Friends-Only Post No. 21: So Hungry and Broke

AW, RATS

A lot of years ago, I lived in a basement apartment -- really, the basement of the house of my friends, a married couple. The basement had been walled off, down the middle, and then that walled-off half halved again, so there were two rooms behind doors, separated by a wall, then the rest of the basement. One room had a mattress on the floor, and a boom box, and a cheap particle-board desk with no chair (so not all papers had to go on the floor) and a few milk crates of clothes, and was called the Bedroom. The other room had the stereo, and all the records, and my dad's old laptop, and a two-seat couch, and a particle-board shelf with booze on it and another particle-board shelf with painted models on it, and that room was called the Dude Room.

My bikes lived outside the bedroom, leaning against the staircase down into the basement. Next to them were my panniers, and my bike bucket, a former kitty litter carrier, a plastic container with a snap-on lid and a strap connecting body to lid.

I worked nights, usually, usually in the neighborhood of 6-2:30 serving beer, then an hour or two dropping the cash into the safe, mopping the bar, drinking a beer while watching Angel, etc. After work, I'd ride the six blocks back to my house and spend 4:30 - 6 watching TV or playing on the internet or listening to sad / angry / angry / sad music or all of the above or whatever until I was tired / drunk enough to move out the Dude Room door, around the furnace and the hot water heater and the brick pillar in the center of the basement and to the bedroom door and through the bedroom door and onto the mattress on the floor, to hit play on the boom box and try to sleep on the sheets, if things were going well, and in the sleeping bag, if they weren't.

Nothing different about this one one post-dawn night, in my sleeping bag, except that that night, a lady customer had brought me a shirt she'd made me, to wear at work, for she was concerned that I was having trouble meeting people. (Ladies.) And that I was having trouble going from drunk / exhausted to asleep. This was because, despite my boom box, I was hearing ... noises. Noises from the wall separating me from the Dude Room. There is only one thing a noise in the wall can be; I was having trouble sleeping because convincing yourself that that a noise from the wall isn't the one thing it can be is hard work that takes concentration and effort. Then the rat ran over my leg.

The feeling of a rat running over your leg cannot be mistaken for anything else. It is a rat. It's light and fast, but powerful. It's a body, a tense and agile body, and as firmly present as any body you will ever encounter. I got out of bed as quickly and noisily as I could, got my glasses on fast, and saw the rat. It was racing around the perimeter of the room, the three concrete walls and the concrete floor offering it little escape. I lurched for the bike bucket, and lumbered after the fast rat with it. By this time, it was leaping up the wall, scrabbling, making a high-pitched ANGER-FEAR-DESIRE-TO-ESCAPE noise, leaping up the wall like a foot and a half or more, as I stalked it with my bucket. I was, obviously, terrified: it was a violently alive creature literally vibrating with explosive strength and total desperation, extremely near my face.

At some point I slapped the bucket down, and threw a heavy book on top of it. The rat went berserk -- more berserk -- scratching at the walls, its solid body banging here then there against the plastic walls and I thought "shit, now what" and put on the clothes I'd worn home from the bar and went upstairs to get my landlord / best friend. He found a short sheet of plywood and snugged it under the bucket's rim as I tilted it to allow the wood insertion. We clumsied the bucket / wood up the stairs and out of the house and like six blocks away to the park, where we set it down and took more than a couple seconds to get our courage up to knock the bucket off the rat, which we eventually did, leaping backwards away from the rat, by now almost certainly rabid, which flatly flew off the sheet of plywood and rampaged away from where we were standing. I'm pretty sure that rat, and all its friends and descendants and all its descendants' descendants and all its friends' descendants would know my face today, and that they would punish me sharply for the torture I subjected it to in that bucket that day, and I'm not sure it would be wrong to hold out hate for me, and I can't think of a reason why they all won't eventually seek me, and leap at my eyes with a fleeing need and the only route through my flesh ... and that's why I'm afraid of rats.

As my friend and I walked back from the park, a punk girl rode by us on the bike path and gave me a smirk of infinite contempt.

I thought "the hell? she doesn't even know me!" and simultaneously realized I was wearing what I'd worn home from work the night before, the shirt I'd been given by my regular, who had made it for me and who was surely just looking out for me. The shirt read "I heart vagina." Oh. Right.

Contempt.


CONTEST

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THANKS

--Collision for IDEOTVPOD

P.S.
This one is dedicated to Fred & Toody and Andrew & Sabrina.

https://agiantdog.bandcamp.com/track/sex-drugs
https://sweetspirittheband.bandcamp.com/track/poor

P.P.S.
This was the song of the summer.
https://agiantdog.bandcamp.com/track/too-much-makeup

P.P.P.S.
This is the title song off the album of the fall.
https://emmaruthrundle.bandcamp.com/album/marked-for-death

P.P.P.P.S.
Unless this is the album of the fall.
https://superunison.bandcamp.com/album/auto