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By Root 934 0

o’clock at night, swinging at it like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs while my cat, Gully, sedately sat by and monitored the situation, interested in seeing how this would turn out. Once the mouse was suitably flattened (not something I enjoyed doing, but glue traps seemed more sadistic and the snap of mousetraps too guillotine), I, sweat drenched on this summer night by the sudden exercise, gave Gully a silent look of reproach for falling down on the job as a mouser. I may have actually voiced something like this aloud, since a person who lives alone with a pet is prone to carrying on one-sided conversations. As I prepared to sweep the dead mouse into a dustpan, Gully trotted over to the radiator, reached behind it with her paw, and scooped out a decomposed mouse body that had been there so long it looked mummified, it too unable to give up a rent-stabilized apartment. Rather than tote the dead mouse in her mouth, she scooted it over with her paw and left it next to the fresh body, as if to say, Since you’re disposing of that one, how ’bout getting rid of this one while you’re at it? Cats really do have their nerve.

What I inhabited on St. Marks was a primitive, rough-draft “man-cave,” a term that makes me shudder whenever I hear it on a real-estate show such as House Hunters or Property Virgins, a man-cave being something one needs to escape from, not a womb to revert to in middle age to revegetate. It was the only apartment I lived in in that high-crime era that was burglarized. I returned from a screening or some other outing one night and, reaching the top steps of the first-floor stairs, saw that my door was ajar. I heard nothing happening within. Whoever had been there had presumably left, unless they were waiting inside, as happened to someone I knew who had been face-punched as soon as he stepped in. I eased the door open, flipped on the light, and flinched as if expecting everything to leap to life, crying, “Boo!” What I saw was a shambles worse than the one that was the usual ordinary. Drawers open, their contents spilled on the floor, mattress askew, records and books strewn across the floor. But nothing major seemed to be missing. The TV and the VCR must have been too megalithic to lug in a jiffy down the stairs and through the narrow hall, and nothing else would have fetched much on the resale market. It wasn’t as if I had a jewelry box where I stowed all my “nice things.” It wasn’t material things I was worried about, in any case. The fear in my throat was that vicious harm had come to my Gully, that she might be lying kicked-dead on her side, her life broken. Or that in a panic as the place was being tossed she might have darted out the door, and the rest of my night would be dedicated to going from floor to floor looking for her, hoping she hadn’t somehow gotten out into the street. As worst-case scenarios were firing synaptically away in rapid overlapping succession, Gully poked her head out of the closet door, checking to see if the coast was clear, then stepped into the room, her meow sounding only marginally more cranky than usual. I filled her water bowl, which had been kicked aside by the intruder, and mopped up the spill as she sipped and enjoyed a late snack of dry crunchies. While she dined, I tidied up the debris in the living room, which was also the bedroom, which was also the workroom. Less than an hour later my girlfriend came over and we made love on the bed amid the disarray as if it were London after a blitz raid, then made love less romantically a second time, the encore having a lot more James M. Cain boiling on the stove. Next morning I phoned a professional, undergoing one of those meaningful and costly rites of passage for New Yorkers in that period, the Changing of the Locks. My saltine box of an apartment was now fortressed with the bolts and bars of a security cell at Rikers, but that was part of the package deal of living in the East Village, the trade-off for being at the nexus of everything it had to heave at you before it eventually turned into a simulation of itself, a watering