“But you knifed me in my dirty filthy basement…”

– The Rolling Stones, “Let It Bleed”

She was “just a friend” but she was a very good friend and he’d made this commitment to help so he wasn’t going to back out of it now, even though if he’d been able to find a way he would’ve backed out of it now if at all possible.

But she had to be out of her old apartment by tomorrow morning latest and right now it was already nine or so PM of a mid-summer’s eve in the Year of Our Lord 2000 in the city of Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Her boyfriend was in Thailand for three months and the main character of this story was also taking care of the boyfriend’s apartment for the summer.

The main thing that duty entailed was being the caretaker for a seven and a half foot long, yellow python named Snake Eyes.

Yes, the snake was literally seven and a half feet long. He lived in a huge plywood cage the front of which was covered with chicken wire so you could sit there and look in at the snake and the snake could look out, which is what the main character and the snake were both doing right now.

The main character had initially planned on staying at his friend’s (her boyfriend’s) apartment for the summer while taking care of the snake, until he realized how small the apartment was and how large the snake was.

The apartment was a dumpy run-down studio on the third floor in an especially ragged corner of the Wicker Park neighborhood (before Wicker Park was gentrified) and so, when one slept here on the futon, one was actually sleeping in the exact same room as a seven and a half foot long and yellow constrictor snake whose cage was locked but whom the hero of the story kept dreaming about as he slept on the futon in the tiny rundown studio apartment.

For example, he dreamed that the snake grew hands which were tiny enough to reach through the chicken wire and unlock the cage. Next, the seven and a half foot long and yellow snake opened the cage without a single sound and quietly slithered over to where the main character was peacefully sleeping on the futon. Next, the giant constrictor pounced on the main character’s chest just to wake him up to see the terror in his eyes right before he pressed the main character down and wrapped all of his impossible-to-resist, supernatural power around the main character’s throat and began to squeeze…

Such dreams had haunted the main character every single time he’d tried to sleep in this dumpy apartment with Snake Eyes in the same room.

So he’d had to patch together other sleeping arrangements for the summer, which ended up being a combination of staying part-time with his aging parents, part-time with his brother, part-time with his estranged wife (but not so estranged that she wouldn’t let him stay at her place some of the time), and part-time with his friend who is the other main character (other than Snake Eyes) of this story, who he was supposed to be helping move right now.

She was over there in the Pilsen neighborhood (before it got gentrified) waiting for him right now.

There wouldn’t be much furniture but there would be a lot of boxes and the main character had a very small car.

He felt sorry, very, very sorry, for Snake Eyes who had to stay in his cage for three months.

When Snake Eyes’ owner was in town, he took the snake out of the cage every day or two at the very least and he even wrapped the snake around his shoulders and body and went wandering around the scruffy neighborhood with Snake Eyes, letting neighborhood kids come up and visit the snake and letting the snake get fresh air and see the world a little bit.

The main character wasn’t sure if snakes liked to be visited or not but he was pretty sure the snake must’ve at least appreciated being taken out of the cage and taken for a ride around the neighborhood on the shoulders of his owner.

But this was Chicago so in the wintertime the owner of Snake Eyes just let Snake Eyes out to explore the tiny apartment every day or two.

The owner of Snake Eyes fed Snake Eyes live mice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (which didn’t happen every day) as well as frozen chicken legs.

The main character of this story was too sensitive to the plight of the mouse to feed Snake Eyes live mice, but he knew the snake enjoyed toying with the mouse before he ate it so he did feel sorry that all the snake was getting for three months were frozen chicken legs.

…

The phone rang again and he got up from where he was sitting on the floor in front of the snake’s cage, looking at the snake, feeling sorry for it and drinking another beer. Just as the main character wasn’t sure whether the snake actually enjoyed being visited by neighborhood kids, so he wasn’t sure whether the snake actually enjoyed it when he sat there communing with the snake, looking into its eyes and talking to it a little bit, saying things like, “I’m sure you’d rather be in the jungle than here but we are all stronger at the broken places if we only know it.” It was a lame attempt to console the snake even though he didn’t know how much the snake actually cared, but the snake’s owner had told him he could take the snake out of the cage if he wanted to and didn’t have to if he did not want to. He’d said the cage was large enough for the snake to be okay for three months as long as he was fed properly. “Just make sure he gets fed properly and he’ll be okay until I get back – but feel free to take him out whenever you want to.” He smiled.

