STRIKING EXPOSURE

PHOTO BY DANNY FULGENCIO

Inside a tidily kept Hamilton Park home resides a cute young couple, their precious new baby girl, two cuddly canines and about 60 snakes. We arrived last fall to photograph and interview Klayton Mai (a plumber for the family business by day) about his moonlighting gigs as a snake breeder and mixed martial arts fighter. Inside the so-called “snake room,” Mai pulled open a plastic drawer, revealing four tangled hatchlings. The other cubes, stacked in columns and rows, contained one adult ball python apiece. Working in a reptile room can be intimidating, but Mai’s calming, confident presence and patient genetic-engineering-101 lessons made it feel more like a well-controlled laboratory. Safe. His wife Hannah actually made the serpent-populated space feel homey and inviting. Seven months pregnant at the time, she showed us her favorite snake as well as her pet gecko, which she keeps in its own plastic habitat amid the pythons. Her love notes to Klayton, scrawled on Post It notes, lined one wall. As we talked and photographed, the smaller snakes curled in Klayton’s hands, and he draped the big ones around his neck. Most were cooperative models. But one particularly animated, hissing python remained in her box. Seemingly agitated, probably hungry, she raised her head as our photographer leaned in, until they were nerve-wrackingly lens-to-nose. “I can provoke it,” Mai offered. “I can make it strike, if that would make the photo cooler.” (That won’t be necessary, we insisted.) The photo came out cool as the other side of the pillow, no provocation necessary. Hannah gave birth to a baby girl in October. “We had our little nugget Camille Lane Mai Oct. 9,” Hannah beams. She also mentions that Klayton won a televised fight last November and remains 8-1 in his class.