MORROW: Long-legged. Kind of wobbly.
BURROUGHS: Well, I guess.
MORROW: You seem to be an expert on snakes too, and spiders.
BURROUGHS: Well, snakes I don’t care about—well, not always. The relative potency of the venoms—the most, I suppose, drop to drop, is between a krait and a sea snake, a yellow-bellied sea snake. All sea snakes are poisonous. And some of them are deadly poisonous. The fatal dose of a sea snake or a krait is about one or two milligrams, it’s a thirty-second of a grain, a tiny amount. But a krait, it’s about—you can almost never pick them up; sea snakes, it just doesn’t happen. People are bitten by the kraits. And even with immediate antivenom, your chances are only fifty-fifty. Without antivenom, they’re nil. Get the table lamp, I’ve got a snake book here somewhere, it shows the number of people bitten and their deaths … (Looking at book.) You’ve got, like, people bitten by a cobra, 150 deaths … ten or twelve, this was with antivenom, of course. Now we get to the krait. Number of people bitten, nine; deaths, eight.
MORROW: This is where?
BURROUGHS: India. It shows the relative potency of the venom. Now, the bushmaster, which is a huge snake, it’s got to be twelve, fifteen feet long and as big around as that. (Gesturing.) But they have a very weak venom. It’s two hundred milligrams is the fatal dose—imagine, two hundred milligrams as opposed to one milligram. But they’ve got a hell of a lot of it. That’s their … They can shoot in a jigger full of their venom. The shock of that, without a doubt, leaves you dead in a few minutes. If they had a potent venom like the krait they’d really be a terror. Probably the most dangerous of all the snakes, well, the most dangerous snake, is probably the black mamba.
MORROW: Where is that?
BURROUGHS: In Africa. They’re very potent. I think fifteen milligrams is the fatal dose. They’ve got a lot of it. They get to be eleven feet long.
MORROW: How did you gather up all this information?
BURROUGHS: Various places, like in books.
MORROW: Any idea why you would be interested in snakes? It’s not like you keep snakes.
BURROUGHS: No, I don’t keep snakes.
MORROW: Any idea why?
BURROUGHS: Never ask anyone “why.” (Laughter.) Never ask anyone “why.” They’ve got a little bladder of poisonous venoms. Of course, the black widow has a very potent venom, you can [inaudible] a tiny amount, it’ll make people deathly sick. It’s not fatal for a healthy adult but it makes you very, very sick indeed. Gives you terrible stomach cramps.
MORROW: What kind of snakes do you have around here?
BURROUGHS: We have a team this year, they’ve caught about fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of snakes. We’ve caught copperheads. They have quite a weak venom. These snake handlers get their reputation handling copperheads. It’s about the same potency as the bushmaster. That is, two hundred milligrams is the fatal dose. But no copperhead would have anywhere near that much. They probably have fifty milligrams at the most so people very rarely die from a copperhead bite. So they got copperheads, and they got a [inaudible]. Small, about that big (Gesturing.), but Dean milked it for me just to show me how it’s done. He’s not into the venom business. He got a fatal dose: Sixty milligrams is the fatal dose for that kind of snake.
MORROW: What is the venom used for?
BURROUGHS: To make antivenom. That’s a large-scale operation.
MORROW: You have to have the exact same snake venom to get the antivenom?
BURROUGHS: Sure, well, there are classes of venom. The two main classes are neuro- and hemotoxic venom. Neurotoxin is a nerve venom. That’s the cobras. Cobras, kraits, sea snakes, mambas. This is quite painless. People may not even know they’ve been bitten right away with a mamba until they start to slur their words, their speech gets slurred like they’re drunk, and then they’re—boom—dead. Dean brought in a black mamba and a green mamba. When he was here he had a green mamba and he wouldn’t let it out, they’re too quick. Another thing about the mambas is they’re very quick, they’re very hysterical, and they will attack without provocation.
MORROW: They’re arboreal?
BURROUGHS: They’re arboreal, so they come slipping down out of the tree and they’ll whack you. They can make ten miles on the level. That’s fast.
MORROW: That’s quick.
BURROUGHS: One of the quickest snakes. Quick and very aggressive and very dangerous. If I let it out, it would get up on something and I’d have a hell of a time getting it down. We let a cobra out in this room once—Dean had a cobra, thirteen feet long.
