CJ Greco

Cold and exhausted, I had just arrived home from work, and the sky was ‘2:00 a.m.’ dark, but it was merely 5:17 p.m. I walked up the steps to unlock my street-level apartment. My hand shivering from the frigid wind - a stark contrast to the balmy 45 degrees the day before. As soon as the door unlocked, I rushed in. I quickly closed the door behind me to prevent my already-poorly-insulated one-bedroom-half-kitchen Ukrainian Village apartment from becoming even colder. As is the case for everyone upon returning home, my first stop was, of course, the bathroom.

“What the fuck?!” I screamed as I opened up the lid of the toilet bowl. My hands instinctively raised above my head in revulsion, and my eyes began to tear as I slowly backed up towards the wall. My mouth was agape as I looked on in disgust at what I discovered within my porcelain throne: a rat, about the size of my forearm, dead, likely drowned in the toilet after climbing through the pipes. Growing up in a tame subdivision in the western suburbs, I yearned for the day when I could live in the big city of Chicago, and for a time it was a really Hilary Duff experience, i.e. what dreams are made of. This, however, was no dream. Instead, it was something from a movie I’d be too scared to watch. I was frozen in horror, and a chill colder than the weather outside on this icy January evening ran down my spine.

What does one do in a situation like this? I had no clue what the correct course of action was, but I did the first thing I thought of: hands trembling with anxiety, I pulled out my phone and took a picture of it, texted everyone I could think of, and asked, “What the fuck am I supposed to do here?”

The flash of the camera made the sopping, brown, matted fur of the dead rodent in the toilet bowl glisten in a way that would change the way that I see wet fabric forever. My polled peers came to the consensus that I should contact my landlord, an idea that, in retrospect, most certainly should have come first before texting my closest friends and family a picture of a dead rat in a toilet. Next steps made clear through my council, I texted my landlord, a man who had owned many buildings on the same street for longer than I have been alive, and lived multiple states away, one that aligned more with his…political leanings.

He responded after an hour to a text that I started with “URGENT ISSUE” in all caps to imply the severity of needing this fucked up rat funeral handled. His response was wise; sage words that I am known to quote often: “Wow, that’s crazy”. This was then followed by another text that said, “Can you just flush it back down?” which was only the second-most insane thing I had seen that evening.

“Can I flush it back down?” I thought to myself, aloud in a rather sarcastic yet stunned tone. The mere thought of flushing this bloated rat carcass back down the toilet made me nearly vomit. Visualizing the rodent viscera in the porcelain bowl or, worse, a clogged, decaying corpse backing up the pipes, nearly caused me to faint. I texted my landlord back, “No…I don’t think I can do that.”

A moment later, my phone screen lit up; how kind that I did not need to wait another 60 minutes for an equally unhelpful response. “O.K. I will send someone in the next few days”. Good, no, for sure, that’s perfect. A fabulous example of landlords really taking care of their residents.

Unfortunately for me, I still needed to piss, and this dead rat wasn’t going anywhere. I took a chip clip to pinch my nose, and wrapped my hand in as many plastic bags as I had available; I closed my eyes and reached into the void that was the final resting place of an intruder in my home, a rat willing to die to escape the cold. I tried to imagine it was something less deranged than a drowned rat in a toilet bowl, like a fucked-up dog shit on the ground or what was left of my mental health after this ordeal. Even through the multiple layers of plastic bags, I could feel the rodent rigor mortis and hear the squelching of soaked fur; like a hero, I mustered on, if only to finally pee at peace.

I went to stay with a friend for a few days, afraid that there might be more unwanted guests in my home. I felt as if this experience tainted my expertise as a Chicagoan, like ketchup on a hotdog. About a month after what became known as “the rat incident”, the ceiling in the very same bathroom collapsed due to water damage. Bitter as a shot of Malört, I moved out the next week. I sought change, for a renting experience I thought could be better. Well, at least it couldn’t be worse.

And where I moved to just so happened to be in the lap of luxury. Not some slumlord’s three-flat in Ukrainian Village, but a full-on 24-unit apartment building run by a property management company in Rogers Park. This was certain to be an improvement, as I was confident an upstanding management company would be more responsive than a scummy landlord. And for the first few months, it truly was the paradise that was promised. Well, at least as much paradise as it could be without in-unit laundry.

Within the first three months of me moving into this new apartment, the veneer began to crack. It started with a singularity. A one-off, a blip. Well, a bug. A cockroach, alone, fleeing from its feast of crumbs on the counter, quickly and quietly quashed below my frazzled fingers.

True to form for an insect invasion, this was no singular incident. The next few days came with many more one-offs and blips. Climbing up the radiators, sneaking up the pipes and drains, and breeding deep in the dishwasher. I began to find them everywhere, in the bathroom, on the couch, in my cereal. After a week, I was overrun; on average, I was seeing more roaches in a day than people, more bugs than I had fingers and toes; in an afternoon, I saw more insects than one ever needed to see in a lifetime. I was living a nightmare, but there was a shining light: the property management company, sure to save me from this infestation in my home. Less than 24 hours later, there was a knock on my door that I hoped and prayed wasn't from a massive cockroach coming to claim my apartment for its bug empire. Instead, a true blue-overalled ‘merican hero arrived, a pest control specialist.

An hour of spraying some repellent, and then a return a couple of days later, and I was free and clear. No more roaches! A return to paradise. Eyes closed, a smile on my face, I was approaching a deep nap on my couch. All of a sudden, a crawling feeling on my skin. I opened my eyes and saw one. Another roach, this one creeping up my arm towards my face. I flailed my arms like an overstimulated Muppet, shaking this bug off of me, losing its location in the process. It was time to put in another pest control request. Again, they came rather quickly. The turnaround time from "bug-free" to "overrun" was only three weeks. And it is now evergoing and constant.

I am consistently cycling through “I’m drowning in insects” and “oh good, they’re gone”. The creepy-crawly feeling on my skin rarely goes away. Now I’ve seen enough cockroaches to coat my walls in their carapaces. But compared to a dead toilet rat, this place is still paradise.

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