Red Light House

In an apparent act of suicide I found another mouse laying dead at the bottom of our plastic recycling bin in the pantry. I didn’t find the mouse so much as smell the mouse…he was pretty ripe when I got to him. Whether the mouse was lured there by the tasty smells of beer cans long since drunk or just couldn’t bear the loneliness after I disposed of his compatriot the other week I’ll never know.

What I do know is that I had to empty his dead, smelly ass out of our plastic bin and bleach the bejeezus out of it. I couldn’t bear to put the bin back in the pantry so now it’s standing a deadly vigil in the garage.

My Aunt and Uncle are in town and staying with us for a few days. My uncle was a cop in New York 25 years ago and my wish for “amusing cop anecdotes” came true last night when a Kentucky Fried Chicken KFC add came on the television.

“KFC,” my Aunt said, “you have them here?” Which is a question she’s been asking since she got here. You have Best Buy? You have Costco? I guess New Yorkers get surprised at these things when they leave their home state.
“Yep,” I said, “there’s a couple around. Man, I haven’t had KFC in four years.” I thought back to when PCE’s band practices were a more genteel affair and we brought in pizza or burritos or KFC to eat while we practiced. Now we opt for the more nutritious “3 beers and a pull from the whiskey bottle” diet. Then my Uncle chimed in:

“I haven’t eaten at KFC since I saw a guy stabbed to death for eating the last piece of chicken at a party.”

As I collected my jaw off the floor he went on.

“I was a uniform officer and got called to a tenement building in the South Bronx. A lot of the apartments in those places had holes knocked through the walls so you could go from room to room. So I get into one apartment and go through a hole in the wall and there’s a party going on and in the bedroom there is this dead guy on the floor. The host of the party was there and told me, ‘Yeah we were havin’ a party and he took the last piece of chicken so I stabbed him.’ All matter of fact just like that. And the party just kept going on around the dead guy.”

“He must have loved chicken.” I said.

“He couldn’t order more chicken?” My Aunt said.

“Then the best part,” My Uncle said, “Was the next day in the papers the headline read ‘Man Killed During Chicken Gala’.”

Yesterday morning, as we were getting ready to leave the house for work, I realized I hadn’t seen my keys in over a day.  I started running around the house looking on tables and shelves and in pants pockets and jackets but to no avail.  Sammi had little patience and told me to buck up, take the spare house key we have on the Captain Morgan key chain and look for them later.  Pretty much the advice I would have given her in the same situation, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

When I got home that evening the hunt for my keys had taken on a new importance because I knew I had to drive my car the next day and I don’t have a spare car key…oh the drama!  I rechecked all the tables, shelves, drawers and floors.  I checked in every pair of pants pockets, in all my jacket pockets, in any nook and cranny I could imagine the keys falling into.

I walked into the dining room and saw the boxes of New Year’s Eve decorations and party favors sitting on the table, waiting for me to take down into the basement for storage.  I looked in a box that had a few plastic top-hats, some black and white leis and a few noise makers that I wisely didn’t hand out to people during the party.  I looked down past the “Happy New Year!” tiaras and there, in the bottom of the box, were my goddamn keys.

The memory of using my house key to slice open the tape on top of the box came back to me.  Why I left the keys inside the box I do not know but the enormity of my luck bum rushed me as I stood there shaking my head.  If I had happened to carry the boxes of New Years crap down into the basement while we were cleaning everything else up I’m 100% certain I wouldn’t have found my keys until next year at the very earliest.  The sheer jackassery and hassle of losing my only set of car keys came flooding into me and it literally gave me a shiver.  A bullet is dodgethed.

Last week Sammi and I received a Christmas present from mother nature when I opened up the cabinet under the sink and saw mouse poop collecting behind our bottles of various cleaners and boxes of trash bags.  More searching showed us the situation was dire as we found more mouse poop in the pantry along the floor and on the ledge where we keep our cookbooks and radio.

As gross as it was to find poop under the sink and in the pantry I can’t help but be grateful because if mice didn’t let out a near constant stream of nasty poopy pellets we’d never even know that they were there and they could have maintained their invisible mooching forever.  It seems to me that rodents should have evolved an evolutionarily beneficial instinct to control their poop a little better to hide from predators and pissed off humans.  But as evolution turned out, mice scamper in the dark and dirty places eating garbage while I sit on a gleaming throne of gold, silk and mouse skulls.

After cleaning up all the poop I went right out to the corner store and bought traps.  They were the glue traps, and while I had misgivings about this sort of trap (preferring something a little more instantaneous and laser guided) they were the only kind available so I pushed all thoughts of cute little mice stuck in gooey doom to the back of my mind and laid them out.

I really expected to catch a mouse that very night but we had no such luck.  Each morning and every time we’d come back into the house from being out I’d scout ahead into the kitchen to make sure the traps were clear.  Sammi would hang back, filled with the conflicting emotions of the sadness of trying to kill something small, cute and furry and anger at something trying to steal her candy.

The story ends badly for the mouse, I’m afraid.  I found it when we were madly running around preparing for our New Year’s party, six days after laying out the traps.  I quickly bagged up the trap and brought it outside, not saying anything to Sammi because I didn’t want to introduce the topic of death along side our talk of pecan tarts and champagne cocktails.  All during the party I kept quiet about it, but I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut forever so after everyone had left I told Sammi and she responded with sadness.  She felt sad because she’s a good person and not a mouse murderer like her fiancé.

The next morning when we woke up she rolled over, looked at me and said, “I feel sad about the mouse.”

“Yes,” I said, “it was very cute and it’s sad.”

“It was probably a daddy mouse going out to get food for his kids, and now he’ll never come back.”

What do you say to that?