I'm Dirty 2

My apartment's not as bad as it was before, I swear. We've been keeping it cleaner and sweeping now and then, but still, we had our second mouse emergency last night.

Turk, the little bastard, came trotting into the bedroom with a live mouse in his mouth.

"Oh my God!" J said.

"Oh my God!" I said.

We stood up and Turk dodged us, confused. He'd been expected celebration. He darted left and right, lowering his head every now and then like he was going to put the mouse down. "Nonono!" We shouted at him. We waved our arms. We didn't know what to do, but we knew we didn't want him to let that mouse go.

Eventually, we got Turk, Bean, and the mouse sealed off in the kitchen. We stood on the other side of the door, our hearts racing, trying to come up with a plan. The thing was alive. If we got it away from the cats, we would be dealing with a live mouse. Or, even worse, an injured mouse in need of our attention somehow.

"We'd have to kill it," I said. "If it's bleeding or broken or half-dead we can't just throw it away and let it die for six hours in the trash can. We have to whack it or something."

Neither J or I wanted to whack it.

We carefully let ourselves into the kitchen. Turk had the mouse trapped behind the garbage can. Bean was guarding the closet, the most likely escape route. The mouse dashed from one side of the can to the other, trying desperately to outmaneuver Turk.

"Well, I guess we've got to try and...get it."

Does this sound dumb? Are you laughing at us? I feel like this is something we should've known - how to deal with a mouse in the house. This is one of those ancient human problems, right? I mean, isn't this why we domesticated cats? To catch mice? But then again, mice are disease-ridden, right? Do we really want our cats eating them? And is it morally wrong to let our cats torture a mouse for hours? And what if it gets away and dies of its injuries and rots under our couch? And why, at the age of 26 and 33, did we not know how to handle this?

Our best guess was to take an empty, kitten-sized litter box left over from Turk's baby days, edge the cats away from the mouse, and try to capture it. It wasn't easy. The mouse was fleeing us now and kept darting under Turk, hiding in his chest while he sniffed frantically around, tail puffed and eyes wild, knowing the prey was close but not realizing how close.

Finally, I slammed the box down on the mouse, pinching Turk's paw and the mouse's tail in the process, but small price to pay. The rodent was contained. Now, the matter of what to do with it.

"I mean, I guess we could...what? Put it in a bag? Slam it with something or something?" The cats weaved through our legs with yellow eyes. They had been torturing the mouse, and now we were torturing them. Whatever we were going to do, we needed to do it now.

We decided to let the mouse go. I slid a piece of cardboard under the box and carried the trapped mouse upstairs to the roof. When I lifted the box, the mouse was still there, huddled in a ball on the cardboard, looking adorable and terrified. I waved my arm and the mouse squeaked, turned, and fled. It ran pretty fast, like any injuries it had might be minimal.

I know we made the wrong decision. Mice are pests. Humans kill them, and not out of any sadism or superiority. It's not healthy to live with mice. That's just how things are. And to release a mouse because you're too squeamish to kill it goes against the ancient collective knowledge of our species. But seeing that little tail disappear into the shadows made me feel better. Sure, the mouse might return. But there are nineteen other apartments in my building to chose from, most without cats. Next time, someone else'll get the opportunity to kill the damn thing.

I'm Dirty

I cleaned my apartment today. I hadn't done that in an embarrassingly long time. Really, if you'd seen my apartment you would have been like, "Miranda, I know your brother just died and everything, but this is fucking nasty."

First, I unearthed my couch. It had been buried beneath a mountain of fossilized clothing and it was nice to see it again. Then I started sweeping. My year old cat, Turk, loves nothing more than tearing apart pieces of cardboard, so the entire floor was covered in cardboard snow. I swept it all up, stuck the broom under the couch to half-assedly get the dust out from under it, and pulled out a dirty tangle of rubber bands, delivery menus, underwear, cat hair, and almost-dried-up pens. I also found a lighter I lost 5? 6? months ago. And then, like a chill through my body, a great wave of stink filled the room. It was really bad. Musky, sweet, and a little cheesy, like a sweaty sock dipped in Alfredo sauce and left to rot. Fucking disgusting.

