As I asked a couple emails back, what did our friends’s — elder artists’s — patrons enjoy the most over their tenure? Honest tales of life in the marketplace. Sometimes we focus so much on production that we forget to tell an honest, “Here’s what life’s really like in NYC” kind of story. So why not compare the “mouse in apartment NYC” to the “flying roach NYC” and you can let me know in the comments what horrifies you the most?

Today, I want to talk about Tara and my tenure with critters of New York. Many of them have, in different seasons, taken up residence in our home without permission.

Joseph Chamberlain, the British Statesmen, offered up the old curse:

“May you live in interesting times.”

Some of the most interesting times were, straight up, invasions. I’m talking about our home, not history.

You know it’s bad when your Buddhist and Jewish and Muslim and atheist friends in your life all simultaneously start to wonder if someone cursed you.

It’s important to know we’re not dirty people, other than in the same way that everyone else is. Everyone else judges every other family’s cleanliness — what does and does not count as “dirt.” Certain Asian friends find it disgusting that we don’t have two sets of shoes — one for inside and one for outside. I find other things they do disgusting. Neither of these things have anything to do with actual poison: the disgust emotion is deep in our lizard brain to keep us from eating hemlock. It’s important to remember in these judgments that Jesus taught us cleanliness and what constitutes “clean” for each of us has absolutely, positively nothing to do with godliness. The opposite of this is OCD: cleansing rituals done for nothing more than to ward off demonic spirits. If you’re scrubbing your house to keep away the bad, you might reevaluate your theology. In fact, it has something of the air of a comedy of manners when rich folk get rodents. All the same, we’re clean. You’re clean. Rest in it and rid yourself of the anxiety: it’s doing nothing to increase your good life and may well be decreasing it. 

That said.

Tara in particular has washed covers of things I didn’t know were covers until they were already in the wash and I returned home to the bones of strollers, carseats, couches, and cushions. This stuff is just the reality of living in a world.

And, frankly, even if we were, it’s as Chesterton said: 

“In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss.  We were inclined to ask, “Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?” But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead.  The moss is silent because the moss is alive.” 

— G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

There’s a smell to old houses that’s consistent. I used to associate it with death, now I associate it with a long, earthy, rooted life. Sometimes it’s pipe dream tobacco on old Harvard Classics. Sometimes it’s denture solution. Sometimes it’s an overabundance of hydroponic plants in the garage.

We’ll start with the coons and fleas, we’ll end with the mice.

RACOONS NYC

I grew up reading Where the Red Fern Grows and in the heart of coon country. World Coon Hunt happens in Salem, Illinois every year and my brother’s father-in-law (my father-in-law-in-law?) hunted with coon dogs for a good chunk of his life. That plus growing up with a Davy Crockett hat gave me a nostalgic, even sentimental place in my heart for coons.

But they’re also vicious chaos monkeys with demon knives where the fingers go.

At Darren Dwyer’s house growing up, I remember one got into the cat door and got livid he couldn’t get out. It was like a three car garage with a lot of interesting “secret passages,” we called them, and other places for boys to explore. But this coon tore it to shreds — turned the garage door into so many cans opened with screwdriver tips and monster claws.

So that too has been in my mind.

And near Greenwood, there are coons aplenty. I once saw one escape with an egg in both hands, just sprinting across 5th ave late one night, cackling as it held out its great big pearly white prize. Another — same “fenced in” parking lot — tried to sprint across 5th ave. A 30lb, 3 foot long behemoth. Our neighbor Kelly had ridden back from her pop up coffeeshop — the one featured in Modern Love — in Red Hook and was barreling home at full speed when she ran over the 30lb coon. I don’t know how this happened without a faceplant: maybe she clipped it just right, maybe the thing ran in the undercarriage after the first wheel had passed. One way or another, she ran over this abyssal gigantism with the front and not the back wheel. 

Now she had a 30lb coon underneath her pedals. “AAHHHHH!”

“HISSSSSSS!”


“AHHHHHH!”


“HISSSSSS!”

And the awkward struggle for her to un-run-over the coon and for the coon to extricate itself from beneath the pedals began. 