MORROW: In this room?
BURROUGHS: Yeah. It went all around the room. He had a special trick to control it with, though. He came out with a hook.
MORROW: Who is this?
BURROUGHS: Dean Ripa. He’s a real professional snake catcher, he’s been bitten three or four times.
MORROW: You don’t go in for the big zoo-type animals then, you’re not crazy about them, elephants or …?
BURROUGHS: Oh, well, no, I don’t have the facilities. (Laughter.) He had the Gaboon viper, he had one of those and laid it down on the couch here. Now this thing is about that big around and that long, weighed thirty pounds. Had a head like a small shovel. That’s a hell of a thing to be bitten by. They have both neuro- and hemotoxic venom and a lot of it. Fangs about an inch long. It just lay there and growled. They growl, like a dog.
MORROW: On your couch here?
BURROUGHS: Yes. He growled, like a dog. Another thing about them, see, most snakes do this. (Makes a slithering gesture.) The viper walks on its ribs like a caterpillar. It looks very sluggish, but they can move very, very rapidly, they can catch a rat in the air. Very dangerous …
MORROW: How did this Gaboon move?
BURROUGHS: Crawls on its ribs, eyes straight ahead.
MORROW: Ripa was just showing off his snakes?
BURROUGHS: He had eight of them that he had to offer. I said I couldn’t have them in the house because of the cats … There’s very little money in this. I said, How much do you get for this Gaboon viper that you brought back from Ghana? Well, six hundred dollars. I said, That’s ridiculous. I thought five thousand.
MORROW: What’s the life expectancy of a Gaboon?
BURROUGHS: Oh, like most snakes they live quite a long while. I don’t know just how long, but years. Ten, twenty, thirty years. They live a long time.
MORROW: You were talking about going to Madagascar, right?
BURROUGHS: Yes. Well, I don’t know, I’m going to go down and talk to these people at Duke and find out all the details, you know, the visas and all that.
MORROW: That would be a great trip.
BURROUGHS: Yeah, very expensive to get there and back because it’s so far. It’s about five thousand dollars round-trip.
MORROW: That would be to go to see the lemurs?
BURROUGHS: Well, I’m going to see the lemurs here. Well, listen: that, and I want to see the whole of Madagascar, you know, the different plants, everything they got there. They’ve got all kinds of quite unique plants and animals.
MORROW: Have you been to the Galápagos?
BURROUGHS: No, I haven’t, but I’m not so interested in that as I am in Madagascar. I’d also like to go to Easter Island, to see the giant heads.
(Morrow turns off the tape recorder for a break. When he turns it back on, the dialogue recommences with discussion about Central and South American environmental issues, particularly the denuding of rain forests in the Amazon, the Iran-Contra affair, American education, and political apathy among youth.)
MORROW: I can imagine an argument, though, where it’s not any worse now than it’s ever been. It’s just, it’s the same kind of shit you must have complained about thirty years ago.
BURROUGHS: I wonder. I wonder. No, I think—
MORROW: You think it’s gotten worse?
BURROUGHS: Oh, yes, I think the young people now are politically more ignorant than they were in my day. Jesus Christ, we at least looked a
t maps of the world, and I don’t think there was anyone in the high school that I went to—of course, this was way before the war—but certainly they would all have been able to place France and England and Germany on a map of Europe.
MORROW: They would have been able to tell you who fought in World War I.
BURROUGHS: Yes, they probably would, and they would also know when the Civil War was fought.
MORROW: How do you turn something like this around?
BURROUGHS: I don’t think you can, and I don’t know the point in bothering with it.
MORROW: Why do you say that?
BURROUGHS: I’m not concerned about these stupid people. I’m more concerned with animals than with people now. There are too many people! They’re not endangered enough.
Gavage
H. G. Carrillo
WHAT HE WOULDN’T DO to be higher than God about now, running with his boys, free in the sun, on the streets, knuckling rocks at the windows in the abandoned building down from his Moms’. Instead, he wakes to find the same sleety rain, his head ringing as it is drummed from nodding against the window, and he is still on the bus with the same raging hard-on.
