Rat Bastards.

During my junior year of college I moved into a five bedroom house with four of my friends. It wasn’t too far from the campus and the rent was relatively low for a small central coast college town.

The house itself was in decent shape considering that it had been rented to a rotating cast of college kids over the years. The paint was peeling and the windows needed a wash, but the house itself was fine. The management agency made a very smart move at some point and replaced the grass in the front yard with gravel. While sweeping out my room I found an unopened bottle of Miller High Life behind a vent, a leftover hidden treasure from some long ago party.

It wasn’t long after we moved in that we realized the house came with more than hidden beer and a gravel filled yard. We had rats. A full family of rats.

At first we tried to deal with this problem exactly as you might imagine a house full of 20 year olds might deal with it. We tried to ignore it. Getting rid of rats seemed like way too much effort to deal with. Someone would probably have to call the landlord or an exterminator or buy traps or something like that. Clearly, we were all much too busy to be bothered. The rats would probably just get bored and leave after a while anyway.

Of course this was not true and the rat problem just got worse. My bed was pushed up against a wall that divided my room from the kitchen. At night I could hear the rats running around inside the wall. As I lay in bed trying to sleep, I could hear them gnawing and scratching in the wall just inches from my head. Did this prompt me to call the exterminator? No, my solution instead; I would walk into the kitchen and turn on the dishwasher. This would muffle the noise of the rats and allow me to fall asleep.

One night my roommate Joe woke up when a rat ran across his stomach. He was furious and swore to take care of the rat problem the very next night. So the next evening we all went off to bed while Joe took a seat in the dark kitchen. He sipped on a Mountain Dew and kept his air rifle slung over his shoulder. I woke at 3am to high pitched yelling from the kitchen. Joe was standing on the chair clutching his rifle, a half a bottle of Mountain Dew spilled on the floor. I never got the full story from Joe that night, he just kept shouting, “Those fuckers are fast!”

I moved out of the house shortly after that. The rats kept getting worse and the roommates were starting to ask questions about why the dishwasher was always running at night. (The guy who replaced me moved in and promptly hung up an American flag on one wall and bull horns on the other. He moved out a month later when he dropped out of college and took a job with a logging company in Humboldt County.)

I heard later that the guys put out poison for the rats, and it worked. Unfortunately after the rats ate the poison, they didn’t die until they crawled back into their nests in the walls. The house was free of living rats, but it stank of decomposing rat bodies for most of the winter.
Of course by then I was long gone.