As I watched El Jefe shiver sadly before scurrying out from his perch under the beer pong table and into the cold rain, I panged at realizing that I’d misjudged the rat. For months he’d been the nutria-sized antagonist to our basement apartment, terrorizing the back patio with his sheer girth and gull-sounding battle cries. A full eight to 10 inches longer than the biggest members of his numerous brethren who call the garbage area in front of our building home, his first appearance conspicuously coincided with the death of Mr. Jigglesworth, the one-eared, half-tailed cat who had called the patio home for years and who had shown no signs of relinquishing his domain. My roommates found his mangled corpse under the makeshift metal table in January, and immediately an inquiry was raised. Had Jiggles been the victim of an improbable rat-on-feline hate crime? Or had we simply not noticed him until long after the normal decay had set in?
One thing was certain: El Jefe’s reign had begun. Scouring every inch of the 40-by-15-foot space, perched on the wicker chairs and neglected garden boxes, scaling the chain-link fence separating our building from the adjacent ones, brazenly peeking in our back door, the rat’s presence was constant, though not yet terrifying. Then the casualties started piling up. A succession of smaller rodent remains, both mice and lesser rats, appearing daily, their necks bitten clean through, their tiny palms raised skyward in last desperate acts of supplication. El Jefe enforced his doctrine of isolationism with an iron paw.
Our collective unease culminated during a recent beer pong tourney slash barbecue honoring the equinox in which the rat came out of nowhere and ran across the crowded patio in a Full Metal Jacket maneuver that ended in the trampling of the flip-flopped feet of my roommate’s significant other or maybe some rando. Regardless, war was declared. The superintendent was alerted, industrial traps were set, mice corpses kept piling up and El Jefe remained fearless.
Then came that plaintive shiver that changed everything. Are any of us – the super, me, the giant rat – really that dissimilar? We’ve all made journeys, sacrificed much. I’ve forsaken sunlight and hours of human interaction to work as a copy editor and sometime writer in a drab basement apartment in a decent neighborhood. The super left his family and his as-yet-to-be-determined Spanish-speaking island to pursue his dream of cleaning toilets and turning on the hot water every morning so Amelia in 1B can soak her calloused bunions. And El Jefe made his undoubtedly Quixotic pilgrimage through a maze of basement traps (and the doors connecting the boiler room to the super’s office to the back of the building that the super and his cronies invariably leave ajar) in search of, what, solitude, a patio of one’s own, escape from a mating gone awry, shame from defeat at the claws of another alpha rat? Does it really matter?
We are all searchers, cut from the same ilk. And even President Monroe, recent history’s most famous proponent of isolation (minus Kim Jong and Fidel), once admitted, “Our country may be likened to a new house. We lack many things, but we possess the most precious of all – liberty!” There are always small prices to pay for this liberty. I must suffer the daily rude awakenings by roommates who work 8-to-6, ugh, jobs so that I can afford an apartment where my afternoons are undisturbed. The super must live with the shame of continually forgetting to fix the broken door in my room and the rust emanating from various points in our ceiling. And Amelia must deal with the nappiest feet this side of sub-Saharan Africa. To deny El Jefe his freedom, a freedom for which he has killed, would be a cruel hypocrisy. So scurry on, badass rat, fight the good fight, do not go gentle into that crevice behind the garbage chute!
That is not to say we can be friends; I’m keeping a respectful distance, not really trying to get hemorrhagic fever, plague, or renal syndrome. Not to mention the rat’s brief two-year lifespan (in which El Jefe will have been more productive than the super could ever hope to be in his wildest cerveza-induced dreams), much too brief to form any deep bond. That is, unless he develops more than a passing interest in the never-ending supply of Weight Watchers string cheese and Lucky Charms that I bestow upon the apartment, or he’s actually La Jefa and the killer instinct is really a maternal one – there will be rodent blood. Until then, do your thing my wayward, disease-ridden brother.
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