BitchPHD has a bat story. Now Stonebridge has his bat story.
So I’ve gotta tell my bat story.
Husband was in a new band. Bad band. Let’s not talk about it. A drummer friend had also joined. This was eons ago. As husband and drummer were going to be on the road quite a bit (they ended up on the road quite a bit, but with another band) we decided the thing to do was rent a house together. We all had no money. We were moving to Atlanta from elsewhere and found a a real cheap place in an old mill neighborhood in a small satellite town. A nice-sized place with a great wrap-around front porch, a huge central hall, 3 rooms of a nice size (2 had non-working fireplaces which meant mantles and that was good enough) and a big old kitchen which was really just another room with a refrigerator and stove and sink stuck in it and no counters and still had a vent in the ceiling from where I think an old stove of the coal or wood-burning type used to be. We had lived in a number of cheap old places already, each which turned out to have rodent or bug problems that chased us out, but this place looked clean, clean, nice fresh paint inside and out. The floors were all old big and long pine planks that were still in good condition. The house was, for some reason, the only one on its side of the street and there was a nice large yard, unkept but grassy.
But talk about feeling stupid when we had signed the lease and I was asking about the gas and we were informed the house came without heat.
I just had assumed every house came with some fashion of heat. And I realized for the first time there were no old radiant gas heaters (the kind with the grills, we’d had those in nearly every place we’d thus far lived in) and there was no vent in the floor for a big old under-the-hood type gas heater that many old places would have. No, there was no heat at all.
As I said, talk about feeling stupid. But each one of us had assumed there’d be heat. I wasn’t the only one. We figured it was spring and we had plenty of opportunity to be out of there by winter. And if we liked it enough we talked about getting a propane heater.
The neighborhood kids showed up on the front porch very curious about us and showed us, not completely covered by the paint, a slight discoloring on the wall in the nice large hall, a discoloring that ran from head level toward the floor, and blithely told us that was where the previous tenant had been shot dead and that’s where his blood had been. It sounded like it had the makings of a neighborhood didn’t-happen legend, but as a teen I’d lived in a suburban neighborhood where a serial killer had struck several times, one of those times killed a woman a few houses from us, killed a woman a few houses from a friend, had been caught and imprisoned, escaped and our school had been put on lock-down when he escaped for it was feared he was returning to the neighborhood, he having lived a few houses down from my junior high school. Sometimes the legends are true and I asked one of the parents and they said the last tenant had been killed in the hall and that the house had been empty for several years as no one would rent it because of the murder.
I guess we were the first out-of-towners to happen that way.
The next morning I noticed a rat skeleton nailed through the skull to the telephone pole outside the place.
It was going to be an interesting place to live.
The kids said there were a lot of break-ins but they would keep an eye on the house for us. because they thought we were ok.
We weren’t broken into the brief amount of time we were there.
It was a very poor neighborhood, a poorer neighborhood than we’d realized as its slum lord had kept up the exterior of the houses but, with the exception of the fresh paint in the house we’d rented, had not kept up the interiors of the other houses. The place across the street from us resembled a cave when you stepped across the threshold. The walls, long-since unprotected by paint, were an ancient sooty, smokey, oily gray-black, a mix of crumbling plaster , shredded disintegrating wallpaper and newspaper. Obvious they relied on some kind of wood or coal heat in the winter. The children of the neighborhood ran around all day eating candy. Once, when one of them came by with a candy bar and said she was eating her lunch, I asked in as casual and off-hand way as I could, not wanting to give her any impression of my being judgmental, why she ate so much candy. She frankly replied that it was cheaper than real food.
We had been in a position of extended hardship a couple of years earlier, not just a few weeks here and there, caused by illness, and I knew what it was like when food is too expensive to buy. When fresh vegetables and fruits are a dream. A time when we lived on dried beans, beans, beans and rice. It began when I had gone to pick up my husband from his day job at a large nursery and was told he was at the hospital. A glass pane from the ceiling of one of the greenhouses had fallen out and struck him on the neck. The glass had shattered in two when it struck him and he was lucky as there was a small niche in the glass where it had struck my husband’s jugular vein. So the glass pane had cut his throat around and under the jugular, but not the jugular itself. For which reason he was still alive. He apparently required only lots of stitches. His throat looked like it had been sutured back together by Frankenstein. He went back to work and promptly became so ill he couldn’t walk but a few steps. Blood work was done and he was at first told he had leukemia. Then he turned out not to have leukemia. He ended up studied by a specialist at the Medical College and what he did have was a rare South American tropical disease that had been imported on the plants and had entered his blood stream when he was cut. There was no cure. He would have it the rest of his life. He was told he would be unable to work for a year, that he must go on bedrest for a year. In the meanwhile we had learned that he had no workmen’s compensation as greenhouse workers were classified as farm laborers, and farm laborers were not given workmen’s comp because of something about them considered as receiving room and board as part of their wages. On top of it all, rather than fire my husband, the greenhouse owner kept him on the payroll so that he couldn’t collect unemployment. We decided it was time for a lawsuit but he was a member of my husband’s parents’ church and we were talked out of it. A year later, when my husband was trying to find work and turned down repeatedly, he learned that someone at the church had gone around saying he wasn’t ill, that he was instead a heroin addict. It was the biggest church in town. News like that, spread around, can have considerable effect. We were surprised at the considerable effect it can have. We had, previously, no idea how small that little city was. It seemed like some gritty, grainy bad dream that couldn’t be possibly happening.
