Rodentia
The squirrel has become the daytime equivalent of the rat. For whatever reason, people feed squirrels, coax squirrels to approach them, and generally treat them with the exact opposite of the hate bestowed upon the rat. They are like those rotten little kids who, since they are so cute, can get away with anything. The squirrel is a cute rat, without the reputation.
When talking about survivors, adapters, and hangers-on, one is usually making reference to the more human inhabitants of this city, instead of the lower-on-the-genetic-totem-pole denizens sharing every square inch of
the city with us: the stinking trees of heaven sprouting out of every atom of available soil; the filthy pigeons that people feel sorry for and feed in the winter--while paying no nevermind to the freezing-cold homeless people likewise scrounging for food and shelter on the streets--which then fly up and make disgusting pigeon-sex noises outside our windows, or roost on our windowsills, or ignobly expire on my friend Marjorie's bathroom window ledge leaving thousands of fly larvae crawling around her bathroom as calling cards when spring finally rolls around; or the huge waterbugs that come up through the shower drain and leave such an indelible impression that the boyfriend suffers a paranoid fit in imagining the keys in his pocket to be some huge insect crawling up his leg that causes him to strip off his shorts in the middle of the street--with my immediate concern not so much the possibility of bloodsucking hitching-a-ride vermin but the likely criminal charge of indecent exposure as reported by the people across the street currently watching his French Striptease; or the various subspecies of Rodentia, which as far as I'm concerned includes squirrels, along with the huge rats seen in the subway and the peripheral-vision-spied field mice that inhabit my building to such an extent that I wonder who is trespassing on whose turf sometimes, despite the fact that the nearest field is fifty-odd miles away.
Our running battle with mice has gone on for years--one particularly bad infestation made us consider simply replacing our plaster wall with a big piece of glass to at least be able to enjoy the Habitrail that is the wall separating us from the apartment next door. Their return is always heralded by the dog, who sniffs along the baseboard and the closet door or who all of a sudden tears into the kitchen on the scent of some tiny mouse prey; since the mice are in the walls and not yet in the apartment proper, I double-check our first line of defense, which is the steel wool filling every hole in every closet and the space around every pipe in the apartment, with the dog patrolling the baseboards like some moated crocodile searching for castle gate crashers.
Our defense system holds up pretty well, although the encroached fortress wall is revealed by the dog's barking, which is more than his usual heard-a-dog-barking-outside growling, and different from his saw-a-pigeon yapping; I go into the kitchen and turn on the light and behind the dog's food dish is a mouse, a brazen creature not scurrying away but just sitting there facing the food dish; I stand there a full few minutes and the dog stands there and the mouse stands there as well, and I try to think like a little mouse, which, like the creatures of that book Flatland, can't likely imagine something six feet tall staring down at it from above--which accounts for why the mouse facing the blue plastic of the dog's bowl probably considers itself well hidden. The mouse makes a break for it, narrowly escapes the dog now hysterically in Hunting Mode, and runs under the dishwasher, as the dog vigilantly paws the floor in front of the dishwasher until the mouse, a few minutes later, emerges, on its side, legs running in the air, bleeding a red streak across the linoleum, giving itself up before dying at the feet of my crazed dog, who I can only imagine now considers himself a Great Hunter.
Months go by, and we figure that our dog has done a good job of ridding us of this one mouse scout leaving the other mice in retreat, until the super puts a sign in the elevator announcing the exterminator's imminent visit to "deal with" the mouse problem; meanwhile the dog, sensing conflict perhaps, is again on the prowl, barking at the stove, and then at the refrigerator, and crying, and generally driving me crazy with his barking-at-major-appliance behavior, which turns out to be dead-on when I hear scratching coming from within the stove and I lift up the top and another mouse runs down into the oven as brilliant me turns on the gas but then, thinking of that book Maus, shuts it off, not because I was about to pull a Sylvia Plath due to vermin in the stove, but, more distressing to me, due to a comic-book interpretation of the Holocaust.
That night the dog decides to bark at the living room furniture instead of the kitchen appliances. Since I now trust his instincts, I gingerly move a cushion only to see a brief flash of mouse fur scurry inside the couch. Now, I'm pissed. After ten years of living with an in-no-way-comfortable futon the boyfriend and I finally invested in a nice
couch; for ten years we argued about style, and fabric, and workmanship, and price every time we would actually make a point of going couch shopping, and since we managed to agree on this one style-, fabric-, workmanship-, and price-wise, I was not about to allow some Family Von Mouse to live inside as if it were some plush overstuffed rodent
condominium. I break out the chemical weaponry: mouse poison.
