Snake Smitten

Everyone that year was talking of financial meltdown and war without end, heads bent low and fingering the lint in their coat pockets. I was thinking of snakes.

I'd just been let go from my job as private waiter to Manhattan's elite. I should've been boiling up ramen and polishing my resume. But sometimes the push of obligation unleashes the pull of desire.

Desire. For years now I’d been dealing in other people’s overfunded whims—Baccarat boats of glistening black caviar, the fine froth of champagne. But these things bored me. Since boyhood, I’d pressed down my own desire. Now it surged up like an exhortation: go to Africa and seek out the resplendent, deadly Gaboon viper, a monster in the leaf litter.

Looking for a killer snake in rural Cameroon can put you in funny company.

I met a witchdoctor who showed me a stinking, pickled mamba’s head used for boils. Later we watched the inauguration of Barack Obama on an ancient black and white, surrounded by a clutch of patients all woozy and slumped and chained at the ankles.

I met a sorcerer who promised me an astral voyage to see the viper. His assistants spit on me and slathered my body with mustardy goo. I marched in my boxers around a hole that burped great plumes of smoke. I saw no serpent, cosmic or otherwise.

And then I met Banabat. Wit, raconteur, scion of a family of reptile hunters: Banabat showed me a world. He told me of the wicked tortoise (‘if you want to drive away a Bafia man, show him a tortoise’) and how to tame a baboon. Once, when I picked up a fat, barbed caterpillar he slit its belly and smeared the cooling guts on my burning hand.

In a dusty little cafe I showed him how to use email. He writes me now about his children and the death of his father, the great hunter. For a week his village shook with tears and singing. Reading that email back in Brooklyn I felt something strange and new: homesick.