First New York Rodent Experience

The following is a story I wrote in my writing class about my first New York rodent experience.

I'm really phobic about mice and rats. And I mean phobic! I think it started when I read 1984 in junior high. There's a part in the book where O'Brien puts a cage filled with hungry rats in front of Winston's face. The rats are squealing and if O'Brien pulls the front of the cage away from Winson, they'll eat right through his skull. I guess I must be pretty affected by the books I read because that friggin' book scarred me for life. I've been terrified of these damn rodents since then. Even hamsters kind of creep me out.

Anyway, I moved to New York for law school. The first year I opted for residence housing. I lived in the law school dorm and just felt like it would be the easiest way to make friends. It really was for me.

There were five of us living in this townhouse in East Campus. If you observed our suite, it would be like watching a season of MTV's the Real World. I was the black one, Jojo was the Asian girl, Ekin was the Muslim and from Turkey. Alex was a Jew – his family had defected from Russia five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was also by far the oldest among us – he was 35 our first year of law school. Sean was half-Jewish, half-Christian. He was the son of longshoremen – a real blue collar union family. He dated Jojo (so we had some romantic intrigue) and he also turned out to be gay. But that's another story. I want to tell you about the fucking mouse that almost scared me out of law school.

So the first couple months of law school were fine – I mean they were as fine as the first year of law school can get. We lucked out. We had a great suite. Though we were all really different physically and culturally, we had similar temperaments and became good friends. Everyone called us the Dream Suite (to be distinguished from the hell suites that comprised the other groupings of stressed-out first-year law students). We made dinner together every night and were a shining example of racial and law school harmony.

Anyway, all was fabulous until the first time I saw the mouse. Jojo and Sean had already seen it. They were afraid to tell me about it because they knew how I was. One time in the subway, we'd seen rats the size of cats and I'd almost started crying. Anyway, I was alone in the kitchen and I saw the mouse pop it's head out of one of the stove top burners. I screamed like a little girl and ran downstairs into my bedroom. The mouse was probably more scared than me and popped back into the stove. At the time I didn't think about the mouse being scared, and as I paced around my bedroom I imagined it coming and eating my face.

Jojo heard my screaming and came into my room to comfort me. I was absolutely horrified. Not only did we have a mouse, but it was coming out of the stove – where our food came from! Can you get any more gross than that?

We discovered the hole through the kitchen cabinet where the mouse came in and saw how it got to the stove. I keep telling myself there was only one. Thinking about more than one is just too upsetting.

Jojo and I went later that night to buy traps. The rodents in New York are too smart for those though. That stupid thing managed to pull off the cheese and evade the trap. It was mocking me.

About a week later we were all sitting in the living room working quietly. I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye. The mouse was scurrying into the living room. I started shrieking and pointing my finger in it's general direction. I hopped up on the chair like some woman in a 1950s sitcom and just screamed, "Please kill it! Please just kill it!". My roommates tried to chase it out or catch it and it ended up running back into its hole. When the mouse was gone I slowly calmed down and got off the chair. I think my roommates were going to make a joke about it, but when they saw how pale I was (I was a black girl with a completely white face) they comforted me instead.

I was really all nerves at this point. I was afraid to go into the living room and kitchen – especially when I was alone. I felt slightly better in my bedroom, but still felt uneasy. In fact, the whole rodent-infested city made me nervous. I was jumpy as hell.

I went to talk with the housing people about the hole where the mouse was coming from. I mentioned the mouse to the building handyman and he basically laughed at me and said something to the effect of "We'll try, but this is New York. Rodents are a part of life. You should be happy it's not a rat." As you can probably imagine, that was not the answer I wanted to hear.

A couple weeks went by and I became really distraught. I started seriously considering leaving Columbia and transferring to Georgetown so that I could live with my parents where I knew they had no rats or mice. Final exams were coming up and I couldn't eat, I couldn’t sleep and I couldn't study. I felt like I was losing my mind.

Desperate times calls for desperate measures. This is when I decided to visit Julia Spring. Julia Spring was the law school shrink. During our first-year orientation she'd introduced herself to the class and mentioned that she was available if anyone was dealing with any stress. Law students, stressed out? Ha! I remember smiling and thinking it was funny that the law school had a shrink. I imagined that poor Julia often sat in her office alone and knitted or surfed the internet.

Now I needed to go talk to her. I felt like my life had become a battle between me and a mouse and the mouse was winning. I was losing – I was losing my sanity. I went to knock on Julia Spring's door. She had a very nice inviting smile and told me to come in.

I sat down in her guest chair and sheepishly told my story. I mentioned that I was going crazy and that building maintenance was not willing to help me. She was very sympathetic and said she'd see what she could do. While I was sitting in her chair she called the head of the residences for the law school and informed him of our mouse situation. She asked him to take care of the hole behind our stove. He said he'd look into it. She looked at me kindly and asked if that would make me feel better. I said "I think so. Yes," I said softly.

I thanked her and she said that I should come back if I still felt worried about it. I ran to my next class and an hour and a half later returned to the dorm. When I opened the door, I heard a strange man's voice upstairs. I walked up to the kitchen and found Sean talking to a handyman who was just finishing up patching the hole. Evidently Julia Spring's phone call helped. The hole was patched up and the mouse was never seen or heard from again.

It helped much more than just the mouse situation. With that hole patched up I was able to sleep and comfortably. I guess Julia was rather useful after all.
At my graduation three years later, I saw her standing in the crowd. I gave her a shy wave and smile as I walked out of the auditorium hall with my family.