Among the Lizard People
By: Madeline Cash
Tags: Reptile Expo, Lizards, Snakes, Reptiles

Amy the peppy representative at a booth called SnakeLand, looked to be in her late forties. She smiled, revealing two rows of bubblegum-pink braces. Snakes covered the table’s surface, each balled up and crammed into the kind of container I’ve only ever seen chicken tenders served in. One of the boxes was not for sale.

“Yeah, that’s my guy.” Amy said. “The breeder. He’s just here for show.”

She picked up the snake, a milky yellow Python about as thick as a roll of toilet paper, and draped it around her neck like a scarf. “He hangs out with me while I do the dishes or laundry. He’s like a scaly puppy dog.”

The corn snake vendor was a skinny man in the midst of a sale. Two girls passed a wisp of a snake back and forth and murmured to each other. Feeling the match was right, they finally asked him the snake’s gender.

“I’ll check for you,” he said reluctantly.

I leaned in closer as the man flipped the snake over and began rubbing back its scales. They parted ways to reveal a small slit no thicker than a thumbnail. The man turned a deep shade of red.

“Uh-oh, it’s female.” He put it down. “I — I have to go wash my hands.”

He ran off, leaving us alone with the aroused corn snake. One girl leaned over to the other, “For God’s sakes, it’s just a snake vagina.”

The Tortoise woman stood statue-still behind her booth, dressed in a long coat with a ruffle collar and tiny circular spectacles. Many of the vendors had a particular look, and hers appeared to be 1880s Prussia.

“How big can these guys get?” I asked.

“Up to 18 pounds.”

I asked her how she got into tortoise breeding.

“I got my first male and female four or five years ago and purchased an incubator soon after.”

“I mean what inspired you to get the turtles in the first place?”

“Tortoises,” she corrected, but didn’t seem to have an answer for me. What I really wanted to ask was why she’d chosen the least enthusiastic pets on the planet to dedicate her time to.

“My daughter graduated from USC last spring.” She did what any empty-nester would do; started breeding land tortoises.

As a child, I had debilitating dog and cat allergies. During my parents’ lengthy separation, my father got me Spike, a Bearded Dragon, in lieu of a puppy. Spike became my confidant for all of first grade. I talked to him for hours, pushed him around in my Barbie car, and cuddled him at night until his body temperature got too low and he had to go back under the heat lamp. When he got mad or stressed out, flaps of skin would protrude from his neck like a Shakespearean ruff. I can still picture Spike’s knowing look. His mouth started under each eye and stretched across his whole head in what I interpreted as a coy smile. He just got me. Then Spike got a metabolic bone disease and died. My parents divorced, my dad got a new wife and a golden retriever, and I got an inhaler.

Lunchtime for humans was 12:00, and for reptiles, 12:30. I reached into a large ice cream cooler to discover it was packed with frozen rodents. There were rats and mice, some large and come small and fetus-like, packed popsicle-style in Ziploc bags. The most alarming were the frozen guinea pigs. Huge, eyes open, mouths contorted, and paws out as though they’d been petrified mid-leap. What could possibly eat something so big, I wondered.