The Rat Race (Critters Part 3)

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

After the dust has cleared and the nuclear winter has thawed, there will still be rats and cockroaches. Having been conditioned by the hard living of New York City, these creatures have been bred to be indestructible. Though many of us find them quite repulsive, I have to tip my hat to these critters for their tenacity in the game of survival.

At the top of our most hated urban critters list, is the rat.
City rats much like pigeons have adapted to eating almost anything to survive.
I could go through a list of things I've seen rats eat, but let's face it, I don't even want to talk about it.

One of the most delightful subway memories I have floating around in my brain happened late one night at the West 4th street subway station. I was sitting on a bench waiting for the F train back to Brooklyn when a V train pulled into the platform. Simultaneously a rat scurried across the platform towards the arriving train. I was on the edge of my seat as the subway doors slid open and the rat approached the car. He started to enter the train. He popped his little rodent head inside, looked left, looked right, sniffed around with his whiskers twitching and then suddenly turned around and walked away just before the doors closed.

I envisioned one of two scenarios, as I love to fantasize.
The first was of course, the rat getting into the car, the doors closing and the screaming monkey shit hitting the fan. I pictured a large woman who looked much too much like a cartoon elephant on top of a table screaming at a passing mouse. It made me smile, which quite possibly means that I have a dark sense of humor that occasionally likes to revel in the ridiculous nature of human suffering.

The second scenario involved the rat's tail getting stuck in the subway door and the train pulling away with a rat's tail hanging out the side of it. I wasn't sure whether to find this thought oddly funny or disturbing, so I quickly washed it from my brain.

I have only had one bad experience with the rats of New York. As a whole, we have accepted each other's existence.
At long last, here is the brief but frightening retelling of what happened to me late one summer night in Prospect Heights Brooklyn.

I had been to visit my friend, S____, and grown rather groggy finally excusing myself to hit the streets and let my feet carry me back to Park Slope. I was on auto-pilot with that glazed sort of city vision where even that which is directly in front of you is in peripheral. This is how we we walk without making eye contact. This is how we block out all the stimuli.

As I was walking in my tunnel vision fog, I saw what I thought to be a black plastic bag being blown by the wind in my right peripheral vision. I thought nothing of it. Suddenly the bag moved very quickly toward me and was on top of my feet, but it wasn't a bag at all. It was a pack of rats. I screamed like a 12 year old girl kicking and flailing. I accidentally kicked three of the rats with my feet and they flew into the air like rockets, squealing in that high pitched sound that only a rat can make. I began running at full speed and didn't stop running until I was two blocks away.

I had never before and have never since seen a pack of rats. Perhaps I stumbled down the wrong block on the wrong day. Perhaps it was the 12th Annual Brooklyn Rat Race.

Many years from now, a grandfather rat who was only a tiny rat on that fateful day, will be tucking in his grandson at bedtime and tell him the story of the year of the last rat race, when poor uncle Timothy was injured by an insane screaming man. How Margaret was never the same and wouldn't venture out anymore to rummage through the garbage, scared that something horrible would happen. He will tell of how she withered away and died long before her time, leaving behind her only son, who vowed to make that crazy man pay. Margaret's son's name was Anthony. He grew up to run the neighborhood watch at a church in Brooklyn Heights. One night, he saw a man with a guitar passing the church and had it not been for his wife, Jessica, he would have had his revenge, for a rat with score to settle never forgets a face.