When my new girlfriend called and said that a rat had taken residence in her apartment, I thought she was testing the relationship waters. Would I kick down the door and lay waste to rat-kind, or would I tell her to call the Orkin man to take care of her pest problem? Let me tell you a secret: I have never seen a rat in the wild. Or in the urban, suburban, or rural. Mice, sure, but never rats. Rats lived in sewers and grew up to be small alligators that nipped at your ass when you sat on the toilet. Rats did not habit the apartments of newly found girlfriends.
I told her that I would come over, and when she answered the door, she seemed disappointed that I was not carrying a bazooka. I mean, it’s just a rat. The Marines or the National Guard would be a little heavy.
“Thank you for coming,” she whispered. “It’s in the closet.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, stepping through the door, “it can’t hear you.”
She led me through her apartment which, embarrassingly, was only vaguely familiar. We had met outside of some shit bar. I was waiting for a bus and she was waiting to pass out. We hit it off immediately. Her name was Racquel, she lived somewhere along the 72, and had very little standing time left. I was feeling charitable, or a little drunk, and offered to escort her home. She accepted and promptly fell asleep on the bus. Like a gentleman, I dragged her up the stairs and threw her into bed. I let myself out.
A few weeks and a few dates later, we were somewhat steady, and I was her rat-killer. It was only the second time I had been in her apartment. It was neat and tidy, like her sober personality, and her manner was businesslike as we stepped into the bedroom that I had once drunkenly left her in. She turned to me with urgency.
“It’s in there,” she pointed.
I grabbed the handle and slid the door away. Dresses, blouses, and pants were stuffed to the rafters, and a neat but overpopulated shoe rack sat on the floor. There was little room for a rat.
“Are you sure-”
The door clicked shut and I heard her padding away.
I nodded slowly and realized the task at hand. This was a battle in the Coliseum, a fight between beast and gladiator, and the winner would have the young girl’s heart. The loser might not have to worry about death, but loss of respect and tainted integrity was just as deadly in a young relationship. The failure of this test would bring certain peril. I brought a hand to my mouth and rubbed the stubble. Should I kick it to death?
I dropped a knee to the carpet and cocked my head to see under the clutter. The need for a vacuum was clear. Dirt, grit, and bits of gravel dropped from the shoe rack pebbled the nap, but there was no rat. None that I could see, anyway. While I was looking, I wondered if I would find any dirty secrets: bones of lovers past, a mountain of soggy bar coasters, the eleven herbs and spices for KFC chicken. No such luck. Just shoe boxes and balled up socks. But it gave me pause.
Some of the debris on the carpet was shredded bits of cardboard. That’s when I knew. The little bastard was inside one of the shoe boxes.
My tolerance for creepy-crawlies is very low. Fortunately, it’s not a standard question on date night. “So where do you work? Can you kill spiders?” I would rather burn down the house than stand toe-to-toe with a spider – could you pass the pepper? I’m sure insurance companies work that into their premiums. Oh – are you going to the bathroom? You’re leaving?
When I was a young child, my family spent a week in the Maine wilderness shacked up in a lonely cabin by a lake. Every night, we all stared at the ceiling while constant scratching, scampering, and other stock horror movie noises kept us awake. We discovered that a cloud of bats was living in the walls. At dusk, at least two dozen of the little devils flew out of the eaves, and my folks went to work on plugging every hole they could find. Their efforts were premature. The bats that stayed in for the night were very angry when they found that their egress was destroyed. We spent the next hellish night fighting for our lives with brooms and wiffle ball bats, swinging violently at flapping black baseballs and beating the tarpaper walls as little lumps scurried down.
I decided that I needed a weapon. With one eye on the closet, I tiptoed to the door and cracked it. She wasn’t there. “Racquel?”
“Did you kill it yet?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, and now I’m wearing its head as a hat. Do you have a baseball bat or a broom or something?”
She crashed into a closet and rumbled around. A yellow handle poked through the open slit. I pulled the door a little wider and caught a glimpse of her ashen face before she disappeared again, and it assured me that my own ridiculous and irrational fear was validated. I eased the door shut and brandished my weapon, a ten dollar corn broom from the local hardware store. The worn bristles swished as I hefted it.
There it was. The Rat King.
I really didn’t know what I was expecting, but there it was, in all its glory, and I stood there feeling like a thief caught in the act. I couldn’t kill that. It looked so pitiful and defenseless. It’d be like killing my mom’s cat for raiding the pantry.
The rat regarded me with its needly black eyes, and the whiskers quivered as it sniffed in my direction.
I cracked the door again. “Racquel?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you stand by the front door and open it when I tell you to?”
“Sure…” she said, with a little hesitation.
The rat hadn’t moved. I laid the broom on the carpet, with the bristles resting just before the little beast. I waited. The rat still didn’t move. Very slowly, I approached on the side, taking great care not to startle it. The rat bobbed its head and followed me with shaking whiskers.
Also very slowly, and with great trepidation, I stuck out my shoe, and nudged it in the butt. The rat obliged and stepped onto the rigid head of the broom.
I carefully and firmly grabbed the handle and hoisted the rat into the air.
“Racquel?”
“Yeah?”
“Open the front door.”
“Okay…”
I heard the deadbolt turn down the hall and I made my move. Curled my foot around the door, pulled it away, stepped into the hallway. The rat stuck out on the head of the broom like a hood ornament. Racquel turned around and her eyes blew out of her head.
“FUCKING SHIT!” she screamed, and disappeared behind a slamming door.
