Member-only story
The Writing Advice That Changed Everything For Me
It involves…snakes. Stick with me.
I’m not one to take inspiration from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure but go with me on this one. There’s a scene in the movie where Pee-wee suddenly encounters a fire in a pet store. He races in, releases the animals, one by one, from their cages. The chimpanzee, the dogs, and even the birds and fish tanks find their way out.
Each time he returns he recoils from the snakes. Bypassing them to see what else could be salvaged. Best to leave the snakes for last, he thinks. Finally, when there are no more animals left to save, he rushes out of the burning shop, hands full of snakes, and collapses.
When I was a teenager, my mother sent me down to the corner Optimo to buy smokes. I sifted through the racks of all the magazines I couldn’t afford to buy when a man walked in with a snake wound around his neck. The issue of Big Bopper I was reading fell to the floor. I inched backward. So far back I was up against the porno magazines they used to wrap in brown paper. I’d never seen a snake before.
Sure, I’d grown up in Brooklyn — encountered dens of them, pockets of cobras in the church pews and under the hallway carpets of the buildings in which we lived — but never the literal kind.
I grew up around the dope sick, in a neighborhood where the trash was collected faster than the bodies, but this snake had me nearly apoplectic. I gasped, and the man turned around and laughed. Pinched a smoke between his lips when he asked if I was Rosie’s kid. He nodded in the direction of the pack of Kent 100s on the counter and a book of matches. Everyone knew my mother — even the kind of cigarettes she smoked.
The man told me the snake was harmless. He unwound it from his body and placed it over mine. I remember the weight of it on my shoulders. The cool, leather skin against my neck. It was the color of daises past their prime.
