The Honest Truth

http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2008,Feature+Writing

I see it. That brown piece of fluff with legs, scurrying along the wall and gone in a second. I scream into the phone. “What?” says the person on the other line. It takes me a second to recompose myself and somehow he guesses. “You saw a mouse?”

Yes. I’ve been seeing them everywhere. I go in the kitchen and turn on a light and they flee from the counter like children with their hand in a cookie jar. Guilty. They know they shouldn’t be there. They know its not their house. But the winter’s cold and our leftovers take good and you know what, if I was a mouse, I’d probably squat here too.

A fear of mice is in my blood. My mom is terrified. When she was a kid she went to the bathroom one night and a mouse crawled up from the toilet seat. She screamed. My nonna screamed. The women in my family can’t stand those furry creatures that flee when they sense a human.

Why are we scared of mice? I mean, they’re not rats, which means you’re living in dirt. We pay money to have furry things in our house and more money to take care of them. So why can’t we deal with the ones that chose our homes as home.

The first thing I find frightening about mice is I never know how many there are. 1? 20? 200? They all look the F&*(*ing same. There’s something comforting about having your pet mouse, naming it Jimmy, and trying to get a hello in everytime you see catch it running from under the couch. But mice are a mystery, they move fast, so there’s no way to tell them apart, and you can’t whistle and know they’ll come out from where they’re heading.

The second thing I hate about mice is they contaminate your food. It’s like your in competition for you own groceries. I feel like grabbing Jimmy by the neck and saying “get your own part time job. I paid for that.”

I hate that they defy science. The can collapse their skulls and back and fit in a hole the size of a pencil. Freak shows.

They remind me of my pet hamster from grade three, scratching at things all night and waking me from my sleep. The most disgusting mouse story I ever heard was from my friend chloe who said in one of her old houses, you’d hear so many mice running in the walls that it sounded like rain. Last night it was raining, but all I could picture was heards of mice by my window. It was the worst sleep.

It’s so complicated to kill them. There’s forums dedicated to the best way to get rid of mice. Either way you have to deal with the dead rodent. Wanna use a live trap? Be prepared to take a hammer to its head or drown the poor thing. Wanna use poison and forget about it? You’ll be reminded when you smell their rotting stench. It’s a lose lose. They die, you feel like death dealing with the aftermath. Apparently getting a cat and 49 cent traps are your best bet.

You start thinking they’re cute. My friend and roommate Ruth lived with me when he had mice. At first, we were scared, jumping of the couch and standing on the edge of the room with hockey sticks waiting for it to come out again. Even lifting a couch corner made us scream. Then, Ruth started getting attached to the mouse, and we realized she looked kindof like a mouse. That’s when we started getting lazy with the problem and they probably started breeding. That’s how mice roll: fooling you with their good looks, then shagging eachother and infesting your house.

Mouse poo makes you sick. Maybe this is actually what I like about Mice. Let’s get this straight, I don’t like that mouse poo is linked to a deadly virus, but I do like that it gives me an excuse to kill them other than being freaked out.

The last thing I hate about mice is that they love piles of things. My room is made up of piles of things, which mice like to make their nest from. So now I have to rearrange my room to keep mice out? My parents could never get me to be cleaner, but all of a sudden I’m buying shelving and picking up clothes from the floor so my bedmates not a rodent? This seems unfair. It’s one thing for my parents to tell me to clean up, but to be forced into different habits by mice?

It seems like mice get a good deal. Free lodging and food. Different nesting spots to chose from. Eight hours of dark a night. I’m not so sure I feel so bad about this killing them thing. But, I do feel less bad then this creepest guy I stumbled on in a mouse forum who kept readers updated on the progress of his mouse murders.

