube with these monstrous slimy slidey creatures hissing and coiling and uncoiling like one of those slinky toys.  I remember the smell... it was August, like now. No air conditioning in those days... according to Retha, that's how the snakes liked it... hot and humid-- tropical.  There was one gigantic snake with this spectacular elaborate diamond pattern-- like argyll socks in pinks and blues... pressed up against its window... I puked up my cotton candy and whatever else.  Retha had to clean me up later. My mother was highly disappointed in me and the fact that her housewife psychology had backfired.  But the bedtime stories continued-- with that fascination kids have with horror tales... and the nightmares kept on.  I was chased, I was stalked... I was surrounded, fell in a pit of writhing legless bodies... they dropped from the skies like a Biblical plague.  I woke my sister, had to save her from the under-bed reptiles.  

Still, I never ratted on Retha.  I adored her... her cosmetic rituals and hair-braiding... her incomparable black skin.  We'd go to the store and men glared at her.  She was sexy, although I knew little of that then.  Eventually she was fired.  My mother told my sister she was pregnant... I had no idea what it meant, but with her plaid suitcase in hand, she put my hand on her bump and told me she'd swallowed a damn snake.  It seemed plausible.  

What other animal has those incredible patterns on their skin?  I mean-- there are zebras and leopards and tigers-- but the exotic pictures on reptiles?  For years I never really liked tattoos.  There's a famous anecdote about some old bluesman asking Mark Wenner of the Nighthawks why he done went and made a freak of himself.  Another remarked to me backstage how he can't figure why white people like to turn themselves into snakes.  I dated a guy with a snake tattooed on his arm and I couldn't bring myself to touch it.  In the end it was sort of a dealbreaker.  And a reminder, although my mother assured me there are no snakes in New York City, there are plenty, lol. 

Today I passed a huge glass cage that had been discarded on the sidewalk, close to the river.  It was big as a room, with decorative rocks...and kind of flat.  Obviously it had housed a snake... I wondered whether it had died of natural causes or slipped out in the dog days of summer to find some hot shade in which to coil or molt. Rats don't bother me-- mice, cockroaches... I'm a city girl.  But the image of a slithery stray moonbathing on the sewer grate gave me a hot shiver.

Retha promised to write even though I could barely read.  I guess she forgot, or as I later learned, our mother censored mail.  I wonder what her baby was like, and whether without her tales of swamp horror, whether I'd have tolerated reptiles the way I still don't.  I have an ex-boyfriend who turned out to be secretly married-- for decades. Not just a lying cheater but a cheating liar.  When I called him a snake, he had no idea of the depth of revulsion it conveyed.  I guess in these air-conditionless August nights, when we play back summer scenes from a life, when dog-day feverish sleep induces nightmares, the modern urban versions have at last replaced the ones from childhood.  Not sure which are worse.  Snake-days.