They don’t call it Juvey anymore—don’t lock them up like he’s heard they used to—and he isn’t shut up in the house like his primo, Fredo, with an ankle bracelet and a mess of video games. No, he is on his way to being reformed. Re-formed, he has overheard his new social worker tell his Moms, in a new style in a new way, he’ll learn skills, he’ll learn a new way to look at the world.
Two years down of the four years he’s to do. His Moms counts the days with Xs on a calendar in their kitchen like the new social worker told her would be best for showing how far he has come since the morning he was picked up with a gun and a Marlboro Reds box with half a blunt in his coat pocket.
Though he had been trying to tell them from the beginning that there was nothing to remember—look upon; reflect on—from that day when all he had done was get dressed, go out in the alley behind his Moms’ to get high, and head toward school. The next thing he knew he was being thrown up against an unmarked.
The part he never told, would never tell, was how he had heard his boys yelling, running up behind him—he had no idea how many there were, or who was there for sure—and how as they passed he was spun a full 180 on the ice. The blunt was the only thing he could explain, the Reds box he had found in the trash outside the currency exchange down from his Moms’, and he didn’t smoke cigarettes.
Possession—of a handgun, of a controlled substance—at thirteen meant for the first time he could remember he was always under watch, was sent to a school with surveillance cameras in the classroom, they tested his pee weekly—sometimes twice a week—and he wasn’t allowed to hang out with anyone, except his Moms, who still called him Mateo or Teo or Spooky.
His whole body now responded to shouts of Ungarte! though only the Latin teachers or supervisor get it right, but it doesn’t matter, he spends most of his time hiding the fact that whatever even comes close now—Ungarty! Ungrateful! Unguentino!—tears through him the same, from head to foot, like an open box cutter.
His dick won’t let up, each bump the bus takes runs a white-hot electric current from his balls that oozes out of the tip and makes him wonder what will keep him from screaming his head off like the big Mexican kid just this past summer who lost it on the way back to the city, lost it so bad they had to stop the bus. Rolling on the floor screaming so much their supervisor that day had to call in, screaming that took three boys to hold the boy down he was thrashing about so. Gnashing his teeth, screaming until the kid had lost his voice but kept on screaming anyway, screaming until just a girlish rubber toy squeak was coming out when the paramedics came and put a needle in his arm.
They had been out picking cabbage that day. Sweaty and foul as they were from work, they had to stand in line on the side of the highway in the sun, while cars passed and honked, a carful of girls blew them kisses while the paramedics lifted the boy, who by then was no longer screaming but was making gurgling—head and eyes rolling—pigeon-like sounds, as he was carried on a stretcher out of the bus and shoved—like bread into an oven—into the back of an ambulance.
And as much as he tries to remember being taken out the next week, to the same fields, the same farm, bent over for hours multiplying rows of cabbages, remembering that even though they had all seen the screaming kid but said nothing about it and instead complained how much their backs ached at the end of the day, how they thought their arms would fall off, Ungarte can’t help but touch himself. At the same time that he rolls his body away from the boy sleeping in the seat next to him toward the window, he forces his thumb into the top seam of his left trouser pocket until it gives way and he has his hand around it, can huddle into himself and slowly stroke.
He had lost the right to have weekends he could call his own and just roll out of bed when he wanted to, head to the park, to the basketball court, eat what he wanted when he wanted and where he wanted. The first year, he and his group of boys were taken to the city’s parks daily where they had to pick up garbage. The supervisors broke rules, beat boys, swore at them, once he had even seen a boy get spit on.
But there was nothing they could do about it and nobody to tell. The new way, his new social worker told his Moms, is an experiment they are trying that takes a few selected boys out of the city each weekend to redirect their energies. And his Moms trusts her and signed the papers because his new social worker is pretty and white, and somewhere along the way learned to speak Spanish with the clean, clipped, clear precision of a newscaster. His Moms wants to trust her, like in a movie wants to be the brown woman who comes to trust a white woman without having it somehow come flying back in her face.
