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The red-and-black Snake Farm billboard on I-35 to San Antonio hovers over the old, animal-adorned building and the adjacent, slumping doublewide rumored to have been a brothel when the Snake Farm opened 38 years ago.
The sign lists several non-snake offerings for snake-fearing drivers and artifact enthusiasts: jewelry, rocks, fossils, arrowheads and other rarities. In the billboard's shadow is a smaller sign that says "An Experience Since 1967."
I finally visit the Snake Farm to see just what kind of experience I had passed by so many times on the edge of New Braunfels. Snakes frighten me, but they are calling from far away, tempting me to forget my daily grind and delve into a little wilderness.
An 18-foot-long reticulated python skin sticks to the wall above his head. He takes my $6.75 entry fee and lets me wander through his prized possessions: 200 different snake species. To the left are beaded jewelry and gaudy souvenirs - Snake Farm shot glasses, T-shirts, baby spoons and even giant plastic roaches. To the right are 500 snakes, stacked on top of each other in cages.
There's a taipan, the most poisonous land snake on earth; a Gaboon viper; a Black Pakistan cobra and some Texas rattlesnakes and copperheads. In cages, rats hide behind water bowls and fake branches. Mellyn and his employees feed the snakes between 500 and 1,000 rats per week. Knowing that death lies powerlessly just a foot away, tapping its head against the thin glass of the terrariums, I smirk.
Entering through the back door, a fat rooster plops on top of an old-fashioned vending machine, a few feet from a Buddha statue. Exotic and barnyard animals jump, fly and scurry in the close proximity of a half-acre. There is no more thorough depiction of spring: The tortoises are mating.
A baby wallaby pokes its head out of its mother's pouch while a hen strolls by with her chicks. Ducklings scuttle through the grass just beneath the macaque cage, in which the father, mother and baby hold each other, as if to protect themselves from the buzzing life outside the cage.
A frustrated male peacock waddles into the pen with the miniature horses, llamas and chickens, and furiously rattles his plumes to attract a mate. The hens look unimpressed and run away. Unfortunately for him, all the female peacocks are sitting motionless on the opposite end of the yard.
All the animals around him seem annoyed - especially the llama, which spits at him but misses and hits a miniature horse.
I walk over to the baboon cage to stare at a colorful male. He begins to pounce and grunt, staring me back in the face. At first, I think he is offended, but Mellyn says he is trying to impress me. This particular baboon grew up in the circus and is especially humanized and girl-crazy. The female baboon sulks alone at the other end of the cage.
Back inside the snake building, I find a big, lazy beast coiled in the corner of its enormous cage. Her name is Lucy, and she is an albino reticulated python. She's fat and long and creamy white with yellow splotches. Mellyn likes to let children hold this 300-pound constrictor because, even though this python is the only snake species ever to have eaten a human, Lucy is calm and non-venomous. I watch Mellyn sling the serpent around the shoulders of a grinning 8-year-old boy.
This reptile eats chickens and rabbits and looks disinterested in the boy's chubby stomach. Lucy's body is as thick as the boy's neck, maybe thicker, and she would have no difficulty making quick work of him.
But the 4-foot boy obviously feels superior to the 30-foot Lucy; he lets her dangle for a good five minutes. Mellyn looks at me and asks, "You wanna hold her?" Mellyn is holding one end of the snake to keep the full weight of the animal off the boy. The boy's father, mother and brother stand around their son in awe, confident in him, Mellyn and Lucy.
The father snaps a picture of his son, and Mellyn looks like a king sharing his snake kingdom with a world that only wishes it knew as much about venom and mating.
Mellyn later tells me this boy's father grew up going to the Snake Farm and is now passing the experience on to his kids.
Snakes are not the only creepy sights in the snake room. Iguana, cat, monkey and alligator skeletons align the top of the snake cages. Mellyn, who has owned the Snake Farm for 10 years, collects skeletons of reptiles and mammals, as well as artifacts from jungle tribes in Africa and South America.
A dusty poster titled "Shrunken Heads!" sits in the corner of the room. The photo of the shrunken head looks like a cross between a monkey, werewolf and caveman and resembles an ad for an early 20th century freak show.
