Ronnie

Morning

At 6:30am I wake up and am face to face with a mouse.

Well, not exactly, but since it's been a billion years since I've written one of these things, I felt like it needed some sort of stronger opening than, "I wake up and notice a small rodent like creature scampering behind my bed."

I start freaking out. Not only am I freaking out, but I'm really pissed off because I don't like waking up at 6:30, especially when I don't go to bed until 4:30, and am constantly woken up during the night by weird sounds.

"Calm down, self. Calm down. You're seeing things. You're hearing things. You're paranoid. You're sleep deprived. Get some water and go back to sleep."

"Oooh, water!" self replies.

And so self and I embark on a journey from the bed to the door in quest for water, and immediately notice small mouse droppings on my floor, then hear strange noises from under the futon.

I run out of the room in a panic.

After a brief stint of panic, I get some water and return to the room. I drink this water, and try to remain calm. I fail when I see a piece of mouse feces on the heater connected to the wall next to my bed, even with my pillow. This indicates that a mouse was shitting not one foot from my head as I was unconscious sometime in the past two hours.

I start freaking out again.

A mouse. A small vermin. Shitting. By my head. While I sleep.

As official Narnia House Manager I begin to deal with the situation like an adult. I call the facilities emergency hotline.

"Facilities."

"Yeah, hi, umm, I have a mouse in my room!"

"Are you sure you have a mouse in the room?"

"Well, I saw it, and then I saw its feces, so yeah. I'm sure."

"Yeah, umm, you're going to have to wait until normal maintenance hours start. You need to call back at 8."

I look at my blinking digital clock. It's 7:15.

Clearly, nobody grasps the severity of the situation besides me.

I take command of the situation and indicate that I'm not going to take anyone's shit. "Fine. I'll call back later."

I freak out for a while longer, then I put some clothes on and head to the kitchen, while trying to ignore the fact that there's a damned mouse burrowing away through all the crap in my room.

Confused looks abound as the morning people who never see me before noon wonder if I woke up early or just haven't gone to sleep yet, and ask me the obvious question, "Why are you up so early?"

"Yeah, there's this mouse, and it's in my room, and yeah."

"Oh my god, is it still in there?"

"I think so. I don't know, I kind of freaked out for a while and left the door open, so it might have run out sometime while I was frantically darting around the house, or it may have climbed out the vent. I think it came in from the heater."

"You left the door open?"

"I figured if it wanted to leave, I shouldn't stop it."

I pace up and down the kitchen. Which is what I do when I'm nervous, I pace. I always pace back and forth when I'm a neurotic mess.

Not that it helps.

What to do... what to do... mice in room... facilities useless... it's 7am, I haven't slept, I can't sleep anymore. Ever. Because there are rodents in my room. Shitting right where my head rests while I sleep.

So I decide to do laundry, because at 7:30 am I will have all washers and driers to myself. I gather my clothes, head to the laundry room, put a load in, and then realize I need more quarters.

Luckily, the nearby change machine is there to satisfy my change needs.

I insert a dollar. The machine spits out a single, lonely quarter, then hums. And hums some more. For about a minute it hums, then a small orange light next to something that says "OUT OF SERVICE" lights up.

Clearly, this is one of those days I should have just stayed in bed. Except that I couldn't, because there are fucking mice shitting in my room.

I pace around the house a few times until it's 8:00am. I call the 24 hour facilities emergency line, where someone might now apparently might be willing to talk to me.

"Good morning, facilities emergency line, how may I help you?"

"Hi, this is Adam Mathes, I have a bit of a mouse problem."

"And what is the problem?"

"Well, I saw a mouse in my room this morning, and I thought maybe I was seeing and hearing things, but there's little mouse droppings in the room."

"Is it still there?"

"I'm not sure, I think it may have left through the heater."

"Ok, we'll send someone out to inspect and lay traps."

"Great. Thanks."

I grab a book and try and read in the lounge, but instead just end up pacing nervously around the house for the next hour and a half, babbling incomprehensibly to everyone I see me about the mouse. I head back to my room

Dan "Tubby Bitch" Rich shows up at the door.

"What the hell are you doing up this early?" he asks in the calming Midwestern manner only someone from Cleveland could muster.

"Oh, I've been up since 6:30am. Because of a mouse."

"Wow. That sucks."

"Yeah."

"So maybe now you'll actually have time to put in that new hard drive for me?"

"Yeah, when you wake up at 6:30am the day seems a lot longer. I still have a few hours before I have to start watching cartoons."