The next morning I wake up and stumble into the kitchen to make coffee with the dog at my heels to check the appliances, and then into the living room to check the furniture, and then into the bathroom where he almost does a cartoonlike somersault in that way dogs have of stopping their front legs while their back legs keep going, since there, on the floor, is the mouse from the previous day. I chase the dog away and throw the mouse down the garbage chute re-re-disposing of the monster; but later at brunch with Robyn when I relate the story to her she keeps correcting me: every time I say "mouse" she says "mice" and I say "mouse" and she says "mice" and finally she says: "What makes you think there is only one? Like, maybe it was an orphan or something?"
Another day goes by, and a weird smell pervades the kitchen which I figure is the not-taken-out garbage, or the not-taken-out recycling, and I throw everything away and I throw open the windows only to find the dog once again barking his fool head off; this time, however, a fly has managed to invade our air space; the dog is unable to get much traction on the wood floors, and does a pretty good Wile E. Coyote imitation of running in place as I hunt down the fly, just to get some peace and quiet. The boyfriend arrives home just then and joins the hunting expedition, which moves into the kitchen where we both stop, because like an Amityville Horror warning-to-leave, huge, bloated, repulsive flies have collected on the kitchen window screen. The boyfriend exclaims: "What is that smell! It's disgusting!" This bothers me, since it recalls for me the time we had a big fight and he brought home a bouquet of lilies that I later learned were a gift he'd received at work, and every night he would come home and loudly proclaim how nice his pawned-off-on-me guilt-gift of lilies smelled; since I could not detect any lily scent at all this prompted an entire new argument about whether the argument-appeasing-gift of lilies smelled or not, until to prove my point I stuck my nose point-blank in the bouquet and realized that, yes, indeed, lilies do smell; they stink in fact, of rotten cloves, or some other decomposing vegetation, making the secondhand present of lilies all the more loathsome.
Once again, the boyfriend smells something that I do not. I no longer have the excuse of the garbage, or the recycling; I start disassembling the dishwasher into the middle of the floor, a cue for the dog to attack from behind before I have a chance to see what is there; meanwhile the boyfriend, cigarette in hand, is quite blasé-ly calling his mother in France, watching me as I systematically dismantle the entire kitchen, using an actual unwieldy lamp from the living room to see since we don't have a flashlight to shine into the darkness behind the dishwasher, where the smell is appreciably worse, and where I can see the black bloated body of a dead mouse. I'm about to vomit. The boyfriend is not only not helping keep the dog at bay, he is giving a play-by-play commentary to his mother in French, including a description of the dog's desperately inane attempt to tunnel underneath the dishwasher, and then distracting me with his mother's questions concerning the state of the mouse--translated literally from the French as "What face does the mouse have?"--which makes me scrunch up my face and roll up my eyes in a feeble attempt at impersonating a dead rodent.
It is with all the will I can muster with a plastic trash bag turned inside out on my arm and with a wad of paper towels in my hand that I reach in, grab the mouse, and throw it down the trash chute in the hallway. I come back and look on the other side of the dishwasher and there's another dead mouse, so I go through my little trash bag pomp-less mouse-funeral ritual not just once but twice more, with the last mouse being a mummified forebear from years before, as if the dishwasher were a huge pyramid-esque burial ground. I throw out all of the poison behind the refrigerator, vowing to use regular mousetraps for any subsequent Mice Invaders, since the mice, in a final act of revenge, seem to pick the most inaccessible areas of the apartment to die in like wounded soldiers pulling themselves off of the battlefield, urging their compatriots on, in some strange War of Mousean Independence.
The Neighbors
We hold a tenant meeting to organize around some building-related problem that probably still exists but which I don't remember at all and which fills me with a great feeling of grass-roots activism and other idealistic notions of Us-versus-Them-ism; the only people who show up, however, are Complainers and Gossipers, both of whom ignore the more-pressing building problem to endlessly and untiringly complain and gossip about everyone who didn't show up at the meeting. Over the course of a boisterous two hours we manage to accomplish absolutely nothing, but I'm glad I show up, if only because I can't stand the idea of people talking about me behind my back.
My neighbors are an eclectic mix of people, from an older generation of escapees from war-ravaged Europe who moved here fifty years ago and whose combined life stories could fill books and books, to newer generations who've grown up in the building, including assorted artist types whose creative output pleasantly fills the lobby and halls with opera arias and piano recitals; and despite the fact that my friend Marjorie thinks at times we should just put bars on all the windows (including ours) and call it an institution, there is something rather comforting in knowing most everyone in my building, with certain holidays like Halloween finding more trick-or-treaters arriving at our doorstep for homemade peanut butter cookies in the so-called impersonal city than for the must-be-wrapped candy at my parents' home out in suburban New Jersey.
