I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (13 page)

Their practice has a great old name: mithridatism. It comes from Mithradates VI of Pontus, aka “the Poison King.” In his lifetime, Mithradates was the last independent monarch to stand against Rome. He tried to unite Hellenic and Black Sea cultures into a neo-Alexandrian empire that might resist the Western one. For a moment, he was successful. Rome was forced to march against and attempt to occupy the Middle East because of him. The Roman Senate declared him imperial enemy number one. A ruthless general was dispatched to search and destroy. Mithradates went uncaptured, hiding out in the craggy steppes.

Machiavelli deemed him a hero. Racine wrote him a tragedy. A fourteen-year-old Mozart composed an opera about him. A. E. Housman eulogized what was most remarkable about Mithradates:

Like any despot, Mithradates inverted humanity’s basic psychic task and made insecurity less, not more, tolerable. He trusted no one, and in anticipation of conspiracy and betrayal, he bricked up his body into an impenetrable fortress. Each morning he took a personal cure-all tablet that included things like cinnamon, castor musk from beaver anuses, tannin, garlic, bits of poisonous skinks and salamanders, curdled milk, arsenic, rhubarb from the Volga, toxic honey, Saint-John’s-wort, the poison blood of pontic ducks, opium, and snake venom. His
piecemeal inoculation worked so well that, when finally cornered, Mithradates was unable to poison himself. According to Appian’s
Roman History,
he begged his guard to murder him, saying, “Although I have kept watch and ward against all the poisons that one takes with his food, I have not provided against that domestic poison, always the most dangerous to kings, the treachery of army, children, and friends.”

The official recipe for his
mithridatium
was lost. But from Nero onward, every Roman emperor ingested a version of the Poison King’s antidote. Some had thirty-six ingredients; others as many as one hundred eighty-four. Charlemagne took it daily, as did Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The Renaissance poor had their generic versions. Oliver Cromwell found it cleared his skin. London physicians prescribed it until 1786. You could buy it in Rome as recently as 1984. It was believed to kill the helplessness in your constitution. It’s our longest-lived panacea.

Tim is adopted. A cop raised him. Asked about his childhood, he offered: “I grew up fighting in the streets of inner-city Milwaukee.” He once tried to reach out to his biological parents after one of his children was born dead, strangled by the umbilical cord. “I thought it might be some kind of genetic thing,” he told me. “But I never found out. I couldn’t get an answer out of them as to why they didn’t want me.”

What he’d wanted for himself was to be a marine, a Special Forces agent. But he broke his ankle in a car accident two months before basic training. He took a year off, reenrolled in basic, rebroke the ankle. He could never be Special Forces if he couldn’t jump out of a plane, so he did the next best thing and became a high-rise window washer.

Ten years of window washing put him up to injecting snake venom. “Why?” he explained. “Because when you wake up
feeling no pain, then you’ll know you’re dead.” He began by injecting a dilution of one part Egyptian cobra venom and ten thousand parts saline solution into his thigh. He did this every week for a year. Then he upped the potency to 1:100, including in the mix Cape and monocled cobra venoms. From his journal of that time:

He was left with a six-inch-by-six-inch scar on his leg and an immune system with twice as many venom-specific antibodies as most people have regular ones. He’s since repeated the procedure with mamba and rattlesnake venoms. He takes booster shots every couple of weeks. He has begun immunizing against the inland taipan, the deadliest terrestrial snake.

“There’s no standardized guide to this shit. Everybody’s different. I sort of wrote the handbook on self-immunization,”
Tim said, referring to a self-published PDF available on his website for twelve dollars.

“I’m separated from my wife of fifteen years because of this. I didn’t change oil or cut grass or really be a husband or father. I was researching venom twenty hours a day. I had a thirteen-hundred-dollar mortgage. One day I came home and my wife had taken the kids. She had left.” With her, he’s maintained a kind of relationship; it’s his kids, Tim admitted, whom he’s lost touch with. “My wife was supportive, but I never needed her. Oh, she’d said, ‘The snakes or me’ before I lost our house. I was sleeping in a tent. My two kids are fifteen and six. But self-immunization is my entire life.”