As I leave the room to install Dan's hard drive, one of the university's pest control experts, Antonio, finally comes. I greet him. He seems far too happy and cordial for someone who has to deal with diseased vermin and frantic humans all day.

"So you have a mouse?"

"Apparently. I saw it this morning when I woke up, but wasn't sure. Then I saw the little mouse feces." I show him the mouse feces, now in the trash, where I carefully placed it after picking it up with eighteen thousand layers of tissue.

"Oh, that's not mouse droppings. That's from a rat."

"A rat."

"Oh yes, definitely a rat."

"A rat." Great, now I have giant fucking diseased rats shitting in my room while I sleep and I'm going to get the bubonic plague and die a horrible terrible death. Having mice in my room suddenly seems like not such a bad thing.

My room. Infested with rats.

And, it all makes sense now, it has to be a huge, giant, angry New York style sewer rat since the only way I'd see anything at 6:30am without my glasses is if it's huge and scary, because I'm practically blind.

I hate my life.

We discuss my options for dealing with the rat problem. "So what I can do is leave you these traps, and you can just put those in by the heater and around the room once you clear out all that stuff under the bed and futon."

He holds up some pieces of paper. He partially peels one of them revealing a sticky, glue-like substance. I look at him incredulously.

"See, it's just super sticky, just peel these apart and put them down."

There are giant, angry, diseased rats in my room, and I'm being offered sticky paper. So that the rat can step on it, get stuck, and get really, really angry and flail around with great difficulty in its attempts to shit all over my room and bite me in my sleep so that I can get the bubonic plague and die.

"Do you have anything else?"

I'm thinking of something with remote controls, external video monitors, and lasers, mostly because all I do is read Battletech novels and play video games and apparently my mind is basically that of a sci-fi obsessed five-year old who's watched the The Empire Strikes Back too many times. (And since I was a five year-old who watched The Empire Strikes too many times, there may be some sort of permanent brain chemistry changes because of it.)

Or, I mean, if not high tech rat-killing machines, at least some fucking rat poison.

"Well, I could put in snap-traps, but you'd have to clear out all that stuff under the bed so I could get back there and under the futon," Antonio said. He was quite understanding and didn't seem at all worried that I was acting like a crazed neurotic.

"Great, no problem." Yes, snap-traps! You can't really build a better mouse-trap, which is why we still have snap-traps. Oh, glorious snap-traps.

"Ok, I'll come back later this afternoon and set snap-traps, like around 2:30pm."

"Great. Thanks for your help."

I then go on a mad rampage of clearing out the massive amount of crap under my bed and futon, but I make Dan stay in the room in case I run into the rat. I begin to create a fire hazard in the hallway with all my shit.

"Can I throw these notebooks out?" Dan asks.

"Let me see. No way! Those are my old Latin notebooks. We have to save those." Keep in mind that I haven't taken Latin since Junior year, and it is almost the end of my Senior year.

After much effort Dan and I succeed in clearing out the dirty underbelly of my bed and futon.

So I bitch and scream and complain about the rat while I rip apart Dan's computer and install a new hard drive since his old hard drive is dying a slow death and giving bad sector damaged disk error messages constantly. Then, we go to lunch.

Lunch

"And then he's like, oh, no those are definitely rat droppings. I mean, there's a fucking huge scary diseased rat in my room shitting while I sleep!"

"Adam, I've heard this story three times already, and you haven't told it to me personally. You've been screaming about this all day."

"Ok, maybe I'm not explaining this right, you don't seem to grasp the severity of the situation. There's a GOD DAMNED RAT IN MY ROOM."

"Aww, you should give him a name."

"I've decided to call him Ronnie."

"Can't you do something more humane than kill it with a snap trap?"

"Are you kidding? It shat all over my room. Once you shit all over somebody's room you're totally not covered by the Geneva convention or anything anymore."

Afternoon

After some more cleaning Dan and I are sure that the rat is no longer in the room, and has probably crawled back out through the heater, which I'm convinced has a whole in it. I finish setting up Dan's new hard drive, proving once again I am a super computer genius who should immediately be hired and paid lots and lots of money, but due to laziness and intense hatred of corporate America fueled by a misspent youth reading the Baffler, I will probably end up spending the next few years as a college educated bum. (Note: I will be calling myself a "writer" and will be doing lots of "traveling" in order to obfuscate this fact.)

