Snake Neckties

I went to Catalina with my mother yesterday. It's an island off the coast of Los Angeles, purely a vacation destination, there is no other industry. You can take a helicopter, but since I'm not made of money (yet), we took the boat like everybody else. The town is Avalon - like the island from King Arthur's story - and it's a neat-o little beach community, very small, with restaurants and shops and hotels for the tourists to spend money in. Interesting note: on Catalina there are very few cars, mostly they get around with golf carts. True story.
   Anyway, the day was winding down and we were sitting in the sun getting sunburned and eating ice cream while people-watching. Lots of good people-watching on a tourist island the last weekend of summer break. Generally speaking, too much skin from people you would really rather stay covered up, and not enough skin from people you would rather see more from.
   Then we saw him, the drunk shirtless guy carrying the snake. A real snake, black-and-white banded, draped around his neck. The guy was fat, but a solid fat, like he works with his hands not in front of a computer, and his face was red from booze and the sun. He was handling the snake gently but a little carelessly, I thought. And all could think was this was his way of screaming 'somebody take a look at me!'
   Kind of desperate, really. Waddling down a beachfront with hundreds of tourists just takin' it easy, carrying a big snake. Surefire way to draw attention to yourself, because people aren't usually noncommittal about snakes. I wondered what kind of home life this guy must have that he needed to walk around, drunk, with a snake around his neck. What does his place look like? I imagine litter-strewn and stained, and it probably smells like a pet store. Or worse. Maybe a stolen neon beer sign or two. Carpets that have never seen a vacuum since he moved in. Not a place he'd want to stay anyway, which makes it easier to grab Slinky and make for the boardwalk.
   And then I imagined what must be in his refrigerator. A jar of pickles with one left inside, which had probably been in there for months. Mustard. A take-out container with days-old leftovers. A few slices of moldy bread. An almost-empty jar of grape jelly. No fruits, no vegetables. Cheap beer. Frozen pizza in the freezer, the cheapest he can get on the island.
   The guy disappeared onto the boardwalk, engaging in his desperate plea for validation as a person and I turned my attention to others, like the red-faced loud guy in the cowboy hat, or the girl who looked kind of like an Easter Island statue but with a silver ring in her lip (it looked like she was drooling), or the ten-year-old boys having a grand old time hitting each other with foam bats over and over and over and over, or the tall woman with fake breasts that looked like torpedoes jutting out from her ribcage. Good times, good times.
   As we were getting ready to head back to the boat, I saw the snake guy again. Still drunk, but this time he wore a gray shirt. And he had the snake looped around his neck like a necktie.
   Nobody paid him any attention.