Snake venom is an astringent cocktail of ribonucleases, nucleotides, and amino acid oxidases that, once injected into prey through hollow fangs, immediately goes to work disrupting cellular function. It breaks down tissue proteins, attacks muscles and nerves, dissolves intercellular material, and causes metabolic collapse. The stuff is usually classified as either neurotoxic (if it attacks the nervous system) or hemotoxic (if it goes for blood components), because even though most induce both neuro- and hemotoxic symptoms, each venom tends to induce more of one kind than the other. Meaning the damage a venom does is species-specific. Snakebite is thus like lovesickness in that, each time, you’re wrecked special and anew.

But there
are
generalities within the two categories. For instance: a potent, primarily neurotoxic venom will effect a quick death. Immediately after the bite, though, comes a lightness of being. Then an acute sense of hearing, almost painfully acute. Chest and stomach cramps next. Sore jaw. Tongue like a bed of needles. Inflamed eyes; lids closing involuntarily. The soles of your feet feel as if on hot coals. Numb throat. Blurred vision.
Then every fiber explodes in pain. From head to toe you are under a barrage of agonizing spasms. Neck, eyes, chest, limbs, teeth—searing, aching. The pain feels like a filament burning brightest before it pops. Then your vision splits. Everything splits. Then your muscle contractions are disabled. Your body paralyzes gradually and methodically, as though someone were going from room to room, turning out your lights. Your central nervous system is not able to tell your diaphragm to breathe. You fall down the tiers of a sleep that feels just and due, a reward.

In North America, only a few snakes—corals, elapids, and Mojave rattlers—are neurotoxic like the old-world killers, the cobras and mambas. The vast majority of venomous snakes here—the copperheads, the water moccasins, and the other rattlesnakes—are hemotoxic. Though their bites are less likely to kill, their venom, even if survived, often causes chunks of tissue or whole limbs to fall away. It dissolves you. But first you feel a flame bud and lick at the wound. Your skin tickles, pricks, and burns, as if in the process of crisping. Your lymph nodes distend and your neck balloons into a froggish sac. The venom is going from door to cellular door, pillaging. Blood from ruptured vessels escapes into your tissues. Your afflicted limb hemorrhages, enlarging to monstrosity. You sweat and go dumb. Your blood pressure plummets like barometrics before a storm. You see double, go into shock, and barf up everything. It then feels as if red-hot tongs have plunged inside you, to seek out the root of the pain. This is a living death. You witness yourself becoming a corpse piece by piece. You are barely able to piss, and what does come out is ruby red. You twitch and convulse. Your respiratory system is no longer strong enough to pump the bilge from your lungs. The foam you cough up is pink. And hours to days later, cardinal threads fall from your gums and eyes until, beaten by suffering and anguish, you lose your sense of reality. A chill of
death invades your being. Your blood is thin as water. If you die, you die of a bleeding heart.

None of the above, I should say, is Tim susceptible to. He’s been treated with enough neuro- and hemotoxic venoms that his Swiss-army immune system will respond to a bite by flooding itself with the requisite antibodies. These will patrol his blood, disengaging toxins like keys opening locks. He’ll swell up, but he’ll be okay—if there’s
one
bite. It’s
multiple
bites that might overwhelm him.

Still, he’s worked hard to do this, to reconcile himself to the grand old foe.

Sifted flurries began to fall on the drive from the restaurant to the place Tim’s rented since separating from his wife. We took my rental car because his rust-eaten Intrepid had no heat. Try as we did, we could not figure out how to change the Club Life satellite radio station.

“Here’s one for you,” Tim said, doing an economical frug in his unbelted seat. “ ‘Venus’ and ‘venom’ come from the same root—’ love,’ in Latin.
Venenum.
‘Venom’ used to mean ‘love potion’ but over time came to mean ‘poison.’ ”

I skidded us off the highway onto a lightless dirt road. I flipped on the brights and blinked several times to see if there was in fact more past the windshield than unspooling mud and velvet nada. The sputtering heater worked intensely when it worked. The rattle from the backseat meant the diamondback was up.

“Somebody’s getting hot to trot,” Tim said. He’d picked up this snake from a friend around the way. She was going to be the last one to bite him this weekend.

