BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I once lived in a little white house near downtown Bakersfield in the Oleander area. A rental, it wasn’t a fancy house. Probably built in the 1950s, it was still comfortable, had three rooms, and was just down the street from quaint homes built in the 1920s. Yet like some forgotten pagoda on a no-name Osaka hill, its cobwebs held secret voices and its cracks harbored spirit warriors.

There’s a design studio next door owned by Mike Willis. He was also my landlord. He once walked into a store in a flamboyant voice, and while making a return, tried to convince a couple that the rolling pin they were buying was a sort of fancy walking stick. I don’t know how he stayed in character.

In the middle of a recent funeral he was staring at this guy George who was wearing a tight suit. I was staring at George too because George’s head was bulging out of the suit like some kind of jumbo mango. Suddenly Mike whispered, “Look at the size of George’s head. Is that normal? Is it growing?” We were both elbowed.

Mike used to live in the house years ago. He loved the house. He raised one of his kids there. And he wasn’t a bad landlord. I once tipped him a dollar for being an exceptional slum king. I even wrote that on the check.

Note to tenants: Tip your landlord. Try it!

Recently when I passed by the house to help a friend move, there was this little kid, probably six years old. He danced around outside in his tighty whiteys. The kid was obviously possessed by the spirits of the house.

You ever see one of those old Japanese movies? I imagine this house was like some old pagoda where warriors once trained. If they even trained in pagodas. Maybe they trained in chain store gymnasiums. Either way, they were masters of their art. After a thousand years they would transform into withered hulks. Their voices, a mere rustling of leaves cracking paper-thin syllables. Yet they would still be formidable from the shadows.

And they could possess that little kid with ease and laugh while he danced outside—a marzipan grin on his face, a pencil torso, and wearing stupid superhero undies.

I instantly felt for that demon possessed kid. Stick legs. Dancing skeleton. Goofy grin. I hoped to the great Sun Temple in the sky that he would man up somehow and confront the spirits of the house.

I mean, why not? I did.

Although I admit it took some time for me to confront those spirits.

I remember when I lived in that same house with my boys. At first I thought I was seeing things. Shadows danced in the kitchen. “Did you see that?” I said to my kid, Landen.

“You’re on drugs, dad,” he said. He and his band, Dirty Spanglish practiced pop punk in the living room right next to me as I worked. I wore headphones that didn’t block any of the sound. It was pre-punk shui.

Lando saves the world through rock. Was he the pied piper who brought the spirits into the house?

They could never hear me as they struck chords and I yelled back, “It looked sort of like a black blobby thing!” They sang and rocked and drank Coca Cola.

I wasn’t on drugs and I saw something again. These were ancient spirits. Not even in human form. This time I saw a tail as the blob darted around the fridge.

While most people would have moved out right away, I wasn’t going down without a fight. I was only paying $700 for rent and I could walk to work. Granted the street was falling apart by the minute with drug addicts, shootings, stalkers, bomb explosions and a mythical Lords of Bakersfield home. I was happy.

I informed my handy dandy comedian landlord of my problem with the rat spirit. “I have just the thing,” he said. He brought over a handful of mouse traps and a metallic cage that resembled a futuristic coffin. If you stood it up on end it kind of looked like a tower on Coruscant in Star Wars. “The rats will go inside and they will get zapped,” he said. “You won’t even have to touch them.”

That’s definitely sort of a Sith move, I thought.

Next to the fridge there was enough space for the zapper. I tossed some bread into it and waited like the dark lord at a hair salon. It’s your turn when it’s your turn, you know?

Have you ever heard something chewing in the dark? You go to the kitchen for some water and you hear it. You flip on a light and there’s a rat looking like Ratatouille caught with the gourmet discount special wheat bread in its mouth. Suddenly the beast is running for its life, breadcrumbs fly and its doing backflips across the cheap kitchen linoleum.

I don’t even know what I thought a broom might have done had I connected with the beast. Probably would have snapped the cheap metal broom in half had I did. But I grabbed one. I swung away with my best moves from the two episodes of Power Rangers I’d once seen with my boys before banishing them from it 10 years before. Dumb move on my part.

Checkbox. Parent re-do: If having the chance to do it over, allow kids to watch all karate and samurai films and TV shows. Watch along with them. Now that Jordan boxes, I’m thinking I also missed a chance to help him get way ahead.

So yeah, that’s when I found out I was battling no ordinary rodent or Ratatouille bread-stealing soup-making fuzzball. This was a samurai rat.

It had evasive skills to avoid slow-moving brooms and skirted the rat zapper as if it could sense possible electrical currents before connections were even made. Sort of Matrix-like predictions.

Hand-to-hand combat with a samurai rat is not unlike the Battle of the Gargantuas, or Godzilla taking on all of Monster Island. It’s a ruthless fight to the death. Fire is breathed. Tokyo gets crushed. A hero is born. It’s a real deal scenario with a moral: A man defending his home insists a rat can’t take his castle.

I’d had it with the zapper. After two weeks the bread inside was moldy anyway. So I busted out the mousetraps and peered into the refrigerator for some kind of potion to swab on the death machinery.

