I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (14 page)

The problem, Tim continued, is that even with antivenom available throughout much of the world, 125,000 people still manage to die from snakebites every year, most of them in Asia and Africa. This is because antivenom is a very particular drug. It must be stored at a constant temperature not exceeding 46 degrees Fahrenheit. It must be administered by a doctor under controlled conditions. And, in most cases, it must come from the species of snake that did the biting. This all presupposes things like reliable electricity, clean needles, expertise, and the money needed for five to twenty-five vials of antivenom, which in our country cost about fifteen hundred dollars each.

“The cure is in the snake,” Tim said. “People are stepping on the cure. The cure is in me. And I want to develop a vaccine from it. I want to be the first person in medical history to develop a vaccine with no degree.”

Tim walked into the other room and waved at me with his
bitten hand. It looked like a cheap prosthetic, the fingers curled and fused. When I shifted my weight to follow, the diamondback coiled into her S-shaped strike posture, rattling.

This other room was carpeted and clean. Tim had hung it with streamers of shed skin belonging to every snake that ever bit him. Inside a curio cabinet against the far wall were antique snakebite kits, tinned bunk that had never saved one life: chloroform, chlorinated lime, and carbolic acid; injections of ammonia and strychnine; tinctures of devil’s dung; potassium permanganate, which was rubbed into sliced-open fang punctures as late as the 1950s. Kits like these were popular especially in Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There, they were hawked by traveling salesmen who performed sideshow acts with deadly species. These men received so many defensive bites in which only trace amounts of venom were injected that, unbeknownst to them, they built up immunity. They thought they were being saved by the nostrums they’d cooked up in the bush and applied after every bite. They sold them; people bought them; they still died.

Tim showed me a photograph of one such showman, Thomas Wanless. In the photo, he’s crouched in a dirt patch with a tiger snake clamped onto his forearm. Tim’s marginalia read, “NO ONE HAS TALKED TO ME MORE THAN THIS.”

Around us were turrets of books stacked on homemade shelves:
God: The Failed Hypothesis,
old leatherbound volumes of Darwin,
Calculus for the Practical Man, The Immune Self,
evolutionary biology, a history of self-experimentation entitled
Who Goes First?
I pointed out one called
The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize.

He said, “I mean, if I do it, I do it.”

Tim did not have a college degree. He did not have any formal training in medicine. “As much as school could help me,
it’s such a crock of fucking shit,” he said. More than anything, he wanted a university to agree to study him, to find out what exactly is going on in his body, how it might be reproduced in an easily injectable form, maybe even underwrite the funding for the vaccine production agreement he has with Aldevron, an antibody research outfit.

But universities don’t and won’t, because of liability issues. They can’t be affiliated with a layman whose only test subject is himself. (When the History Channel asked to feature Tim in an impressively ridiculous segment a few years ago, his one stipulation—that the network arrange for the University of Wisconsin to study him—was not met.) “If they backed this, and then I died, or I somehow led to other people’s deaths? Well, what’s that gonna cost them?”

Tim won’t personally help anyone who wants to start self-immunizing. “Liability. All you gotta do is make one calculation wrong, and then my shit’s done, too,” he said. What he did to himself wasn’t illegal. Even the Food and Drug Administration had given him the okay. It’s just that this was not how objective research was supposed to be done.

“Bullshit,” Tim said. “Mice, rats, sheep, equines—but no humans? There’s no other recourse. Only humans know what a thing feels like.

“Whatever, though.” He picked up a framed portrait of a former friend who had become the director of a reptile zoo and had gone on something of a smear campaign against self-immunization.
*
¹
The glass was webbed from the center out, suggesting
a punch. “They may got seventeen degrees, but the one thing they don’t got is their hand in the cage. I just don’t see why they have to cockblock me on this.”

“Why would anyone try to stop you?” I honestly wondered.

“Jealousy. They’re jealous of my ability to not get killed. And they hate me because I’m proving the books wrong. I’m proving
them
wrong. But that’s the history of self-experimentation and immunology.”
*
²

So, having given up on academia, Tim was petitioning the government of Sudan for money. He had taken out a two-thousand-dollar loan to fly there in the summer.

“Sudan,” I said.

