Guns N’ Rats
Back in 2003 my boyfriend lived in a first floor apartment in South Williamsburg that had rats living underneath the floorboards. All through the winter you could hear them scampering around down there, making strange scuffling noises and high pitched rat screams. It was like some hoodlum rats had picked that spot as their clubhouse and were always bringing home stolen goods and vulnerable lady rats and fighting over them. Like Guns N’ Roses in their prime, at least as described in the old Rolling Stone article I read the other day, but without the music or the money. Like Guns N’ Roses before Appetite for Destruction, I guess, living in some decrepit crash pad off the Sunset Strip in LA, consuming only the beer and heroin they could afford to buy with cash the strippers they were sleeping with gave them.
Anyway, one night my boyfriend and I were leaving the apartment and a rat ran right out in front of us and he stepped on it. It wasn’t on purpose, but he was wearing heavy motorcycle boots and afterward the rat just lay there, twitching, and by the time we got home later it was dead. Previously I had assumed rats were sensible city wildlife and therefore, like all wildlife, more afraid of me than I was of them. In other words, I expected they would do their best to stay out of my way. But that night I discovered when it comes to rats, if you happen to get in the way of them and a particularly juicy looking bag of garbage, that is your problem, not theirs. Unless you step on them, in which case it is a problem for both of you, but particularly for them.
In the years that have passed since then I have been entertained by watching many a rat pursue may a piece of garbage from subway platforms, but I have taken what I learned to heart and managed to not have any physical interaction with them. Until a vulnerable moment a few weeks ago when I was distracted by the fact that it was late at night and I was walking along a completely deserted stretch of five blocks, an unusual enough scenario in New York that it feels like a bad omen. In the midst of this, I walked by a garbage can and a rat ran out from behind it, across the sidewalk and right over my foot. I screamed then, really loudly, but in that awkward way that happens when you don’t mean to scream but do anyway. Which wasn’t all bad, because then I laughed at myself and this cut the tension, and within ten minutes I was home. But, ugh, I can still feel the hefty weight of the thing through my shoe. It must have weighed about ten pounds.