The demarcation line between outside world and inner sanctuary was first made clear by the sign that greeted us as we moved in, asking people in no uncertain terms not to let any strangers into the building; vigilante-in-the-making that I was, I was ready to do my share.
Later that first day in our new apartment, the buzzer sounds.
"Who is it?" I ask, not expecting anyone, and fumbling with the triple-buttoned new-to-me door buzzer.
"It's FAYE," comes the reply.
"I don't know who you are," I offer back, proudly doing my part to thwart this interloper.
"What do you mean, you don't know who I am? It's FAYE!" the voice chastens.
The voice is so insistent that I don't quite know what to do; no one has informed me about secret codes, or passwords, or special names to use, or people whosevery existence overrides the security measures of the building, and so I buzz Faye in, and not hearing anything later that day about break-ins, or old-lady pharmacy-scam racketeering in the building, I relax a bit, though still not wanting to be the weak link in our new building's protective security chain.
Weeks turn into months as I daily perform my electronic doorman duties for the up-to-now unseen but quite heard Faye; until the fateful day when my dog-walking schedule and Faye's comings and goings intersect in the elevator, with Faye, unaware of who I am, completely ignoring me except to demand that I hold the door open as she shuffles inside. I'm surprised, since her commanding voice is contradicted directly by her actual presence: perhaps the oldest tenant in the building, Faye weighs all of next-to-nothing, has dyed jet-black hair held in place with quite Riot Grrrl-looking silver barrettes, and wears fashion ensembles that have seen a generation or two go by and have come full circle back in style. Faye rocks. Faye can barely see, and so she pounds on the buttons downstairs until she finds someone to let her in; with our button right next to the super's, we are second in line; but we're more than Faye's doormen, since running into Faye usually brings on a plea of "Can you help me out, doll?" as Faye savagely lords it over everyone in the building who become her serfs: holding doors open, buzzing her in, helping her up the stairs to
the mailboxes.
Faye proudly announces to me one day that she was the "first illegitimate daughter" on the Upper West Side; another time she criticizes my laundry, explaining that she never does wash: "Off the body and into the sink!" she explains. Faye tells me sad stories about her dearly departed dog every time she sees me walking mine; sometimes I walk with her as she slowly, slowly makes her way around the block with one hand on the building at all times so as not to lose her way or her balance. Faye is age-defyingly active, going out a couple of times a day, which means that a couple of times a day I am called to the buzzer to be yelled at by Faye wanting to come inside, the tone of her voice never wavering in its insistence, no matter how many times I open the door for her. "It's FAYE!" she hollers.
Since the dog goes crazy every time the buzzer goes off it becomes instantly noticeable when Faye doesn't buzz up; the day that I stop hearing from Faye slowly goes by, with the appointed times of Faye's entrances coming and going with no sign of her whatsoever, leaving me worried yet chiding myself for even thinking about it in the first place. That afternoon the buzzer goes off and I happily go to answer the door.
"Hello--this is Faye's son," the garbled voice announces.
My immediate reaction is that a friend is playing a trick on me, or that I am not hearing quite right; I wonder, though, how Faye's son would know about me (maybe Faye told her son about me?); I wonder above all about the Upper West Side's first Love Child never mentioning anything about having a son in the first place. The voice pleads: "My mother is not answering her buzzer--can you let me in the building?" I buzz him in, and halfway want to run down to the third floor to see what happened, feeling slightly uneasy the rest of the day, since as distracting as the constant buzzing was, its silence is not-so-surprisingly worse.
I never do hear from Faye again, and I never did ask anyone what happened, not really wanting to know the answer but overhearing that she had to be taken to a rest home, where I imagine her shuffling around the corridors in her couture original polyester ensembles, leaning on her call button fifty times a day, creating general mayhem and panic among the other residents and staff. My only desire, when I finally reach the ripe old age of ninety, is to somehow be half the rampaging diva that Faye was.
I try to maintain this level of courtesy and helping out (not at all exemplified by our vitriolic so-called mayor and his incredibly hypocritical calls for city-wide politesse) that I imagine used to be a part of New York City life, which I hear in the way the older ladies of the building refer to each other as "Mrs. So-and-so" when speaking about mutual friends--an Old Worldism that just maybe can survive in one apartment building even if it has disappeared from the city at large. One of my regular tasks awaits me every Friday evening when a crowd forms outside the elevator, since it's Shabbes, and the more orthodox in my building are waiting for someone to open the elevator door; I find it reassuring that people raised in other faiths can grow up and still comfortably practice their religious beliefs, unlike recovering Catholics such as myself who instead worry about spontaneously combusting while
attending someone's wedding or funeral or merely walking past St. Patrick's Cathedral. Usually people don't have to wait too long for someone to come by and open the elevator door and push the buttons for their destinations, except during Shabbes Rush Hour, just around sundown on Friday evening, or on the occasions when I come into my hall and the one-stop-shopping stamps-and-coupons lady from my building--who sells stamps at a markup and collects favors like a loan shark so she can later ask me if I won't go down to Delancey Street to get her some kosher wine for Passover--impatiently waits for the elevator to come up, and sometimes on Friday nights I can hear her agitatedly walking up and down the hall waiting for the elevator, to the point where I go and play elevator man for her so she can stop mumbling in Yiddish at the top of her lungs outside my apartment door already.
