Once upon a time, the time being about 1992, I was living in a crappy rez hotel on Mission Street. The building had roaches and drunks and addicts, and residents struggling up from the street, or toppling down again — all the same amenities offered at every rez hotel.
It also had mice, lots and lots of them. Walk down the hall to take a dump, and you’d see a mouse scurry and hide behind the baseboards. Climbing the stairs, watch your step, a mouse could dart out along the way. A couple of times I found a dead mouse in the shower, and a couple of times live ones. It was a rez hotel.
The little indignities soon became part of the background, same as crabgrass in suburbia. Sometimes I’d feel something walking over my legs when I was asleep, and think it was the cat… before remembering I didn’t have a cat. Or I’d want to make a sandwich, but find holes in the plastic, and the bread partially chewed. Or pick up my jacket off the floor, and see a lump of furry life leap from the hoodie. Mouse turds on the floor. Gnawings on an album cover. Out of habit, I shook my shoes before putting my tootsies inside.
Eventually, the mice exhausted and defeated me. I packed a few bags and walked from Mr Patel’s rez hotel to a different rez hotel two blocks away, run by a different Mr Patel, where I’d been assured there were roaches but no mice. The new Mr Patel even let me walk around inside his hotel’s common areas for a few minutes, and I didn’t see any mice or droppings.
A mouse joust, a few nights earlier, was what motivated me to ask.
I’d been watching TV, flipping through the rabbit-ear channels, because San Francisco has more channels than anyplace else I’d lived. Star Trek dubbed in Spanish was on channel 48 or channel 66 or channel 99, and then I heard a rumbling and rattling from behind me.
Eh, what’s that? I turned the telly off, the better to hear and pinpoint the sound. It was coming from deep inside my oversize garbage can. I peered over the edge and saw a mouse with its head inside a peanut butter jar that I’d been using as a roach trap. The rodent wasn’t huge — about thumb-size, or double-thumb if you include the tail.
Then the mouse noticed me, came out of the jar, and for a second we simply stared at each other. When it figured out what I was, it frantically tried climbing the side of the trash bin, and would’ve been successful, I think, if I’d used garbage bags — it could’ve sunk its claws into the soft plastic and made its escape. I was cheap, though, and didn’t use garbags, so there was only the bin’s walls, made of a hard, ungrippable plastic.
The mouse tried scratching at the plastic. Then it climbed on top of the garbage already in the bin, hoping to leap out, but there wasn’t enough trash for it to get much altitude, because I’d emptied the bin the day before.
As I watched that slimy stinking feral food-stealing and just generally disgusting little hairy parasite in a panic, I must’ve misplaced my sanity. I was in a primitive place. The mice had been invading my turf, eating my food, shitting on my clothes, and interrupting my sleep and now interrupting my Star Trek in Spanish. I was suddenly in no mood to pretend at being evolved.
You and me, ya ugly effin’ bubonic plague-carrying’ bread-eating dropping-dropping little monster.
If it had been a roach, I had a spray for that — one shot, and then I’d go back to Capitán Kirk and Señor Spock. I had a spray for aggressive bums, too, but nobody sells a spray for killing mice. This was going to be a physical confrontation.
I didn’t fancy going mano a mouso, so I‘d need a weapon. How could I kill a mouse? I had a couple of steak knives, but that would’ve involved me bending over, inside the trash can, and I probably would’ve stabbed myself, and the mouse would just jump on my back and climb up my shirt to freedom.
The trash bin was nearly empty and it had a lid; I could’ve sealed it shut, lifted it and shaken the mouse to death. But even in my most savage mindset, that seemed unsportsmanlike, and also, it was a big trash bin. Aggressively shaking it might wrench my back.
I saw my broom in the corner, and thought, Yeah, that’ll work. I grabbed it, bristles up, handle down, leaned over the trash can, and started stabbing at the mouse with my broomstick, at the bottom of the barrel. It was like swatting at a fly — the mouse could see the broomstick coming, and would pirouette out of the way, every time.
After twenty hard-pounding stabs with the broom, all I’d hit was trash and the plastic at the bottom of the bin, so I reached for a can of cooking spray — generic PAM. When the mouse emerged from behind an empty box of Eggos, I misted it lightly, but enough that it was disoriented, and squealed.
A few more jabs hitting nothing but the hard plastic of the bin’s base, and then came a jab that felt like I’d hit something firm, but giving. Like meat. There was also a crunching sound, and a surprisingly loud howl.
The enemy was mortally wounded, and my next several jabs were fueled both by hatred and by mercy. I wanted it dead, dead, dead, but as quickly as possible. More meat was bludgeoned, with progressively less howling and shrieking.
That was my only direct battle with a mouse, but I’d been using traps and poison and disposing of the dead ones, so I’d already lost any squeamishness about handling their grisly cadavers.
As I pulled it out of the trash by its tail, smacking its head against the side of the trash bin a few times to make double sure it was dead, I pondered — do animals have rights? Did I have a right to do what I’d done?
On principle, then and now, I say cruelty toward animals is to be avoided. I oppose bludgeoning mice to death with broomsticks. But I’d briefly lost touch with such sophisticated thoughts. It had been a few damned ugly minutes.
To top it off, I went into the building’s shared hallway, and clicked off the lights to let the fixture cool down. A few minutes later I returned with my only chair, stood on it to reach up and loosen the fixture, and hung the dead mouse from the light by its tail. To be clear, this wasn’t punishment for the mouse; the mouse was already dead. This was a memo to the landlord.
Then I washed my hands, and went back to Star Trek in Spanish. When I came home from work the next day, the dead mouse was still dangling overhead in the hallway. By the second day, someone had cut it down, apparently with a pair of scissors, leaving an inch of mouse-tail cooking under the heat of the bulb.
Am I a better man now than thirty years ago, when this happened? Hope I’m a better aim. There must be more human methods of demousifying one’s living space, but I still believe it’s better to kill a mouse in your bedroom than to have a mouse in your bedroom.
If I was again surrounded by mice, every damned day and night in my own home, my veneer of civilization would vanish once more. The only thing I’d do different is, I wouldn’t hang a dead mouse from the nearest light fixture. It was cool as ‘art’, and Mr Patel never said anything about it, but the light was only a few feet outside my door, so I must’ve been the prime suspect. If I had to do it all again, I’d take the dead mouse and hammer it to the hotel’s front desk door.
11/11/2021
Republished 4/17/2025
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