He writes:

So far, the best luck i am having is with those regualr old 49 cent victory rat traps. Hell, i have caught now i think 6, and today i hear one trying to lick the peanut butter right off the already sprung trap with his brother dead caught in it! I took him out, put more butter on there and set it back where it was, not even 5 minutes later, seriously the other came back and was killed haha!

stupid mice, i can do this all day they never catch on. even when thier siblings are dying one right after another. hehehe

just wondering really if there is a good mouse repellant i could use outside or inside. I can take care of the ones that are here now, just dont want them to come back. My cat’s odor was the best, mice never even came to my block. but id rather have a better smelling house

He feels the need to come back and say this:

its amazing how stupid the are. theyre nothing more then eat sleep bump machines. i couldnt believe they watch another mouse die in a trap and then go right to that trap and lick off the leftover peanut butter. they dont even notice death.

And then this:
i think i scored a victory with the 49 cent victory traps, no bites last night at all.

i am really surprised a peta banger hasnt rung in and told me to use live traps yet, those are a joke! if i were to use live traps i would just flush them down the toilet anyway

anyone hear of those electroic traps? theyre like a box, and when the mouse goes in for food its zapped by voltage and the amps kill it… cool i thought… too much money compared to what im using though

Let’s just hope this dude sticks with mice. I started this post scared by rodents, but this guy is way scarier.

So I started working at a bar. That’s right. Me who likes to be in bed by twelve so I can get up at 8 a.m. and work on being a “writer.”

This is what I’ve discovered so far. Bars are sad places. Well this bar is anyway. It’s called Boomers and it’s a big ol’ room with tile floors and wooden booster chairs. The upstairs is nice and intimate, but the downstairs part is to bare and dark to be cozy.

I work with the two guys who own the bar, Scotty and Johnny. Then there’s the female bartender, Sara, who’s platinum blonde extensions and tight jeans threw me for a loop when I first got there. I thought this was supposed to be a bar for old people. A jeans and a t-shirt type of place.

I started on a Friday night. A busy Friday night. Scotty was running around frantic because I wasn’t trained, people were filling in, and Johnny was late. Sara was doing her best to get me acquainted with the system, but she had her customers to tend to.

So there I am, tray in hand, wearing a t-shirt and jeans feeling like a boy beside my barbie doll co-worker. What the fuck. My job is to go out to the floor where people are sitting, take their drink order, tell the bartenders those orders, and bring out the drinks. Yes, I get to keep my dollar tips.

I also have to bus the drinks, which is not a problem because I’ve bused tables in restaurants before. My eye can spot an empty glass miles away and my body propels me toward it.

I’m surprised by the Boomer’s crowd. Given the name, I really expected everyone to be over 30. I actually spotted a couple of kids that looked 12. People ranged in style from a hockey team, to a group of artsy kids, to the lonely 30 pluses staring aimlessly drinking alone, to the group of obnoxious men, one of whom knocks over my tray while asking me if he can take me home. That’s when I learnt there’s a fine line between being nice and too nice. Give a smile, flick your hair, but don’t show too much tooth or interest. Drunk men interpret this the wrong way.

The night went slowly and I found myself fading quickly after having woke up at 7 a.m. that morning. I had no idea if I was doing the cash right, and based on the amount of tips I made (too much), I assume I probably wasn’t. Oh well, I see it as financial compensation for a stressful night.

Scotty and Johnny were nice, asking me if I was doing okay, and demoting me from corporeal to captain every time I screwed up. I appreciated the humour. Nobody yelled at me and I don’t think they will.

The music was badly done by DJ dolla. I’ve evolved into somewhat of a music song, but that aside, his playlist hasn’t evolved from the songs I heard in the clubs when I was 14. Later I was informed it was retro night, but that still doesn’t make things okay.

But DJ Dolla was nice, and I forgave him. That’s my general feeling about this job. I don’t particularly like the bar, or the people who go there, but everyone I work with/for are nice so I stick around.

The night was fairly uneventful aside from a guy getting kicked out for drunken antics like taking a chair, flipping it upside down, and spinning in the middle of the dance floor.

Everyone cleared out about 2 a.m. and then the clean-up happens. It’s an odd thing when a dark bar suddenly turns light minutes after the D.J. has declared last song. It’s an even stranger thing to know that’s when the worst part of your shift starts, cleaning toilets and whatever liquids came out of people for the night and mopping shitty floors. At a restaurant, you leave this stuff for the morning, and generally the washrooms are being visit by polite patrons. In a bar, a washroom is a place where puke happens, piss happens (not always in the toilet bowl) and sex happens. I will never look at a guy coming out of the washroom the same again.

