Rat Bastard





The house I grew up in was built in the 1930s. It was on a wide, palm-lined avenue in the sprawling community at the base of the Hollywood Hills. The Hollywood sign was completely visible from the middle of my street, and we used the letters as focus points when giving directions. Many movie and TV studios were within walking distance, and it was an everyday occurrence to see movie crews set up on someone’s sweeping lawn or at a sleepy intersection, filming a movie or TV show.

The houses were old and beautiful. Most of them were old and beautiful and had rats. Big rats the size of cats. Rats that could probably drag a small cat. The Western Exterminator truck, with its 4-foot-tall icon of a top-hatted man with a huge hammer on the back was frequently parked on our block. He visited our house many times during my childhood. You see, you could set traps for these rats, but they always came back. They predated us. Their ratty ancestors had lived there since my parents were children. Maybe before. Rat royalty. The Divine Right of King Rats.

We could hear them in the attic. Once, late at night while sitting on the back porch sneaking a joint, my sister and I saw a huge brown one slinking along a power line between our attic and the MacLatchey’s attic. Another night, babysitting the Millers in their immense house, I was harassed by rats. Sitting on the four-poster bed in the master bedroom in front of the television, I watched in growing horror and incredulity as one, then three, then more rats scurried past me, under the bed, out the door toward the staircase. Rats racing back and forth in the bedroom, down the halls, on the landing. Mr. And Mrs. Miller came home to find me shipwrecked in the center of the bed, with my mouth open, and a huge case of The Creeps.

“Oh, the rats,” Mrs. Miller said, with a dismissive wave of her manicured hand. “Isn’t it awful? We’ll have to have the exterminator back again.”

I am sure there is some entirely Freudian reason why I have had rats as pets since I was 13 years old, I just don’t really care to explore it. So would you just lay off the analysis and let me tell my story. We had two rats until very recently. Brisbane was gray and white and had some sort of a stroke. She became less and less able to walk or move. I did not realize how bad she had gotten until I realized that I was literally carrying her from room to room, and feeding her by hand. My husband finally called my sister the vet and had Brisbane taken away to be put to sleep.

So it’s time to get a new rat. Last week, I brought home a tiny little rat with a cream-colored hood and strip over a white body. Perfectly darling. We named her Lizzie and put her in the high-rise, three-story cage with the lonely and bereft Beatrice. Shhh, kids. Let’s leave them alone to get to know each other.

Fucking little Houdini rat spawn from hell.

Lizzie stayed in the cage for exactly 6 minutes before she found some space in the bars and exploited it to make her escape. So now a tiny rat is loose in the house. This was a maddening week. Lizzie would make an appearance and we’d all caper around trying to catch her and put her back. At night, Lizzie would make a mockery of our sleep. She’d claw her way up the quilt and have a little rat disco party on the bed. Racing back and forth across my face, sniffing my ear. More than once I hears my daughter crying out in the night, “Lizzie, NO!” as she tried to sleep while the rat played NASCAR all over her bed. She eluded us for a week. We would find “evidence” under the couch, in the corners of the living room. I reached the very end of my frazzled nerves when I saw that she had somehow gotten into the pantry and had nibbled her way into a box of mostaccioli. OK, now I am foot-stompingly, hands-on-hips, stridently pissed. I hate that little rat. Hate her.

Yesterday, I was simmering. Lizzie had kept us all up through the night. Chacha set traps for her. This consisted of taking a single bite out of each of 9 apples and positioning the bitten apples at various points throughout the house. The bites, according to Chacha, were supposed to convince the renegade rodent that the apples were delicious and worth breaking cover for. Yes, I just ended that sentence with a preposition. I am going to have to live with that for the rest of my life. Like I care. Honey, I have rat problems.

Operation Apple worked. I put that demon rat in a box and took her back to the store. “She’s a biter,” I pronounced officiously to the clerk. “I want a new one.”

See how I said that? Like I am a badass rat owner. I demand recompense for my suffering, and I want it now.

So I lied about a rat. I am not sorry. I don’t even care that my daughter heard me lie. I hate that little rat. As if I am going to tolerate a little beast that never interacts with me except to eat food and leave its mess all over the place. I’ll have a teenager soon enough. Until then, the rat goes back.