“What I’m saying is—” I began, and then stopped, having forgotten what I was saying.

“Snakes and love,” Tim said. “Love and snakes.”

“You fell in love with these beasts because why?” I asked. “They aren’t pets. A snake doesn’t know what a damn relationship is. The thing doesn’t know your ass from Adam.”

“No, no,” he said. “With snakes it’s cut-and-dried. They’re like, ‘I want to kill you, and you’ll have to survive. I’m a badass motherfucker, and you need to be a bigger badass motherfucker.’ And I’m like, ‘You’re going to kill me every single time, and I love you.’ It’s the best relationship I’ve ever had.”

We jounced past huge barns pushed back from the road. They were hung with one high, bright light, and I felt drawn to each even as I thought of anglerfish and their bioluminescent lures. “But, bro,” I said, “how can you still love them once you’ve become immune to them? You’ve hardened yourself to their serpentine wiles. Now what? It’s like—like the difference between being in love and then being in a committed marriage.”

“That’s a good analogy,” Tim said around the Marlboro he was lighting. The diamondback bumped its head along the seams of its plastic Bed Bath & Beyond container. She was not in time with the four-four radio beat. “But the snake is ten times the woman for me than the women are. Besides, this shit right here has to be a one-man show. You can’t depend on that snake-woman, because she don’t give a shit. She just wants to eat and shit and kill you in defense.”

Tim told me which unpaved byway to look out for, and we rode on in silence but for the electronica/serpent mashup. With his swollen right hand he handled his cigarette ineptly, inserting and then removing it from his mouth the way an intern might a thermometer.

“But how great is it to be a human and do that? Beat that?” he said, and turned to point into the backseat. “To be one of the only people in history to beat you?”

And this is where I did not ask: Is it really evil that tempts?
Or is temptation more about thinking you’ve found the shortcut to utopia? I was actually very curious about what Tim would answer. Because, to me, the desire to divinize yourself has always been the most tempting thing in the world.

“Yuh-oh,” Tim said into the backseat.

I heard the rattling afresh, and then Tim muttered something, and then the plastic lid on the case snapped shut.

“The venom,” Tim said, “it gives me something I need. If I had the time and the money, I’d become immune to everything.”

I pulled the car around hay bales and dead tractors and parked next to an unfinished guesthouse on the edge of a llama farm. Somewhere in the night, a windmill lamented oil. We put the beers and the whiskey in the cold-storage shed and went on inside.

A fox pelt and an ankle trap were nailed to the wall of Tim’s foyer. There was no furniture. On the floor in the living room/kitchenette lay a sheetless full-size mattress. Drifts of books on animal tracking and mixed martial arts. Whey protein and fifteen-pound weights on top of a fridge that didn’t work. A bran of roaches and plaster flakes, all over. Many delicate bones were laid out to dry on paper towels by the sink.

Tim put the rattlesnake case on his mattress. In the light I could see she was gravid with babies. Her poison head tracked me but not Tim as he approached a stereo and cued a skipping CD of Scandinavian heavy metal. We lisped beers and poured Gentleman Jack into them.

I crunched across the floor and picked up an old textbook on venom. I flipped to the middle, where there were color photos of hemotoxic snakebite gore: carmine fissures and scabby limbs. Tim walked over, pulled a bookmark from the later pages, and unfolded it. It was a letter addressed to him from the textbook’s
author. “Dr. Findlay Russell told me that I’d never be able to survive pure venom,” he said, handing me the letter. Then he told me about antivenom.

Antivenom is no new thing. We’ve known about it for more than a century. Back then, its production was a simple if crude, painstaking, and resource-intensive process. Nothing about that has changed. Take an animal—usually a horse or a sheep because of their blood volume, but a shark works, too—and inject it with small but increasing amounts of milked venom over the course of several months. The animal develops antibodies in its blood. The animal’s blood is then extracted and purified and made into a serum. The serum is injected into a victim of snakebite, and the purified antibodies ride in on hyperimmune plasma like cavalry over a hill. It works similarly to a vaccine, except the immunity it confers is short-lived. The antibodies are on loan, and their introduction doesn’t spur the production of one’s own immune cells.