The main character walked over to where the phone was still ringing, and he set his beer down next to the window, lit a cigarette, and picked up the phone.

It was another friend of his who lived in Florida. They’d almost gotten married at one point except that he already was (even though he didn’t live with his wife full time), but now she was down in Florida with another guy so why is she calling me? But there wasn’t a reason, except that her boyfriend was out right now and she missed him, i.e. the main character of this story. He sat down to have a brief conversation with her before heading out the door to go help his other friend move all of her precious stuff to the new apartment.

But the conversation turned out to be a longer one than he had initially planned on. Talking on the phone with anyone, anyone at all, made him nervous, so he began to drink and smoke even faster than he already had been. She was going on and on now about how she missed him and couldn’t stand her Florida boyfriend and at some point, without his even realizing it was doing so, the conversation took a fresh turn. It took a fresh turn into a new territory that can only be described as a kind of phone sex where, again, she did almost all the talking and he played along in other ways. This part of the phone conversation was not something he’d planned on, even more so than the conversation itself, and by the time it was all over he looked up with a startled surprise to see that at least another hour, and maybe more, had passed by.

As soon as the conversation was over he hung up the phone then picked it up again and dialed the number of his other friend, the one who was waiting for him to help her move her stuff because she had to be out of her old apartment tonight and her boyfriend was in Thailand. The main character thought to himself: if he were here there would be three of us moving her crap instead of just two but that a’hole has a way of leaving me holding the bag, doesn’t he. He glanced at Snake Eyes, who right at that moment struck the chicken wire of the cage with his yellow-and-white, hard-as-a-rock head with such force that the chicken wire bulged out a little. It was a habit he had. This snake could be as scary as a great white shark almost. The difference was that he wasn’t always that scary.

She was not happy about having to sit around waiting while she was so stressed about getting all her stuff out of her old apartment. The landlord had made threats earlier in the week and she didn’t have a car so there was nothing she could do on her own, since the new apartment was three miles down the road from the old one and all the boxes were heavy. It took him about ten minutes on the phone to get her calmed down but she finally did calm down.

He finished his beer, grabbed a fresh pack of cig’s from the carton, reached into the freezer for the flask of vodka, popped it into his back pocket, made sure he had his wallet and keys, said goodbye to Snake Eyes (“I’ll be back to see you later”), locked the locks on the door, and ran down the three flights of stairs, so fast that he almost felt like he was flying.

Then he burst out into one of the most beautiful mid-summer eves he’d ever been in, or that was what it felt like. He was a moody individual and often, very often, the moods were made up almost entirely of profound JOY for a reason, or reasons, that he himself didn’t even understand.

He walked so fast to his car that it was much faster than some people can run. She (the car) started up right away without any problems and as he turned the radio on he heard to his utter JOY that the radio station the radio was already on was playing “Let It Bleed” by the Rolling Stones, Chicago’s favorite band.

He turned the volume up LOUD and headed across town.

…

His joy, which had already cooled off a little as he approached her place, cooled off even more when he saw her sitting there in the summer’s late evening on the steps of her ex-apartment building smoking a cigarette, because he could already tell from here how upset she was. As he approached her on foot on the sidewalk she looked over at him and he gave her a big smile trying to somehow wordlessly apologize for his after-all-not-that-unusual lateness, and she turned her head away from him toward the other direction down the sidewalk and took a hard drag of her cigarette. As it turned out, she was in a foul mood because, while she was waiting for him, she’d gone to the drugstore for a pack of cigarettes. As she waited in line to buy the cig’s, a huge, naked man had entered the store dripping with sweat and holding a pistol in his hand. Without further ado, the man had jumped up onto the counter next to the cash register wearing nothing but tennis shoes, waved the pistol around at the half dozen people there in the front of the store and informed them all that they were about to die now. As it turned out, when another man in the store came around the corner of the aisle and yelled at the man to shut the hell up, get down off the counter and put the pistol down, the man did exactly as he was told to. The main character of this story’s friend had heard the man telling them all that he was sorry, he was just high and had lost his head for a moment, as she hightailed it out of the store without a new pack of cigarettes.

The main character of this story couldn’t believe, and by that I mean that he literally could not believe, how many boxes she had all packed up and ranged up and down the stairs behind her when she unlocked the triple locks of her soon-to-be-ex-apartment and showed him.