So yes. There be coons. Hic sunt dracones. Hic sunt leones.

LICE NYC

Several years back, my beautiful bride picked up lice either from a fellow subway passenger or the seat on a plane. We’re not sure. I also have a weird relationship with lice because my mother ran the Marion County Health department in Centralia, Illinois for ages and she treated a lot of folks — many, even, well-off families absolutely flabbergasted that their kids would get lice. Frankly, it reminds me of the Robert Burns poem To a Louse, On Seeing one on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church. My sister’s incredibly generous and growing up, she would frequently lend her coat to children worse off than her who had no coats. She would then get her coat back and bring home lice. This happened like four times and took a long time to curb. Before I had long hair (I’ve always known, since Rev. Kyle Welch’s cancer, that worst comes to worst I can bic mine down to the scalp).  In this way, my sister and Tara are profoundly similar — sacrificing their own well being for the sake of others. 

But Tara got lice here at the old apartment, we didn’t know how. But they were many. And they were large. And she wept at the sight of them, being beautiful and… now and again… a little OCD. The first thing she did back when she got them was to hold her gorgeous, multi-year tresses over the trash can, bundled them, and shear them in a single swipe. She looked up, issued three tears and a single sniff — for someone that has rather dramatic reactions, I found this one remarkably stoic and tough. We then slathered her hair in, what in retrospect turned out to be remarkably effective, organic treatment of coconut oil and apple cider vinegar after burning out what she could with the hottest shower she could stand. Then we began the painstaking process of combing it out with a hyper fine metal toothed comb. She sat in front of me, I worked meticulously strand by strand, layer by layer, a creative writer turned surgical beautician.

She wept, quietly. 

And the combination of combing those cold, wet, oily, shorn tresses of my bride and the sound of soft crying accompanied by the soft sounds of an abnormally quiet Brooklyn will remain with me.

It only took one treatment. Those were gone quickly.

FLYING ROACH NYC

I really don’t want to go into this one in depth other than to say when you live above a diner, you’re fighting against wall-crawling apocalypse-surviving protein pustules that come from trash four floors downstairs. 

And sometimes they’re “water bugs” which come from the street. 

Four-inch long monstrosities that crawl up from the sewer at random intervals. 

And fly. 

The flying ones attack our friend Jenny on the regular. 

THEY ARE FLYING ROACH DEVILS.

MEN IN BLACK WARNED YOU ABOUT THIS.

MOUSE IN APARTMENT NYC

Before we get to mice, I want to talk about rats. Thank GOD we have never had a rat. But we have had encounters with rats that have horrified us. Echo, for one, was on an evening walk with me one winter and her flush breed nose caught scent of something in one of those discarded trash bags on thirty-eighth street. 

I thought nothing of this, frankly. She finds half eaten bagels so often that I’m happy to just give her a quick yank and hustle onwards. New York: the magical fairy land where bagels spring up from the sewers. 

This time, though, the bagel bit back. Screamed even. Shrieked. 

So I started hauling the leash to extricate the sniffler out of the black plastic. And she had a foot-long rat in her maw, screaming as if someone had subjected a lawn gnome to enhanced interrogation techniques in hopes of finding a secret path into the subway. I yanked and she finally turned loose.

This poor creature had ribboned flesh and was limping away from us. 

Far be it from me to feel empathy and compassion for a rat, but I did. I truly did for brother rat. It tucked away into some hovel before I could attend to it. 

Then my dog looked back at me, literally grinning. Beaming. So proud, those sad spaniel eyes suddenly happy. And that maw of hers — those pearly whites — had been painted red. Her nose too. I thought it was her blood, honestly, at first. Adrenaline pounding from the inside-out, begging to come out. She licked her nose over and over and over, tasting the blood. Aren’t you proud, Dad? Aren’t you proud.

No. 

Dear heavens, no. 

In the end, at least we don’t have a rat.

Let alone, a super rat. 

Here are some pictures of the monstrosities found in the sewers:

In case you needed anything else to haunt your dreams, you’re welcome. That’s what “mouse in apartment NYC” is like for some.

