Exotic Dancers and Country Mice

Thongs. Lots of 'em. In fact, every single pair of underwear strewn about the duplex laundry room was of the butt-crack wedging variety. They hung from clotheslines, they dangled from pipe knobs, they danced across the dryer...

It looked like party decor for a Hugh Hefner surprise birthday extravaganza.

Now, I understood there being a few thongs, of course. Heck, Babies 'R' Us probably sells Infant Thong Diapers these days-- counterproductive, yes, but oh-so chic.

But all? Not one single pair of underpants hearkening back to Ye Olde days of Bikinis, or-- God forbid-- Granny Panties?

I shrugged. Okay, it seemed a tad excessive. But neither am I hip. I am the opposite of hip, in fact. I am square... Though, Huey Lewis says it's "hip to be square"...

And by citing Huey Lewis, any remote sense of hip has thereby vanished.

Cool! Good to get that out of the way.

So back to the Wide, Wide World of Thongs and how this relates to small, brown furry rodents.

See, this was about six years ago, when I was still a renter. A roommate and I rented the lower half of a duplex, with a second set of roommates upstairs. In this case, it was a pair of blonde Floridians with a BMW convertible.

Like most of these rental situations, home wasn't exactly a haven. I'd come back to the apartment from a stressful, deadline-oriented, angry-boss day only to be confronted with interesting through-the-ceiling entertainment from Autumn and Trish upstairs.

I always suspected they watched a lot of Melrose Place, because their drama was of the Face-Slapping-Hair-Pulling-Pushing-Someone-In-The-Pool variety.

Arguments with their boyfriends resulted in the guys' stuff being chucked off the second floor balcony into the backyard, where it would stay for days and weeks in the elements. Until I would get tired of seeing it there and bag it up.

I got a couple of CDs this way.

The other unique facet of the girls upstairs was that they slept during the day, went to work around 6pm and then didn't get in until 4 in the morning. My bedroom was directly under the stairs, so every day at 4 a.m., they'd go clomping up the stairs with Frankenstein-thick soles, and then they'd turn on their music and fight with their boyfriends for a few hours before getting some well-earned rest...

Meaning more ashtrays and boxer shorts and CDs in the backyard. And more guys banging on the communal door begging to be forgiven and let in. I'd have said something, but I had a feeling my car tires would have been slashed.

I operated for the first month or so of this situation thinking, well, maybe Autumn and Trish were taking night classes. But night classes, it seemed would probably end before 4am.

So maybe they were bartenders... Well, yes, bartending was certainly a possibility, but my mind kept flashing to that waving string of thongs, and the fact these girls were 25 years old but driving a new BMW convertible.

Whatever.

Anyway, it was about three months into their stay that my roommate and I began noticing the little black pellets that connoted furry visitors in the kitchen. We scoured the kitchen, looking for where they might be getting in, but didn't see anywhere specific.

And my roommate, who was just absolutely brazen about dealing with creepies like spiders, was unexpectedly terrified of mice. So we got some of those covered mousetraps and put them around. That way neither of us would have to get too close to the carnage.

Days passed, the traps were undisturbed, and something was still leaving pellets.

Deciding we needed to build a better mousetrap, I laced the traps with peanut butter and removed the cover from the trap. I didn't want to have to kill the little fellows, of course. I tend to think they're cute, really. Like gerbils or Richard Hammond. And they were certainly welcome to the entire outdoors...

I just didn't want to have to fight them for my Lucky Charms every morning.

So as the sun did finally rise over the Pittsburgh skyline, I saw just why the covered traps weren't working.

The mice were entirely too fat and bloated to fit in the hole.

Yes, that's right, we had mutant mice. Giant, over-fed Hulk mice making themselves merrily at home in my kitchen. The Fat Bastard of mice, really. And since we didn't have a whole lot of food they could nosh on, we wondered just what it was they'd been gorging.

We found out all right! And it was directly related to the strippers-- er, ahem-- bartenders upstairs.

See, when Autumn and Trish suddenly made a quick and surprising disappearance one day, our landlord discovered that-- in addition to the sun-room, two bedrooms, living, kitchen and bath featured in each of the units-- the girls from Florida had also created a refuse containment center on the upper level of the porch.

You know, a big ol' garbage heap.

Meaning that when the rest of us on the block were putting our Hefty bags to the curb each week, Autumn and Trish had come up with the clever, much more convenient storage solution of just stacking it up above our heads, bag upon bag.

And the mice were absolutely digging it!

But as the garbage buffet moved to more appropriate accommodations, so eventually did the mice.

And I often wonder if those four-legged furries didn't shed a tear at the loss of their benefactors, Autumn and Trish...

Create a little mousie shrine to those Great Days of Plenty, as they'd call it. Kneeling before a black lace thong and saying a few words in prayer that someday... someday their golden-haired goddesses would return and reward them for their continued adoration.

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