Beginning, "There are scores of ceremonies that attend the taking and shrinking of a head," it vaguely and mystically describes the Jivaro tribe's ritual of shrinking the heads of its enemies. It is dated, sensational and hilarious, leading me to think that it came from Snake Farm's first owner, a "carny" named Mack.
But Mellyn enthusiastically says he bought it himself, then goes into lengthy detail on the spiritual meaning behind shrinking heads. Mellyn actually has his own shrunken head but puts it on display only in cooler months when it won't shrivel up.
I approach Mellyn while he's unloading boxes of tree frog pens to ask him about the history of the place in order to ease into the subject of the brothel. He says the menagerie behind the snake building is primarily his addition. He used to live in Chicago supplying feed to pet stores, but in 1994, he moved to Texas with his wife to buy the Snake Farm and finally house his favorite animals and artifacts.
He boasts the most diverse primate collection in the state; macaques, baboons and numerous other monkey species live in Mellyn's little world. Mack, the first owner (his last name is unknown), had a single chimpanzee, which he called a gorilla to attract road-trippers.
Mellyn says people still pull off the highway asking for the gorilla, which is one animal the Snake Farm has never had.
After Mellyn finishes with the tree frog pens and moves on to boxes full of hot pink and green plastic toys, I finally address the brothel rumor. He looks slightly stressed but still agreeable.
"I've been waiting for you to ask me that," he says.
He looks up from the boxes as though relieved I finally asked and quickly explains that Mack the carny owned the original Snake Farm in LaPlace, La., which almost certainly had a brothel. Mack opened the Texas location in 1967 to attract HemisFair Park-goers in 1968, when San Antonio hosted the World's Fair. Mellyn describes Mack's Snake Farm as a roadside carnival with nothing but snakes, a chimp and a possible whorehouse.
This infamous reputation traveled from LaPlace to New Braunfels. Whether the rumor is true, Mellyn doesn't know - or won't tell me. Mack sold the Texas Snake Farm to Joe Treska, a former employee, in the mid-1970s, and Mellyn bought it from Treska in 1994.
He describes how the place has changed over time, but I'm more interested in the whorehouse. He claims that the Snake Farm is no longer freakish, but family-oriented. Mellyn is proud that field trips and birthday parties - even a wedding - have taken place at the I-35 stop.
One of the employees, Jared, says the brothel rumor at the Texas location is "probably true." But even if it is true, it is unclear when the presumed brothel died out.
When Mellyn and Jared are working in the souvenir section, I put on my innocent face and take one last shot at the rumor.
"Is that all you can tell me about the brothel?"
Mellyn and Jared look at each other half-smiling, as if each knows what the other will say. Mellyn stands up to arrange the toys on the shelves and brags about the time he ripped off a man who believed there were women waiting for him in the backyard:
"This man dressed in a nice suit walked in asking for the entertainment. I said, 'It's in the back,' and he paid the entry fee and walked on back to the animals," he says. "He came back to the front and said he wanted his money back, that that wasn't the type of entertainment he was looking for. I just played dumb and said that that's the only kind of entertainment we have."
Mellyn says he does this every time people ask for "the entertainment." Jared says a car full of well-groomed college men from California recently drove all the way to the Snake Farm just to visit the brothel. They thought the mysterious doublewide was the brothel but were disappointed to learn it is really used for storage and office space.
They both say that most rumor believers think the doublewide is a brothel, but a few think it's somewhere in the back, or underground. They relate other stories and admit that the rumor is good for business. It's a fun game to play with curious customers, and Mellyn, at least, likes the nostalgia that comes with the "carny" image.
I head out the door, past the sign that says "An Experience Since 1967," and feel like I know Mack.
Mellyn is wrong - Snake Farm is still a roadside carnival; it's just owned by a guy who genuinely loves his animals rather than a pimp who calls his chimpanzee a gorilla. After all, there is a penny press machine and a petting zoo. I get into my car and stare for a little while at the doublewide: Palm trees line the front and wrinkled curtains cover the windows.
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