JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT ALL RATS WERE TERRORISTS....ONE OF THEM FALLS IN LOVE WITH YOU

GROUND ZERO PLUS 1109 DAYS,--New York, NY, Saturday, September 25, 2004--A rat is a rat is a rat! Or, is it?

There can be little doubt that the vast majority of humanity looks upon rats as they do Terrorists.

Famed for carrying such horrible diseases as the bubonic plague and living in the sewers and subways where infestation and disease breed, the rat has little chance of being considered a "pet" or a "buddy" or a "pal" or something you might let kiss you, sleep with you or crawl all over your body.

Rats are famous for carrying the plague and other disgusting diseases

But that's what Jake allows Sheetee to do.

The female rat, he says, thinks he's her mother and acts that way. Whiskers twitching, Sheetee crawls all over Jake, an East Village Street Person--his tatooed arms, neck, face, head...just about any where she wants.

I ran into Jake and Sheetee on my way home to catch the last few innings of the away Yankee/Red Sox game on tv.

The irony of seeing a rat crawling all over a human being at 9 p.m. on a Friday night in the heart of the East Village stopped me in my tracks. Suddenly, the Red Sox and Yankees had little priority over the Rats of New York City.

Earlier in the day I scheduled myself to attend a special Rat Terrorization Meeting being held next Thursday evening at 6:30 pm on Bowery Street. It seems a major infestation of rats has the community disturbed, and Thursday's meeting is all about rallying the Sentinels of Rat Prevention to action.

The community is holding a "Terror Rats" meeting next week since current rat-abatement techniques have failed

Two days ago I was a major fan of executing every rat in sight. On my way home in the middle of the afternoon I came across the body of huge dead rat stretched out in the middle of the sidewalk.

The rat's carcass formed a No Walk Zone directly in front of STOMP, one of New York City's famous shows where performers use garbage cans and other common items to produce beats the dancers choreograph to the delight of the audience. It would seem impossible a rat would be anywhere near the beats emanating from the building.

I live just around the corner from STOMP. The dead rat was violating my community, my backyard.

I took some pictures of the rat. Flies were feasting on his body, and from tip of his nose to his tail was close, if not more than, two feet. I didn't get that close obtain an exact measurement.

The dead rat formed a "No Walk Zone" in front of STOMP

A couple of things bothered me as I stepped back as any good journalist and tried to dispatch my feelings by observing the actions of others. Everyone was veering around the rat's body. It was right in the middle of the sidewalk--like a Terrorist with explosives strapped around its body.

It surprised me at first that no one moved the rat at least by kicking it off the walkway into the gutter. Instead, people stepped out in the street or hugged the wall as water splits when it hits a boulder in the middle of the river. Also, I looked into the window of STOMP and sitting there was a big, strong guy eye balling the rat. The rat was intruding on STOMP's terrority--in fact, it was barricading STOMP's front door--but then it was early afternoon, and the show was hours away. Still, I wondered why the guy just sat on his stool looking at the rat.

I took my pictures, getting close up and personal with the rat. I've seen lots of rats in my life--the biggest and ugliest in Vietnam. They often required blasting with a .45 caliber to exterminate them, and would pull the traps we set as though they were elephants.

I was also an anti-rat guy regarding my younger daughter. She fervidly despises and fears rats. I would say, she has Rat Phobia.

Her apartment building in the East Village on First Street was built on top of old coal bins, well over a century plus old. Below the ground were deep caverns where rats have bred for decades, and slip up through holes in the concrete they chew to feast on humanity's garbage.

One of the rat entrances was near my daughter's apartment door and she would run wildly at night to stab her key in the door and enter before the fleeting body of a scuttling rat sent her into emotional shock.

My younger daughter has a rat phobia and used to live in a rat infested neighborhood

Ironically, this particular daughter carries two 9mm Glocks. She's a federal special agent and can shoot the eyes out of rat at 25 yards, but, the mere sight of a New York City Rat at night puts her into a state of apoplexy. She now lives in the Bronx with her husband and doesn't miss the rats.

Many times when I would walk her home at night after coffee, I made all kinds of noise while she waited across the street under the lights of the Mobil station until all the rats had fled--for the moment.

When the coast was clear, I'd yell "Go!" and she would make an Olympic dash for the door I had opened with her key so she could leap inside, free from Rat Sight.

The second concern I had about the STOMP rat was my grandchildren. We have three of them who are constantly negotiating the sidewalks of the East Village. I thought of this dead rat fouling the cement, as though it wasn't already fouled, with the intent of leaving some vile disease that might crawl up and roost upon one of our grandchildren.

So after watching the dead rat for a good ten minutes, and noting that the hundreds and hundreds of passing people avoided it like the "plague," I decided to be a Rat Sentinel of Vigilance.

At six-four and 265 pounds, a former Marine combat veteran, I sucked in a deep breath so no one would notice the sweat dripping from my brow and marched up to the dead rat.

I stood there for a moment as though I were looking at the fly-infested and decaying body of Osama bin Laden and pondered if I really wanted to risk any body contact with the rat, however insulated it might be.

I looked down at my feet. I had just purchased a great prize--Timberlake loafers that normally retail for well over $100 for $34 on sale at Paragon Sports near Union Square, a few blocks northwest of us. I also had these shoes shined the day before with my grandson at a famous shoe shine stand on 42nd and 5th Avenue.

Could I touch the body of a dead rat with these wonderfully new and shiny shoes? Or, did my grand kids come first?

I didn't stomp the rat, but I did kick it

I could feel the guy inside STOMP was watching me. So were passersby who noted this big giant of a guy standing next to a dead rat. I wondered if they thought I was going to STOMP it, or, in keeping with the weird nature of the East Village, eat the dead rat.

