The Night Frank the Snake Discovered Fairbanks Port

The Night Frank the Snake Discovered Fairbanks Port

By Hunter T.

The trouble started on a Tuesday, which is always the worst day for trouble because you never see it coming. Tuesdays don't have the drunk dignity of a Friday or the desperate glamour of a Saturday. They just sit there like a beige wall waiting for something stupid to happen.

And something stupid slithered right through the door.

Frank was a bullsnake, six feet of muscle and bad judgment, living behind the radiators of a flophouse on 3rd Avenue in Fairbanks, Alaska. He'd survived the bitter cold, the landlord's cat, and a near-fatal encounter with a snowmachine. But nothing—nothing—had prepared him for what came next.

The bottle rolled under the radiator on that frozen February evening. It was a bottle of Fairbanks Port, the kind of rotgut that strips paint off a '78 Ford and makes men weep for mothers they never loved. The label was half-eaten by frost and something that looked suspiciously like caribou piss. Frank, being a snake of limited experience but boundless curiosity, did what any sensible reptile would do.

He sniffed it.

Now, snakes don't have great sniffers in the human sense. They've got that forked tongue business, tasting the air like it's a fine wine. So when Frank's tongue touched the sticky rim of that bottle, he didn't just smell the Fairbanks Port—he *tasted* it in all its chemical glory: cheap grapes, industrial alcohol, and the faint ghost of some poor bastard's broken dreams.

It was love at first flick.

By midnight, Frank had managed to coil around the bottle and tip it sideways. The port flowed out like liquid fire, pooling on the cracked linoleum. Frank didn't hesitate. He lapped it up like a man dying of thirst in a desert made of bad decisions.

The first few ounces hit him like a freight train made of warm blankets. His cold-blooded metabolism, accustomed to the slow burn of digesting the occasional mouse, had absolutely no defense against what was essentially rocket fuel in a $4 bottle. Within twenty minutes, Frank was what you might generously call "snake-faced."

He slithered in loops. Not graceful loops, mind you—the kind of loops a garden hose makes when you're trying to coil it and you've had six beers. He tried to climb the radiator and fell backward into a pile of old newspapers. He attempted to eat his own tail, convinced it was a particularly juicy rat that kept escaping his grasp.

The flophouse residents gathered. There was Old Pete, who'd lost his mining claim and his mind in that order. There was Sheila, who ran the front desk and kept a .38 under the counter for "emergencies." And there was a kid named Dewey who just wanted to see something interesting before he died of boredom.

"Goddamn snake's drunk," Pete observed, taking a long pull from his own bottle of something that might legally be described as "beverage."

"Can snakes even get drunk?" Dewey asked, eyes wide.

Sheila snorted. "Honey, in Fairbanks, even the *rocks* get drunk if you leave 'em out long enough."

Frank, meanwhile, had achieved a state of reptilian nirvana that bordered on the apocalyptic. He'd discovered that by flexing his muscles in a particular way, he could make himself roll across the floor like a wheel of flesh and poor decisions. He rolled into the wall. He rolled into Pete's boots. He rolled into the stove and singed his scales, which he did not seem to notice or care about.

Around 2 AM, Frank decided he needed more. The bottle was almost empty, but there was still a sheen of port on the floor, mixed with some unidentified grime that had been accumulating since the Carter administration. Frank went for it with the enthusiasm of a man who has just discovered that the bottom of a bottle is not the end, merely a new beginning.

That was when things went sideways.

Frank tried to climb the wall. He made it about three feet before gravity, that cruel mistress, reminded him who was in charge. He fell onto the table where Sheila was counting the night's meager receipts, scattering coins and a half-eaten sandwich. He then attempted to apologize in what he imagined was a dignified serpentine manner, but it came out as a hiss followed by a burp that smelled like a distillery fire.

"He's singing," Dewey said, awestruck.

He wasn't singing. But he was making noises—a sort of guttural rumble that might have been either a mating call or a cry for help. In his port-addled brain, Frank was convinced he was a constrictor of legend, a snake of mythic proportions who could squeeze the very soul out of a moose. In reality, he couldn't have gripped a grape without slipping off.

At 3 AM, the landlord showed up. Mr. Henderson was a man of limited patience and unlimited fury, a combination that had served him well in the Alaska real estate business. He took one look at the scene—the drunk snake, the empty bottle, the three degenerate spectators—and made a decision.

"That snake," he said slowly, "is a menace to society."

"That snake," Pete corrected him, "is having the best night of his life."

Henderson grabbed a broom. Frank, in his infinite drunken wisdom, decided this was a challenge. He reared back, or tried to—he mostly just wobbled in place like a cobra with vertigo. He hissed. He wobbled some more. Then he threw up a small amount of port and partially digested mouse onto the floor.

It was, by all accounts, a low point.

Sheila intervened. She scooped Frank up with a pair of oven mitts and carried him to the bathroom, where she ran cool water over his limp, scaly body. Frank gurgled. He might have been thanking her, or he might have been plotting his revenge on the Fairbanks Port company. Probably both.

By dawn, Frank was curled up behind the toilet, sleeping off the worst hangover of any snake in Alaskan history. His scales were askew. His tongue hung out slightly. He looked like a man who had seen the other side of the bottle and found it wanting.

The bottle of Fairbanks Port sat empty on the bathroom sink, a monument to excess and poor reptilian judgment. Dewey picked it up and read the label: "Aging is for cowards. Drink now."

"Jesus," he muttered. "They're not wrong."

Frank didn't touch alcohol again for three weeks. And when he did, it was only a cheap California red that was on sale. But that's another story—one that ends with a snake, a case of Thunderbird, and a police raid on a bingo game that nobody wants to talk about.

The moral, if there is one, is this: Fairbanks Port will ruin you. Doesn't matter if you're a man, a mouse, or a six-foot bullsnake with nothing left to lose. That cheap, glorious, terrible nectar flows through the veins of Alaska like a promise you know is a lie but drink anyway.

And Frank? Frank is still out there, somewhere between the radiators and the bottom of a bottle, living the dream one bad decision at a time.

END.