It was only the main character’s desire to get to the bar before the sun came up that made the work go so fast. They knew of several bars both in the city and outside it which stayed open 24-7 but he’d recently realized that when he stayed up all night drinking and swapping yarns on into the morning hour, as the sun rose his spirits sank so very low that nearly suicidal depressions were starting to descend upon him at that time, a thing that had never happened before until recently, when he was in his early thirties. As a younger man, he’d stayed up well past the dawn on many and many an occasion with no ill effects, but such was the case no longer. Last year, a good friend had put a loaded pistol to his head when the cocaine ran out at sunrise and pulled the trigger in another town. Somehow he didn’t die, but he would never walk or talk again most likely. When the main character visited him, his friend had scrawled on a piece of paper that he didn’t mind, at all, not talking or being a member of the rat race any more; and the main character had (almost) understood that very well.

So the work of moving a million boxes off the stairs and three miles across town in his small car went off rather quickly in the scheme of things because of his desire to get to the bar before that lucky ol’ sun started rising. Using all of the car’s trunk and back seat and moving fast like a maniac in between swigs of vodka is what did the trick. They were only pulled over by the cops once and the main character was able to instantly sober up and talk his way out of it just as he’d been able to do every single time he’d ever been pulled over while intoxicated, sometimes he himself didn’t even know why or how. As he placed the last box on the top of the last pile of boxes in her brand-new one-room studio apartment, she stepped over and gave him a huge kiss on the cheek. Wow and whoa, that had never happened before.

They made it to the bar by perhaps two in the morning which, for this bar, was not really all that late at all. The bar was filled with men dressed as women and women dressed as men and other so-called “hipster”-like figures who all looked around themselves out of their cool eyes as if they were snakes trapped in a cage that they loved. The main character and his great, beautiful friend found themselves a spot at the bar and ordered tequila. At some point he noticed that she now was wearing a bright red, silky scarf drawn tightly around her beautiful throat. He realized then, again, for the millionth time just how beautiful she was, with her long, thick, flowing, black-as-night hair and her gigantic, long-lashed, oval-shaped dark eyes that sometimes seemed to see everything and the very, very, very short polka-dotted skirt she was wearing. To this day he doesn’t know how it happened but suddenly he realized that she and he were holding hands underneath the bar, and then on top of the bar. Her boyfriend, who was in Thailand for the summer, had several friends who were in this bar right now.

Somehow, without either of them knowing quite how exactly, they very soon found themselves back in her new apartment rolling around on the floor amongst the boxes, pressing each other, devouring each other’s mouths with kisses, hugging, holding, feeling, touching in all the privates places you can possibly imagine – almost. It wasn’t full-on sex exactly but it was enough to qualify as “cheating” almost certainly, at least in the minds of some people, like the guy in Thailand who was, after all anyway, probably returning the favor over there in Thailand right now.

She fell asleep right in the middle of another kiss and that was when the main character looked up at the windows to see the gray light of dawn starting to peek in.

He hurried away, and as he stepped out into the street that just kept on growing lighter he realized that there was something he still needed to do, that if he didn’t do this thing, he would somehow not be fulfilling his duty to the Universe.

So now he was back in the other apartment, sitting on the floor with a fresh beer beside him, staring at Snake Eyes right in the eyes as the seven and a half foot long yellow python stared straight back at him.

The main character undid the lock of the cage and raised the chicken wire.

He gently leaned the whole top half of his body into the dark cage toward the snake who just turned his head away.

He had held the snake once before when his friend was in town, but right now he simply could not believe how heavy Snake Eyes was as he pulled the snake from the cage and somehow, with the snake’s help, got it up and wrapped it around his shoulders – and around his neck.

He felt the snake’s massive body tighten a little around his neck.

But only a little.

And he took the snake for a long, long walk around the block and out into the park and back so he could breathe the fresh air and feel the warmth of the morning summer sun in all its beauty.

As he did so, he was absolutely positive that Snake Eyes was enjoying himself.

They made it back to the apartment and the main character of this story passed out drunk on his friend’s futon with Snake Eyes curled up right next to him, believe it or not.

And he had a dream.

In the dream, he dreamed that Snake Eyes and he were in the Garden of Eden rolling dice with the Devil, and they had rolled double sixes, and they had won the pot. The Devil disappeared – that is, he vanished in front of their eyes – permanently.

No more failure, no more humiliation, no more confusion, no more self-hatred, no more temptation, no more being put down – no more coming out on the losing end. In a town full of losers, they were pulling out of there to win.

The Drifter

(Images by The Drifter)