RATS: LIVING IN NEW YORK CITY OR THE CONFESSIONS OF A RODENT HITMAN

It's been a while since I posted to my blog, I would guess off hand that it has been about three years. Well unlucky for anyone who reads it I'll quote Jack Nicholson in The Shining ... I'm Back!

We were living on the second floor of a three family home on Paerdegat 3^rd Street in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn around 1994.  The city was doing major construction work on the proposed Paedergat  Basin Nature Preserve a half a block away and many of our neighbors were complaining about rats being displaced due to the construction and scurrying about in the streets. I personally did not notice any.

Our absentee landlord, David, sent a plumber over to do some work in the sub-basement that was accessible through a steel cover in the garage.  Later that day after the work was completed we had noticed that the plumber never fully closed the hatch so we did it. It was at that point that we noticed some strange things in our apartment.

The carpeting, already fairly worn, was starting to unravel by the closet door in my daughter’s room. We also noticed a lot of papers mysteriously bundled up under our microwave oven cabinet. I also felt at times while sleeping that I heard something run by my headboard but as our upstairs neighbors had two cats I thought it was their cats running around at night. 

OK, still no bells ringing. A few days later my wife, Ilana, angrily calls me and my son into the kitchen holding a bagged loaf of bread we kept on top of the microwave oven that was ripped open on the top and had a hole about four 4 by 5 inches dug out of  it and says if you want to snack on the bread why don’t you open it and take a slice instead of poking your fingers through the bag and ripping it out!

I stood there looking at her dumbfounded as to why she would even insinuate that I would do that. So to show her I turned to my son and accusingly  asked him why he did that to the bread. He stood there looking dumbfounded as a normal 12 year old usually looks and said that he didn’t do that. It was at that moment that it occurred to me that we had a rodent problem.  Ilana asked me if I really thought that we had a mouse. I looked at her, my eyes wide open in horror and said that I didn’t think we had a mouse problem … we had a (as in one) RAT! Then we proceeded to run around the kitchen screaming and holding our hands in the air. No we really didn’t do that we were pretty cool, calm and collected.

We threw out that loaf of bread and the next day I told Ilana when we buy a new loaf we have to keep it in the bread box drawer. If you're not familiar with that term many years ago kitchen cabinetry was often fitted with a metal drawer with a sliding steel cover to keep your breads fresh and handy dandy. Probably also as a deterrent to rodent problems that were prevalent before the 1960’s and obviously nowadays as the infamous rat with a slice of pizza photo can attest to.

 Later that evening we see the drawer bouncing around and something making a lot of noise and movement in the drawer. I grab my trusty baseball bat as everyone in Brooklyn has a baseball bat regardless whether you play baseball or not.  Ilana runs upstairs to get our neighbor Tony so he could pull open the drawer giving me the opportunity to swing the bat as soon as the whiskered demon from hell pops his little head out.  

Tony comes down and we get a few deep breaths together and open the drawer with a primal scream …. Aaaahhhhhhhhhh. And theres nothing in the drawer. Nothing but a rats tail and blood. When we opened the drawer the rat panicked and ran getting his tail caught in the sharp corner of the drawer shearing off his own tail!

After escaping he somehow managed to run through all the other drawers leaving rat blood on our flatware and everything else. Everything ended up in the dish washer on the hottest setting and we thoroughly scrubbed the drawers to make sure we wouldn't contract bubonic plague.

The next day we bought an old-fashioned spring loaded rat trap and set it up in the kitchen with a chunk of bread as bait knowing full well that this varmint likes bread. We went to bed and about two hours later … SNAP … eek eek eek…scratch …eek eek. 

Ilana, who is in charge of reconnaissance went into the kitchen and yelled that we caught him but he’s running around the kitchen. I came in armed with the requisite baseball bat and saw the rat with the spring bar clamped down on his neck and eyes bulging running in circles around the kitchen. There was no way I was going to go near it to release it from the trap so I took the bat, closed my eyes and swung down on it two, three, five, seven times possibly more while yelling, “AAAAAHHHHHHH, Die! Die! Die!” I may have hit him twice but nevertheless I finished the critter off.  When we noticed that this rat had a tail it had occurred to us we had a family of rats living with us.

We called our landlord, who up to this point was very unsympathetic about our dilemma and told him that if he doesn’t get the building exterminated we would do it and deduct if from our rent. He agreed and the exterminator came the next day and placed traps and poison everywhere.

That evening I cam home from work and went to the bathroom in our bedroom and lowered my pants and was about to sit when I heard a splashing sound. I looked into the toilet and a rat was splashing around in the it. From what I was told by the exterminator, the rat most likely ingested the poison and was trying to get water to drink due to the poison burning in his gut. I closed the lid as he tried jumping to get out so I placed a cinder block on the lid to make sure he couldn’t get out. Who knows how strong rats really are? 

What to do next? I had no rat poison in the house so I poured some chlorine bleach in the bowl through the small space at the rear of the seat. Knowing that they tell you never, ever, ever mix ammonia with chlorine bleach I poured in ammonia anyway. Then some Drano pipe cleaner.

We called the exterminator for advice and asked if my concoction would kill it and he said forget about the rat those chemicals may very will kill us. He further stated that we should open the bedroom windows and leave the room for an hour and a half.

We waited the requisite hour and a half and braved opening the lid. There was no longer any splashing sound. There it was bald with Drano damaged white eyes, completely dead. A bald rat is a sight to see. If you Google the Naked Mole Rat it would give you an idea what it looked like. We lifted it with a nice long pair of channel lock pliers and placed the body in quadruple layered plastic shopping bags and then brought it upstairs so Tony could have the privilege to observe our carnage.

This was the end of our rat problem. We got rid of our son’s captain's bed because there were rat urine stains in the drawers. There was also the smell of decomposing bodies wafting through the walls for two weeks but the exterminator assured us the smell would dissipate in a few weeks. 

I never killed anything before, with the exception of insects, arachnids, worms, fish, a parakeet sprayed with underarm deodorant and two turtles that choked on M&Ms but I never killed any vertebrate just for the sake of killing them. The skill of an executioner or tiny animals came in handy as I had to kill a dying rat in the basement of Samuel Tilden Houses of the New York Housing Authority because the caretaker didn’t have the nerve to do it but his was a mercy killing. Of course the first swat with a shovel missed and I just got it’s legs but the second swing got him.