I pace and pace and pace and wait for Antonio to return with my snap traps. He fails to show up, and I leave at 2:30 because I promised I'd drive Kathryn to a job interview at some soul-less corporation so that she can sell out for the summer, make lots of money, and pad her resume so that it's more attractive to other soul-less corporations when she graduates. She will, of course, not be a bum when she graduates, because she, in very stark contrast to me, has her shit together.

I pick Kathryn up, and try to explain to her that I'm a gruff asshole not because I'm angry at her but because there's a RAT in my ROOM and I got about an hour and half of sleep. She is, understandably, disgusted at my story.

(I neglect to mention that I'm also very, very upset and crying on the inside that I'm missing Batman Beyond. I mean, it's one thing to have a rat in my room, but to have a rat in my room and miss Batman Beyond all in the same day, that's enough to make a grown semi-functional man-child like myself cry. Almost.)

We get on highway 101 and I rev Tayla's engines as I cut across traffic into the carpool lane.

"I feel like I'm cheating Tayla right now. I just can't drive her properly in this mental condition."

"You know, you probably don't need to drive 80 in the carpool lane. We're just going to Mountain View."

The Interview

While Kathryn is being interviewed by Satan Incorporated, I sit outside and read Listening to Prozac for a while. I decide I've had enough of mental health problems and pop open my cellular phone.

I call Ian at work.

"Hi, this is Ian R. Hill. Please leave a message at the tone."

"Dudey. It's me. I'm uhh, sitting outside AOL's offices right now. And, uhh, I woke up and there was a rat in my room. This morning. At 6:30 a.m. I feel like this is all very funny, but I'm not really seeing the humor in any of it right now. I think, maybe, it's because I got two hours of sleep last night. And, also, because there's a fucking rat in my room. Talk to you later. Bye."

I call Craig, who actually answers.

"There was a rat in my room this morning."

"Did you sleep with it?"

"This is why I call you, Craig, you really know how to put these things in perspective."

I finish my conversation with Craig. Eventually Ian calls back.

"Dudey."

"Dude."

"Dudey."

"There's a rat in my room."

"Ok. Here's what you need to do. First, I need you to find..."

"No. That's not going to help. And I will never, ever, ever sleep with anyone you slept with."

"Oh, but dudey, seriously...then you need to set up a webcam. And, remember, this is important, you need to webcast it."

"You're not making constructive suggestions here."

"Dudey. Seriously. Bang. Webcast."

"I hate you."

Early Evening

After dropping Kathryn off, I head back to Narnia. It's 5:30. And there are no traps in my room.

Again, I take charge, act like a responsible adult. I freak out and call facilities. Since it is now after normal work hours, I am assured that a page has been put out and that somebody will be by in the next few hours. My blood pressure rises and I become ever closer to my inevitable heart attack by 25.

Dinner

I go to dinner but can't really eat. I think this may be because there's a rat in my room and no traps, and I am under an intense amount of stress that I have no way to deal with, but I'm not really a doctor, I'm not really qualified to say that.

Evening

At 8:30 I call facilities again, this time as an irate, angry, bastard house manager. I demand the duty manager send somebody out to lay traps that very instant.

I am told within the next hour someone will be out.

"You're sure? Within the hour?"

"Ok, maybe two hours."

"Ugh."

I finally tire of pacing around the house, and I'm too anxious to read. I glance at the massive piles of books and assorted junk in the hallway outside my door. Boxes. I need boxes. I leave a message on my whiteboard for pest control detailing exactly where to lay traps and head to my new favorite store: Target.

Driving to Target, I pass Dairy Queen and briefly consider stopping in to buy Lisa something since pretty much every night, after Dairy Queen has closed, she will announce she has a craving for Dairy Queen.

I dismiss this thought since she's probably not even at Narnia right now anyway, and I'd just be left with a melty Blizzard by the time I got back anyway.

Upon returning from Target with my boxes I start packing away my years and years of textbooks into them, since ten years from now I'll of course need my three volumes of ancient Egyptian literature, Annotated Student's Guide to Catullus, and Computer Hardware Organization texts. Actually, ignore the sarcasm on that Catullus one, I think I may need that. I mean, I might want to compose another Latin Punk Rock Epic.

After some packing, I listen to my phone messages.

"That's a really, really, really unoriginal message, Adam. You let me down." Click. Lisa doesn't leave her name.

I go back to packing up the few tangible pieces of evidence that I actually am a college student, only to be interrupted by a locked out Narnia resident.