I open the elevator door for everybody, and then ask everyone's destinations, remembering that according to custom, I will not be explicitly asked to do any work for anyone else, and a neighbor's friend says: "He must think we're crazy" in that vexing way of talking about other people in the third person within direct earshot of them, and my neighbor asks: "Are you Jewish?" which I am forced to deny once again--all the while recalling Lenny Bruce's comment that every New Yorker is Jewish--as she continues: "We have this thing called 'Shabbes'--" as I interrupt: "I know from Shabbes," which I do. More ironic is the fact that when the boyfriend and I (gay) and our friends Judy and Sharon downstairs (also gay) and various other friends (also also gay) get invited by my friends Marjorie and Sy to dinner on Friday (or any given holiday event), the chances of a Queer Quorum at the Cohens are pretty high, so much so
that we start referring to it as "gay Shabbes," with Marjorie asking me matter-of-factly while coming up in the elevator: "So, are you coming down for gay Shabbes?" to the consternation I imagine of a neighbor in the elevator with us who probably now sees new evidence pointing to the Jews and the gays conspiring together on some paranoid the-world-is-run-by-Them level. She smiles, as I obligingly hold the door open for them as they exit, engendering in me a new neurosis that everyone in my building refers to me not as "that nice boy from the seventh floor" but more likely as "that Shabbes goy from the seventh floor."
Living on the seventh floor means more often than not having run-of-the-mill stress-relieving elevator conversation with my neighbors on the way down or up as the case may be, with the older women in my building wanting to know if the mailman has been here or not, and the men usually having something to say about the weather, and the resident Marxist-slash-entrepreneur breaking into revolutionary discussions of Communist history past and present that don't really begin or end but seem to pick up from whatever we were discussing the last time we met and that usually end with a "Vive la France!" thrown in for the boyfriend's benefit. Last year a new lady moved in across from me and frankly she is no more or less strange than anyone else in this building, and so I am not in any way on guard while we uncomfortably do not say a word to each other in the elevator one otherwise nondescript day like any other, since she isn't talking about her three cats, or my dog, or any of the banter we usually share but instead chooses to break the silence with: "Did you hear me screaming the other day?" I measure my words carefully as I reply, since I can't very well say: "Yeah, I heard you but didn't do anything about it," à la Kitty Genovese. I say: "No," while wondering nonetheless if I am supposed to ask what was wrong, which I guess I want to know, but I can't quite figure out the manners protocol of exacting such information. She only confuses me by blurting out: "My friends got married the other day," rather non-sequitur-like. Following her train of thought has so tired me out that I can't bring myself to ask whether this and the screaming are somehow linked, and she leads me even farther afield with: "I had to buy them a present, so I bought them glow-in-the-dark underwear." At this point I'm leagues behind in terms of her thinking process, for which there should probably be a Latin phrase that means non sequitur in a huge-leap-in-train-of-thought way, as opposed to regular change-of-subject-wise, not to mention my disbelief that someone might purchase such a wedding gift in the first place, as she brings us round to the original point: "I wanted to check and see if it worked, so I put it on, and went into my closet and closed the door and got locked in!" I say to myself that it isn't really necessary to try on the underwear to test it, that putting it in a dark box or looking at it in a dark room would have been test enough, but furthermore, how gauche to present a friend a gift of underwear much less a gift of underwear that you have already tried on beforehand, but what I say is: "I was not aware that our closets had locks on them." I nonchalantly emphasize the banal aspects of apartment hardware in the hopes of bringing the conversation back into the realm of the probable, but she swerves us back toward the conversational cliff looming before us as she exclaims: "Well, this one got stuck! And I was screaming for two hours before the neighbors downstairs heard me and called the super, who called the police, who broke into my apartment and opened the door!" as we thankfully arrive at the first floor. She says goodbye and leaves me standing there, the image of New York's Finest and the building's maintenance staff and the downstairs neighbors opening her door and finding her standing there in glow-in-the-dark underwear now burned indelibly into my brain for the rest of the day, causing me to blush whenever I see her from then on, and leaving me much too embarrassed to ever find out whether in fact the underwear actually worked.