Bats!

• Posted on April 7, 2009 at 12:08 am

Do you want to see your family freak out? Let a bat loose in the house! They will lose their damn minds. I now know where the term “batshit crazy” comes from. Trust me, I have a lot of experience with bats in the house. My parents have a big, old, drafty house and we had bats on and off for years while I was growing up. The first time we got one, I was in third grade and already asleep in my room. My dad knocked on the door and was dressed in a makeshift beekeepers outfit. I shit you not, he was wearing a pith helmet with some sort of netting over it, big leather fireplace gloves, and he was carrying a broom. How in the hell he assembled this enchanting outfit so quickly is beyond me. He told me a bat had just flown into the living room and he was coming to check my room.

It was clean, so I went downstairs (blanket over head, God forbid it should fly in my hair) and what I found looked like a fucking crime scene. Furniture was overturned, our 1970’s-era afghans were strewn EVERYWHERE and my mom had locked herself in the bathroom. My brother was dressed similar to my father except he was carrying a baseball bat and fishing net. Of course, they had no clue how to catch a bat so they ran around for awhile aimlessly chasing after it. Remember the scene in “The Great Outdoors” with Chevy Chase and John Candy trying to catch the bat in their cabin? Yeah, it was pretty much like that. My mother and I waited terrified in the bathroom until they finally caught it. They came up with the brilliant idea to turn on all the lights in the house except for one room, which it naturally flew into. Then they caught it with a fishing net and took it outside. From there, the winged rodent met his maker.

The next time we got a bat was on Easter Sunday. My brother and I were going through our Easter baskets when it flew past my bedroom. My mom was getting ready for church and, once again, locked herself in the bathroom (I am seeing a pattern here). We trapped it in the guest bathroom which had a glass window in the door. We took turns shining a flashlight on the bat to make it fly back and forth until it was taken outside and (symbolically) murdered on Christ’s Resurrection Day. Happy Fucking Easter!

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  • Childhood Memories of the 80's