The Legend of the Mouse is Still Hardcore!

Recently eaten: chili cheeseburger
Recent annoyance: vermin of all kinds

The tenants of 2903 still buzzed from time to time about the Great Mouse Hunt of '05. In the grand tradition of the buffalo hunt of the Great Plains and the Hunt for Red October, they had prevailed over a gruesome, terrifying mouse-beast of epic proportions and of legendary strength. It's manifest destiny over their kitchen had come crashing to a bloody halt amidst the hair-raising schoolgirls squeals of the 2903 denizens.

Time has not dulled the memory, but a new challenger has arisen from its ashes. A new challenger to the Thunderdome. Tina Turner has got nothing on these private dancers of pain.

It all began again with a dinnertime mooning. The flash of a mousey derriere diving into the infernal depths of our gas range; this tiny rodent Whitey Bulger was on the lam. No sir, he wasn't going down like Cadillac Frank Salemme.

I screamed like Randy lighting a Hanukkah candle. The second Crusade had begun. Bring it, Mouse. The contact lenses are coming out and the Tupperware is getting oiled up real good. I've got rodent intifada fever and the only cure is more vermin jihad!



An oldie but a goodie...The Legend of the Mouse is Way Hardcore! (March 2005)

The tension in the air was palpable when Lisa heard the first faint rustlings of something in the kitchen. It rattled and stopped, rattled and stopped. Perhaps DP was back to install more tiny fiberoptic cameras in the walls; all the better for observing gentleman callers and the lack of glue traps under the oven. No, this was not the sound of perversion, it was the sound of desperation. Lisa could almost hear the heavy breathing, the tiny mouse heartbeat thumping against a tiny mouse ribcage. Egad! It was the mouse. What could be done? Certainly it wasn't dead and it didn't seem like there was any hope of it dying anytime soon. She crept out of bed, hoping that the dying, pain-blinded rodent hadn't tried to drag it's death trap upstairs. Julie would know what to do.

Julie thought to herself, maybe we could call Dan. He could crush the tiny intruder with one stomp of his giant foot. No wait, there was a man in the house already! CW. We would find out soon enough that this stood for Clearly Wussy. Lisa and Julie listened one more time to the death throes of the unlucky vermin and decided to go upstairs for more back up.

"Emily." Lisa whispered to the closed door. By this time, Phoebe wasn't sure what was going on. She thought, if it's a robber, I'll need something sharp to jab in his face. Phoebe always thought in practical, if not gruesome, terms. She opened the door and there stood Lisa, Julie, and Emily wringing their hands.

"It's the mouse. We can hear it in the trap." Great hammer of Thor, what could they do? A house of pertrified, grossed-out, rodent-phobic women, and not one man-for-hire in a 5 block radius. Phoebe wasn't sure it was the mouse. She hoped it was a hardened criminal. At least there would be rules, at least she could fashion a shank out of a toothbrush handle. But mice, they don't fight fair. They invade your home while you are sleeping, crap all over the house and then eat all your food. It was a diabolical plan evil enough for Phoebe's liking, for surely she would have done the same to a hated enemy. But this mouse terrorized them in a deep and profound way that no stealth pooper could. Maybe he had Hanta virus. Maybe he was a friend of the glue trap victim, either way he was fighting for his little worthless mouse life and he would bite their faces to survive if he had to. Lisa slathered vaseline on her cheeks in preparation for battle.

At that point, Jen woke up from the commotion. Mice were not uncommon, but this mouse was clearly a govenrment experiment. How many traps could this thing withstand before it hulked out and cut them with a broken wine bottle? It had managed to drag two traps with it to the pocket door of the kitchen. Good god, it had mustered a supermouse strength that even Bob would be jealous of. Clearly, impact base multiplication would be no match for this Uber-Mouse.

All five tenants made their way down the stairs in darkness, shrieking at every rattle of the trapped mouse. Phoebe, using her long, creepy, finger-like toes, swung herself onto the couch and flipped on the light. Handicapped by her legal blindeness she saw a black blur on the floor move and crash against the wall. they all screamed. They screamed like girls, hands clutched to their open mouths and they stared at two traps, banging up against the pocket door.

For the next 5 minutes they continued to shriek and shrink from the noise, the utter nastiness of a dirty mouse that had been touching their fancy snacks, dragging his scaly table across their plates.

Finally, they snapped out of their disgust. Something had to be done. Jen made the first move, poking at the traps keeping the mouse captive in between the doors. He seemed to have almost wiggled his way out of those yawning jaws of death. They weren't sure, it could have been his arm, or maybe it was his tail stuck in the trap. Either way it wasn't going to take long to weasel his way out, or worse, gnaw off a little paw at the tiny elbow to reach the promised land. As Joe noted later on, this mouse was the Mel Gibson of mice. He was a hero among rodents who surmounted impossible odds and was being tortured in the vise-like grip of the traps.

No luck from the umbrella assault. The mouse continued to wriggle and writhe in the pockets doors. The girls thought again. Surely there was some way of trapping it. They weren't going to let him get away now. They picked up a tupperware. Perhaps the most fantastic plastic invention ever to arise from the 20th century. But this was no tupperware party. There would be no kitchenware purchases today. No, it was the mouse or them.

Julie gathered her courage and they tried again to drag the mouse out by his long, gray tail. I say gray, although the author cannot be sure of anything she saw considering Ray Charles would sooner win and archery contest against her.

In a last ditch attempt to incapacitate the Uber-Mouse they sprayed it with Lysol. Burning it's eyes and nose and skin it writhed furiously. Ick, they thought...ick, indeed.

Again, the Braveheart mouse hung on to the floor for dear life. As though she had drunk that godly potion of ambrosia, Julie gathered her supernatural strength and tossed the bucket on the unfortunate mouse, trapping his head on side and his body on the other.

Good god. It was the storming of the Bastille, the guillotines ahd been set and this mouse was not going to have any more cake and eat it too. Surely they couldn't leave it under it's own plastic case of emotion. So Jen was going to do this: she shifted her weight onto the tupperware hoping to drag its body from behind the wall. In that instance, it let out an utterly desperate cry, a last death squeal: "FREEDOM!" he cried.

They could not stand it. Phoebe's homicidal tendencies got the best of her and she repeated over and over, "We're going to have to kill it, We're going to have to kill it." But she could not stand another pathetic cry from the mouse so she called on her banshee roommates to cry the beloved country! And they sang like harpies in the night. Yelling piercing shrieks and squeals of murderous rage. Phoebe beat down furiously over the tupperware with the broom. Her executiioner's hatchet. One. Two. Three. At least 8 times she beat on that drum, tolling the last of the mouse.

They were almost too afraid to look. Jen peaked at it. Head askew, neck broken, it lay with tiny bits of mouse blood and brains on their newly washed floor.

It was over now. They breathed a sigh of relief and then disgust set in. How were they to dispose of such a grisly crime scene? Phoebe's blindness saved her but she was too grossed out to touch the tupperware. Emily jumped in and they prepared the cover up. Phoebe clutched a wet paper towel, a funeral shroud, for the broken body. Emily removed the plastic tomb and the white shroud was laid on. Jen and Julie swept the lifeless mouse onto the snow shovel and in a cruel twist of fate, were attacked by his larger, meaner, uglier cousin gutterside: the city rat.

But it was finally over. 2903 had won. Heads swimming with adrenaline and the rush of their first kill, the women filed back upstairs. Not sleeping soundly as they had hoped, but nervously watching for any signs that the mouse martyr had incited a rodent insurrection in the house. No matter now. In your face DP.