What we did have in this season is a series of mice. Guys, it’s worse than any barn or country house I’ve been inside, post-harvest. What happened was a change in the guard of the building’s super. The old one still lives here and mouths off about our new one, but never really bothered to show the old systems of bleaching the trash compactor room, laying poison, the like. Plus the exterminator’s lower management hadn’t been laying poison anywhere. 

So when the super sealed and painted the new basement, the fumes drove the mice — who had gotten deep nests during the pandemic and aggressive habits from searching farther and wider for food and therefore had multiplied, locally — all up into the wet walls. When that happened, almost every apartment in the complex had overnight drastic infestations. 

We have, as of now, killed at least 24 mice in the last two months in our apartment alone. We know of others who have killed as many or worse.

It’s crazy town. 

But we’re finally getting a handle on it, God willing.

ASSORTED CRITTERS NYC or “THE PANOPOLY OF NOAH’S UPPER DECK NYC”

Over time, I’ve grown to think much more like St. Francis. It pains me to kill the mice, let alone in what I perceive to be an inhumane way. I’m very aware, many meals, precisely that life was taken in order for me to live another day. And aware that there won’t be death in heaven and therefore won’t be beef. 

If you can’t be aware that something died for your meal — emotionally present for that — you should probably stop eating for a little while and refocus to keep yourself from cruelty.

I take Solomon at his word in Ecclesiastes when he says that the soul in animals is the same as the soul in man. It’s not that we don’t have a higher consciousness, but the imaginative soul is something that can foster language as many have with apes and dogs. That shouldn’t intimidate us or threaten our Christianity, that should inspire us. It should move us to see animals — at times — as mentors. 

So I make time for my son to feed the birds. I make time to preach to pigeons. I make time to say, “Hello, sister squirrel,” and feed them from the acorns I myself have collected from Greenwood. I wave joyfully to the bird ladies — who, in my childhood vision of Home Alone 2, used to terrify me — though I’m well aware that those who spread bread instead of seed feed as many super rats as birds. 

I’ve grown to adore feral cats, for the catch-and-release programs run by hippies in NYC are the single most effective deterrent to rats. 

And mice. 

It’s the malicious, vindictive side of me that keeps score of how many of them I’ve killed from the house.

The softer side weeps with every one. 

AND A BED BUG IN A CAPE COD CABIN.

The absolute horror of horrors for all New Yorkers is bed begs. Absolute. And we’ve luckily never gotten them. But they’re near impossible to get rid of compared to everything else. They bring with them fines, 311 reports, new filings on leases. Because of all of this, if someone gets bed bugs in the city, you immediately see who your real friends are. Or at least the real New Yorkers. Those who have been here long enough and have dealt with the problem immediately lean in as hard as New Yorkers did on 9/11, the miracle on the Hudson, etc. Those who haven’t, don’t want it. So they scatter like so many pigeons on a playground.

We’ve been fortunate. 

However, one writer we took up to Cape Cod. Her family’s pretty fascinating. Rented a car to drive us up to the Cape, do a writing retreat / vacation. Tara woke up the first night and found a single bug crawling on Arthur’s pack and play. She captured it in a jar, waited until morning. The writer friend — who has had bed bugs in her apartment — came upstairs that first day of the writing retreat. She confirmed: it was a bed bug, it was an adult, it was alive. 

As far as we could deduce, it came from the rental car. 

I immediately got on the phone.

Tara immediately started stripping everything, spraying it with alcohol.

The writer explained to her mother and her mother explained to her aunt why the young couple with the baby were tearing their house apart and doing so much laundry. 

Turns out, the aunt had had an infestation of bed bugs that wouldn’t go away. And she’d gotten on to her businessman husband for staying at Motel 6s and Ramada Inns. But they weren’t bed bugs. They were bat bugs. From the bats in the attic. They got rid of the bats, got rid of the bugs. Luckily for us, they knew how to handle bed bugs from mistreating. So they were — in the end — remarkably calm, considering.

And Drive-O rent-a-car sent us a free replacement and two free days of rental on a 6 hour drive out to the Cape, one way. So I’ll use them for life, whenever I can: they went above and beyond the call of duty to amend it. 

Anyways.

Lots of things live in New York, not just people. So you nature lovers would love it!