My New Roommate

Sis and her boyfriend came to visit from NYC last weekend, albeit just for a couple of days. A friend of hers was having a baby shower and we were supposed to have a family cookout later that Saturday evening. (Shitty weather forced us inside.)

Seeing as I'd transformed sis' old bedroom into my third room (hey, the computer's in there), I did my usual routine: put off cleaning it up until days before her arrival and just move all of my shit from one room to one of the other two, leaving it still completely unorganized.

Sometime in the fall, the light fixture on the opposite side of my actual bedroom went out. Thus, with no windows in that room of the basement, it was completely in the dark. For a short while, I placed a lamp by the door, which shed perhaps twice as much light (at best) on things as when I found my way around the room using the glow of an open cell phone.

Then, one night, I broke the lamp.

For the entire spring semester, that bedroom has had no light in it. This used to be a major selling point of that space. On an off-day, with no light coming in, you could sleep in as late as you wanted, roll out of bed, and realized you just slept the entire afternoon away.

But my regular routine while in school every week was to fill up my now 10-year-old backpack with old assignments, various loads of printouts, and folded copies of the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Reader, etc.

Then on the weekend, after coming home from work on Saturday afternoon, I'd remove that week's papers, lump them on the floor, and forget about them.

During the break between the fall and spring semesters, I began collecting some to send out to the curb to be recycled. I ended up filling seven grocery bags.

In the preocess of cleaning sis' old room out for her arrival, I added to the sea of paper that more or less makes up our basement's floor. Deciding it was time to finally begin rediscovering what color the carpeting actually is, I went to that consumer-friendlier Wal-Mart (i.e. Target) and bought a couple of new (albeit, cheap) lamps.

One was simply a desk lamp and needed only to be plugged in. The other was a stand-alone that required a bit more effort. When finished, the base resembled the picture on top of the box. But the shade was tilted slightly to one side, despite my six attempts to screw it in straight. The finished product resembles something like a frosted martini glass with a very long black stem and the top of the bulb inside visible over the rim of the shade (gelato?).

When I turned the switch on that device, the room lit up like I hadn't seen it since probably last summer. And the scene was horrible. I looked back at my crooked lamp, and it now resembled something like a animated stick figure with it's head tilted to the side, as though it were disappointed with me.

I began aggressively clearing up the floor of the additional space outside the bedrooom this weekend with my Saturday off, and while gathering up my collection of Sun-Times from May, and April, and March (etc.), I thought I saw a black blur streak by out of the corner of my eye. I walked toward that part of the room, over by the additional bed and the entertainment center. I was holding a rolled up copy of one newspaper when out from under the bed scampered a tiny grey mouse. Its body couldn't have been any bigger than a golf ball. If this thing took a shit, it would be a speck.

It stopped at the corner of the CD racks and ran its paws over his face, either unaware or unconcerned that there was a 6'2'' human being now standing over it. I placed the newspaper on my bed and grabbed something with a much harded spine to smash the critter with. And so now I was armed with my journal.

But the mouse scurried underneath the CDs. I went to the opposite side and banged the side with the journal, sending the mouse back out the side from which he entered.

It stopped there in the open ... and again began running its paws over its face. I held my journal over my head and internally debated about which was the more effective way of striking a death blow: using the spine of the book would result in a more forceful, more direct strike; but using the entire back would increase the odds of actually scoring a hit.

But as I stood there, procrastinating and procrastinating again, the mouse turned and went back under the CDs. I went to meet it on the other side again, but it was already racing against the wall, toward a corner where a poorly-constructed area where the siding was curling up. The mouse paused in the corner for a second—as if to mock me—and then snuck into the little opening and disappeared to the other side.

I could have gone around to that area of the basement—our storage—but I just set the journal onto the bed, looked at my floor, and saw that the carpeting is beige. I resumed pick-up.

"I've got a new roommate," I told GIBS at the bar on Monday night.

She squinted, making the "W.T.F." face, and I explained.

"I'm going to call him Stuart," I said.

GIBS shook her head. She said she'd freak out anywhere she saw a mouse.

"But he's so small," I reasoned.

She rolled her eyes. But GIBS is right. So now I know what must be done.

I saw a mouse once before, when I first moved into the basement. My friend loaned me one of the industrial mouse traps that they used for his company's warehouse. They were big metal boxes, strange contraptions you wound up. I don't remember catching anything before I returned it to him, but I don't remember seeing a mouse again either.

Still, the last thing I need to happen is to be watching a movie on the bed in that extra room and to have the little critter racing out in the glow of the television screen, causing a girl to jump up and say:

a) "Kill that thing!"

b) "I'm outta' here!"

or

c) "I'm outta' here—and you oughta' kill that thing!"

So I've decided that following work on Thursday, I will walk over to the hardware store, purchase a number of the old-fashioned mouse traps, and leave Stuart's untimely demise to be the fault of its own curiosity. That, or its own hunger.