This was posted to alt.tasteless in October of 1992.
The ratfishing thread evokes fond memories of my one venture into the world of urban renewal and rodent extermination. This was back in the summer of '88, when I worked for a swimming pool construction company in Connecticut to raise enough dough to send me back here to RPI for another nine months of hell. But I digress slightly. Anyhow, once it got towards the end of the summer, work slacked off a little and the boss started thinking up all sorts of miscellaneous crap jobs for us to do instead of building pools. Well, it seemed that he owned an old apartment house in a section of Hartford which used to be French and is now mainly Puerto Rican. The kind of place where the cops won't go in alone during the day, or at all after dark. And five of us suburban white boys, plus the boss himself (gotta give him credit for coming along with us) had the task of cleaning out the basement of this building, its first such cleaning since at least the Carter administration.
You wanna talk tasteless? It was all right there in that basement. Rotten furniture and mattresses soaked in piss and puke. Piles of dried shit in any odd corner. Dozens of used syringes (we had thick rubber gloves on to deal with all this). And the wonderful urban wildlife... cockroaches the size of Volkswagens, spiders as big as my hand, and, of course, the rats. (Bet you were wondering when I'd get to the rats.)
Now, these rats weren't very bold ones by nature, they mostly hid behind old boards and chairs and things. Probably scared of the roaches. My task, at one point, was to take a sledgehammer and knock down a wooden partition that sectioned off one end of the basement. Well, there I was happily sledgehammering away, sending a happy family of rats scurrying this way and that as I rendered them homeless. One of these rats, however, apparently decided that he wasn't going to take this so lightly. Instead of heading for a corner or out up the stairs, he made a kamikaze dive for my foot and latched his teeth into my trusty workboot ($45 at Bob's, and not the first time I was glad I'd invested in the best foot protection to be found). The thing was about the size of a well-fed cat, and mean enough to sink his teeth in a quarter-inch of leather. You think I was going to grab him? Yeah, right. But I had to dislodge him somehow. Then it occurs to me, I've got this 15-pound hammer in my hands. Position the foot, take very careful aim, put your back into the swing... *SPLAT*! Most of the rat's torso becomes a good approximation of road pizza. The tail is still twitching a bit. Once it stopped, and I assured myself that it was quite dead, I pried its jaws open and extracted the rat incisors from my boots, picked the whole mess up by the tail, carried it out of the cellar (to the applause of my fellow basement-cleaners) and flang it in the nearby dumpster. One of my co-workers thought we should have mounted it on the front of our truck as a trophy. I told him he was welcome to go back in the dumpster and get it if he really wanted to. He turned a funny color and went back to sweeping up syringes.
I've still got the boots with the rat toothmarks in them, though I don't clean too many basements these days. If there's a lesson to be learned from all this, I guess it's a fairly straightforward one: when you're in a tough neighborhood, it helps to wear sturdy footwear and carry a big hammer.
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