The Python Dream

by Alex

It gets cold in Chicago at night, and the radiator starts hissing and spitting in the darkness to keep me toasty warm. As a Californian I appreciate its presence although I am unaccustomed to it. There are two major side effects of this: First, I wake up in the middle of night since, as a light sleeper, said hissing and spitting tends to rip the shroud of morpheus from my brow, if you know what I’m saying. Second, I get really dehydrated.

One result of living two years in Papua New Guinea is my keen appreciation for the very simple things in life – being dry, being clean, freshly washed clothes, and so forth. And so I happen to take an enormous amount of elementally simple pleasure in waking up at four in the morning, straggling out to the kitchen, drinking half a pitcher of ice cold water, and then falling fast asleep in bed again. This enjoyment is also enhanced by my completely irrational and yet deeply held theory that drinking tons and tons of water makes you more healthy. Anyway. So while I sort of resent living in a cold climate and being dehydated and awakened, I’ve learned to find the silver lining.

The problem, of course, is that this sort of behavior deeply upsets the enormous fifty-foot long python who watches over me as I sleep. Hell, just geting him to ignore the urban racoons who forage in my trash cans was hard enough. But he seems almost constitutionally unable to not get freaked out when I stumble out of bed for some water. Which is fair of course, since his job as sacred guardian python is to, well, guard me.

Like most guardian animals, he mostly just chills out and falls asleep like I do. But this thing’s got a hair-trigger alertness to sounds. I start snoring and the thing wakes up and starts going ballistic. It’s like an out of control postcolonial Rikki Tikki Tavi where the snake is the guardian and mongoose is the bad guy (although in this case it would be racoons). Its immediate reaction, understandably enough given his ‘constrictor’ status, is to coil. A while back – when it was really bad – he accidentally scrunched my copy of The Nuer in his massively protective serpent-coily grip. That was when I had to order him one of those long, orthopedic collumnular pillows for people with bad backs. I thought he could squeeze it as, you know, a security blanket kinda thing. Constricting makes him happy, know what I’m saying? Gives him a sense of purpose. And I’m not willing to let any other classic Africanist Monographs go to waste, hey?

I don’t know why I have so much more trouble than the other people in my family. We’ve been doing this for the better part of a century. It all began when my great-grandfather, Shmuel Masterson, was unwitting drafted into the Czar’s army at the height of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904. Poor guy got shuttled off to the Amur river basin where, in his gentle big-heartedness, he noticed a wounded garden snake in the road and, rather than killing it, kindly took it in his hands and released it into the forest. How could he have known it was the Serpent Diety, fresh off the loosing end of a prolonged Hanuman-the-monkey-god vs. Serpent Diety matchup? And don’t get me wrong – it’s not like we Mastersons aren’t grateful. I mean, the 20th century was a bad time for Jews in Eastern Europe. There’s nothing quite like watching a fifty-foot guardian python crush seven SS officers in its adamantium-like grip to make it clear that maybe this is the time you should start implementing your long-term plan of becoming a greengrocer in Brooklyn. And lots of the quick members of my family still rely on the herpetological surveillance that is my blood kin’s inheiritance. Linda swears by her python, after all.

But ultimately I find the python more trouble than he’s worth. Which isn’t to say that I don’t love him, mind you. It’s just that it’s one thing to have to buy an extra seat on the plane for your gigantic fifty foot python guardian everytime you fly. But these days? Man – forget it. They don’t even let you on the plane with metal rods in your shoes, much less an enormous constricter snake that can understand human speech and is hyper-anti-nazi. It’s like: “What’s that in the framepack then, sir?” “Uh… well, see, back in 1904…”

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not blaming him. It’s my issue, something I need to work through. I’m just saying – sometimes I get thirsty is all.