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Tragedy truly does bring people together.
In case you weren’t already aware, I’m an extremely dramatic person, so “tragedy” refers to a mouse infestation, and “bring people together” is my fiancé sharing living space in his cramped Brooklyn apartment for the past week with me. I’ve been staying with him until I feel comfortable enough to lay my head on a pillow in my own pad again. That’s going to take some time considering that a week ago, I caught two mice trying to do a fast break for freedom in both my living room and bedroom. Blame it on the snowstorm? After getting help disposing of their bodies, I did what any easily disturbed New York transplant would do–I put on the first outfit I could find, threw as many drawls and clothes as I could in my gym bag, along with some new groceries and leftovers (because my man doesn’t really cook more than one meal a week) and I fled.
Now, if you’re not a New York transplant, and you were born here, what you might do is calmly get out your nearest traps and wait for the mice to find their way into them while you get back to doing whatever it was you were doing before. And if you’re like my neighbor, when you catch them, you will ask for something to beat them to death with, and then dispose of the carcass in a grocery bag like it’s nothing. If you’re from here, you might laugh at the fact that I ran for the hills and say, “It’s just a mouse.” You might pretend to make mouse noises to scare me, like my fiancé did. You might tell my co-worker, who is terrorized by the same large rat hopping up and down the steps at the 23rd train station that “It’s not that serious.” Or, if you’re my landlord, you would say, “I will call the exterminator, but this is what happens when people live in close quarters. This is New York.”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that excuse: “This is New York.” As if to say that living with mice, or in some horrific instances, rats, is the consequence of living in this city. But I’m sorry, this is not what I envisioned when I used to cool out to Jay Z and Alicia Keys’s “Empire State of Mind” with my big city dreams. They never said anything about “Concrete jungle where mice run rampant, there’s nothing you caaaaan doooooo.”
I’ve been bamboozled. And despite the best efforts of our lovable Guyanese exterminator Collette, some steel wool won’t keep the mice from running wild through my apartment complex’s pipe system. So there I was, in my apartment last Monday, trying to figure out whether I should play it cool after my glue trap caught another mouse and try to remember that this is just how it is ’round these parts, or if I should seek refugee status in Crown Heights. I went with the latter because the situation was not anything I could or can assimilate to.
In the midwest, if you had mice, lice, roaches or anything more than some silverfish, junebugs, or rollie pollies (don’t step on those!), your family was living quite the nasty life. You were like the man in my neighborhood who we called Catman because he had a slew of felines running around his home. (Sidenote: He ended up on the news when I was in high school because come to find out, he had hundreds of cats in his home, dead and alive.) I’d rather go at it with raccoons, kittens, possums, rabbits, and the crunk ass squirrels we used to see in my parent’s backyard then to deal with these mice. At least they stayed outside. Well, there was that one raccoon in the attic…
But alas, this is my existence here. I try to be brave about it all. I try to pump myself up and say that if I see one, it’s going to regret the day it came in my house. I’m going to beat it senseless! But with my issues with being easily startled, I still find myself screaming and walking around my apartment with boots on until further notice after a sighting. (Does anyone else imagine that one will run over your feet?)
Not to mention that such encounters have left me with an insane level of paranoia. Quick movements of even human feet under a desk now make my heart race, as do small specks of black lint balls on the floor. I can be laughing at something and the minute I hear something or see something, I stop and stare for seconds until I can either confirm or deny that it’s an appearance of what I used to give Voldemort status–those things that won’t be named. I truly believed that if I didn’t speak of mice, they wouldn’t come around. I wasn’t trying to jinx myself.
So yes, I’m a punk. And you would think having lived in this city for almost five years now, I would have toughened up. But mice? I just can’t do it. And I don’t care what anybody says, I’m not going to get used to those squatters invading a space they don’t pay rent in because “this is New York.” It’s just not natural. Not to mention, it’s disgusting.