He told me a Sudanese immigrant he worked with on the production line was going to introduce him to the minister of social affairs. Was supposed to have already, actually, when she was visiting Kentucky. But Tim’s coworker’s rental car broke down on the drive from Wisconsin. “Now, instead, I’m going to stay in Sudan for a week, get bit by mambas to buy confidence.”

“That is crazy,” I said.

“This is crazy? You just took a flu shot last week.”

“I’m from Florida. I’ve never had a flu shot.”

“What I have to have is a short nap on a long couch,” Tim said. I went to fix us a couple more boilermakers.

When I returned, Tim took me on a tour of what he called his “peer reviews.” They were printed-out Hotmails from scientists and one Nobel laureate. He’d framed some. Others he’d taped to the wood paneling. They were all polite and vague. “You are probably one of a few people who have immunity against snake venoms”; “I appreciate the studies done on you and there is no criticism.” Each was a printout of the whole screen, not just the text, so there were a lot of perimeter ads for penis-enhancement pills and
Wedding Crashers.

“This is as bad as it gets, with a good ending,” Tim said, cheersing with a hand that was rooted with dried blood. Already the swelling was ebbing. “Write this down: If you can’t do it yourself, well, then, what the fuck good are you?”

No man lived through a wider variety of venomous snakebites—if not more bites, period—than Bill Haast. “I’ve been bit more than one hundred seventy times and maybe almost died twenty or twenty-five times,” he said in a 2007 interview, four years before his death from natural causes. “I don’t count the little bites.”

In his personal museum, Tim keeps a photo of himself with Haast, the most renowned modern mithridatist. (“I had to fill his gap,” Tim said of the man.) Haast started self-immunizing in 1948, when he injected one part Cape cobra venom and one thousand parts saline solution into his left forearm with a number-25 hypodermic needle. He took a booster every three months and eventually upped his dosage to a drop of raw venom. Then he added Indian and king cobra venoms to the mix. No one could say what might happen to his liver and kidneys. One zoologist wrote to tell him that he wouldn’t “give a plugged nickel” for Haast’s life in three years. But there were no harmful side effects, no severe reactions except for some boils
caused by Haast’s refusal to use sterile solutions. By the time he was ninety-five years old, Haast was injecting himself weekly with a brew of venoms from thirty-two snakes and lizards. “I could become a poster boy for the benefits of venom,” he told the
Miami Herald.
“If I live to be one hundred, I’ll really make the point.” He lived to be one hundred.

After stints as an engine tester, a bootlegger, and a cashier in a prohibition chophouse, Haast operated the Miami Serpentarium from 1946 to 1984. There, he charged the curious to watch him milk venom from cobras, kraits, rattlesnakes—all of the dread host. He didn’t have a high school diploma, but he donned a white lab coat when doing extractions. Using no protective equipment, he handled up to a hundred snakes every day of the week. On Sundays, he’d release a fourteen-foot king cobra onto the front lawn and spar with it, feint and duck its strikes until he’d grabbed its head and subdued it. (It often bolted for the audience, there not being any issues of liability in those salad days, and he’d have to yank it back to him by its fist-thick tail.)

The Serpentarium was the culmination of a boyhood dream: encourage venom research by making it easy for scientists, especially those in the United States, to obtain all sorts of snake venoms from a reliable and knowledgeable source. “This venom has got to be useful,” Haast said to his tearful second wife after he was laid up in the hospital by another bite. “It can’t affect every nerve in the body like this and not be useful. It must be. Someday, someone will find a use for it.”

Haast tried. He was leading a promising study on the effects of neurotoxic venom on polio when Jonas Salk discovered a vaccine. In the ’70s, Haast and a Miami physician were using a venom-based serum called PROven to successfully treat more than six thousand people suffering from multiple sclerosis. When the FDA shut them down, they cited improper human testing.

Scientists and academics did not much love him. “It is hard to evaluate the significance of Haast’s work because so little has been published,” wrote one of his customers, a leading venom researcher. “He has certainly demonstrated that a human being can recover from a hell of a lot of snakebites.” But the self-immunizers inspired by Haast cherish his work, most of all his long-out-of-print biography. (Tim referred to it as “my Bible.”) In it, Haast is described as “a sometimes unapproachable and stubborn man” who “doesn’t waste motions or time,” who “hopes and plans for the best but expects the worst and is ready to accept it.” He was “strongly individualistic with an almost innate sense of pride. He could never bring himself to ask anybody for anything, least of all to beg or plead.”

