One God-Damn Hit?: The Bat-slayer!


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Monday, November 2, 2009

The Bat-slayer!




Manu Ginobili is more of a man than I am. And that was a sentence that fucking PAINED me to write. But I have to give props where props are due. Smacking a bat out of thin air with your bare hand and then PICKING UP the bat? Jesus you have to be crazy to do that. Those things have rabies, and AIDS, and herpes and everything else! You better hope that hand sanitizer fucking works miracles.

I've had two run-ins with bats in my lifetime. The first time occurred a few years after graduating from Tufts, living with a couple buddies in an apartment...I came home from work and was exhausted so I went to bed at like 8. At 9, two of my housemates came barging into my room screaming about a bat flying around downstairs. I told them to fuck off and tried to go back to sleep but they insisted that there actually was a bat so I begrudgingly got up and we started to walk downstairs, only to have the demon creature fly up the stairs directly at us. They bailed into the party room and I dove into my bedroom and slammed the door. After a few minutes of "Go check it out!" and "No, YOU go check it out!" we all ventured back out and headed downstairs. I armed myself with a frying pan and my housemates both had empty milk jugs (we didn't take the trash out much) and we went searching for the bat. Suddenly it came flying out of a bedroom and we all pretty much cowered in fear and screamed like girls as the bat flew up the stairs. Fuck! I decided that my best weapon would be the squash racket I had thanks to taking a squash class during college, and we set up shop at the base of the stairs. We hucked bottle caps up the stairwell to try and get the bastard to fly down and finally, here it came...my buddy took a swing then ducked and covered and then BAM! I nailed that fucker with an overhand smash. The bat slammed against the wall and then fell to the floor and we covered it with a cardboard box. We thought it was dead. It was not dead. Just as we were about to lift the box a fucking disgusting wing came shooting out the side of the box and we slammed that fucking box back down, slid another piece of cardboard underneath everything and then tossed it all out the window into the back yard. I'm telling you, it was fucking traumatic. The next day we went out to the back yard to check things out and there was no bat. Either it survived and flew away or some neighborhood cat ate it. Either way, it was fucking creepy.

About a year later I stumbled out of my morning shower, went past the low-hanging light bulb string, and my head bumped against something. I didn't think anything of it until I heard a little squeak. I turned around, and tangled in the light bulb string was another fucking bat. Apparently it was flying around all willy-nilly and got tangled up in the string. Keep in mind that it was 5am, I was freaked the fuck out. I had just bashed into that fucker with my head! So I ran upstairs in my towel, grabbed my bat-slaying squash racket, and smashed the fucking shit out of that bat. This time, I definitely killed the bat. One of its wings was completely ripped off and its lifeless body lay somewhere in the kitchen. I used an empty pizza box to clean up the carnage and threw everything in the trash barrels outside.

And that concludes my bat-slaying career. So far. I've got my squash racket ready just in case any of those fuckers try to fuck with me again.