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HOUSTON CHRONICLE (Texas) 07 September 03 Snake handler chooses fame over pain (Cleatus Rattan)
In case you've ever wondered, the holders of world records, as documented by The Guinness Book of Records, receive a certificate, nothing more. For world records in bravery, foolishness and often just plain stupidity, they get a piece of paper that seems to them a kind of immortality. In Jackie Bibby's case, immortality is less important than just surviving.
Bibby, a North Texas resident and ex-con who served 26 months of an eight-year sentence in Huntsville for drug dealing, holds four world records for snake handling. In addition to regularly kissing a cobra on its head (not a record), he has crawled into a sleeping bag with 109 rattlesnakes, held eight (large) rattlesnakes in his mouth, sat in a bathtub with 81 rattlesnakes and sacked 10 rattlesnakes in 17.11 seconds.
Chevy Chase, in his now-canceled talk show, called Bibby "the bravest man I've ever seen."
Brave but not dumb. Although he has crawled into sleeping bags with rattlers, lately he doesn't get into containers with snakes already waiting for him, as often as he has them placed in a tub, sleeping bag or coffin with him. He says snakes often strike at movement, so he is "really cool" -- he is absolutely still.
On the night of Aug. 13, he set his most recent world record on the Ripley's Believe It or Not TV show. The old record (which Bibby held) was for sharing a tub with 75 rattlers. He topped that with 81 rattlesnakes.
And he had a competitor -- a young woman, who began to shake involuntarily after about 20 rattlers had joined her in a tub. She had the snakes removed, then she got out. The ever-cool Bibby's style is to have himself lifted out of the tub or coffin or sleeping bag still filled with large rattlesnakes, very slowly.
Bibby has an inexplicable knack for knowing when a snake is about to strike. As soon as he senses something's wrong, he asks one of his helpers to take a particular snake out.
He believes -- and who is to dispute him? -- that snakes have a kind of herd instinct. They feel safer when there are many of them about. When the snakes feel safer, he is safer, Bibby says.
He has his container, whatever it is, filled carefully with snakes, then as rapidly as possible he has them placed at his feet where they are close to each other. But his real secret is to remain extraordinarily calm. He does not move a muscle, voluntarily or involuntarily.
Five times Bibby has been bitten severely enough to require hospitalization. He stutters and a slightly glazed look comes to his face when he says that the pain is immense. You would think, watching him handle the snakes, that through some quirk of genes, Bibby didn't, couldn't experience the same pain and fear that the rest of us do.
"It is really beyond the scope of my language skills to explain the pain," he says, looking down at his boots.
Bibby grew up in the small Central Texas town of Rising Star. He was 17 and not long out of high school, when he learned about a rattlesnake-sacking contest in Brownwood. He had touched only one snake -- almost dead -- in his life. His youth kept him from entering, but the next year, 1969, he entered and won.
Bibby did it because it seemed like a good way to get his name in the newspaper, he explains today, but more important, it gave him the adrenaline high he always wanted and needed.
I first met Jackie Bibby when he was a student in my English class at Cisco Junior College in 1969. Jackie didn't have much interest in classroom doings, so he withdrew passing (WP). I saw him a few months later, and he was a prosperous-looking bull rider, trying to fill his card, earn $3,000 in a year, to gain membership into the Professional Rodeo Cowboys' Association.
A few months later, he was a soldier, looking good with his Airborne insignia as shiny as his new pickup truck. Soon thereafter, I remember being startled to read a letter to the editor, a long preachy letter from an inmate at the Texas Department of Corrections. It was written by Bibby. His letters appeared about once a week for about two years in the biweekly county newspapers and satisfied the local inhabitants that Texas' prison system produced a perfect, model prison, doing what it should be doing -- punishing and rehabilitating. Bibby proclaimed his regret for his life as an evildoer. I remember thinking that he was an effective writer and just plain smart. His letters were read, discussed and popular throughout the county.
When Bibby came home I told him what he already knew, that his letters had made him a local celebrity. Not overly impressed he said, "You know, when the oil played out in the '30s, the smart people left Eastland County while the others stayed here and bred. Ain't too hard to impress some folks."
Years later Bibby told me loudly, not surreptitiously, that far from being rehabilitative, prison was a dealer's paradise. He could get whatever he wanted in prison except women, he said. The omission struck him as unreasonable.