I examined the dirt pile, but there wasn't anything that horrendous. I poked under the couch some more. Nothing. I wondered for a moment if I could just pretend I didn't notice it and let it go away, and it's a testament to how bad the smell was that I overcame my laziness and moved the sofa aside. Turk and Bean - our older, wiser, fatter cat - ran into the room, tails bushy, eyes wide with feral lust. They found the source before I did.

A dead mouse.

A motherfucking dead mouse.

A dead and rotting mouse underneath my couch.

Those of you who don't live in New York may be thinking, "Well, of course! You're living in filth in a cheap New York City apartment, what did you expect?" But those of you who reside in Gulliani's sparkling and cheerful Manhattan know that there's a lot fewer mice and bugs than you'd think. Especially in a fifth floor walk up. We haven't seen a mouse here in two years.

In fact, I've lived in this city for eight years now, in eight different apartments in three boroughs, and I've only had one other dead mouse incident.

It was in the Bronx, where I was living with my boyfriend at the time and a small, short-lived, black and white cat named Boops. We woke up one morning to find our painted wood floors land-mined with three dead mice. We suspected it was Boops' work, but the mice looked untouched. No blood, no innards - it was a like a little family of People's Temple mice had moved in and drank their little cups of Kool Aid in our living room.

We'd never seen a mouse in our apartment before. I cleaned them up. An hour later, I found a fourth dead mouse in the office. It was baffling. Boops was a tiny cat, sickly, she died of natural causes after two years. Though she was the obvious suspect, we couldn't quite bring ourselves to believe she could so effectively and systematically kill anything.

And then, as we sat on the couch later that evening, Boops began a slow gallop from one corner of the bedroom to the other, across the living room, and into the kitchen. This wasn't unusual. We didn't look up until she passed us, flung her head back, and opened her mouth to let something fly up, up, up into a high arc, brushing the cheap light fixture and hanging there silhouetted for a second before falling, hurtling down, slamming first into the wall and then the floor.

It was a mouse. Dead, now.

We never saw a mouse in that apartment again.

The stinky couch mouse is my first mouse since. I don't know what happened to it, if there were tooth marks on it or what. I just threw it away, opened the window, and got the 409.

It was weird how we couldn't smell it until I started sweeping under there. Encased in trash, it was like it had it's own little mouse tomb, where it could decompose without bothering the neighbors.

I'm going to try to keep my apartment cleaner from now on.

Also under the couch were a surprising number of Turk's toys. Turk likes to play fetch with plastic milk and water bottle caps. We throw them, he chases them and brings them back over and over until he invariably loses them under the couch. Then we give him new ones. He has amassed 32 so far. Here he is, with his bounty:


GTD from ***7441542:
you got some nerve gettin that girl pregnant and i can't believe that u said that ashley wasnt going to be there 4 u. miranda

Eau De Weekday Morning Toilette

This morning, distracted by my iPod, I accidentally got off my train a stop too soon. I was disoriented, it took me a minute to find the right staircase up, and when I finally made it into the early light, I was hit by a particularly strong odor. It was familiar - New York often stinks this way - but I knew the smell from somewhere else. It was at once industrial and musky, man-made and all-natural, and suddenly, as I stopped at a light and took another deep breath, I was no longer 25, flip flopping my way through Chelsea to work. Instead, I was 14, dressed horrifically in my pastel pink all-girls' school uniform and doc martins, straddling a pile of dog shit at 7:15 in the morning, armed with a pooper scooper and a brown paper Trader Joes bag.