Often, when he strokes he thinks of his new social worker’s tetas and what the powder he sometimes sees between them smells like. Even though he isn’t supposed to have a girlfriend or anything like that, he sometimes kicks it in the laundry room with a girl—older, probably about twenty-five, who presses her lips against his neck, tells him to pretend a teacher is about to walk in, says to call her Kai, even though he knows her name to be María and he has seen her with her husband and three children—and sometimes it’s the way she unzips him, pushes the crotch of her panties to the side, and, with an insistence that feels like a mix of anger and hatred, shoves him into her, and the way—when she’s done—she just walks away leaving him unsatisfied, hanging out.
Though right now he strokes to nothing at all, a black hole, a still, warm, wet, shapeless place.
Since the year Ungarte picked up trash in the parks, he and groups of boys have been taken out of the city, for country air, for the experience, for whole weekends, his new social worker said, so they would have some sense of how they were to organize their time once their time was their own again.
Before the cabbage farm he had spent every weekend for three months at a dairy, mucking stalls, three hours from the city, and since then he had picked apples, pears, and melons. They raked and shoveled and lifted and loaded, ate, washed, and took care of their bladders when they had permission, slept in barracks built for migrants with a supervisor or two who rotated, keeping watch over them in the night. No hats or caps, hoodies or chains, no jewelry or personal items. They wear security tags that are scanned by the supervisors as they are shifted from place to place, but they should leave wallets, IDs, and money at home. They were free to choose whatever shirt they wanted, as long as it was blue or brown or green or khaki and had no writing or pictures on it and was versatile enough—most wore sweatshirts over T-shirts—for shifts in weather; as long as it was not a sports shoe, they were free to choose whatever they wanted as long as it was a work boot—preferably steel-toed in brown, not black—and appeared to be utilitarian rather than fashionable. They were all issued a jacket in the spring they exchanged for fall/winter ones. It is not really a uniform, his new social worker told his Moms, they get four pairs of khakis and she should let
him take care of the cleaning and repairing of them himself.
Sewn tough by prisoners upstate, new, fresh out of the packages, the pants fell like a double-sided drop cloth. Double-stitched at the seams and all sized larger than they are marked. There is no give at all in them except for the pockets—flimsy in their construction, something men who made them predicted boys who wore them would need: a relay of secret hands—opening into a dark, damp, focusless universe of sparks that connected to no real woman, but to thousands, the smell of dank, of fingers and upper lips, a mouthful of unwashed hair, the burn of salt in the corners of his mouth. And just when he is close to letting loose against the back of the zipper, a tear of sunlight jags the sleet and gray outside and bounces him back upright and blinking.
The Hudson rolls black and green opposite the direction they are headed, and through the bare trees it is as if they are being raked through the icy water. To ease the queasy in his stomach he begins to count the heads on either side of the aisle in the rows ahead of him. And it is at fourteen that he gets to the white boy.
Light reddish-brown hair, pale greenish-pale spotted skin, he is called Mueller, but even the supervisors, as though they’ve never seen one before either—wide-set, nearly colorless eyes that first make him appear blind—call him White Boy. White Boy, come here! White Boy, I’m talking to you! Over the last three weeks when they have been sent out to dig, cut, and stack roots into trucks, only once did Ungarte hear one of them call out Mueller!, and it is only by chance that he saw the white boy turn his greasy head toward the sound and walk in its direction.
Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Ungarte counts. There had never been one before; most looked like he did or some variation of him. Brown boys, black boys, there had even been an Indian from someplace in India that had wanted a girl so much, said he couldn’t speak English too well at the time, so he let her know by pissing outside of her door like a dog until someone in the building caught him. And where Ungarte saw a logic rise out of what the Indian told him—how poor his family was; how they all lived in a one-room; how they needed to come to the US to find out just how dark they were—Ungarte found he couldn’t care and couldn’t appreciate what a white boy could do to get himself put on one of these buses once a week. Twenty. Twenty-One, no reason he could think of why a white boy should have been there. They played golf, they were loved by girls who smelled like cream, they lived in houses like the one the bus turns off the main highway and heads for, houses with gables, rolling lawns, white fences, gardens, trees all around, and the nearest neighbor miles away at another farm. They lived in high-rises with doormen, they took cabs all the time, they drove expensive cars or hired them, they drank scotch and fucked the women in Playboy magazine and married the ones that wore head scarves and dark sunglasses and shopped one store for olive oil and another one that only sold cheese.
Menagerie Page 25