So at 3:30, the time I usually find myself heading home from a bar or party to my warm bed, I find myself slapping on latex gloves and following sara into the washroom with a bucket. I can’t describe how hilarious it was to see sara, wearing a white tank top, tight jeans, and high-heeled boots, slam down the bucket in the men’s room and start scrubbing the urinal without flinching an eyebrow. It’s par for the course at Boomers.

After the tidy up, which wasn’t actually that labour intensive safe for the fact it was almost dawn, it was time to reward ourselves. And do you reward yourself after a night of serving booze? Apparently with doubles. About six of them. Me, Sara and Johnny, sat drinking and smoking cigarettes till 6:30. I was a combination of being so hungry and tired and terrified of not fitting in that I slammed back at least four whisky gingers and smoked a cigarette and a half.

Finally, after Johnny had declared it was his “last one” for the past five drinks, I realized if I didn’t stand up and go I would be taking a cab to McDonald’s with Johnny and Sara to eat a breakfast burrito. This is what they did. Seven a.m. to them was not seven a.m. to me.

So I stood up, thanked everyone for the booze and promised to be back again at 9 a.m. the next day. Then I slept till 3 in the afternoon. But hey, in my bar star alternate universe, 3 p.m. is the new 8 a.m. and double whiskey ginger’s go down like water.

New York City. One of the greatest cities on earth. No matter how long you stay, there’s never enough time to see everything you want to. I was glad to have the last couple of days to myself. I’d been travelling with my friend Kristen, a great companion, but when it came down to it I wanted some time just to explore on my own.

Kristen left a few days before me, so my stars were aligned. After a late, hungover brunch with my friend’s roommate at whose apartment I was staying at we walked back to his place so I could pick up a lighter coat. After all, I’d be taking the subway downtown, stop at the brooklyn bridge, the world trade centre and then some shopping at the discount store Century 21.

I grab my coat and head to the washroom to “unload” before my trip. My stomach had been a little rocky these past couple of days. Too much cheese, conflicting with my lactose intolerant tendencies, too much booze, and not enough water. I was ignoring my bowels, and figured we’d figured things out when I got back to Ottawa. It’s New York City. Who gives a fuck about my stomach?

Turns out, I should’ve. I flush the toilet and get that dreaded sound of water filling the bowl instead of draining. If I had been in a public place, sorry to say, but I would’ve fled. I’ve got two days left in the big apple, and I can’t spend it looking at the china bowl. But this was not the case. I was staying at an apartment with three others, one of which had been extremely hospitable and I sensed had a mild case of OCD with cleaning. I had to make this go away before he noticed.

At this point, I had written off the next hour for figuring out a way to flush down the waste from the week. I took the plunger and tried to make the problem go away. I try a flush again and hold my breath. Shit. Literally. The water is full of it and it’s coming up threatingly close to the lip of the toilet bowl.

Okay. So maybe just the world trade centre and the clothing store. Scrap the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s just a bridge, right?

I sneak out of the bathroom so as not to draw attention to the fact that I’ve been in there an abnormally long amount of time. Neil’s at the other end of the long hallway and he’s on the phone. I can still remedy this without him knowing about my little problem. I grab a plastic bowl from the kitchen and lock myself back into the mathboz sized New York bathroom.

I scoop out some of the shit water and flush it down the shower. Because there’s less of it, the problem seems more likely to get solved, and the water starts to go down. I make a quick jet out the door to the nearest laptop on the kitchen table. www.google.com. How to unclog a toilet. I’ve got my pick of videos, websites, and even a wikipedia entry. After watching a hilarious british youtube video of a sullen woman delicately plunging her toilet. She advises me that if this doesn’t work I should use a coat hanger to get at the source of the clog. Shit. literally.

She also advises I get some plastic gloves, so I run to the nearby hardware store and pick up a pair of slick yellows. Feeling confident from the video tutorial, I arm myself once again with a plunger, this time with the proper technique. Fingers crossed. Flush. More watery shit.

