Like, Too Cool--Snakes Set Up Shop With Surfer Dudes

The window display is funny for a surf shop. A painted desert scenewith a painted road going off into the horizon. Plus real desert-bleached cattle skulls and a couple of gnarly potted trees.

And there, halfway up the wall of the Emerald City Surf’n Sport shop in Coronado, is a little brown mouse, swinging crazily from a palm frond.

“God,” says my wife, “we’ll have to tell Rod he’s got mice in the shop.”

(Rod Messinger, 35, is shop manager, waiter at Chez Loma around the corner and a lifeguard on Coronado’s Central Beach. He’s kind of famous around town.)

But the big question this particular night is: Can this little mouse get down?

“Ooh, look! There’s a white one,” says Lita. “A whole family of them!”

Three or four mice are kind of huddling together for warmth, even nuzzling each other, down in the other corner. “My God, they’re . . . they’re . . . what is that ?”

I look around. It’s in the branches of a potted tree. It looks like a kind of tire. Except it seems to be slowly unraveling.

“A snake!” Lita yells. “What the hell’s going on?”

What’s going on is this huge python as thick as your biceps is looking at us through the window. Its tongue flicks out. I jump back.

There’s another snake. This one is red and uncoiling from the middle of the big snake’s coil. It is moving onto a branch, looking down.

“Oh, my God--it’s going to . . . “ cries Lita. She’s looking at the family of mice huddled on the floor.

The snake slithers slowly down the tree trunk, flicks its tongue a couple of times, then zzzat! Its head darts forward, and quicker than you can say, “While the cat’s away,” the snake has Mama mouse in its mouth.

Its body follows super quick, wrapping around the little fur ball, literally squeezing the life out of it. After a long moment, the snake turns the limp body toward its mouth and starts the long, slow gulp.

“Hey, when did you last eat a steak?” asks Rod defensively the next morning.

Outside the shop, a clump of kids with skateboards in hand are bunched around the window. “Cool, man,” says one kid. “So cool. It’s like, I can’t believe he’s going to eat that thing. . . . I mean I guess they’d be doing it somewhere else, so it’s not like they’re torturing the mice or anything.”

“Absolutely disgusting,” says an elderly woman who’s just been brought from a restaurant across the road to see this. “It is the most tasteless window display I have ever seen.” But she too stands rooted, with four family members, to see if anything is going to happen.

“The whole thing just kind of happened,” says Rod. “Like, every couple of months I have to think up a new window display, and we were thinking desert. . . . Then I kept seeing how people would stop outside the pet shop any hour of the day. They’d look at the little puppies and go, ‘Awwww, how cute.’

“I decided we needed something like that, except, hey, this is a surf shop. It had to be cool, not cute. Somebody said he had a snake at home. He could bring it in, and he had a friend. . . .”

And so on and so on.

A week later, Rod had two 6-foot-long Colombian redtails, a Haitian boa (6 feet), a Burmese python (8 1/2 feet), a Ball python, a red corn snake--and a big mouse bill. “We bought them from the pet shop. $1.25 each.”

But it hasn’t been a clear sail.

Like the day Rod was trying to impress a surfing supplier. He put a mouse on a branch and started a gosh-almighty fight between the Haitian boa and one of the Colombian redtails. It was the supplier who lunged in and separated the two writhing bodies--to the cheers of the kids outside.

Then came the day when the owner of the Burmese python came to feed his pet a duck.

“The duck stood 2-feet high!” exclaims Rod. “We had to play this one real careful. Like, I had some of the kids get out there and play ball on the sidewalk as a kind of diversion.

“It was amazing. We put the duck in and . . . zzzzoing ! He sinks his teeth into its neck, and in a second he’s coiled around it, like forcing it to aspirate . . . and of course it never gets to breathe in again. Not even a squawk.”

“Yeah! I saw the duck in its belly,” says Brian Belmonte, a 12-year-old who’s at the shop for the umpteenth time. “You could see the whole thing!”

“And you should have seen the, uh, extrusion he left a week later,” adds Rod. “Half of it was feathers. I’ve spent hours bringing sand up from the beach. It’s one giant litter box.”

Then there was the Haitian Boa’s little adventure. It escaped. Into the store. It was lost for two days, but was found on the third in a hat box.

The worst crisis occurred just last week. “I was worried about the Burmese python--the duck eater,” he says. “His owner hadn’t come in with another duck. I knew the guy was getting hungry.”

Hungry ‘s the word. Rod found the giant python had pushed its potted tree-home against the windows and, using its tail end as a lever, was thrusting its nose against the air grill in the display door, gradually forcing the mesh out of its frame.

Rod put his hand against the grill and started pushing back.

“I tell you, that night was one to remember,” he says. “It was like ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’ There were the two of us. Me, 5-10; him, 8-foot-6. In the dark. Dead silent. Staring at each other, pushing, struggling like hell for supremacy. Three times I won. Three times through the night I came back and there he was again, pushing. I was one worried man.”

The last snake left Emerald City last weekend.

“It’s been great for business,” says Rod, noting that short-term business has increased about 5%.

“We had a retail analyst come in the other day. He said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ ” says Rod. “But the most important thing is what it’s done for our reputation with the kids. With them, now, we’re super-cool. We are it.”

Already, kids are coming up to the counter and asking: “When are you going to bring them back?”

The only problem is, how do you follow that act?

“We’re thinking about a shark window,” says Rod. “Line the window display with plastic, bring in baby sharks, dogfish, toss in minnows every night.

“Hey, it’s a dog-eat-dogfish world out there.”