August 26, 1998

RATS!!!

Goddamn fucking rats!!! On my kitchen counter top!!!

I now realize they've been infiltrating my house for a while. For the past week or so, loaves of bread have been disappearing from my kitchen counter top. Every morning I'd buy a fresh loaf of Wonder...yes, I eat Wonder!...and every evening when I got home, it would be gone. I mean, the bag was still up on the counter top, but there was a hole gnawed in it and all the bread was gone.

Like an idiot, I thought the culprit was Jack. But, while he can do many things, Jack can't jump up onto the counter top. Besides, even if he did get up there, he wouldn't leave the bag in the same place. He'd grab it in his mouth, jump back down onto the floor, and devour that delicious Wonder bread in the middle of my living room.

I gotta tell you, when I saw those two beefy, beady eyed rats wiggling around on my counter top, I wanted to puke. I wanted to pick up my dog and never come back to my apartment. But it was three in the morning and I had nowhere to go.

The rats got out of Dodge when I shined my big Mag light on them. I saw them disappear behind the radiator in my kitchen. Upon further inspection, I found a big hole at the bottom of the wall behind the radiator. I also noticed two more disturbing things. One was a rusted rat trap. The other was one of those metal wire racks that serve as a shelf in a refrigerator. That metal rack was just big enough and heavy enough to block the rat hole. What that told me was that a previous occupant of this place had had a rodent problem. Why they moved the metal rack out of the way, I don't know. Why my landlady didn't tell me about this, I don't know either.

I should be surprised. This is the same landlady who got mad at me when I broke her "special window." (This side-note is worth telling.) When I first moved in, I noticed one of the windows in my living room didn't have a lock on it. When I informed my landlady of this, she promptly replaced the window. This was a good. Then summer rolled around. It got really hot one night and I decided to open the window. I slid the window to the top, then turned around to get some ice water in the kitchen. CRASH!!! I turned around and the glass window lay in pieces on my living room floor. It narrowly missed shattering on top of a sleeping Jack. When I told my landlady about this, she got mad, saying that I'd opened the window incorrectly. "They're special windows" she said. "What do you mean 'special?'" I asked. "You gotta open 'em slowly" she answered. She said she wouldn't charge me this time, but she didn't want to have to replace any more of her "special windows." (Incidentally, almost three months later, she still hasn't replaced the broken window.)

So if I tell her about the rats, she'll probably say that it was my fault. "You can't leave dog food out in a bowl!" I can imagine her saying. Or "What are you thinkin' leaving a loaf of bread on your kitchen counter?"

So I've been handling the rat problem myself. At first I thought I'd wait for a rat to reappear, then I'd grab him and bite his head off (ala G. Gordon Liddy). Then I'd throw the rat carcass (minus the head) back into the rat hole as a message to the other rodents.

But then I decided sliding the metal refrigerator rack back in front of the rat hole would be easier. So that's what I did and the rats haven't been back.

 

Broadway Jim Jenkins