my favorite snake story

A few years ago I was working at a club on Capitol Hill as a sound engineer. this is a little story about the weird things you can see at work.

Anyone who has worked in a club that hosts music knows the end of the night always moves slow. First you have to get the audience to leave, then you have to get the bands to leave. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it happens very smoothly, but most of the time musicians want to linger, take their time, even if you want to get home. It happened on one of those nights.

After the band finished playing the bouncers cleared the house and I tried to get the band to get their gear off stage. After killing as much time as possible, I checked to make sure they didn't leave anything and cleaned the stage of beer bottles and set lists. Off to the side of the stage we had a stack of cinder blocks used to hold bass drums in place. On top I saw a toy snake. I could still hear the band loading out, so I reached down to grab it and it moved.

Now I can't completely describe the hallucinatory effects of the realization that the snake I thought was rubber was actually real, but believe me when I say it was trippy.

I gathered my composure and asked the bartender what he thought I should do. He wanted to see it for himself, then we put it in a bucket from the kitchen. I later found out someone had lost the snake a couple of weeks before and it must have been living under the stage until it came out to say hello to me.

Just another day on the job.