EXTERMINATOR!

OF GODS AND VARMINTS

Ever since I moved back to Brooklyn in August, in addition to all the other major life upheavals, I have had a mouse problem that has only gotten worse and worse, despite repeated visits from the exterminator, whose contraptions full of poison don’t seem to do anything but fortify the little fuckers like X-Men.

When your nerves are already jangling like a gamelan orchestra, vermin can be greatly unsettling. I suppose my neighbors now think I have Tourettes, since I am constantly screaming and shouting swear words like I’m pushing a baby stroller full of garbage.

At first the mice confined themselves to attacking bags of trash or groceries left too long on my kitchen floor. They’d chew holes in them in under a minute.

Then they started frolicking openly in my kitchen, and boring a frayed hole in my mental balance.

One scuttled across the floor and made a foray into the laundry area.

I threw a clog and called it names.

Then they got bolder. One started hanging out in the doorway of my bedroom sitting on its hind legs, staring at me, until I screamed at it.

Then a mouse ran into my bedroom closet, and I almost crawled out of my own face.

I had to get my zen going. My heart was pounding. There had been so many insane upsets in the last six months. As part of the texture of the general dystopian vortex I’ve been living in, and since reality is the mandala, I decided they were cute.

I had to ask myself, as a Buddhist, what should I do about these adorable living creatures?

I decided that the very un-Buddhist answer of instant death was the answer for the mice, and here’s how I justified it: the same way I justified my abortion when I was 19. I had an unwanted tenant in my body, and there was only one way to evict it. It had come uninvited and did not leave when kindly asked. It’s the same way I felt about wanting to take out a contract on my stalker. My logic: he was threatening to kill me all the time, so death really shouldn’t be off the table for either of us.

Anyone with eyeballs should know that “humane” glue traps are anything but…they are rodent torture devices, pure and simple. The mouse dislocates its legs and shoulders and is scared shitless, thrashing around.

“What you’re supposed to do once the mouse is in the glue trap is put it in a Ziplock bag, until it suffocates,” said Killer Joe.

I’d go so far as to say clubbing baby seals or simply shooting mice is actually more humane, and it’s illega

My old Ifa priest, the Babalawo, used to put decapitated mice heads on top of my Ellegua (Esu) statue in order to “feed” him. Ellegua is a lot like the elephant god, Ganesh. Ruler of the crossroads. The shady-looking guy on the corner with the hat and cigarette.

My Esu finds things for me when they are lost in the house all the time. He was less responsive when I asked him to clear up the mice. He’s a trickster, see, and the mice are more of an emanation of him. He likes mice.

I keep telling myself the mice are just more gravel in the strange cosmic asteroid belt my soul is traveling through, at this juncture of my life, and I should try to co-exist with them.

A few days ago, I sat up on my bed to see a mouse standing up at the end of it, staring at me. I screamed holy fucking murder.

A few minutes later it was crawling on the lamp wire to get onto my bedside table. I didn’t want to go to sleep, at all.

When I finally did, it was with a spray bottle of peppermint oil right next to my head. The varmints hate that shit, apparently, but the exterminator told me they won’t really care — they’ll hold their noses and stride on into it. Apparently if you punch a mouse directly in the nose, it could kill them — but try connecting with it.

The President who was inaugurated today has referred to immigrants as “vermin,” but I don’t have Central Americans crawling around my bed unless I feel like it. I’ll never forget the glue traps he put children in who were forcibly separated from their immigrant parents at the border. So many kids died on ICE’s watch, they literally burned the books. This thought is skittering around unwanted in my head as well.

I just found a mousetrap under my dresser, sprung. I turned it over carefully, with great trepidation, and discovered that all the peanut butter was gone, but the mouse had evaded the guillotine niftily. These bastards are more slippery than Steve McQueen.

Killer Joe keeps telling me to get a cat, but I’ve got less than a month left in this apartment. I tried to rent a cat on next door, but people just chastised me and sent me the crying laughing emoji.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen to my nerves or the mice, but on the flipside, my nieces and nephews had a minor post-Christmas miracle, apropos of all creatures great and small, which somehow balances my current predicament.

The Christmas before this one, I gave one of my nephews (an 8 year old naturalist, who knows more about animals than I ever will) a Bearded Dragon — a fine thick little dinosaur, who was promptly named Taco. My nephew wore Taco around like a burrito-sized brooch for eight months, and then my sister’s family went on vacation for a few days in Modesto. Taco naturally came along, being part of the clan.

It was a terrible day when Taco escaped his outside cage and ran into a patch of ivy. They searched and called for him for hours. For three days the whole family looked frantically, and finally they had to leave. My poor little nephew cried for days.

Cut to: Christmas Eve, this year. The same nephew enjoyed the proceedings at Grace Cathedral, where my family goes to hear the music every year. He requested to go to church again, since Covid had them doing church online - a habit they never broke, once people started leaving the house again. He enjoyed being in church.

My sister, an ecumenical sort, reasoned that she and I had been raised going to Christian Science churches, so she took her family to the local branch we had gone to.

Now, Christian Science has some deep voodoo, for folk who weirdly abstain from doctors and medicine. My grandparents were Christian Science “practitioners,” who are people you call in the church when the shit comes down. They pray on you, and weird miracles happen. When I was a little kid in Christian Science Sunday school, the man who was teaching us told us about a boy that had three of his fingers cut off — and thanks to Christian Science, he said, they grew back. The weekly Christian Science Sentinel is largely devoted to such hair-raising testimonials.

Anyway, my sister started chit-chatting to a guy who was purported to be the main mojo-master of the practitioners. The kids were introduced. He asked if they had any pets, and they told the sad story of poor lost Taco. Then they went home.

Two hours later, my sister received a text from her friend in Modesto, where she had been house-sitting on vacation.

“Is this your baby?” Her friend asked, with a picture of TACO.

Taco had come in from the cold. He was lounging around on her patio in the sun, waiting to be found.

Nephew and Taco were joyously reunited, after six months apart.

He had grown a few inches and become a man lizard. The nephew happily FaceTimes me while feeding him fruit on the carpet.

I don’t know what Mary Baker Eddy ever wrote on the topic of pest control, but at this point I’m willing to try anything. There are no atheists in mouse holes. I’ll probably have better luck on Next Door renting a gun.

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Theme song: Jack Black

Artwork: “TNT Lamb,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2022