Most people don’t know that expired white cake frosting is a samurai rat delicacy. In ancient Japan the samurai rats have their mistresses lather up their entire bodies with the stuff. It’s slowly slurped off in some kind of erotic B-movie rat-licking style. I never really read the whole lyric sheet on it. But I was humming the song that day.

I was probably watching something important like Star Wars when I first heard the trap go off. Imagine my discontent to have Luke’s whining about Yoda’s aphrodisiac soup interrupted by an empty trap. The rat stealing the potion.

This went on for weeks. Chewing in the darkness. Scurrying across linoleum. Flying shoes. Whipping brooms. Snapping traps. Samurai taunts. Me and my boys were spooked like we were going to be next loaf of half-eaten bread. Then more chewing in the darkness and me dancing like that kid I’d later see outdoors with his ridiculous grin and legs kicking from hidden strings—yappity yap yap tadaaa!—and hands limp in the air in frustration at the end of each tighty-whitey show.

Finally I said, “Screw it!” I pulled out the big kahuna spoon and lathered that bad boy trap up like I was the concubine greasing up that hairy mutha sucka at a Kyoto discount sewer spa. The trap was set. It looked like the top of an iced coffee. If anything, I would catch the warrior by its forked tongue.

The obvious problem in this portion of the story is a mouse trap is not a rat trap. I know this. Rat traps can catch small children. Mouse traps are good for floating into fishbowls as goldfish landmines. In fact, a mouse trap can’t even fit over the head of a rat now that I think about it.

In many movies about a near-dead hero there’s sort of a redemptive battle scene. It’s do or die, fought without an audience, in the film at least, and marks the end of a solitary journey for justice, peace and harmony.

I was home alone. The mouse trap snapped. This time Chewie was interrupted while snapping C3PO together like giant LEGOs. He was half finished. And I was caught off guard—only half ready for battle. This is the slow motion part—true Japanese monster movie. I turned my head toward the sound and words formed but didn’t fit the movement of my lips.

Although I’d like to say I was in business casual I was probably in my boxers. I can’t remember. What I do remember was rushing to the kitchen to find an empty trap, blood on the kitchen floor and a big fat hairy rat looking like he was momentarily stunned after seeing Minnie Mouse with her skirt hiked. She’d clubbed him with her high heels.

This was the moment of decision because the rat with his beat-up face clearly wasn’t dead. What could I do? I was scared of the rat. It had stars floating around its fat head. Once its eyes came into focus wouldn’t that mean my throat? After all, he was the professional. I’d just finally found his sweet weakness. It had been written on the scrolls. Strange, he had a beard that looked like white frosting. It was him or me. For all I knew it thought I was a big can of frosting it could chew through to a creamy center.

So I did what anyone who is too afraid to grab a knife would do. I grabbed the broom and like some kind of dark Emperor Palpatine on an Order 66 mission over the rebel samurai rat kingdom, I put the beast to its bitter end. You know the scene with Mace Windu getting fried? That was me. I transformed. My eyes went red with madness. Forget my kids, the landlord, the zapper, the insanity of having to deal with my own pests, my own conscience, my own cleansing.

I dropped the broom down over its throat and choked the entire family tree out of its frosting-obsessed body.

Its eyes bulged. My eyes bulged.

I weakened. This was taking too long. But then the impossible happened. The rat kicked its left leg out in one last dramatic hurrah.

My chest heaved with brutal fury. Would I one day be known as a samurai warrior for having conquered the ancients?

A week later my son Jordan fulfilled his own personal journey into the land of the samurai by finishing off a second rat. Battle weary, I had tagged out. Jordan stepped in with the broom in a carbon copy of my own personal war: bloody rat head, dazed like it shot up morphine with the neighbor Chihuahua and just returned home for a beer. It didn’t give up easy and it was an honorable death, a valiant fight for rights over the kitchen’s heavy supply of Top Ramen.

I now think back to that dancing tighty-whitey kid. That boy, so humiliated by the samurai rat spirits in his gleeful string-pulled skippity do, is just a pawn in a larger game that includes rabbits, squirrels and ninja cats. It is with great honor that I commit their spirits to the wisdom of the people of TheNervousBreakdown. Whether I’m a hero or a killer, I know I’m part of some modern day twisted Rashomon tale. But I will never forget what one day will become the ancient story of the samurai rat.
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N.L. BELARDES is a journalist, blogger and videographer. He writes several media blogs, including Noveltown’s Paperback Writer and Nick 2.0 (Formerly on ABC23). His work has appeared on the homepage of CNN.com and other news sites all over America. You can purchase Lords: Part One, which describes the infamous Lords of Bakersfield. They still creep the city long after they and a 1977 Central California dust storm ravaged the area. N.L. welcomes humorous notes and news tips to his MySpace or Twitter.

Tags: ancient sumaria, cartoon mice, Disneyland nightmare, Japanese horror films, mickey mouse, minnie mouse, rat stories, samurai tales, secret of Nimh, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, war movies

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 9:41 am and is filed under Death, Family, History, Humor, Nightmares, Pets & Animals, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.