Murray the Rat
Last year, New York State introduced a law prohibiting smoking in bars. While there was a lot of bitching and complaining about having to smoke outside (especially in the winter), it did give us the opportunity to meet Murray the Rat.
We didn’t actually meet Murray, and I don’t know that Murray was his real name. It was probably Squeeel-Skreetch, or something like that. You see, Murray was a rat. We assumed he was a male, although no one ever captured him to find out for sure, or even tried to prove otherwise. He was about a foot long, and his tail was about as long as his body. His thin, short fur was greyish-brown, and his tail appeared to be hairless. He scampered around the parking lot at the plaza after eleven pm. We saw him all the time in front of the McDonald’s, jetting back and forth between the medians that sectioned off the parking lot. There were rat-holes everywhere: beneath trees and bushes, in grassy knolls, and in the dirt between the closely-placed buildings.
He probably came out at night to visit all his little holes. Maybe he had a family in each hole, practiced polygamy or bigamy, and was the Grand Rat Patriarch. In the rat society, that might not be taboo, and might even be encouraged by the Church of Rattus Norvegicus of the Latter-Day Finks. Maybe he came out at night because it was easier to forage for food – easier to feed his many families and numerous offspring. Lord knows there was plenty of food at that time, too, with the supermarket and the various restaurants and bars having all their dumpsters filled from the day’s business. He would have had pretty easy pickings at that time of night, and no one to stop him.
There were lots of rats last year, too. On any given night, we would see five or six running around, sometimes simultaneously, but usually we saw only one scurrying here, one sprinting there. They must have had quite the little rat society built up. A community center, several schools, a dysfunctional government, and rat-wing conservatives haranguing progressive raticals on radios pilfered from the Radio Shack garbage cans. They might even have had a little rat-bar, where they drank stale beer and booze obtained from mostly-emptied bottles in boxes behind the bar, and gnawed on discarded chicken wing bones.
One hot summer night, a smallish rat got into the bar. We used to jimmy the door open to let fresh air in; it was also easier to sneak out during a commercial break for a quick smoke. It was a weeknight, and there were only about fifteen people there. A couple of tables were filled with college students drinking and eating, and there were about five of us at the bar. We were watching TV, waiting for The Family Guy to come on. The bartender was running back and forth from the bar to the kitchen, filling food and drink orders. The owner was holed up in his office, doing paperwork and calling in the next day’s produce order.
We saw the rat scamper through the open door. It ran around the bar, ducking under tables and chairs, scared and confused by the commotion. Girls jumped onto their chairs screaming, as scared as the rat running beneath their feet. The barkeep chased it with a broom, trying to drive it out of the still-open door. I went outside for a smoke after about five minutes of this amusement, and the door was shut behind me. While I was outside, the rat crawled between a placard announcing a jazz show and the picture window in the front of the bar. By that time, the owner had come out, wielding his little-league baseball bat. It was mostly used for show, a humorous warning to those who might want to cause trouble. That night, it would actually be used more in line with its maker’s intentions.
After circling the floor a few times looking for the rat, I popped my head in to advise him where the rat was. He crawled into the booth by the picture window, and poked the bat behind the placard. The rat, after several attempts to evict it from its safe haven, finally jumped into the booth with the owner. I could hear the rat scream through the window as he pummeled it, and I felt momentarily sad that it should suffer such a slow and violent death. I watched the owner’s arm rise and fall repeatedly. His glasses slipped off his nose and fell onto the table as his toupee slid out of kilter on top of his head. After more than several swings, the rat was finally dead. It was swept into a dustpan, and dumped unceremoniously into the middle of the parking lot for the street sweeper to pick up later.
While outside having a cigarette later that evening, we joked about taking the rat’s carcass and leaving it in the paper box as a gruesome present for the person who filled it in the wee hours of the morning. As it turns out, a couple of the guys were accosted by local police after I left. They were trying to duct-tape it to the front door of McDonald’s. Sure, they were drunk, and yes, it was a juvenile act for thirty-something men to be doing, but it was quite funny to hear about it the next evening. While they weren’t arrested, I can imagine the conversation at Hotel Franklin (the county holding station) if they were:
What are you in for?
Murder and dealing coke. What got you in?
Duct taping a rat to the front door of McDonald’s.
I got something long and furry to tape in your back door . . .
We still joke about that incident, and those fellows are not allowed near any duct tape to this day.
This year, however, there aren’t many rats running around. We’re lucky to see one or two per week. It could be that the road construction on Main Street has caused them to move to a more comfortable suburban existence. Maybe neighborhood cats have chased them all away. Perhaps they were poisoned by the new plaza owners, in an attempt through chemical warfare to rid the area of unwanted miscreants. We don’t know what happened, but it appears that the rat society has been effectively destroyed.
Last night, as I walked through the parking lot after leaving the gym, I saw a rat by the lot exit, its head crushed by a car it failed to successfully dodge. Maybe the reason they are fewer in number this year is that they aren’t as adept at avoiding cars. I said a small prayer for the repose of its soul, and over a beer later in the evening, we made sure there was no duct tape in the bar.
