Rats!

My life with rodents (and my favorite topic of discussion at a Baltimore party)

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: the path of rats that has run through the maze of my life.

Ingredient List

🎵 : “The World at Large” by Modest Mouse, “Year of the Rat” by Badly Drawn Boy, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” by The Smashing Pumpkins, “Cream on Chrome” by Ratatat, “Le Festin” Ratatouille (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Listen to the playlist on Spotify

📖 : Still reading “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Murder and Mutiny” by David Grann

Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Farm Fresh Goat Cheese

My mom grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania, which my whole family still lives on, though I grew up a mile away from there. We spent many days on or around the farm and the old barn, which meant I spent many days around rats, whether I knew it or not. Sometimes I would hear them in the corn bin, sometimes I would see them, sometimes I would watch my cousin hunt them at night with his Crosman BB gun. 

Old barn, young boy

Though they had tamed down (thanks to an abundance of stray cats), they were especially pernicious when my mom was growing up on a fully functioning farm. We had already landed on the moon, but the farmhouse my mom lived in did not yet have indoor plumbing. To use the bathroom, they had to use a privy near the barn (aka an outhouse). As a little girl, she hated using it, for obvious reasons. Spiders, of course. But also the unnerving sounds of rats scurrying around whenever she needed to use the bathroom at night in the dead of January.

While my encounters were never that extreme, I was always terrified of a rat running up my pant leg while we climbed and jumped off the hay bales in the barn. 

The fear is still very much alive, and the closest it came to happening was this past Christmas. My parents live a literal stone’s throw away from that same barn, but these days my mom just raises goats on her own property. When we go up to visit, my kids will help her feed the goats, or we’ll just go in the pen to check things out. 

Inside the enclosure, there’s a small doghouse-sized shed on which the goats practice their parkour, because I guess you never know when you’ll have to do a kickflip to impress another farm animal. Anyway, my boys and I went into the pen with Penny, my parents’ German Shorthaired Pointer. As soon as we got in, she went crazy trying to dig her nose under the shed. She smelled rodent and was not going to give up. Me, trying to move the situation along so she wouldn’t break off her nose, decided to tip the shed over so she could have at it.

Hobbies included killing groundhogs and rodents

Just as I was leveraging the structure up and off the ground, I saw a quick flash of something fly out to the opposite side from which Penny was on– it was the rat. Unfortunately, my youngest son was standing on the side on which it did bolt out of, and before he knew what was happening, a rat had traveled over both his feet in a direct beeline to the main goat pen. It was so fast that he had no idea, but I knew.

I knew that had he not been wearing boots, he may have had a rat run up his pant leg. But it wasn’t my pant leg.

And for that, I am grateful.

Course 2

Appetizer: Dippy Eggs

Not far from my family’s farm (same road actually), there lived two fraternal twins raised by a single mom. They were in the same class as me and lived less than a mile away, which put them at a 90% chance to be my friend since they were pretty much the only kids who lived near me at the time. Their names were Nick and Brian. Nobody called him Brian, though– everyone called Dippy. Not sure if that came from eggs, constellations, or general demeanor, but but he was definitely a Dippy.

Their rental house was pretty rundown and I don’t think they had much money, but their mom did her best. They also had the coolest things that I did not– baseball cards galore, Baseball Stars for Nintendo, Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Warrior comforters and action figures, and their older sister had a VHS copy of My Cousin Vinny (this is an irrelevant bit of info, but I thought it deserved mentioning). But the coolest thing in the house, in hindsight – were their homegrown, organic rattails. 

This was the late ’80s, so rattails were peaking hard. Much like a morning glory or a one night stand with Tommy Lee, the rattail had a brief blazing moment before dying off into the history of hairstyles. It’s seen brief comeback attempts over the past 35 years, but nothing defined a kid so much as a rattail during that time. It was a whole identity. 

And boy did the Lightner boys have some good ones. I remember Nick’s the best, probably because he was a ginger that always seemed to want to fight, probably because he was a ginger who always watched wrestlers pretending to fight. It was more than just a rattail–  it was a never-ending spiral of hair, like a rotini gone wild or the unspiraled dough of a pretzel dog. It was so good that it could be tucked into the collar for the Christmas play or let out to play for a pony league baseball game. That kind of versatility is hard to find in life, much less a hairstyle. 

I don’t know when he cut it off. It honestly could’ve been 11th grade. It may have been in 8th grade, when Dippy annoyed me too much one day with a punching barrage to the stomach as we were walking to the afternoon bus. For some reason, I was just tired of it and I reared back and hit him as hard as I could in the side of his head, sending his glasses across the floor of the school. A teacher saw it and we both got in-school suspension for the next two days.

