USOs

This morning I arrived early to Grand Central so I lolled around the entrance of the train track sipping on a coffee. The train was late coming into the terminal, as it is wont to do at the 7 am hour, so I chatted to another commuter about the unreliability/weird smell of MTA trains. Suddenly, my left eye lit onto something moving across the entrance of the track. It was a cross between a black furry crab, a really small cat, a rat with an Afro or a tarantula on steroids. I still don't know what it was, but one of the other commuters did catch an eyeful of this odd aberration and screamed, reeling back in horror. As she did so, other people involuntarily uttered shocked grunts of horror and they too recessed, following her lead. I looked at them and said, "What the hell was that?" Heads shook furiously. I still don't know what it was but we all saw it. I'm relived it wasn't a drug flashback (hence the need to seek validation from others).

There are lots of weird things like that in New York City. Yes, the water is great here for making bagels taste good but that same water has probably contributed to the mutations of weird things spotted in public places. Lots of things and people live here. It's a small island and we're all jostling for space and passage. It's just that you eventually cross paths with things you can't necessarily identify. I refer to them as USOs--Unidentifiable Scurrying Objects.

The first time I experienced this was with my brother, Marv. He was visiting from California on one of his first trips to New York. As we stood on a subway platform he looked with disgust at all the debris littering the subway tracks. Suddenly he blurted out, "Jesus Christ. There's a piece of shit on the tracks!" I came up and looked at it. "Yeah," I said, "but that piece of shit is walking." And it was. We watched it as it ambled down the tracks and into the tunnel. Hairless, headless rat? Nuclear roach? To this day, I have no clue.

You do catch these things out of the corner or your eye. The odd movement. The sensation of something running to escape you. The notion that they are as afraid of you as you are afraid of them is somewhat a comfort. By the same token, it would be nice to have a visual biological identifier to ease comfort with the USO you are sharing space with. If I can clearly identify that you are a rodent, we're cool.

I think the most difficult aspect are when USOs scurry past you in your home and hide under some low piece of furniture that you can't access. I don't know about you, but I will wait for them to come out. Like the oft repeated mantra about Bin Laden, "I will smoke him out of his hole." That's my position on the USO. Entice with food. Sit silently. Patience. Show yourself mutant enemy so that I may capture and flush you down my airplane super flush worthy toilet. It's an ordeal, yes, but without closure, I simply can not sleep. So I wait.

When I lived in New Jersey, my cat Bunny used to drag all manner of critters into the house. Usually we could salvage the life of the victim clenched in her cat mouth which she presented to us as part of cat-proving-worthiness-exercise. One day she brought in something that looked like a furry hockey puck. When she put this oddity down, it suddenly rose up on a spiral of arachnid legs and scurried crab-like under my dining room buffet. I said out loud and to no one in particular, "What the FUCK is that?!" Oh Jesus, that had to leave my house. But how? I opened the doors to the deck and waited. Eventually, it started to languidly wander towards the light and then I pressed a glass bowl over this curious thing. Angered by the trap, this creature flung itself against the glass bowl violently. I had to put a brick on top of the bowl to secure it. OK, scared shitless now. What do I do?

At that very moment my lawn guy Paul showed up riding his reliable John Deere. Seeing him, I flagged him furiously for assistance. He came up to the house, observed the violent USO and offered to take it out to the woods and set it free--preferably very FAR from the house. As he did, he grimaced with horror then shuddered visibly as he shook the furry hockey puck from the bowl into the woods. Good to know these things freak everyone out. On later inquiries, he had no idea what that creature was.

So I think you get the idea..which is good, because I don't even want to tell you about the albino raccoon I saw in Connecticut yesterday.