At this point I decide to pay a visit to Neil. “Aren’t you supposed to be out?” he says, as I guiltily show up by his desk. “Um, you see, I’ve got a bit of a problem.” Now Niel is quite the hospitable guy. People are staying at his apartment all the time and he has a tolerance for things going wrong. But still, he has his limit, so after telling him about the situation, I assured him I’d handle it. Sensing my anxiety, he imagined what the state of affairs must be behind the door, and decided to take my word for it. “Call me if you need me.” He said.

I went into Emily’s closet and found a coat hanger. Back to the washroom. The toilet and I were getting close. I couldn’t even smell my own feces anymore. This is how people turn into savages. Fingers crossed. Flush. Still nothing but shit. At this point I was worried the shower was going to get clogged so I started scooping shit into a bucket. No, not from their kitchen. This was an actual mop bucket. I still had some sense of decency.

After another google search I decided to pay another visit to the hardware store to check for a toilet auger. According to the website, this was the last step before calling a plumber. This gave a new meaning to pissing away money.

I find a toilet auger, which looks like a long rod with a coiled metal attachment that goes down the toilet and you crank it in hopes it will catch the clog. I have no idea how to use this thing, but the guy at the plumbing store looks at me dryly and says “you just put it down and crank.” Alright. Turns out there’s two holes to “put it down” but only one was big enough. Problem solved.

After cranking the thing, which brought up pieces of shit but not the clogging culprit, I sat down defeated. Then Neil came walking towards the bathroom. Everytime he did I felt my stomach turnover. “Is it ready yet?” he said. “Um, look Neil it’s pretty bad in there. Just don’t go in.”
“But I really need to pee.”
“Neil, man, seriously, go downstairs to a restuarant.”

Neil left and I felt another wave of panic. What was the alternative to calling a plumber? I had tried everything. I googled New York plumbers and got in touch with a company that said they’d send someone in 15 minutes.

The buzzer goes off, I press the button, to let in Steve my plumber. Steve’s a jolly man, wearing green suspenders and a white t-shirt. “I’m really sorry you have to go in there,” I tell him. “Oh, don’t worry,” pipes Steve back. “I’m used to it running down the stairs.”

After taking a look Steve tells me the bad news: Either he can fix it with his heavy duty toilet auger, or he’ll have to replace the toilet bowl which will cost upwards of $300. “But I’m on vacation,” I plead with him, as if this makes a difference. “Well then you better cross your fingers this works,” he says.

Steve goes downstairs and comes back with a toilet auger so heavy duty it’s strapped to his hip. I stand back, watching nervously from the door. After a few minutes of fishing around, I hear a FLUSH. “What does that sound like?” he says, turning to me and smiling. I actually have no idea. For all I know the shit water’s about to overflow onto his boots. I give him a half hearted thumbs up, but if I could form a question mark with my fingers I would’ve done that.

“Yes, it worked.” he says. Sigh of fucking relief. Steve cuts me a deal (which in New York, means a whole lot of nothing). I pay him for showing up ($100), and he’ll tell his boss when he came I had fixed it. Instead of paying the companies fee (starting at $275) on top of that I’d give him $100 in cash. $200 to fix a clogged toilet on vacation? Didn’t sound like a deal to me. But Steve assured me it was.

As I closed the door behind him, I got this weird feeling like I didn’t know what to do. The toilet had taken up so much of my energy, that I felt lost. My day consisted of staring, plunging and flushing, and it’s all I knew how to do. This must be what it feels like to have your kid grow up and not need you anymore. The toilet was fine, but would I be.

After telling Neil what had happened, and accepting his generous offer to pitch in, I told him I was going to get some fresh air. It was dark outside, and I decided to take a stroll down avenue A. The good thing about being in New York is your are anonymous. No one had to know about my day. No one was expecting me to be anywhere. My clogged toilet story could stay between me and Neil and be flushed to the bottom of my memory. Then again, it would’ve been nice to get asked how I was and be able to answer “shitty day.”