I had been headed to NYU film school, had submitted a student film I’d done and had been accepted. It was about 1977 and it was still a big deal to be accepted to NYU’s film school. At least I thought it was a big thing. We’d had a place to live lined up and my husband had a job lined up as well when the greenhouse dropped the glass pane on his neck.
Shit happens.
Sometimes you’re just glad to come out of something alive. Our concerns were now just keeping food on the table. A roof over our head.
We lived that year on beans given to us by a professor friend who was fed up with that small little city and had quit her job and moved to San Francisco and she recommended we too get out of that town as quickly as possible. We lived for that year on casseroles of soy beans and those huge blocks of god-awful government cheese that we’d illegally picked up somewhere. I was still attending a local college and my waitress job wasn’t enough to cover bills, let alone medical. I worried daily about my husband being ill and living on soy beans and cheese, fresh vegetables and fruits and meat too expensive to buy. Afterward, I never wanted to see another soy bean in my life. I wondered why in the world our friend had so many soy beans in storage but we were grateful for them.
I had considered starting a vegetable garden, thinking we would have fresh veggies that way. Which is when I realized how expensive seeds and soil are when you haven’t the funds to buy fresh vegetables. As a teen, when I’d hear about poor people and poor diets, I’d always thought well why didn’t they start their own vegetable gardens? Seemed like a no-brainer. I had no idea the expense of starting a garden. I tried. I broke the Georgia clay in the back yard and struggled with making a small garden plot. Someone gave me a couple of packets of seeds and I sowed them in the Georgia clay of the backyard of the urban duplex in which we were then living. And nothing grew. Nothing appeared. Not one single plant. I had grown up thinking that vegetables and fruit was as simple as sowing seeds.
I have since then done a good community garden, but it was expensive to start, bringing in soil to replace Georgia clay. And bug infestations would suddenly appear out of nowhere and kill a crop of tomatoes or squash, and squirrels and rodents eat through nearly ripe melons.
I remember all this whenever I hear individuals tearing into people for not supplementing hardship diets with good garden vegetables. When you don’t have the money for purchasing fresh fruit and vegetables, gardens are expensive. You have to have good soil. You have to have adequate sun, which can be difficult getting when you’re urban.
So, I knew what it was like to be hamstrung. Chocolate bars are cheap compared to even the rudimentary makings of a sandwich–bread, lunch meat or cheese, mustard, mayonnaise. Though not as cheap as peanut butter. I reasoned that if you live that way long enough, no other possible future envisioned, then you simply give up on a lot of things. Some of the parents seemed to usually be drunk. A mission van from one of the local fundamentalist churches would sometimes roll around and the minister would visit with the teens and children. He attracted them by handing out chocolate bars.
A couple of weeks had passed, band out on the road, I had been mostly out of town as well and the drummer’s wife was staying at her parents, who lived several hours away, and not at the house. Then I stayed there a few nights and noticed one of our several cats had started to get really greasy, funky looking fur and I wondered about that. And was leaving strange things in the litter box. Husband was then home for a night before going back out on the road. Drum cases and piano and musical equipment all over one of the spare rooms. All the equipment in black road cases. As we were loading out, I heard something but couldn’t figure out what it was. Then I picked up a drum case to carry it out and a bat goes flying off of it. Then there was another. And one on the piano. Husband and drummer finished packing up. “Bye bye,” we all said. There was no time to stand around and discuss.
I went into the kitchen. Another bat. A bat in the pantry. This was broad daylight. What in the world? I chased them out. Then it was drawing close to evening and drummer’s wife and I heard strange chirping. There were bats suddenly all through the place. We went outside and watched as seemingly hundreds poured out of the attic vent under one of the eaves of the house, my greasy cat perched on the roof like Snoopy on his dog house, leaning over and trying to catch one.
What was eerie was the sound. All the chirping and whirring coming from the attic vent. Sounded like a cave in there.
The drummer’s wife and I didn’t have the money to go to a motel and as yet didn’t know anyone in town. The drummer’s wife and I ended up literally barricading ourselves in the front room. At first we just shut the door but bats kept getting in and so we blocked the gap under the door and blocked the fireplace. We listened to the whir of wings up and down the hall all night long. She eventually slept. I stayed up until dawn.
We were freaked out.
