BLAST FROM THE PAST

This past week I have been sick with a cold, and the only creative work I have done has been a productive cough. So I decided to update the blog this week by reaching into the dim past for an online column I wrote last year. Given its woeful hit count, I'm sure its new to many of you. So here it is: (It was originally titled "The Gray, Squeaking Torrent")

When I heard an unfamiliar clatter in the kitchen counter late one windy mid-December night, I thought it was Santa, as any grown man might think. But then I remembered that St. Nick was not due for two weeks, and he doesn't usually come in through the silverware drawer. I chalked the noise up to the wind and went back to sleep.

The next morning when I went to get a spoon, the multitude of droppingsI found in the drawer gave me a good idea of what had disturbed me. Only a rat would be gross enough to leave its droppings in someone'ssilverware drawer.

My initial reaction was swift and medieval: "RATS!" I thought to myself. "Filthy, plague-bearing rats! As soon as the health officials hear of this, they'll come and brick me up in this apartment and leave me to die a horrible death alone with nothing but low-budget porn to comfort me in my most desperate hour!"

All histrionics aside, I knew a rat in the apartment wasn't good and that I would have to evict it. But I didn't truly know what kind of struggle had been brought to my door until I went to work. There, as I tried to deflect accusations of sloth and squalor, I heard this from co-worker Jake: "You're about to tread a dark path, John."

Language like that always gets my attention, and I asked Jake to tell me more of this "dark path." He described his own battle with rats and did so in a manner that made me think he had become a little unhinged by the intensity of the struggle. Think Quint from "Jaws." He said that in terms of gluttony and filth, rats surpassed even my college roommates. He said that they are persistent and filled with sinister cunning. Worstof all, they are legion. Kill one and a hundred will take its place. In short, I was about to grapple with a tenacious enemy, and I was likely to become so obsessed that I would make Captain Ahab look as tranquil as a Buddhist, and any weapon I used to fight the beasts — up to andincluding a flame-thrower — was justified.

I wasn't quite ready to embrace the scorched-earth tactics that Jake suggested. I just wasn't ready to turn my apartment into a free-fire zone. I decided I would stay calm and take a measured approach.

Which didn't last long. While I was being calm and measured the rat was making itself cozy in my apartment. It was helping itself to my bread and amusing itself by shredding my paper towels. It was raiding my garbage and eating the pickings on the counter. Had the rat one day emerged from its hiding place wearing a tiny bathrobe, carrying a backscrubber and whistling a jaunty tune as it went to shower in my bathroom, I would not have been surprised.

And this was beginning to gnaw at me. The sanctity of my home had been violated, and I hated that. I hated thinking that an animal many links down the food chain was thumbing its nose at me. I hated finding evidence of its scavenging. I hated hearing its loathsome skittering inside the walls. And slowly, I was coming around to the obsession tha tJake warned me about. I was alert at the slightest noise, thinking itwas the intruder. I was involuntarily waking at dawn, one of the times when rats are at their busiest. I dreamed that my apartment was floodedby a squeaking, gray torrent. And I was cleaning my apartment daily with a thoroughness that would have made Howard Hughes look like a frat boy. But I wasn't over the top yet.

Until New Year's Day. I came home to watch the later bowl games and, while getting a beer from the fridge, I noticed a cabinet door above the counter was open. As I began closing the door, the rat burst out of the cabinet with all the subtlety of Bonnie and Clyde leaving a bank. It made its getaway behind the stove, leaving behind the remains of two slices of bread ... and one seriously brassed-off tenant.

(To everybody who has heard this story before, this is how it really happened. The rat did not fly around my apartment wearing a jet pack and brandishing a ray gun. So I embellished a little. Deal with it.)

That did it. The rat had to pay with its life. Not even a written apology could save it. With relish, I began considering just how to kill the brute. My first wish was to imitate "Caddyshack" and use plastic explosives shaped like friendly creatures. But explosives might bring an instantaneous, painless death. What about bringing a natural predator such as a python or a hawk into the apartment? No; it might get cocky after devouring the rat and cast its eyes on bigger game — like me. Poison? Too impersonal. Snap trap? This had potential. The idea of therat getting a little blunt-force trauma pleased me. Snap trap it was, then.

After buying a trap the Wednesday after New Year's Day, I raced home to check it out. I tested the spring action several times, and each timethat I heard the POW! of the trap I threw back my head and laughed sinisterly. It was go time. I baited the trap with peanut butter (several people warned me that rats are clever enough to remove cheese safely from traps, so, unless I wanted the rat to die of gout, I should use peanut butter), and left for work, confident that my adversary would soon be scampering down Glory Road.

When I came home that night I found ... nothing. The trap was nowhere in sight and neither was there a dead rat. There was only one conclusion: The rat had taken the trap and made it a trophy. I felt defeated. The future that began unfolding itself at that momentwas a grim one. I saw myself sitting on the couch watching a football game ... next to a 6-foot rat that keeps ordering me into the kitchen to whip up more nachos. And get it another beer while I'm in there.

But suddenly my eyes caught a gleam of something that had fallen in a window sill, and that gleam parted my gloom. It was the trap, and there beside it was the sight my eyes yearned to see: my foe, utterly vanquished. The rat was dead — as in bent-into-a-U-shape dead. Normally,I'm not one to gloat over a dead animal, but in this case I couldn'thelp dancing and yelling, "Oh, yeah! How does that peanut butter tastenow, bee-otch?!" My housemate and I gave the rat the ignominious burial it deserved — the garbage bin — and I slept that night more soundly thanI had slept in weeks.

The peace was short-lived, however. At 6:36 a.m. several days later, I heard a familiar thrashing about in the trash and then the loathsome skittering. And I remembered: kill one and more take its place. The battle had to be rejoined, but my bloodlust was spent. So I put down poison, hoping that would bring a final end to the saga. After about six weeks of peace, I am ready to declare victory and say that my apartment is rat-free. Otherwise, I can only shrug and be grateful I have someone to come home to. Or I can get the plastic explosives.