I don’t know when the rattail went extinct, but in my mind it lives on forever. Because I can’t see the Lightner boys without it. I kind of imagine they still have them, with families and children that are keeping the tradition alive. I’m going to go ahead with, yes, they’ve always had it and always will.

Because selfishly, I want to tell people I punched a kid with a rattail in the side of the head and got suspended for it, because that sounds like something from a Jon Hughes movie.

So let’s go with that.

Course 3

The Main: Irish Breakfast

Of course, nothing in my experience with rats and their tails would compare to my time in Baltimore. Rat culture is kind of a thing here, whether in animal or human form (stop snitching and mind ya business). Everyone in Baltimore has a rat story and exchanging them is my number one favorite thing to do after a few drinks (please share your story in the comments if you have one).

If you are telling rat stories over drinks, just be aware of where you’re drinking and keep the corners of your eyes privy to your surroundings. Especially if you’re at a certain Irish pub in Fells Point which I will not explicitly name in this newsletter. I barbacked at that establishment for the first year of my life in Baltimore, and while I’m sure many stories from my time there will find their way into this newsletter, I’ll start it off with the rat hunting. 

Now, you should probably assume that any bar district anywhere with dwellings built in the 18th century will have one of three things: 1) a rodent infestation, 2) a cockroach infestation, 3) sewage issues, and 4) dishwashers trafficked from Laos. This place had at least three of those.

To be fair, it wasn’t totally their fault (minus that last one). A large structure nearby had been recently razed, and seeing as the restaurant was on the water in Fells Point, there were few options for rehoming the now-unhoused rat population. They came in droves. Outside, in the alley, for sure. But in the basement, in the walls, in all three floors of the building. One night as I was closing up the second floor bar, I saw a chunky one just slowly saunter down the stairs like he was still trying to catch last call. My man, the chairs are up on the tables, we’re done for the night. He didn’t care.

My manager, who was from Hamtramck, Michigan (essentially the Polish version of Detroit), was a bit of a wild card. If you’ve been to Hamtramck then this probably doesn’t surprise you. Part bullshitter, part encyclopedia of weird knowledge, part alcoholic, part could-be-an-errand-boy-for-the-mob, part hardass and part sweetheart, he basically embodied the gold star qualities of a restaurant manager.As such, he was one of my favorite bosses ever.

Already in good standing with me, he kicked it up a notch when he brought a pellet gun into work with the intention of ridding the restaurant of rats. It sat in the kitchen ready for action. Sometimes he would just carry it around for fun after close, I guess in case something popped its head out of a wall. I wanted action and tried to seek it out – one night I sat in the cupboard under the stairs (literally, Harry Potter style) waiting for the bastards to come out, but they never did. They’re smart like that.

They know to wait until the next morning, in broad daylight, during brunch service. Free food for everyone.

My second jarring encounter with a rat was during one of my first winters in the city. We lived on the edge of our neighborhood, when it was a bunch of warehouses, no streetlights, and an endless parade of prostitution. No one really cared what you did and certainly nobody would judge. I was also pretty broke, so I preferred to change my own oil on my Toyota Corolla, which I would do by just driving it onto the sidewalk and hanging the front of the car over the curb to get access to the oil plug.

One day I went to open the hood, and as I lifted the latch, a large rat ran from just where my hand was, down beneath the engine block. All this happened before I could register what happened, which happened before I could jump right out my shoes in horror and disgust. The rat was attracted to the warm engine and was likely posting up there. Luckily no wires were chewed through and a nest had yet to be started.

That one got away. The others didn’t.

Let me preface this next part by saying I do not enjoy killing animals. At all. In fact, I will guide spiders and centipedes and other creepy crawlers to the outdoors or other places in our house without telling my wife. Carriers of dirt and disease are the exception, and so it is with a heavy heart that rats and cockroaches are on my list of “extermination for the greater good.”

I would also like to address the various methods for killing rats. There are many of them. You can call 311, they’ll do some sort of rat rubout thing, it won’t work and the rats will be back. You can get a live trap and think it’s humane, but it’s really just delaying the inevitable if you release them around the corner. You can get a sticky trap and I’ll consider you a sadistic monster for allowing a living thing to die a slow death on a sheet of glue. 

No matter what anybody tells you, there is nothing that works better than a regular old oversized spring trap and the assistance of a “Nerf gun” when it comes to killing rats. I definitely don’t own a pellet gun since they’re illegal within city limits, but I may own a “Nerf gun” that “discharges” “foam darts” at a high number of feet per second.