Haast was made an honorary citizen of Venezuela after he flew deep into that country’s jungle to save a snakebitten boy’s life with a transfused pint of his hyperimmune blood. In all, he donated blood to twenty-one victims of snakebite; each survived. A letter from one, the director of the Des Moines zoo, read, “Each morning when the sun comes up, I think of you.”

He ate meat on even-numbered days and seldom consumed refined sugar. He was fit and nimble till the end. Unusually youthful-looking. He claimed never to have been sick a day in his life, to have known neither the flu nor the common cold. He didn’t even take aspirin. And he lives on as the self-immunizers’ alpha, the apotheosis of how a man wins hard liberty and authors his own destiny.

Haast couldn’t write much, though, for his hands were gnarly. An eastern diamondback bite curled the left one into a claw. A Malaysian pit viper ossified his right index finger. A cottonmouth bit the tip of his pinkie, which then turned black, lost feeling, and had to be clipped off the bone by his third wife, Nancy, who used rose pruners to do so. Nancy is currently writing Haast’s updated biography, his first wife having left him
before the Serpentarium opened, and his second having flown the coop not long after, saying, “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. I love you, Bill. I love you. But I can’t stand it anymore.”

It wasn’t a full-blown hangover I had—more like a subcutaneous chafe. I could feel another sour me ruffling against seams that would’ve split had there been one more drink last night. By noon, I was on my way back to Tim’s lab.

The lab was among the old industrial rind along the south shore of Lake Winnebago, in a disintegrating crematorium. Tim was waiting for me amid piles of snow-swaddled rubble outside. He had on the same dirty shirts and loose jeans. An open Pabst was in his hand. He introduced me to his best friend, Corey, who worked with him at Oshkosh Truck. Corey was brown-haired and haunted. His wide-set eyes seemed clear on their surface but marred below, and he wore both a black T-shirt and a trapezoidal mustache. He handed me a beer.

Inside, half a million dollars’ worth of crossbred reticulated pythons spooled in rows and rows of tanks. They belonged to another friend, Gavin, who ran a tattoo parlor while mongrelizing new colors and patterns of snake on the side. They were vulcanized muscle, and they moved slowly if at all. The musk they gave off was hearthy, like wood chips and spoor; sedative, until one got wind of the antiseptic tang of chemicals used to clean up after a thousand digestive systems turning hard-to-swallow prey into boneless shit. This was where Tim slept after his wife left him.

We went upstairs. Under low pipes and cobwebs were many old sofas, and two plastic tubs with an alligator in each. “These were a gift to Gavin, from this guy, before he went to prison,” Tim said. I asked what was going to happen when they outgrew the tubs. He pointed to a picket corral of unsound construction.

In the opposite corner, a doughy man in Sunday shoes was using both hands to rustle sheets of dead skin off a beaded lizard. Tim led us on past, and we entered the lab proper, a climate-controlled shed with room enough for eight tanks. Tim paid Gavin three thousand dollars a year in rent; cheap, compared with the five thousand he spent on the rats stacked in plastic drawers throughout the crematorium.

The lizard man’s wife clutched a baby to her breast and followed us in. When she crossed the threshold, the newly interned western diamondback roused herself, admonishing. The wife decided to watch from the other side of the shack’s one window.

Then a guy named Dan arrived with Tim’s Mojave rattlesnake. The Mojave was smallish and decorated with tan chevrons. Here now, the most dangerous species on the North American continent. This Dan placed on the floor, to kneel and poke at.

Dan resembled nothing so much as a debased tax accountant. Five-five, wire-frame glasses, a dome Bic’d clean, but no front teeth. He regularly fed quarter-size plugs of Skoal through the slot in his mouth. “She’s a sweetie,” he said, swimming his finger in front of the rattlesnake’s furrowed brow. She lifted her front third off the ground. “She’ll sit on the hook juuuust fine.”