rats! (or things I won't miss about new york)

A couple of summers ago, I heard a scratching sound in the cabinets beneath my kitchen sink. At first, my cat was trying to reach under the cabinets and play with the intruder, but before long, she would take a wide birth as she walked from the livingroom to the bathroom. I had always had something of a phobia about rats, but the sound of the rodent pushed me over the edge. I could tell it was not a small pest at all and I was too afraid to look, so I just taped the cabinets shut. Sleep did not come easily.

The next day, when the rat appeared to have gone on a brief hiatus, my boyfriend came over and attempted to calm the situation by clearing out the cabinets for me after I discovered a shredded bag and a pretzel that had been carried from one end of the cabinets to the other. (Lesson #1: Never store food anywhere that could seem like a rat buffet.) He stuffed steel wool in the entry hole and we nicknamed the rat "Buddy." All seemed fine until that night when I was awakened by the sound of Buddy chewing through the steel wool like it was cotton candy and rummaging around in the cabinets again.

A panicked call to the landlord got the super over the next day and he installed a thick steel screen over the hole. I was satisfied that the rat could not get in, but I was not prepared for what would happen next. All night long, Buddy chewed with what sounded like teeth made of small chisels at the wood around the edge of the hole, trying to make it bigger than the screen that was blocking it. I was well on my way to losing my mind by the morning, so while this may not have been the most humane thing to do, it had to be done. I waited until Buddy seemed to have returned to his daytime haunt and emptied my pepper spray canister into the hole. I don't know whether this killed him or merely turned him off, but Buddy never returned.

I was reminded of this horror scene when I was packing yesterday and had the television on in the background. Fear Factor came on and one of the stunts involved the contestants carrying dead rats in their mouths from one end of a room to a bucket at the other end. It was too much for me to handle. It should be too much for anyone to handle. However, if you haven't had enough of the rat talk, you might enjoy this piece in the London Review of Books (via Maud Newton).