Out of prison and "clean," although he had a few illegal relapses, he came back to school and took my class again. I had him speak to all of my classes. He was eager to do so and wanted to make up for his former life by helping others. Today he is 52 and married to Vickie Morgan. His day job is being a drug counselor in Stephenville. Like most people who meet him, I discovered I admired him a great deal. Although he is a tough, brawny-looking guy, he is eloquent, seems honest, and is interested in keeping others from the world of drugs.
Always a seeker of the adrenaline high, Bibby had become a rodeo bull rider briefly after giving up on college.
"I rode a few, but I got on a bunch," he says.
In the Army after his brief rodeo career, he volunteered for Airborne and loved the experience of jumping out of planes. Later, as a civilian, he became one of those who jump from buildings, bridges and mountains -- a base jumper. He got the double-dose high of jumping and thumbing his nose at the law, which particularly frowned on jumping from a building, under construction, at night, in Houston.
Looking back without any touch of nostalgia, he uses a well-rehearsed line that must be a big hit with the people who listen to his testimony: "Nothing but bird [bleep] and idiots fall from the sky." He counsels against looking up to, or for, either.
Though he has given up sky-diving, he zips around the Davis Mountains of West Texas in a hot hang glider, looking like a bald Tom Cruise in Top Gun, or maybe more like Goose, coming off a carrier.
Bibby says he found using and selling dope to be easy during his cowboy and Army life.
"Hell, in those Merle Haggard Okie From Muskogee days, cowboys were thought to be patriotic for drinking beer, and nobody thought cowboys -- and even in the Army I was a known cowboy -- were going to be doing dope. Man, it was all too easy. I made more money in the Army than the generals, unless they were dealing, too."
Bibby, who admits to having been in more jails than he can remember, and having been married to more women than he can remember, can explain just how he became who and what he was and is. Most of us can't do that -- and maybe don't need to as badly as he does.
Learning how he became an alcoholic and user of anything injectable was the path Jackie took to find his cure.
"You have to know that how you came to be a doper is a reasonable process, not something of a big bang of bad luck. The process is something you can understand; otherwise, you'd give in to the devil and believe you couldn't help yourself. You've got to know God can do for you what you can't do for yourself, or you'll be whipped," he says.
Bibby also knows why he puts on snake shows all over the world, and suffers the occasional snakebite: "When I'm in a sleeping bag full of rattlesnakes, or watching 50 of them or so crawling over me, I'm no longer a baldheaded, middle-aged man. I'm on a natural high just as good as when I was a doper, but when the show is over, I remember it now. When I was high or drunk, I could only foggily remember, but now I remember and get high again. Man, it's wonderful. A little pain now and then is worth it."
In Bibby's many trips to drug-treatment hospitals, sometimes voluntary, sometimes not, he is satisfied that he found the reasons for his obsession with drugs and danger. It all goes back to his mama and daddy, of course. "Hell," he says, "I think God gave us parents and wives just to blame. I don't want to think I'm just a really rotten son-of-a-[bleep]."
Bibby says his parents gave him sips of their drinks until he stole some beer from the refrigerator and ran off to the pasture to drink it. He says he doesn't know how many he drank, but "plenty" made him feel just like he wanted to. When he started school, he was afraid of the teachers, the other kids and everything he could see, including the big yellow buses.
Bibby began running off from school every day, and once when the principal chased him, he threw rocks at him until the principal turned around and went to Bibby's mother for help.
The next day when he returned to school, he found he was a hero with the other kids. That did it. He has wanted the feeling the beer gave him and the adulation of the other kids every day since.
A few years later in junior high, Bibby took his motorbike to downtown Rising Star, north of Brownwood, almost every night and did stupid tricks that often tore up his bike and himself to earn money for beer and the odd joint now and then from older boys.
The cuts and bruises and jeering remarks suited Jackie just fine. Just as long as somebody was looking at him, he didn't care what the reason was. He would get drunk and tear up his motorcycle as often as he could to get high and to get adulation, or even scorn, any kind of notice, from anybody.
"Today, I even look forward to the attention I get from the nurses when I'm in the hospital for snakebite. They're all pretty nice, you know."
Bibby refers to his father, an ex-cop whom he loves dearly, as his chief enabler.
"He had to arrest me once on a warrant, but he bailed me out again, kinda quick. Man, he loved me, still does, only now he's proud of me, though he doesn't know why I do the snake shows and wishes I wouldn't. He says for me to tell him what I've done after I've done it. He can't watch any show," Bibby says somewhat wistfully.
