I’m a big stinky pussy and most of you know that. When I was young, I remember that we’d often go over to our neighbour’s place to hang out. She had a well beside the house with a grate over it. On the grass around it, there’d always be a surplus of snakes. Finding small black snakes in this area was like finding stretch marks on Spoar’s back, saffron-coloured pus on Joe Carolan’s dick or an abundance of pubes on Dan Zammit’s bathroom floor – it was a sure thing.
The neighbour’s property was a shithole with odds and ends of discarded trash strewn about. What we’d do to pass the time was to find a length of rope, tie it to a snake (unlikely I did the tying as, like I said, I’m a big-time puss) and then spin that summa bitch like we were roping cattle. The slithery acquaintance would invariably die, though whether it was due to violent organ stretching or the embarrassment of being the subject of the only exercise this Barnhardt would partake in for many years, I cannot say.
Fast forward a few years. It was my job to cut the grass at our compound. One day, while exiting the shed to commence cutting, I saw a snake in the grass. It moved in a cheerful manner as though it had just come from it’s new girlfriend’s house and she finally, and I mean FINALLY blew him. I quickly put an end to his bliss by rolling the back tire of the riding mower over him. Back and forth, then back and forth, and then back and forth one last time over his slender, glistening 8 inches (I stole that last sentence from the critically panned autobiography of Adam Girdlestone entitled Why Can’t I Smile?, available in paperback November 2nd!).
I’m not proud of those stories. I doubt a snake ever did a damn thing to me to deserve abuse in return. I’ll assume that there’s some hidden meaning to my issues with snakes, most likely that I’m seriously into man love. But when it comes down to it, any fitting description of me contains many terrible, horrible things and if I were to see “also queer” tacked onto the bottom of that list then, well, I think it could only serve to bring my worth up a notch.