House Manager Adam Mathes to the rescue! [Cue cheesy music.]

I immediately spring into action. First, I insert key LD34 into the ultra high-tech Master Key Lockbox attached to my wall. As Key LD34 turns, Master Key GBA01 is finally able to be unsheathed. With the awesome power of GBA01, I am invincible.

My house manager powers allow me with ease to open up the hapless resident's room.

And once again, House Manager Adam Mathes saves the day. The crowd cheers, the hapless resident is eternally grateful.

"Thanks, Adam."

"No problem."

Since I'm right next to Lisa's room, and I haven't bothered to return her call, I decide to knock on her door.

There is no response.

Then there's a long, long pause.

Followed by an even longer pause. And silence.

Three years go by, the door still doesn't open. In this time I graduate college, drive around the country in a vain search to discover what it really means to be an American, go to Europe for months in a vain attempt to find myself and my place in the world and Western civilization, head to Austin and move in with Dakota and Josie, I co-produce three albums with Dakota, two of which even go double platinum while the fucking door is still closed, I get a job writing cartoons at the Cartoon Network, I make a few brilliant episodes of Harvey Birdman and Aqua Teen Hunger Force, revive Space Ghost Coast to Coast, only to get fired when their parent company finds out I refer to them as Satan Incorporated in this piece, but I mean, fuck them if they can't take a joke, meanwhile the fucking door is still closed.

Finally, finally, Lisa opens the door. David is on the couch.

"Hey."

"Hi. So, umm, did you have any actual reason for calling, or was it just random harassment?"

"Yeah, nothing important, just random harassment."

"Great. Well, I've got to go and deal with the giant sewer rats taking over my room." I begin to walk away.

"No, wait, actually, it was important. I wanted you to take me to Dairy Queen."

Staff Meeting

At 10:30pm I attend Narnia house staff meeting. This is where the entire staff gets together and discusses very, very important house business.

I sit in an angry haze as the meeting progresses.

"And, Adam, what do you have? Besides a rat."

"I have a rat. A fucking rat. That's it. I just have a rat. Nothing else."

The Kitchen

Walking out of staff meeting I run into Lisa. "Come to the kitchen with me!" she says.

"Ok," I say.

Once in the kitchen Lisa proceeds to eat ice cream. I swear, the only person who eats more ice cream than Lisa is Dan "Tubby Bitch" Rich, who consumes, on average, two gallons of ice cream per day. He's able to conceal his nearly dehabilitating ice cream addiction since he's the kitchen manager, but the stacks and stacks of ice cream encrusted bowls in his room tell another tale, as does his massive girth.

(My actual conversation with Lisa included something, much, much, much funnier than this but is unfortunately not includable in this essay due to the fact that I promised her I wouldn't tell anyone. As a result, the conversation here will be short and nearly incomprehensible. Admittedly, much like every other conversation in this piece, which is why I have to explicitly specify that.)

I calmly explain my rodent situation to Lisa. She laughs.

"We've switched roles," she says.

"Right, now I'm the one freaking out and having paranoid delusions and being obsessive compulsive, and you're the one laughing."

"David set his hair on fire, does that make you feel any better?"

I think for a moment. "No. No it doesn't."

Happy Donuts

At 10:30pm, there are still no traps in my room. Clearly, two hours to facilities means "never." I decide to give it another hour, then just buy traps myself.

I go to get Happy Donuts and meet up with super-web-friends Neale and Matt.

Happy Donuts make everything better. Because they're happy. Also, I mean, super-web-friend Neale, all the way from Australia!

Because Matt is on the A-List though, all conversations we have are strictly confidential and can not be included in this texty text.

Night

My belly now filled with Happy Donut goodness, I return to Narnia. Finally, finally, there are traps in my room.

Dan stops by.

"So, they finally put traps in?"

"Yup."

"Hallie said that I should offer to let you sleep on the futon in my room tonight since we are hetero-lifemates."

"Dude, we are not hetero-lifemates and we are not sleeping together."

"That's exactly what I told her."

"Funny, Lisa suggested I sleep with you too, and then I told her the same thing. Anyway, I'm not going to let some silly little rat kick me out of my room. I'm sure I'll be fine."

I retire to my bed around 1am.

3am

I hear sounds coming from the heater at 3am.

I leap out of bed in a panic and collapse in the lounge.

8am

At 8am I return to the room and find Ronnie, in the snap trap, dead. His head is crushed.

It is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen.

And that's the closest thing I've ever had to happy ending.