RATS!
Friday, November 26, 2004
This piece is fun to listen to, because my voice cracks repeatedly when I attempt to sing.
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We recently had a small rat problem here in our apartment. I don't mean that the rats themselves were small-there is a theory, in fact, that they may have been adolescent raccoons. I mean that the problem was small, at least when compared to the larger problems facing our community, like social injustice and gun violence and that kind of stuff.
But try explaining that to our houseguests as they screamed, "Rat! Rat! Oh God there's a rat on your dining room table!"
"Don't worry," we told our guests. "That's not a dining room table. It's a card table. And that's not a rat. It's a mouse. The rats are much bigger."
Until the rats chewed through the cord connecting my computer to the Internet, I did some research on rats in Chicago. First, I learned that most of the rats in Chicago are Norway rats, which frankly did not surprise me at all, since our rats were always very courteous to my roommate Sven. They almost never pooped in his bed. These Norway rats often move beneath houses when the weather gets cold, and given the Norway rat's fondness for rotting organic material and our kitchen sink's abundance of unwashed dishes, our nest of rats must have though they'd stumbled upon Eden.
Initially, we tried to explain to the rats that thanks to El Nino, Chicago will likely have a delightfully mild winter, thus allowing them to stay outside, but rats are either stubborn or do not speak English.
So we decided to relocate them. To that end, we set up a large wicker basket in the middle of what we call our living room, even though it is technically a hallway. The basket was propped up with a stick, and the stick was coated with dried cheez-whiz. A few hours after baiting the trap, Sven and I were playing PlayStation2 when we heard a soft thump. I turned my gaze from NBA Live 2003 in time to see the basket scoot across our dusty hardwood floor before the rat lifted the basket up and scurried off to wherever it came from. Which is to say, in the general direction of our kitchen.
We thought of buying a larger wicker basket, or possibly an actual rattrap, but after a contentious house meeting, we finally agreed that relocating the rats seemed an awful lot like shipping the Indians off to Oklahoma. After all, rats are people, too. Well, not technically, but still. For weeks, we had lived with the rats as we live with one another. We shared food. We fought about who bought soap last. You know. It was like Three's Company, except instead of Suzanne Somers, we had rats.
Things got back to normal for a while, but then my girlfriend called me one morning to say that she'd discovered via the Department of Streets and Sanitation web site that knowingly harboring rats in your residence is illegal. My girlfriend, who is caring and sweet when it comes to people but frankly rather cruel when it comes to rodents, threatened to call up Streets and San and turn us in. It was for my own good, she insisted, and then rambled on at length about a disease called the Bubonic Plague, which apparently has killed a number of people over the years.
So we called an exterminator, and now the rats are dead. Sven is inconsolable, although he seems to grieve by cleaning the house, so the rest of us are secretly devising ways to further upset him. It's nice that my girlfriend is again willing to visit the apartment, and there's a certain relief in not having to stomp around the apartment chanting, "Just for a moment, please go and hide / That'll make your presence easier to abide" But there's a hole in our apartment that no rodent-proof epoxy can plug.
Godspeed, beloved roommates. Wherever you are now, I hope there are plenty of dirty dishes.
We recently had a small rat problem here in our apartment. I don't mean that the rats themselves were small-there is a theory, in fact, that they may have been adolescent raccoons. I mean that the problem was small, at least when compared to the larger problems facing our community, like social injustice and gun violence and that kind of stuff.
But try explaining that to our houseguests as they screamed, "Rat! Rat! Oh God there's a rat on your dining room table!"
"Don't worry," we told our guests. "That's not a dining room table. It's a card table. And that's not a rat. It's a mouse. The rats are much bigger."
Until the rats chewed through the cord connecting my computer to the Internet, I did some research on rats in Chicago. First, I learned that most of the rats in Chicago are Norway rats, which frankly did not surprise me at all, since our rats were always very courteous to my roommate Sven. They almost never pooped in his bed. These Norway rats often move beneath houses when the weather gets cold, and given the Norway rat's fondness for rotting organic material and our kitchen sink's abundance of unwashed dishes, our nest of rats must have though they'd stumbled upon Eden.
Initially, we tried to explain to the rats that thanks to El Nino, Chicago will likely have a delightfully mild winter, thus allowing them to stay outside, but rats are either stubborn or do not speak English.
So we decided to relocate them. To that end, we set up a large wicker basket in the middle of what we call our living room, even though it is technically a hallway. The basket was propped up with a stick, and the stick was coated with dried cheez-whiz. A few hours after baiting the trap, Sven and I were playing PlayStation2 when we heard a soft thump. I turned my gaze from NBA Live 2003 in time to see the basket scoot across our dusty hardwood floor before the rat lifted the basket up and scurried off to wherever it came from. Which is to say, in the general direction of our kitchen.
We thought of buying a larger wicker basket, or possibly an actual rattrap, but after a contentious house meeting, we finally agreed that relocating the rats seemed an awful lot like shipping the Indians off to Oklahoma. After all, rats are people, too. Well, not technically, but still. For weeks, we had lived with the rats as we live with one another. We shared food. We fought about who bought soap last. You know. It was like Three's Company, except instead of Suzanne Somers, we had rats.
Things got back to normal for a while, but then my girlfriend called me one morning to say that she'd discovered via the Department of Streets and Sanitation web site that knowingly harboring rats in your residence is illegal. My girlfriend, who is caring and sweet when it comes to people but frankly rather cruel when it comes to rodents, threatened to call up Streets and San and turn us in. It was for my own good, she insisted, and then rambled on at length about a disease called the Bubonic Plague, which apparently has killed a number of people over the years.
So we called an exterminator, and now the rats are dead. Sven is inconsolable, although he seems to grieve by cleaning the house, so the rest of us are secretly devising ways to further upset him. It's nice that my girlfriend is again willing to visit the apartment, and there's a certain relief in not having to stomp around the apartment chanting, "Just for a moment, please go and hide / That'll make your presence easier to abide" But there's a hole in our apartment that no rodent-proof epoxy can plug.
Godspeed, beloved roommates. Wherever you are now, I hope there are plenty of dirty dishes.
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