Which brings us to my back patio and back alley. I don’t live in a particularly dirty part of the city, which is a very relative when it comes to places outside of Baltimore. Baltimore is without a doubt one of the dirtiest cities in America, so there is litter, for sure. At any given moment, there’s probably an old mattress/couch/broken TV within a few block radius. However, my neighborhood is fairly clean in that there aren’t random trash bags or leftover chicken boxes to attract rodents. 

Nevertheless, it has seen changes, and with those changes come spikes in the rat population. It happened when the warehouse across the street was torn down to build new housing. It happened when the man who was living in the storage unit behind our house was essentially evicted. He was a hoarder and both garages he rented were filled to the brim with junk, trash, human waste, and rats. When those were cleaned out, things got real wild. 

Our back alley became the Ellis Island of the great rat migration of Brewers Hill. During that time, it was possible to set three traps in the evening, go inside for a beer and come back to find them all successful in executing their mission.

I soon became known for my prowess in decimating the rat population, and by known, I mean my wife knew about it. So when a neighbor in our block’s group text said she had a rat that had drowned in her recycling bin and she didn’t know what to do with it, my wife volunteered my services sight unseen. I guess I’m that guy now.

I walked back into the alley to see what I was dealing with, and when I looked in the can, it wasn’t a drowned rat. Instead, it was a very-much-alive rat standing on its hind legs in a few inches of water. Now I had a moral quandary. Do I let the rat go, allowing it to establish a false hope of an extended life, possibly breed and create more creatures that must be offed? Or do I just eliminate it now, by any means necessary? Binary logic removed from emotion would say do it now, but now meant using my “Nerf gun” that looked a whole lot like pump-action pellet gun that looked a whole lot like a real rifle from far away, that I certainly couldn’t just bring into a back alley in Baltimore.

Which meant I either had to let the rat go, or pull it onto my own back patio at the other end of the alley and finish the task there. I chose the latter. I grabbed the bin by the handle and started moving it, assuming the rat would move around in the bottom but otherwise stay put. I was wrong. I did not realize how far rats could jump and the answer is: almost out of a trash can. It jumped so high that I swear if it tried just a little harder it could’ve latched onto my hand. So, angling the can away from me, I pulled it ever so slowly to my back patio, the rat jumping and making loud noises for the entirety of the journey. It’s one thing to catch a rat in a trap, it’s another to take it out face-to-face. Both the same outcome, both quick and fast, but for some reason, if we distance ourselves from it, one of them is more humane. I guess that’s how we justify eating McDonald’s. In the end, I opted for the face-to-face method. And I did not love it.

I have about twenty other stories but not enough time to tell them all. But they aren’t quite suitable for a weekly newsletter. Maybe I’ll include them all in my next book: “Rats: A Journey Into the Heart of Darkness.”

Because I haven’t mentioned the full-grown mutants with bodies the size of my actual shoe. So big that when a trap goes off, it merely stuns them, their 14-inch, nose-to-tail body no match for the silly inventions of man (I may have measured one or two of them for official record keeping). It has happened, on at least three occasions, that I’ve found rats beside a triggered trap, thinking them to be deceased, and five minutes later they are gone. Where they are getting their protein and how they are getting into a gym, I do not know. But it is a sight to behold. 

I haven’t mentioned the frustration of growing a sweet potato vine or tomato plant or random other flowers for an entire summer on my back patio, only to come out one morning and have them completely stripped of all foliage.

I haven’t mentioned how the rats took a gourd seed from a husk I had disposed of in the back alley, down into their rat hole, and how that seed bloomed into an entirely large vine of a dozen large and quite gorgeous gourds that I used as fall decorations and my kids sold at a sidewalk stand.

Then there’s this: I haven’t mentioned how my son told his second-grade teacher, in front of the whole class, that killing rats is his dad’s hobby. He basically snitched on me. Of course, I told him that it’s ridiculous to call it a hobby. I do it because we have to, not because I want to. 

And that was a lie I told, because it is my hobby, and I won’t stop until the Chesapeake Bay flows red with the blood of Baltimore vermin.

At least I got these parking lot gourds out of it

Course 4

Dessert: Ratatouille

This newsletter has gone on for far too long, so I’ll end it, short and sweet. I never saw Ratatouille until a few years ago when my kids watched it. Noting embodies the magic of Pixar at its peak like the penultimate scene in the movie, as the food critic is whisked back to his childhood by the taste of the dish his mother made for him all those years ago. 

Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do here. Doing my best to remember so I don’t forget.

End of Menu

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Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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