Sid Had Good Year, for a Serpent

MISSION VIEJO — The television news crews have fled, the klieg lights have dimmed, the newspaper headlines are a memory. My, how soon they forget.

Sid Vicious, erstwhile media superstar and serpent, is out of the spotlight.

Just a year ago, the resident boa constrictor at the Mission Viejo High School biology lab slithered to attention throughout the Southland, undergoing a landmark experimental laser treatment for a cancerous growth on his mouth.

Soon after the January, 1989, surgery was completed at UC Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic by a team of technicians and veterinarians, Sid was trundled back to his oak-and-glass display case and a life of anonymity. No more TV sound bites, no more prying reporters, not even an appearance on the David Letterman show for a stupid pet trick.

So, how’s life treating you these days, Sid?

As is his habit, the snake isn’t talking. But his keeper, biology teacher Emmett Carlson, says the past 12 months have been fairly eventful for Sid, even without all the public attention.

There have been the usual meals of live rats gulped whole, the typical assortment of high school students flocking around the display case that Sid shares with his girlfriend, a six-foot boa named Camille. (The pair’s pen is adorned with a “Farside” cartoon showing two snakes cowering at the sight of a nerdy, bespectacled kid wearing Mickey Mouse ears. One snake says to the other: “Has it left yet?”)

For Sid, it has also been a period marked by a renewed bout with cancer. About two months ago, students in Carlson’s class noticed that the lump on Sid’s mouth had reappeared, so the snake was examined by Dr. Scott Weldy, a veterinarian and 1975 Mission Viejo High alumnus who volunteers his services to the school.

Weldy diagnosed the lump as a renewed onslaught of the cancer. Sid, a mild-mannered sort who hardly lives up to the outrageous behavior of the deceased punk rock star who is his namesake, was quietly wheeled back into the Beckman Laser Institute and zapped again.

This time, however, there were no blinding flashbulbs, no media circus. The operation was low-key. Sid had to be saved.

The procedure was a virtual replay of the first operation, Carlson said. The snake was anesthetized and injected with a light-sensitive dye that gathers around the tumor. Then a laser beam was focused on the experimental dye, causing it to release compounds that are toxic to the surrounding cancer cells.

After the surgery, a woozy Sid was returned to his pen, which includes a stubby eucalyptus branch for slithering along and an assortment of electrically heated “hot rocks” that the snakes use to warm themselves. The multihued reptile was quickly back to his normal self--devouring rats in a single gulp, intertwining with Camille, languorously flipping his forked tongue to investigate the world around him.

For Carlson and his students, it was a welcome sight. After the first operation a year ago, Sid was lethargic for days, refusing to eat even the most doltish rat released in his cage. Carlson took to knocking out the rodents so Sid could catch them. On the advice of Dr. Weldy, the teacher also began giving the snake a sort of makeshift Jacuzzi bath in a science department sink to warm Sid up for the task of hunting.

But the most important development came only a few weeks ago. Weldy examined Sid’s scar tissue and pronounced him healthy and apparently rid of the cancer, Carlson said.

It was Carlson who gave the snake his name. Back in the beginning, it was just Sid, as in Sid the snake. Carlson thought it just sort of sounded good.

But later, one of the students took it further, adding the moniker of the notorious co-leader of the defunct British punk rock band the Sex Pistols.

“I thought it was so clever,” Carlson recalled one recent day while slinging Sid around his neck to show off the snake for a visitor. “I was so out of it, I had no idea who this Sid Vicious was. Then a student brought in a tape of his music. If I had known what it sounded like, I probably would have never gone along with it.”

These days, it’s pretty much back to being just another living specimen in the biology lab for Orange County’s most famous snake.

But there will always be the memories. Newspaper clippings detailing his surgery adorn a bulletin board in back of Sid’s cushy display case. And pinned to the wall is a cardboard sign that lets the uninformed who stray into Carlson’s classroom know that this is no ordinary snake.

It reads: “Sid Vicious, Superstar.”