RATS
Hadn’t been out all weekend until tonight.
Been working.
Staring at a flashing cursor.
Finally started going stir crazy.
Wife and I walked the dog to dinner.
A long walk and then an outdoor table at this sandwich place.
Probably a two-mile walk round trip.
Maybe more.
Beautiful weather.
Daylight savings.
Sun still shining at 7 p.m.
We eat.
It’s good.
I drink a small carafe of wine.
Probably 2.5 glasses.
Then we walk home, back up the hill, the long easy hill.
And along the way we see these two girls.
They were women, actually.
Young women.
Standing there.
By that point it was dark outside.
They were standing in front of a house with a white picket fence.
They looked at us as we were approaching.
“Excuse me,” one of them said. “Do you guys walk this street on a regular basis?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
(I actually said that.)
Do you guys walk this street on a regular basis?
Sometimes.
And then the girl told us that she and her friend were thinking about calling the cops, because this house with the white picket fence looked suspicious.
It was right around then that I started to smell something.
I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and said, “Jesus.”
It smelled like something rotting.
And it was then that the girl told us about the rats.
And we looked.
And there were rats everywhere.
I mean everywhere.
Two dozen rats in the front lawn. Scurrying around.
More rats in the bushes, and then some on the driveway.
And more crawling all over the house.
An infestation.
There was a ventilated window type thing up near the top of the facade, right around where the attic probably was.
There were dozens of rats crawling in and out of the vent.
It was like something out of a horror show.
A house bursting with rats.
Right in the middle of Los Angeles.
It made me feel terrible.
“I think we’re gonna call the cops,” one of the girls said.
I said that it smelled like a dead body.
My wife then tried to joke around, talking about how we probably wouldn’t have noticed had the girls not been standing there.
“We would’ve just walked right on by.”
And it’s true.
We probably would have.
Walking and talking.
Had we just kept moving, we might have missed the smell…chalked it up to the city.
Cities often smell bad.
Los Angeles often smells bad.
And what’s weird is that the house was well cared for.
Well groomed.
The lawn was freshly mowed.
The picket fence was white and had recently been painted.
It looked nice.
But the windows were all shuttered.
The shades were drawn.
There was no light emanating from the windows.
There was a dog house visible along the left side of the house.
One of those plastic igloo dog houses.
It made me think of my old house in Los Angeles, the first place I ever lived in, a duplex in a decent neighborhood.
There was a house next door. Egyptian design.
Hard to describe. A white facade. Two stories.
Somewhat adobe-looking.
Anyway.
The house itself—-the main house—-was in front.
And then there was a smaller guest house in back.
A sort of cottage.
Could’ve been mistaken for a garage or something.
Nothing lavish.
And the thing is, I didn’t even know the place was there until three years after I’d moved to LA.
I didn’t know the guest house was there, or that anybody lived there.
It was shrouded in bushes and trees.
It was an old house.
It had once been owned by Douglas Fairbanks.
The people who bought it from Fairbanks had kept it in their family for decades.
And the mother—-who was now an old widow—-had lived in the guest house for years.
She rented out the front units for cash.
She was up in age, and increasingly agoraphobic.
Mentally ill.
She never left.
Never went outside.
I lived next door for three-plus years and never saw her once.
Her children brought her groceries.
Checked in on her.
She refused to go to a nursing home.
I learned all of this stuff after the fact.
The woman died.
The kids sold the place.
I had no idea.
Some guy bought it with the intention of flipping it.
Renovate and then sell.
He hired some workers to come in and clear out all the brush.
Clip the trees.
He had both houses gutted.
I used to see him all the time.
Overseeing the reconstruction.
We would talk.
He would tell me stories.
For instance: When he cut away all the overgrowth from around the guest house, he found a giant pile of cat litter roughly four feet high under the bedroom window.
The old widow—-who had cats—-had been dumping cat litter out of her window for years.
And to make matters worse, the pile of cat litter was infested with hundreds of rats.
True story.
This was right next door to my house.
On the other side of the fence.
In what I swear was a nice neighborhood.
People are strange.
We’re animals.
We live among animals.
In a city.
I said as much to my wife as we were walking home.
“There are some fucked up people in this city.”
“I know.”
We had left the rat-infested house.
The girls we’d met, they were gonna call the cops.
One of them had her cell phone out.
We agreed that it smelled like someone had died.
“Or maybe someone just aerated the lawn.”