"My father and mother drank too much and probably too often, and they weren't exactly alcoholics, but if you see the parents you love and who love you, drinking too much or too often, even if it's just for relaxing, then a kid thinks drinking is OK. Who knows what comes next? Some will grow up to be alcoholics, some won't -- some chemistry problem in some of us."
Maybe Bibby's story about how he became an alcoholic and narcotic user is old-hat common now, but his attempts at a movie career are unique.
Who else would crawl into a coffin with a dozen rattlesnakes for a part in Walker-Texas Ranger? Bibby has had several bit parts acting on television shows and in movies and has appeared on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and done The Maury Povich Show, Ripley's Believe It or Not, and many others, notably the popular Don't Try This at Home in Great Britain.
It was while performing death-defying feats on TV, such as crawling into a sleeping bag head first with 109 rattlers, that he got to know several celebrities. Those new friends have helped him get small parts in movies and TV shows.
Bibby claims James Garner, Jamie Lee Curtis and several other celebrities as "plain-fun-folks who want to help me."
"They're almost all good people, these actors. Garner and Jamie Lee seem really interested in me. She damn near fainted at the sleeping bag thing, then hugged me. I can take a lot of that," he says, smiling big.
"Still," he says, "the bathtub-gig gag is more dangerous because snakes can see and they strike at movement. I always think that they might get into a fight among themselves, and I'll be caught in the middle, but I love it," he says, laughing.
While Bibby was in a coffin for one show, a rattler wrapped around his neck and squeezed until he thought he might suffocate.
"My helpers had a devil of a time getting that SOB off my neck, and I didn't dare move," he says, laughing. "You sure don't want to sneeze or scratch an itch."
Bibby makes use of the horror people have for snakes when he puts his hands out, has a coiled rattler placed on his head and two more coiled on his shoulders like epaulets and hangs two snakes from each hand. There is no need to tell the audience to be quiet and still at that point in his show.
Bibby is better known in Europe than he is in Texas.
"People in Europe seem more intrigued about rattlesnake handling than they are in the United States. I think it is more commonplace in this country than it is abroad. My agent in California has several gigs waiting for us in Europe. In addition, we're going to the Orient. I can't wait."
"I've appeared in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Cologne. Been to Europe seven times," he brags with his infectious smile.
Bibby received his fifth bite early this year and spent nine days in the hospital in Stephenville. Not long after his release from the hospital, he and I were in a local restaurant when his doctor came in with his small son. The doctor came over and introduced his son. The boy, about 10, asked the question that goes through the mind of anyone who knows what Bibby does.
"Why do you do it, mess with snakes, I mean?"
"Just so your father would bring you over to meet me," he said. "If I didn't handle snakes, nobody would be interested in me."
Maybe, I thought, but he would always be interesting. He and I had just returned from a hang-gliding trip to Fort Davis where I had marveled and watched in horror at some of his near misses while floating above and diving around the local mountain scenery.
Just recently, Bibby told me that he was lying to me in 1969 when he dropped out of my class. The story he told me (which I didn't remember) was that his father had been working on an oil rig and had his leg cut off in some horrible accident. Bibby had told me he had to go to work to support his family.
"That story worked on you," he said and laughed. "If I had been dropped with a WF (withdrew failing), I would have been drafted to go to Vietnam, but you gave me the WP. The next year though, I joined the Army. I really didn't want to miss a good war."
I told him it was a good story, and I probably believed him, but in those days, I didn't fail anybody if he was going to have to go to the war.
"Damn," he said, "I wasted a good story, except I've been telling for years at Narcotics Anonymous meetings how you believed me."
I'd probably believe him today, too. He is a champion storyteller, actor and snake man.
Bibby lives not far from Fort Worth on the Granbury highway. He keeps a very large python as a pet. His door is unlocked, his name is in the phone book, but I wouldn't go in uninvited if I were you.
Snake handler chooses fame over pain

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Quote from article: he said, "You know, when the oil played out in the '30s, the smart people left Eastland County while the others stayed here and bred. Ain't too hard to impress some folks."
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"Seek first to understand, then to be understood"

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Yeah, it sounds like a good case for Placebo Testing....

DONT EVER CALL ME CRAZY!
This guy takes the hobby to a new level of insanity.
wow I read the whole sick thing.
bud