Going Going Guano

One night, one summer-- I can't remember which year, they all ran together after a while-- The Suz and I were sweating our faces off at The Old Apartment. We might have been debating whether or not to go get ice cream, just to get a few moments of sweet relief in an air conditioned car.

We were mostly worried about why her cat, the Bub Man, was sitting on the back of the sofa mewling at the framed print of the London Underground map.

The sun was setting outside. It was too hot to move. Then, in the dimming light, it happened. A thing, with wings and a face, came crawling out from behind the map and proceeded to skitter across the wall.

I leapt to my feet. "Holy shit! It's a bat!" I said. I may have used a few other words to describe the bat, but I'm trying to keep things PG-13 around here as much as possible.

In crisis mode, we swept the cats down the hall into Suz's room. Then we came back out to the living room and stared stupidly at the tiny creature hanging on the wall.

It wasn't even our first bat. The first bat was in my apartment way back when I still lived down south. I called Suz at 1:00 in the morning, hyperventilating.

"You sure it's a bat?" she said.

"Yes! It has a face!"

She advised me to call animal control, which I did. Woke some poor sheriff's deputy from a sound sleep to come take the bat away in a garbage bag.

Previous experience with Boston Animal Control and the Police Department told us that was not an option. We'd gotten a bat in the apartment a few summers before, and were told we were on our own. Bats are a protected species in Massachusetts, so they're not allowed to kill them.

So from us to the wise folks at Boston Animal Control: have it your way.

We stared at the bat for a few more minutes, then it flew over to the window frame. When it unfurled its wings that little sucker was at least seven feet across.*

I dashed into my room and prepared for battle. I emerged wearing my winter coat-- did I mention this might have been the hottest night of the year?-- my Wellies and a fleece hat. This was overkill, yes, but in my defense, I do not want a live animal trapped in my hair, ever.

Gingerly, Suz removed the screen from the window and handed it to me. She had a towel in hand.

"Okay, so I'm going to flick it with this towel," she said. "Then maybe it will fly out the window. You-- are you listening to me?-- your job is to hold up the screen and keep it from flying down the hall. Can you do that? Manda? Can you do that?"

"Um... yes."

And so we proceeded with our daring plan. Suz flicked the towel toward the tiny creature and it proceed to unfurl itself to roughly the size of a pterodactyl. It flew around the living room and I collapsed to the floor, rolling myself into a ball under the protective layer of window screen.

You know the way girls scream in horror movies? I could totally get work in a horror movie featuring bats.

"Manda. Manda. Did you see where it went?"

"No." I'm out of breath now and crying a little.

"You had one job to do! One!"

So we didn't know where the bat went. We called E-Money, because he was still returning our calls in those days. We never played the "we're helpless girls" card with E-Money, because he wouldn't have bought it anyway. But that night-- after 9:00 and after it started to rain-- we played that card.

"It's a bat. And it's not turning into Christian Bale--" she told him. I was still unable to breathe.

Then we waited in the hallway, behind the protective window screen. It was our only defense.

Through the wall we could hear our next door neighbor practicing his trombone. That guy was always practicing his trombone.

"Manda, you were screaming bloody murder," Suz said.

"Yeah. I know. Let's not talk about it."

"No, but they're at home," she gestured toward the common wall. "They didn't call the cops or anything."

"Nice," I said.

The story ends with E-Money arriving about an hour later. He looked behind all the furniture and declared the apartment bat-free. We hoped the little bugger had flown out the window after all and went to our rooms for an uneasy night of sleep.

Three days later, Suz took the recycling bin to the market to return the endless tide of Coke cans for a small fortune in deposits.

And she found the bat. Dead. In the bottom of the bin.

That wasn't our last bat. The last bat turned up in February of the last winter we lived in The Old Apartment. Suz faced that one alone, and it was just as well. I'm pretty useless in these situations. I did get to call the building manager and yell at her about it, though, which was pretty satisfying.

For fifteen years Suz has saved me from bats, literal and metaphorical, of all shapes and sizes and kinds. She once told someone I'd saved her life a thousand times over, and she's done the same for me at least twice as many times. She's talked me down from the ledge and told me to go, to do, to be. I am who I am today largely because of her-- and someday I will make her pay for that.

Happy birthday, my friend. You're a wizard by any definition.


*This is speculative.