Three-year-old Teddy Lasry was napping yesterday in his cowboy outfit yesterday at his family's Fifth Ave. apartment when he shot up in bed screaming. A 3-foot-long black-and-white snake was coiled around his left arm and had just bitten his pinky.
"The baby-sitter freaked out," said Teddy's father, David Lasry, who, along with his wife, Evelyn, was at work when the reptile showed up about 4 p.m.
The horrified nanny called 911 and the building's doorman. The doorman and two cable TV workers helped pry the snake off the boy's arm and stow it in a garbage bag, Lasry said.
Police rushed Teddy to Mount Sinai Medical Center, where his parents said he spent two hours attached to a heart monitor as a precaution in case the snake was poisonous.
It wasn't. Experts at the snakebite treatment center at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, where cops took the critter, determined it was a non-venomous California king snake.
But how did it end up in Teddy's bed?
A little sleuthing determined that the serpent had escaped two weeks ago from its cage in the apartment of a doctor whose family lives four floors below the Lasrys. The apologetic owner said his son's pet snake likely traveled up the radiator pipes and into his neighbor's apartment.
"It's a very docile, very harmless snake," he said. "It's handled by our family all the time."
Lasry, 42, a fine arts publisher, said he believed the pet was simply hungry after two weeks of cruising. Teddy's mother, Evelyn Lasry, 37, said her son seems to have gotten over his fright by thinking of himself as a hero cowboy as he rode in the back of the police cruiser to the hospital.
"I told Teddy he's a pretty snake, a nice pet snake who got out of his cage," Evelyn Lasry said. "But he asked, 'Why did he bite my finger, Mamma?' And I said, 'Because he saw that you are a big boy, Teddy, in your cowboy outfit and he got scared.'"