See, my mother, being of the people, for the people, and by the people, always insisted that my brother and I not take advantage of any of the domestic assistants who visited our home. Julia, for example, would come to clean the house on Saturdays, and it would be our responsibility to have our rooms straightened before she came. While we whined to no end at this - cleaning in preparation for the housecleaner seemed a cruel and arbitrary exercise - we also obeyed. There was something in my mother's tone, something missing from the usual chores and requests, when she leaned over to hiss, "Julia is not your maid."

Nor, apparently, was Mr. Kubiyashi, the Japanese man who came every couple of weeks to take care of the yard. In the midst of the morning weekday frenzy - my mother throwing sandwiches together in the kitchen, Ky clomping by in one shoe, me battling my hair in the bathroom - one could hear, if listening carefully, the rattle of Mr. Kubiyashi's truck pulling up out front. I never heard it, in fact, I actively ignored it, but at the sound of gardening equipment in a truckbed, my mother's head would shoot up and her eyes would narrow.

"Miranda! Did you do the dog poo?" she would call to me across the house.
"What?"
"The dog poo! Did you do the dog poo?"
"What?"
"Get outside and poop scoop before Mr. Kubayashi gets started. He is not your servant!"

And, hearing the no-daughter-of-mine edge to her tone, I would sigh, put down the brush, and go out to the backyard. I scooped poop in the early light while Mr. Kubiyashi hosed down the walkway, the water sinking down into the cement and mixing with dog urine, releasing a smell I would wrinkle my nose at but not think about, not register, not identify until 11 years later and 3,000 miles away, until an old black man in a valet jacket turned off his hose for a minute to let me walk by and then started up his spray again, determined to get his sidewalk clean.

Cat Looks Like Lion, Dog Flies, is Autistic

I'm going back to New York tomorrow, but before I go, a word on my pets. I know there's nothing more annoying than some chick going on about how cuuute Paisley is when she does that thing with her paw, but humor me. My brother just died.

Alright, first The Cat. The Cat doesn't have a name, we just call him The Cat. It's kind of sad. We've had so many pets over the years and doggedly came up with names for all of them, but The Cat was the last in a long line. By the time we got to him, Kyle and I were teenagers, my single mother had laundry to do, and honestly, no one cared.

When I came home last month for the funeral, The Cat was completely matted. Everywhere. It was like petting a braided rug. He used to have this long, beautiful coat, but now he just looked miserable, he probably felt miserable, and touching him was miserable. I felt bad for The Cat, but Kyle had just died, and honestly, no one cared.

I came home this time and the cat was shaved. Have you ever seen a cat shaved? It's really ugly. And they left his paws and lion's mane and a puff on his tail. Like a cat poodle. He looks ridiculous.

The crazy thing is? Everyone likes The Cat better. Like, a lot better. The Cat lives with my mother and aunt, and they've never really liked him. They found him "weird," "needy," and "I dunno, just sort of...lacking." And then they shaved him, he got uglier, and now they love him.

Look how big his head looks:


And then there's Toby. Poor Toby. The best we can figure, he's autistic. Well, maybe Asperger's. He's scared of every single moving object he's ever encountered outside of the home. And of some unmoving objects, particularly garbage cans, parked cars, and real estate signs. He's morose, very reminiscent of Eeyore, and never makes eye contact. At his absolute happiest, he may walk slowly towards you, head low, tail wagging sadly.

Here's how Toby looks 99% of the time:

The 1% of the time he doesn't look like this, he's a fucking maniac. At the top of his list of fears are fireworks, and my mother lives by the marina, where all these rich white people shoot off fireworks from their yachts all goddamn summer in celebration of their ridiculous wealth. Twice this year, fireworks went off while Toby was home alone, he flipped his shit, and jumped out the window.

Yes. Jumped out the window.

And the reason that's completely insane is my mother lives in a condo on the second floor. Jumping out the window involves falling two stories into a thin clump of bushes. My dog is so fucked up that fireworks cause him to fling himself against the screen until it pops loose and then he throws his body out the window.

And here, the scene of the crime:


Amazingly, Toby has never been hurt in the fall. The only possible explanation? My dog can fly.