I kicked the rat.

I didn't want to touch it with my foot, or any part of my body, or even make contact with it even if I was wearing a biological protective suit. But I did. I kicked the rat.

It scooted a few feet. I kicked it again, not too hard so things on it like germs and bugs and fleas might leap from the body to me. I kicked it again until I gave it one firm toe drop sending its dead body into the gutter next to a parking meter.

I turned around and there was the guy in STOMP and a young woman looking at me. They didn't give me a High Five, they just looked. I didn't hear anyone applaud, and frankly didn't care. My mission was to remove the rat for my grandchildren.

I was the Grandpa of Rat Vigilance, not the community Pied Piper. But I did think of other grandchildren. I thought of all the people skirting the Terror Rat and leaving its bucolic potential ripe to infect a child.

I hated rats, too.

But that changed when I turned the corner on St. Marks Place onto 2nd Avenue to see the Red Sox lose to the Yankees.

There sat Jake and Sheetee.

They were almost directly across from STOMP where some 24 hours earlier I had kicked the body of a dead rat into the gutter, and vowed to eradicate all the rats I could in the East Village.

Then I saw Sheetee lovingly caressing Jake, a homeless guy whose only friend it appeared it was rat...but not any rat.

Jake said he and Sheetee had a 'father daughter relationship' for only a week but it looked like it had been from the rat's birth

Sheetee was clean and friendly. I thought it was a big mouse at first, and then Jake corrected me and told me Sheetee was a rat. I asked how he came to train her and how old she was. They had been 'father and daughter', he said, for only a week, but their relationship looked like it had been from birth.

"See this," Jake said pointing to the bandage on his left shoulder, "The Ninth Precinct did this to me."

I knew what he mean. Jake was part of the street people group who live where they can, eat what they can find left by others, and get as much money as they can panhandle. He was younger than most of the street people, but the tattoos covering his body suggested he had been on roads less traveled for most of his life.

When I asked what Sheetee's name was, Jake told me it was S-H-I-_. I asked him how he came by that name, and he told me that the rat had done that on him in Tompkins Square Park, his homeless home.

"How long have you had her," I asked. He told me she had been with him a week.

"But she's so loving...how'd you train her to be so docile...rats are instinctively afraid of humans..."

"She thinks I'm her mother," Jake said as Sheetee crawled over his face and around his neck, down his arm and back up to his neck.

"Mind if I refer to her as Sheetee, it's the diminutive of the name you gave her."

"Sure," Jake said.

Jake told me Sheetee thought he was her mother

Jake let me take pictures. He didn't ask for any money.

I told him about the Anti-Rat meeting on Thursday on Bowery Street, and suggested he come with Sheetee and protest that not all rats are bad rats. He laughed. Thursday was an eternity away to a homeless man.

I started home to watch the game. I thought about Jake and his pet rat. A New York City rat had befriended a homeless man for some bizarre reasons. The rules of nature had twisted, and in the process, made me stop and wonder if I should consider all rats bad, evil, corrupt, not worthy of life.

I wondered how many people think all Muslims are Terrorists, or all Republicans are capitalistic pigs who will eat their children rather than part with a buck, or, how many Republicans think all Democrats are geek-necked, liberal egg suckers?

Then there is the dark hole of prejudice where all blacks are niggers and all hispanics are spics and all white people are honkies and all asians are chinks and all police are pigs, and George Bush works for Halliburton.

I have kicked a number of rats in my life, forgetting that by blackballing everyone or everything about a person, place or thing I eclipse any miracles that might happen, shut down the possibility that there might be hope for the world to unite under common beliefs while retaining individual differences.

It's hard to change your opinion of rats when you grow up hating them

It's hard to change one's opinion of a rat when you grow up hating them and blinding yourself to the fact that all rats aren't necessarily bad or evil or corrupt. After watching Sheetee for a good ten minutes, I almost could see my grand kids playing with her--as long as she was bathed and de-fleaed.

Kids played with mice all day, and hampsters...why not a rat.

I thought about the Red Sox. They had become rats to me. Evil. Corrupt humans trying to destroy New York's faith and belief in the Yankees. Ugly Red Sox.

I thought about Terrorism in general. Fear, Intimidation and Complacency all conspire to blind us. Complacency is the worst, for we just give up on the possibility that some rats can be good and start to bury any rat we see.

Then I wondered if the rat that died in front of STOMP might have been Sheetee's mother...or maybe her father...or even her grandmother or grandfather?

What had I kicked?

What had I written off as an ugly, worthless old rat?

If I am a Sentinel of Vigilance, I need to think through hating rats and wonder if a Sheetee might be giving love to a guy from the streets that no one else is willing to love. Maybe the guy isn't just another "street person" who comes and goes and the world passes by.

Mother Nature showed a feral rat can become a loving friend if there is love inside and outside

Mother Nature dropped a rat into Jake's lap, and showed anyone interested that a feral rat can become a loving friend in virtually no time, if there is love inside the outside.

Looking at Jake's outsides, it might be hard to see a mother or a father. You might also find it hard to imagine that Jake was bubbling with so much love from some part of his inner self that a rat cast aside every instinct of Fear of humans to consider Jake his mother, his friend, his Sentinel of Vigilance.

Life is full of surprises.

 

Once again I learned to take a step back and look for the bit of good in the bad

I learned a lot last night.

I learned that kicking a rat is only the beginning of a long lesson in Vigilance. And that one needs to stop and wonder if we who hate and erase all good in the bad, might need to take a step back and look for the little bit of good in all the bad.

There, we might find a loving rat and hope for us all.