Drummer’s wife went off to stay with her parents. I had bats that didn’t want to leave and cats I was worried about. I discovered the bats were pouring into the house through the old stove vent in the kitchen ceiling. I managed to do a make-shift cover for the hole but they were then coming in other ways. It was the weekend and I couldn’t reach the landlord. I killed 13 bats one night, as they kept getting into the front room and my cats kept catching them. I’d try to shoo them out with a broom but other bats would come in so I ended up killing bats. Which I know will make me no friends. I simply didn’t know what else to do. It occurred to me to be worried they might have rabies and so I figured with my cats having come in contact with them it wouldn’t be bad to have these for the health department. The cats were innocuated against rabies but I was still freaked out, wondering if there were other diseases they could get, and well I was just freaked over the idea of now having household animals (the bats) that could possible be carriers of rabies. Bright and early Monday morning I called the health department and they said that they couldn’t do anything about it unless the bats bit someone. I said there were a lot of dogs in the neighborhood that I suspected were not innoculated, that I doubted the neighbors had the money to innoculate their pets, and roaming dogs as well, and weren’t they interested in testing to see if any of these bats had rabies? Nope, they weren’t. I said well I was really concerned about all this and my landlord was refusing to remove them. They said there was nothing to worry about unless one bit me and saidI needed to hire someone to remove them. Good bye.
My landlord had told me I was freaked out over nothing, that they were chimney sweeps. “Chimney sweeps are mistaken for bats all the time.” I had told him to come over and take a look at the 13 chimney sweeps I’d killed. He had declined and said I had chimney sweeps. He refused to get someone to clear out the bats and said if we broke our lease we’d lose our deposit.
That week, I found another place for us all to live. I forget how we scraped together the money. We moved the following weekend and husband and drummer were that day back out on the road and I drove back to the bat house to collect one of our cats who had hidden while we were moving and we couldn’t find him. I knew he’d be waiting for me. The electricity had been cut off. I still had the key to the front door. I opened it. Called for the cat. Nothing. I had forgotten to bring a flashlight with me. I walked into the old hall. No light at all, couldn’t see a thing. It was the eeriest feeling, no light, and the whir of wings all around my head. Fluttery breezes all around me caused by the wings. There was a meow. I grabbed the cat and got out.
I went home to the new place, nice old house in a nice old neighborhood. A duplex. It would be the nicest place we’d ever lived in. I looked forward to not having to deal with rodents or bats or cockroach infestations.
First I found a dead mole on the floor of one of the bedrooms.
A mole?
Then one night I heard one of the cats banging around the kitchen. I went in and it was chasing a mouse. I couldn’t catch the mouse. I shut myself up in my bedroom and in the morning cleaned up mouse remains. Cats disdain the heads and tails.
After a week, I took the bread out of the pantry and the bag was torn open. Hmmm? One of the cats? I threw it out. Got more bread. Same thing the next night. The next day I opened the pantry and there sat this huge sewer rat. Huge. Snacking on the bread. It didn’t run. It just looked at me like, “Who are you?”
I quietly closed the door and went away to contemplate what to do. It feels odd, after opening a door and looking eye-to-eye with a rat, to simply, quietly close the door and go away to meditate on your next move.
I’d had an eye-to-eye confrontation with a rat only once before. One thing to see them running up and down the city streets but another to have an eye-to-eye encounter. At one of the places we’d lived in I was in my barefeet bringing in the groceries, it had been raining, and I took a step and felt something large and alive under my foot and screamed and leaped away. There was a great large sewer rat. It was wet and looked strangely unkept and wobbly. It didn’t move. Didn’t run away. I backed up and it advanced toward me. I threw cans at it but not directly on it. It was while my husband was ill and food was expensive and I knew if I knocked the rat with a can of food I wouldn’t want to eat from that can. So I threw cans around it. It snarled or something and took a couple steps at me. It was close to me and I was scared to run because I didn’t know from its behavior if it would go after me. Then the rat shook itself and backed off. It turned and slowly walked off through the bushes. I would never know if it had been sick or was just a nonchalant, old sewer rat.
So now I had a rat in the house. I talked to my duplex neighbor and he said he’d heard about a previous tenant seeing a large old rat but it had been several years before and he didn’t think the house had rodents. I called the realtor and they said the house didn’t have rodents.
I got a regular rat trap.
The rat was of course immune to regular rat traps. I set out two and it got away each time, with the food.
I got the mega version of a rat trap.
The rat was apparently immune to big big rat traps. It had set the trap off but wasn’t in it. Had stolen the food.
That night I was going out with a friend. I opened the pantry door and there lay the bloody rat on the floor, dead. It had been injured by the trap and decided to come back and die in the pantry.
I closed the door.
I’d hit my saturation point. In the space of one month there had been the bats, the mole, the mouse and now a great big old sewer rat. I guess I hit my saturation point easily. My friend offered to help clean up the rat. I accepted. I felt like a coward, but I accepted. I got a trash bag, we disposed of the rat and went out to eat.
Years later, I read an article on what bats do for communities and how their habitats are being taken over by urban sprawl. I thought of the 13 bats I’d killed and thought well how ignorant I’d been. I’d needlessly slain 13 bats whose natural habitat had likely been destroyed and so they had moved into the attic of the house.
Someone else might have found a better way of handling it.
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