My Drug Dealer’s Snake

Eventually, he’s going to make you watch him feed it

Published in

Gay Mag

8 min readMay 16, 2019

I’sitting on the edge of this guy’s waterbed while he explains the belt drive on his record player. Or maybe his record player’s better because it doesn’t have a belt drive. I’m not sure. I haven’t been listening because I don’t give a shit. He says the waterbed’s vintage but I think I’ve got it beat. When did they start adding bookshelves to the headboards, mid-eighties? It doesn’t matter. The point is, I’m too fucking old to be sitting in this studio apartment, pretending to be impressed by his record collection. But this is what we do in states run by Evangelical zealots that won’t legalize marijuana.

I’m lucky this is my problem with buying drugs. There’s little chance I’ll get pulled over on the way home. If I do, it’s unlikely a cop will search me. If he searches me, and finds drugs, I probably won’t get worse than probation. I live in Austin, Texas. I’m white. I can scrape together enough for a lawyer. That doesn’t mean it’s not a pain in the ass to have to sit here in a cloud of patchouli listening to Kyle tell me I’ve never really heard Fleetwood Mac. I mean, really heard them, you know?

It’s always some guy named Kyle or Greg or Steve. This guy’s a Kyle. As far as Kyles go, he’s not the worst. Last Kyle I had was back in Maryland. He had a pet lizard and a lot of questions about my sex life. My next guy was Greg, who had a pet snake.

A good rule is if your new pot dealer has a pet snake, find a new pot dealer. He’s going to make you watch him feed the snake. It’s only a matter of time. But I had to keep going to Greg because he was my girlfriend’s buddy from back in high school.

He and my girlfriend talked once about how he’d make a great sperm donor. But he wanted to do it naturally. She never mentioned it to me. Greg made a point to fill me in while I watched his video game character bum rush another heavily armed soldier then teabag the corpse. The guy on the couch laughed.