Cobento HomeI Love Simple

I don’t mind raccoons that peek at me from the bushes. I don’t mind running across an occasional petrified raccoon on the side of the road. I will not lie – they are not on my list of favorite animals and if they were ever in danger of becoming extinct, I can’t say I would quit my job and join the cause. Safe to say that raccoons and I have a mutual understanding. They don’t come near me and I don’t run them over in my car. That mutual respect was broken, however, when Roger Raccoon took up residence in my attic.

I was young, single, and renting a house with three other girls. My room was the attic-turned-bedroom upstairs. I was at that vulnerable age where up until now my knowledge of fear was limited to campy horror movies and running out of beer money. I had no glimpse of the fears that I would face as an adult – taxes, gravity, and the inability to hold my bladder when I sneeze. I was encapsulated in this cocoon of ignorance until Roger Raccoon and his family moved into the crawl space adjacent to my attic bedroom. I know it was a family because they fought constantly and I could heard them washing dishes over the faint tune of Little House reruns.

There was no loud music to indicate a collegiate atmosphere. Had they been frat brothers, I would have seen the empty cans and pizza boxes. Looking back, I now know the source of the loud thump I heard in the attic that time that I was too chicken to check into it. I figured if it was a dead body it wouldn’t start stinking until next semester and I’d be gone. But, no, it was merely Roger moving the furniture. I wasn’t sure what the landlord had stored in that attic, but I swore I could hear the whoosh of an exercise bike during Leno.

It started with scratching. By “it” I mean the nightly noises that turned my warm cozy den into a chamber of terror. Little tiny scratches – I’m thinking hangman on the wall or perhaps a lively game of charades. I called the landlord, who unlike the real Lord, did not take my call. He obviously did not appreciate the gravity of the situation – that, or he knew that his contract covered him should I have a heart attack on the premises.

I soon learned that Roger and his family kept different hours than I did. When I turned off the light, they came to life. So I tried sleeping with the light on. That worked for a while until my head hit the pillow and they would start up again. So I tried sleeping sitting up like my Great Aunt Esther in the wingback on Thanksgiving. I give her credit, that’s harder than it looks.

I looked on the internet and found forty-seven-thousand articles on how to get a rid of a raccoon peacefully. For the record, none of them worked – especially tribal chanting, ostrich mating calls, and Conway Twitty’s greatest hits. I tried telling them about Amway. I even loaned them money because you never see somebody after you loan them money. I tried the one thing guaranteed to make most people run in the other direction – I asked them how they felt about Jesus. They slipped a tract under my door.

My friends thought it was funny. Tell the story, tell the story, they’d beg at parties. I got lots of laughs. Then the raccoons had a family reunion and invited their inbred cousins, the squirrels, who had so much fun they decided to move in and freeload and let their kids run through the walls at night screaming. Now it wasn’t so funny. I’d had enough.

I called the police. For future reference, the police aren’t interested in that raccoon unless he’s driving drunk. I called 911. They asked me to put my mother on the phone. I called pest control who said they aren’t allowed to kill them, but would be happy to come and take them to a sunny place and set them free. I suggested the police department. They said they would be there three weeks from Tuesday while I wondered if I would still be alive by then as I pictured my petrified body standing in Roger’s front doorway holding umbrellas and windbreakers.

I was wild-eyed and three steps to crazy by the time the pest control guy showed up and I kissed him, tobacco and all. He set two traps with a peanut butter sandwich and in five minutes Roger and his family had taken the bait. I know this, because pest control guy picked up his cell, dialed, and in his best John Wayne voice said, “Herb, get over here quick. We done caught us a coon.”

I have to admit that I was a little excited to meet Roger now that I knew he was moving. I couldn’t wait to pucker up and blow tiny kisses at his cute little fuzzy raccoon body. Roger turned out to be the size of a small dog. When pest control guy brought him down hissing and spitting and biting the rungs of the cage, well, let’s just say I knew I was off his Christmas party list. The second cage brought the wife and children who bore a striking resemblance to Roger. The neighbors had all gathered to watch the festivities and ask me questions. I felt like one of those people being interviewed after the neighbor gets arrested for serial killing. He was such a nice quiet man. Never gave us a minute’s trouble.

Roger is gone. I can only hope to a place where he can still paint and home school the children. The attic space never got new renters while I was there – apparently word got out about what happened to Roger and his family and the raccoons put us on some sort of “neighborhood profiling” list.

But you know what’s weird? Since then I’ve gone through three goldfish, four cats, a gerbil, a dog, and a chipmunk who never realized he was my pet. But somehow in the grand irony of things – Roger still runs free. I think he’s even got his own reality TV show now.