So I haven’t been online for almost a week now because I was attempting nonstop when I got home from work everyday to catch a rat. No, not a little mouse that tends to come into someone’s apartment. But a Splinter sized rat who happened to take my apartment as his new abode and try to get away with it.

A week ago I wrote a nice long blog about Michael Keaton and how I missed the poor guy. I was going to follow that up the next day by writing a blog on how I missed Tim Burton and how I actually re-watched the original 1989 version of Batman and how I actually was dozing off throughout the film. Just wasn’t as good of a film as I had remembered.

I was one of the pathetic schmucks who went to see The Dark Knight twice over the weekend, the main reason being that on Thursday night my girlfriend and I had midnight tickets (which turned out to be 12:30 a.m. tickets actually) at the 42nd street theater and waited on the line from 9 p.m. It was actually a pretty swell time, just looking at this moron dressed as Superman behind us and how every person who passed him by had to ask him if he was at the right movie.

Hysterical, I know.

The second viewing came only 12 hours later after work when I saw it with my two great friends (Tommy and Steve… and Steve, we’re hoping you don’t have to get your big toe lobbed off) and went ape shit over how they got it right. But that’s not what this blog is about.

When I got home later that day, I passed out on my couch. Waking up a few hours later, I went into my computer room to write up an article and I heard a rustling. I looked behind me and it had stopped. Went back to my typing and sure enough, the sounds kept coming from behind me. And it would keep stopping when I ceased to type. I shook my head, thinking it was just the draft coming from the window. Our landlord is a real twit and failed to make any repairs to the apartment when we moved in roughly a year ago. And sadly, it feels as if we’re still moving in all these months later.

The weekend went by without a hitch but I had tons of stuff to do so I said no to the computer. Why sit there all day when I could go out and be a bit social for once? Monday rolls on through and I get a text with the following message from my girlfriend.

‘We have a rodent again.’ followed by a ‘Just now again! Def a rat!’

Which made me think that maybe she was seeing things. It had to be a mouse. How does a rat get into someone’s apartment? And if it was a rat, it was probably a small rat, a young one. I asked her if she was sure and she had told me it was pretty big.

So in my day, I would just set up a trap to kill the damn thing. But my girlfriend is a nice person and loves animals so she insisted on buying a rat trap, one that would catch it humanely and then we bring it near someone else’s abode and let it loose there. Or to the side of a highway, which there is one nearby. So she bought that and some of those Black and Decker sound wave contraptions that supposedly drive rodents and bugs insane. So we set up the trap with a Ritz cracker and some peanut butter on top and left it in the computer room, closed door and waited. Nothing happened for a full day. Then I got another text at my job while I was working.

‘Did you touch the trap at all?” Of course I didn’t. I checked it that morning to see if anything was caught.

‘Well, the cracker is gone and the trap is closed.’

Which then made me do a double take at work. Either this thing was really small and escaped through the small holes on the sides of the trap. Or this thing was bigger than I had imagined and was going to bite my throat out in the middle of the night if I wasn’t careful. You know how those New York City rats are, always trying to one up every other rat.

So we figured if it was as big as it seemed to be, we had to close one end of the trap, putting the cracker on the closed side, so by the time it grabbed at the food, it would be trapped. But would it fall for the same trap again? Well, it would have to because we put a towel on top of it, showcasing it as a tunnel. And we put it in our hallway, so of course it wasn’t the same trap. We also figured to tape the vent in the computer room, blocking the thing from leaving.

So yesterday (Wednesday) comes along and I get home, exhausted from work. I go to the bathroom and look on the floor and notice dirt which wasn’t there this morning and spilling out of the vent in there. The damn super rat figured out how to get around and find its way into the bathroom. Now I had no idea where this thing could be, considering the only door closed was the computer room. Looking around, there was no trail at all. Nothing to distinguish where it could have gone.

Nada. Zilch.

So I told my girlfriend that and she made the great suggestion of taping up the vent in the bathroom and our bedroom. So I did this and now it’s only way out was the front door (which I’d have to unlock if it asked me nicely) or the kitchen (which I didn’t know where it could be… too many places in that room to go). We decide to watch our favorite screaming chef Gordon Ramsay’s new show, Kitchen Nightmares. I love the BBC one, so this one shouldn’t disappoint. While watching it, I thought I heard a sound. But of course when you become silent, so does the sound.

I decide to get a water and that’s when I saw the feces. The droppings were huge and it freaked the hell out of me. If the shit of this thing was that big, how the hell was I going to fight it? It would overpower me, tie me up and make me watch while it had its way with my dear loved one. So I come back to the living room, continuing to watch the show when I saw it. It looked at me, winking a bit and running into the bedroom.

IT WAS FUCKING HUMONGOUS!

I don’t exaggerate when I say that it was the size of John Holmes’ AIDS addicted dead cock. Which the thought of that biting me freaked me a bit more then I had intended. Silencing the television, we waited. About 10 minutes later, it came out and nonchalantly came into the living room to sit next to us and have some popcorn.

Actually, it just came into the room and went under the couch and somehow my girlfriend kept it together and made the most silent scream I had never heard. Of course this is all happened when her mom had called her and she had to pretend that nothing was out of the ordinary. So I told her to go into the bedroom and close the door behind herself. I was taking this rat one on one, man to rodent, the best intelligent species would win in the battle of the century.

I just stomped on the couch, on the table, on the floor. Trying to freak it out more than I was and to either get it to run into the trap or to attempt to make a break for the front door. I did this for about 15 minutes when suddenly I heard a slight sound. A sound I had never heard before. Metallic sounding, my girlfriend opened the bedroom door and asked what the sound was. Did I hear the sound I had been waiting to hear all week?

No, it’s neck wasn’t broken. But second best, success had occurred when I lifted the towel off the trap and the beast was now enclosed inside its shiny walls. And it was pissed. Making a sound that seemed to come from the Bog of Stench, it was hitting against the trap, trying to escape. And for a brief moment, I thought it would get out. I mean, rats are known to chew through concrete. And no, I’m not making that up!

So I put it in a printer box, cage and all, and we proceed to leave and walk roughly half a mile to let it go. Of course opening the trap proved difficult, with Remy’s evil dirty cousin trying to pull a Houdini while we were trying to do the animal rights thing and let it out. It finally calmed down and when we opened the gate, it jumped out and ran off into the grass near the highway. My girlfriend, skieved as much as I was, felt like we did the right thing.

I felt worried. Worried that by the time we got home, it would be there again, rapping its knuckles on the side of the couch, ready to evict us from our own apartment. It’s been almost a full day since the capture and release of Public Rat #1.

And I’m still hearing noises. Fucking rats.