Don’t Mess With Texas

American Madness readers: meet William Johnson.

William, it is my pleasure to introduce you to American Madness.

I apologize up front for the awkward introduction, but this is the only way we could arrange for this meeting. William is currently incarcerated in Brazoria County, Texas on a burglary charge.

Turns out, he asked one of the local trailer park residents to help him move a big screen TV out of another trailer home that wasn’t William’s. Outside of stealing someone’s snuff, thievin’ a TV from a trailer park is about the highest crime you can commit in that part of Texas.

And he might have gotten away with the theft if he hadn’t been pulled over during a couple suspicious U-Turns in the middle of the Interstate. And even that might not have got him nabbed if the officers didn’t think it entirely too weird that his co-pilots were a six-foot long alligator and a water moccasin (a type of poisonous snake).

Ok, I’ll pause and let you read that last little bit over again.

Yep, William here is a man with a fondness for reptiles. The Houston Chronicle reports Johnson told the pokey that he found the snake and the alligator on the sides of roads and picked them up because he has an interest in cold-blooded, scaled creatures.

While the ‘gator was cool with it, the cottonmouth (the term us South Texas use for water moccasin) got angrier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockin’ chairs and reared up and bit William on the hand. What did William do about the poisonous snake bite? “Johnson refused medical treatment for his hand,” according to the Chronicle’s telling of this roadside yarn.

And lest anyone accuse William here of being normal (or even sane), found on his person was a hair trimmer (apparently unused from the looks of things) and video game controller.

All this strangeness doesn’t faze the local smokies though. As the Houston Chronicle reported: this was “just a typical day in Brazoria,” according to the town’s chief of police.