Rats never bothered me much. A neighbor where I used to live kept one as a pet–I’d see them out for a walk sometimes on my way to work, the rat snuffling along the sidewalk pulling his smiling master by the leash. Happy together, they even looked alike. A small community of rats used to gather in the garbage bags at the restaurant where I tended bar. I was supposed to put the garbage out at the end of the night, and sometimes I’d do it, other times I’d get a customer to do the job for me. Most of them knew enough to stamp their feet before starting, to give the rats a chance to spring out of the bag. It’s a drag picking up a bag with a rat in it, but one night loudmouthed Louie forgot, and a couple of rats used his arm as an off ramp. You could hear him scream from the bar to the river. We all laughed our asses off, and I gave him an extra beer for his pains, which mollified him.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Squirrels are just rats with furry tails. I’d said it often enough, and I believed it too, until a few hours after the trap was set. I caught a not very large, greasy gray rat, maybe nine inches long including his slimy tail; he bared sharp choppers when I shone a flashlight on him. I turned off the flashlight and went to call the landlord. I wasn’t getting near that thing. There were large spaces between the bars of the trap, not large enough for a squirrel to get his snout through but plenty wide enough for the rat.
The landlord came over the following day. He had two kill traps with him, like mousetraps only larger. He didn’t have any particular plan for what to do with the live rat, but he was adamant that I shouldn’t call an exterminator. “It’ll cost me 50 bucks, and for what? They’ll put down some poison and set some traps. I can do the same thing for nothing.”
“I’m going to get a brick and smash its head in,” he promised. But the rat had other plans. Jumping at the bars, it wouldn’t let him anywhere near the cage.
At least this rat was already dead. I took the trap outside and dropped it in the garbage can, then called the landlord. “I got another one about ten minutes after you left,” I told him. “I’m probably going to need a couple more traps.”
“Oh, I’m sure it doesn’t,” he purred. “You know, Jeff, you’re getting kind of weird about this.”
My head spinning from all this math, I went out to the hardware store and bought two more traps. They were $1.79 each. I caught only two more rats, which brought the total to four. I read in the paper that the White House itself was rat-infested. The story said, “Some 165 traps have been set in various locations, but so far little relief.” Michael Jackson was also in the paper, and one of his biggest hits, “Ben,” was a love song sung to a rat. In China, 1993 was the Year of the Rooster, but that’s China. Here, pestilence had rarely been so hairy.
