confessions of a serial snake kisser
Hi there. My name is Michael, and I’m a snakeaholic.
They told me the first step to recovery is admittin’ I have a problem, so I came here to confess that I’m addicted to snake kissin’.
It didn’t happen overnight. You know how it works – you’re at the playground, the teachers are gossipin’ over by the seesaws, and two of the older kids come over and say, “Hey – check this out, man.” And there it is – some little garter snake they’ve been houndin’ around the junglebars the whole recess. They’ve got it cupped in their hands, and they say, “You wanna kiss? We dare ya. You’re not chicken, are ya?” All the cool kids are doin’ it, so the next thing you know, you’re puckerin’ up for some forked tongue action.
The garter snakes were fun for recess, but after a while the thrill wore off, ya know? So I started experimentin’ with other things – lizards, snails, eventually full-grown box turtles. I was kissin’ scales so much my lips were getting crusty. My mom started makin’ me wear chapstick – she had no clue. I was her little angel. I was in fifth grade.
By seventh grade I was lickin’ slugs.
In high school my parents – they had no idea what they were doing – bought me my first pet: a boa. Four feet long. It was better than Christmas! But I was sinkin’ deeper and deeper into my own private hell. My friends started spendin’ the night at my house two, three nights a week, just to get some lippy-smack off that boa.
Things started fallin’ apart in eleventh grade. I was at the pet store with some friends, checkin’ out the reptiles, when something just snapped and we decided to rip the store off. We tore the tops off a few terrariums and started shovin’ snakes down our pockets, shirts, anywhere they’d fit. Joe dumped a bucket of hamsters on the cashier’s head so we could escape, but we didn’t get far. The cops found us under the main overpass in town. They knew where to look – they’d seen that kind of thing before, they knew where all the local puckersnakin’ happened.
When Dad threatened to take my boa away, I moved in with a friend whose parents were both members of this cult that did nothin’ but kiss snakes. That’s when my real addiction began. They wanted me to join ’em, and I felt like it was heaven. They had this stash of every kinda snake you could imagine. It was one huge lickyscale buffet after another, sometimes lastin’ all night and through the next day as well. I never noticed what it was doin’ to me. It was a place where I belonged, ya know? A place where people really understood me, and that’s all that mattered.
I got a job at the pet store in the next town, and that lasted a few months until they finally got a load of what was happenin’ with the reptile department. So then I had no job. Eventually I started stealin’ snakes from the cult so I could have them around twenty-four hours a day, and they kicked me out.
I had nowhere to turn. I was stealin’ lunch money from little kids just so I could buy a measly snail from the local French place when the cops found me and locked me up. They charged me with animal abuse, but the judge felt sorry for me, bein’ young and all, and that’s how I ended up here at the Ronald McDonald Home for Reptile Addicts.
They say it’s a long road to recovery. It took me fourteen years to ride my snake-kissin’ journey straight to the bottom of hell, but I’m grateful for the chance now to live a healthy life. It’s hard to imagine a day without smooth scales pressed against my chapped lips, but I’m gonna to do it. I know there’s a better life than this, and I’m ready.
I may be a snakeaholic, but my forked-tongue days are over.