I carried my cargo down the hall with short, deliberate steps, and when I crossed the doorframe, flung it down the hall. The rat landed on its feet and turned back, insulted. There, I thought. Someone else’s problem. I slammed the door and addressed my other problem.
“Racquel?” I called, knocking on the door. I assumed it was the bathroom.
“Is it gone?” she screeched, still in the grip of hysteria.
“It’s gone!” I announced, throwing some extra cheer in my voice. “Can you come out now?”
The lock clicked and a ghost appeared. I felt like a lion standing next to this puddle of despair.
“What did you do with it?”
“Threw it into the hallway. Your super can deal with it now.”
“So, you mean,” she said, with a trembling finger pointed at the door, “that it’s out there?”
I nodded.
“Ohhh,” she moaned. “How am I supposed to leave?”
My patience collapsed. “I don’t know,” I said. “Call your super. I gotta run.”
“No! Stay a while! Let’s have some dinner or-”
“Sorry, I gotta go,” I said, and shoved past her. I felt her panicky stare even as I closed the door behind me. Immediately, as if it were possessed, the deadbolt popped and the chain slid into the runner. I sighed as I walked away, and waved to the rat on my way out.
14
Apr 13
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
When I log into Facebook, I have a certain expectation of what I am going to see on my newsfeed or who I am going to interact with. You know, the usual: someone’s mad at so and so, new love is in the digital ether, Bobby Smith thought of something really witty to post and did a favor to everyone by posting it, the Red Sox won, the Red Sox lost. Recently, that expectation has drunkenly fallen down the stairs. I have seen more cinnamon roll pancake recipes and tributes to nieces and siblings on Facebook in the past week than poorly written status updates and adorable cat pictures.
It was a rapid change; abrupt enough to jar me out of my mindless morning Facebooking session to think to myself, “what in the blue hell is going on?” Why am I seeing a pepperoni pizza casserole recipe at 6AM? Why the hell would I want a pepperoni pizza casserole anyway? Has pizza become so boring that we need to casserolize it? Why does everybody suddenly adore every family member, organic or removed, that they’ve ever been related to? Why am I seeing religious propaganda? If I want to be told that I’m a Godless heathen, I will go to Downtown Crossing and listen to the Angry Jesus Man for three seconds. And above all, guns don’t belong on Facebook, because it’s a goddamned website. You can’t even shoot people there.
So far, I know this: I did not change. I’ve gotten a few years older, read a few more books, and even shave more often than I used to, but I have not undergone a large enough paradigm shift to warrant noticing drastic sociological changes on Facebook. On the opposite side of the keyboard, Facebook did not change. While Facebook does abruptly change the way it appears with either organizational changes or site redesigns, the fundamental identity of Facebook did not change. It is still the Internet town hall where the world’s masses gather to publicly urinate on each other and swear loudly while others are watching.
That leaves only one culprit: its user base.
The collective we changed. I truly believe that we are devolving as an intelligent people. The always on, everyone has a voice culture of Facebook has encouraged anyone and everyone with a working mouth to open it whenever the hell they want to. If pepperoni pizza casserole is on the mind at 6AM, well, why not just shout it out to the whole world? Here’s a picture of my dinner. Here’s what I did for my workout. Here are the intimate details of my life that previously only me and my mirror knew. Check out my new abs! Here are my likes and dislikes; in fact, you are one of them and I will passive-aggressively let you decide to which list you belong.
Here’s the issue that I have that precious few people understand. Facebook isn’t an intimate setting like your home living room where you and five of your friends are sitting around shooting the shit. It’s a public space, like a mall or a stadium, and when you open your mouth a lot of people will be listening whether they want to or not.
To wit: if someone walked up to you while you were shopping for a pair of pants at the mall and handed you a recipe for peanut butter cheesecake scones, you would probably have more than a small problem with it. The same goes with religious propaganda and the gun debate – while there is a small targeted audience that will receive the message, the larger part of the audience will go around the crazy town crier and into more comfortable spaces. Such as continuing to scroll until seeing something far more interesting or entertaining.
That isn’t the solution, though, even though it’s what I do now to cope with it: when I see some crazy on my Facebook newsfeed intimately telling me how to prepare goat curd yogurt from expired milk to avoid spending an extra 12 cents at the evil grocery store or why banning 50 round mags is unconstitutional and everyone in Congress should be thrown in jail, I keep scrolling, because I wouldn’t entertain it for even a second in a public space.
Facebook has taught us to become extremely comfortable with telling everyone exactly what is on our minds and in our hearts to the point that normal discourse with fellow human beings has been irreparably affected. “Did you see on Facebook” has become a standard lead for a sentence. We should be ashamed of that. “Did you see on Facebook that Bobby posted a picture of a man in American flag underwear holding an AK-47?” Currently, human intelligence has no problem processing that thought. Let’s change the locale: “Did you see at the mall that Bobby was showing people a picture of a man in American flag underwear holding an AK-47?” Why does it become reprehensible when it occurs in an actual public place as opposed to a “fake” public place?
When Mormons, Unitarians, and Jehovahs come knocking at the door, we run and hide and pretend that we’re not home. You can’t do that on Facebook because it is the most public place that has ever been invented by man. Let’s change that by cutting the bullshit. Let’s go back to posting pictures of our cats waging war on bottle caps and posting our celebrity doppelgangers and posting witty things that will make your fellow man laugh rather than break the last political straw he has left.
Tard the Grumpy Cat endorsed this post.
ADDENDUM: Bill Gates is one of the most philanthropic people the world has ever known. He is not going to give you $500.00 for sharing a picture. Get a grip. You’re embarrassing the rest of us.
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