Mice

In the last few weeks, as the weather has grown colder and the days shorter, tiny evil mice have been plotting their revenge. While I have been here in New York City, trying to be a successful actor, by wife has been in Nebraska, being inundated by what can only be described as a horde born straight from the mouth of hell - mice. At current count, the death toll stands at 9 with no sign of slowing down. I, of course will be heading back to Lincoln for Thanksgiving, and perhaps a little longer, and am already in the planning stages of amassing some sort of defensive stand against these bastards of the animal world.

If pigeons are rats with wings, mice are rats with cherub faces and the smell of baby powder. You see, as I begin my attack I am not only fighting against the evil that is the mouse underworld, but I also have to battle the weak heart of my wife Laura who would like nothing more than to adopt each mouse that enters our abode, and keep them for ever after as a pet. As if that weren't enough already, it turns out that one of our dogs has apparently taken to watching the little bastards run back and forth - from under the desk to under the stove and back - with great entertainment. It turns out that even though they have dug a hole into the loaf of bread and made a tiny hovel bed out of whole wheat, they are just so fucking cute, that we should let them run free, to crawl over our faces in the night, shit in our silverware drawer and possibly eat our damned faces off!

I can't help but think this is punishment of some sort of wrong I have done to the mouse world as a whole, some kind of karmic righting or sorts. "But Nate," you ask "what have you done to mice?" Well, its not that simple you see. Just as Cubs fans have paid generations of post season pain for the goat hating actions of one man, I, it seems am also guilty by association. You see, my father could widely be considered the A number 1 offender to mice everywhere. What Babe Ruth was to baseballs, what Ray Robinson was to Jake LaMotta, what George W. Bush is to peace, my father has been to the world of mice.

Now, I know you probably doubt that Tom Lange has been that prolific in the killing of mice, but do you know the whole story? Are you aware that, unhappy with the classic bait of cheese on a mouse trap, my dad came up with the combined use of peanut butter mashed together with cotton, the use of which makes it virtually impossible for the mouse to pull the bait off the trap with out setting off the trap? And if the mouse accomplishes this seemingly death defying feat, what awaits him after he attempts to eat the peanut butter soaked cotton, but a death of suffocation and choking due to the indigestible "pot-heads nightmare" as it is also known. (I have actually looked in on a trap that was set off to find a mouse dead by asphyxiation.) Trust me the man has given me lectures on the evil of a mouse in the house from a young age, and they are still a vivid memory.

I remember the first mouse I killed in front of my dad. We were in the kitchen of the house I grew up in when a mouse ran across the floor from under the sink to under the movable dishwasher that was currently near the stove. Mom screamed and dad immediately went into combat mode, yelling at all of us to get into position, "the little bastard doesn't have anywhere to go, he has to come back out!" So we grabbed the nearest shoes or pans or newspaper and when dad moved the dish washer, the mouse came running straight at me, then zigged toward my parents bedroom door, that was right off the kitchen. Without really thinking about it, I slammed the shoe down at the mouse and struck it clean on the head, well the nose really. Which only managed to make it flop around in a pretty freakish way before I could gather my senses and hit it even more square, killing it with my Pony high tops.

Years later, as the weather became colder once again, the little devil cherubs started to invade again, this time bringing with them the most conniving mouse know to man. I'm not sure of everything that mouse put my dad through, and frankly I'm afraid to ask him all the details; I do know this, after battling with that one mouse for over a month, upon killing it my dad had this look in his eye of accomplishment. This accomplishment wasn't just bread out of the death of one mouse, but it seemed the feeling that the world of mice had thrown their best at my dad, and he - being the nobler species - had destroyed that mouse, and with it any mouses hope on living long term in the Lange household. The mice, it seems did not share this sentiment.

Years later, after Laura and I had moved into a house apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska, the weather once again started to change, and once again, the mice decided to train their cross hairs on the Lange house, not the Tom Lange house, but the house of his eldest son, Nathan Lange. It started with the bread: a loaf would have a hole chewed into it, then a box of rice or some papers on the kitchen counter. Later we would find mouse turds in the silverware drawer and that was as far as it would last. Of course my animal loving wife wanted to try live traps so we did, much to the extreme dismay of my father. There was a late night conversation in which I was told that no matter how far I took the mouse to release it, it would find my house again and would have no problem settling right back in. Now more due to the live traps not really working than my belief in the mouse's innate ability to seek and destroy my particular life, I switched to death traps.

I decided to go with traps that had a cover over the actual "kill zone" because I surmised that Laura would not have to actually see the dead mice that way and I didn't want our dogs getting at the mouse trap food. For weeks I used the old peanut butter and cotton bait to no avail; the mice were just not taking the bait. After a little deliberation I decided to use a piece of "Bacon Strips" dog treat as well as the pb and cotton mix in hopes that the smell would be irresistible to the mice, and boy was I right. In the first few hours I had caught two mice and was feeling pretty happy about the situation. After a few days no mice had showed up and I thought that I had actually done away with all of them, until I saw one scoot across the floor as I walked to the bathroom early on morning. Seeing him run behind the TV stand, I immediately placed a trap in his run path, careful to put it far enough back so the dogs would not accidentally set off the trap, and left for class.

When I arrived home that afternoon, I was in dire need of a nap before I went to rehearsal that night so I immediately dropped my bag at the door and basically crashed on the love seat in our living room. The nap was wonderful, the dogs laid by my side and when I woke up an hour later I felt refreshed and ready for rehearsal. I got up off the couch and went into the bathroom to splash some water on my face and get ready to leave but as I looked in the mirror I noticed some small drops of blood on the shoulder of my t-shirt. Feeling worried about where it came from I immediately took my shirt off and began to search my neck, back and arms for the source of the wound. Having found no cut I thought possibly one of the dogs had hurt themselves and bled on me while we slept, so I turned back toward the living room to take a look at them.

That's when everything went into slow motion.

Still holding the t-shirt, I turned toward the living room and noticed something small and grey on the love seat where I had just napped. In reality it probably took nano seconds for the whole scene to play out, but in my memory it was eons of pain and confusion. My eyes focused in on the object on the love seat and that is when I realized I had just napped for an hour with my two pug dogs, and A FUCKING DEAD MOUSE! My immediate reaction was that of a ten year old Girl Scout, I screamed like a sissy and threw my t-shirt in the direction of the dead mouse while at the same time diving backward into the bathtub. I turned on the shower, still screaming, and began to scrub my whole body in a feeble attempt to remove whatever form of rabies/bubonic plague the bastard had given me. There were tears. There were so many tears. Needless to say, it was not one of my proudest moments. It was a scene not unlike when Ace Venture realized he had made out with a Plum Smuggler.

When I finally got my shit together and cleaned myself up I went back into the living room to see how the hell this all was possible. It turns out that while my bait for the traps was incredibly effective in capturing mice, it was also incredibly effective in luring puppy dogs to scratch and dig at the trap so as to procure the tasty treat for themselves. My dogs had actually opened the trap, eaten the treat and then, as if to "hide the evidence" buried the damn mouse in the blanket covering the love seat so no one would find out. I not being privy to this information, proceeded to cuddle up with the deceased and take a nice nappy poo.

My fucking luck.