PET SNAKE

My friend James was quite a successful drug dealer in Sydney. He had acquired this snake when he was a kid, growing up in Perth. Apparently, the snake had been attacked by a crocodile, and he found it and saved it. It was small at the time and he nursed it back to health and kept it. He loved this fucking snake.

He moved out to Sydney years later and brought the snake with him. It was big as fuck by then and covered in scars from the croc attack. It was an eight-foot long water python, but it was a really nice snake.

James lived in this big ass house in Bondi Beach when he got arrested and sentenced to a year in jail. He asked me and my friend Nate if we would stay in his house while he did his time and look after the snake. Of course we would. The place was fucking insane. He also had a boat and a BMW M3 that came with the house. Taking care of this snake was a really big deal to James.

We moved in to live with this huge snake. It didn’t have a name—we just called it “Snake.” It didn’t have a terrarium either. It would just slither around the house like a fucking cat. I took the main bedroom and that’s where the snake would sleep. It had a massive Louis Vuitton bag with a heating pad inside that it would curl up in. I woke up a lot of mornings after the snake had slithered into my bed and wrapped itself around my feet. It was very affectionate. One time I had a girl over and when we woke up in my bed the next morning, the snake had wrapped itself around both of our legs. She didn’t even mind! I think she was from Perth, too. I really liked the snake and became pretty attached to it. I don’t know very much about snakes, but I know this one was different.

Three times a week we’d go buy mice to feed it from the pet store. We didn’t want anyone to know that we had a huge python living in a drug dealer’s house with no terrarium in Bondi Beach because that’s probably illegal, so we’d always lie to the people at the pet store about why we were buying all these mice. We’d say they were pets for our girlfriends. The snake ate a mouse every day. I’d fill the bathtub and throw a mouse in, and the snake would get so stoked and hustle over to get in the tub. He’d freak out and fuck around with the mouse a bit before chowing it. It was pretty rad, but after a month it didn’t even interest me anymore. I’d just throw the mouse in the water and walk away.

Everything was going well until about four months into our housesitting when one day we couldn’t find the snake. It wasn’t in the Louis Vuitton bag and we couldn’t find it anywhere in the house. I got pretty worried after a whole day went by because James would fucking murder us if anything happened to his snake. Our one responsibility was to take care of it. Three days went by and we could not find it. I was tripping. We had people over to the house one night and I thought someone might’ve left the door open and the snake got out, but in Bondi Beach we would’ve heard real quick about a python in the neighborhood. I was scouring the local news channels because there was no way an eight-foot water python with scars all over it wouldn’t be a headline story.

I looked in that Louis Vuitton bag at least a hundred times before we reached the point where we had to tell James, and then we’d be killed by him. He still had over six months in jail to cool down about it, but I doubted he would ever cool down about his snake being gone. He would murder us.

On the fifth day, we went out to party, but I wasn’t in the mood because I was pretty stressed out about the missing snake. We went back to the house and a couple girls came over to chill there. We stayed up pretty late and I was dozing off when one of the girls went into the bathroom. She started fucking screaming. Like, hysterical screaming. I didn’t know what happened, so I ran into the bathroom and found her standing against the wall with her pants around her ankles screaming at the toilet. I looked in the toilet and the fucking snake’s head was poking out of the hole. It was smiling at me! I was so happy.

I yelled at Nate to come in the bathroom. “The snake is back!” We were hyped. It must’ve crawled into the toilet to be in the water and then got lost down the sewer pipes. He was down there for five days! We were cheering and celebrating, which must’ve scared the snake because it backed away down into the toilet. We couldn’t get him out, so I called Animal Services and asked if they could get my pet snake out of the toilet. Two massive dudes came over with a stick with a noose on the end and pulled the snake out. It must be a common occurrence in Australia because they knew exactly what they were doing. I was praying they weren’t gonna ask to see the terrarium because I don’t know what they would’ve done when I showed them the Louis Vuitton bag.

When they pulled eight feet of python out of the toilet, it started going crazy and freaking out because it was so scared. It was covered in shit from the sewer and was flopping all over the place. It was such a mess, but I didn’t even care because I was so happy to get him back.

James got out of jail a few months later. The day he was released, I was waiting for him on the street outside the prison with a big Louis Vuitton bag. He was stoked.