My Two Writing Teachers colleagues and I are hosting the 16th Annual March Slice of Life Story Challenge, in which teachers from around the world participate by posting a story per day.
This year, the SOLSC gives me a chance to record memories of our little dog, Indie, who died in January. I want to write these down while they are still fresh, so that my family and I can read them later and remember not only Indie, but little slices of life across the years.
I’ve been putting off writing this story, honestly. It’s a long, disgusting story that I rarely speak of. So here it goes.
When we moved into our apartment in Brooklyn, we were SO excited. It was a recently renovated warehouse, and we had an entire floor to ourselves. AN ENTIRE FLOOR. This much space is unheard of in New York City. It was an embarrasing amount of space. Once, during a party, friends took turns riding a bicycle back and forth through the apartment.
Okay, so we’re living in this amazing apartment, and when I look back, this was one of the best times of our life. We were in our late 20s and early 30s, established enough in our careers to feel like adults, but young enough to stay out all night, hopping from restaurant to restaurant, and party to party, throughout our neighborhood in Bushwick/Greenpoint/Williamsburg.
For you New Yorkers, we lived just a block from the BQE in 2004-2012ish, at the time, not the best location, but it was cheap and it worked for us. It was full of artists and creative people that couldn’t afford rent in the city. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that we were a part of the beginning of a wave of gentrification that would raise prices and ultimately drive out families and businesses who had been in the neighborhood for generations.
We should have known. Construction of new condos and highrises were going on all around our building the entire time we lived in the apartment, but we kept living it up. This construction would come back to bite us. Hard.
So, as I mentioned, we lived in a renovated warehouse, and for the first 4-5 years the ground floor lay empty, in waiting for some store or other business to move in. Eventually, around 2006-2007 they began to renovate the space for a furniture store to set up shop.
Okay, so if you live in NYC you know that construction stirs up RATS. And boy were there a LOT of rats living in the first floor space.
At first we heard little scraping sounds coming from our kitchen floorboards. Then we heard “movements” in the walls of our bedroom. Then we noticed holes chewed into the wood trim near the dishwasher. We knew what was happening. We dreaded what these signs meant. We lived in fear for weeks.
Then, it started. First one rat scampered across our hallway, and disappeared into some unknown crevice that we never found. Then morning after morning, I would send Brinton out to the kitchen to “deal with” the rats. Morning after morning, I tell you! For MONTHS I lived on edge, disgusted by my life.
My job at the time took me to schools all around the city. Often I had to get up at dawn to catch a train or bus to begin my journey across the five boroughs. I would wake up, listen closely. And sure enough I’d hear a squeak or a scratching. Then, the more I listened, the more the sounds would become clearer, and I’d become convinced that a rat was in the room, just about to scurry into our bed, so I would run to the bathroom and slam the door, praying that there wasn’t already a rat in the bathroom.
Our landlord did everything. It’s rare to have a good landlord, but we were lucky. Exterminator after exterminator. Traps everywhere. Our landlord gave us the option to break our lease and move out. We looked at other apartments. By that time the prices in our neighborhood had already started to climb, and we experienced what many in the neighborhood were facing: the gentrification that we had been part of was now preventing us from being able to afford to move. We had to stay.
Eventually, the exterminators resorted to the worst solution ever: rat poison.
Don’t get me wrong. I was all for getting rid of those rats by any means. It didn’t bother me at all that the rats would die. But what did matter was that they were going to die in our floorboards, in our walls, in our ceiling. And they were going to stay there, and rot, and smell. For a long time.
The smell was putrid, unbearable. We couldn’t sleep in the bedroom, where it was the worst, so for six months or so we slept on an inflatable mattress in the living room where the smell wasn’t as bad. And there were still rats scurrying around. It wasn’t working. For every rat that died, another took it’s place.
We stopped having people over. No more parties with bicycles. I didn’t tell anyone about the rats. It was top secret. It was humiliating, disgusting to admit to having rats — even though everyone knows rats are out of control in the city.
So. This is where Indie came in. While all this had been going on, I had been obsessed with getting a dog. I visited the local shelter and walked dogs. I spent a LOT of time online researching dogs. And then one day a lightbulb went off.
Terriers hunt rats.
We needed to get a terrier. And thus, Indie came into our lives.
Although our landlord had initially had a firm NO PETS rule (like most NYC landlords), when I proposed this solution he said HELL YES.
And from the day Indie came home, the disgusting scritching and scratching in the walls, squeaking and skittering in the kitchen, “movements” in the ceiling stopped. As far as we know, Indie never even caught a rat. He would sniff around a lot, but it seemed that his presence was all that was needed. The rats moved on, I guess, to some space where there was no dog to deal with. We never saw one again. We smelled them for a while, like sickening rat ghosts left behind to haunt us for the next several months. But we never saw them again.