Bats, Buttloads, and BB Guns

WARNING: For legal purposes, this is a work of hyperbole and exaggeration and is in no way an admission of guilt. For entertainment purposes, it’s deadeye accurate. Still, no bats were harmed in the making of this story. The abatement, though, well, that’s another story.

Photo by rigel on Unsplash

“Y’all got bats in your eaves.” That’s what our neighbor told us—a neighborly gesture said in a neighborly way. But it failed to capture the reality of what we were dealing with. The way the neighbor said it made me think we had a newlywed bat-couple hanging upside down on the edge of our roof, snacking on mosquitos, preparing to start their bat family while they pursued their fulfilling middle class airborne rodent careers. 

The reality was less Norman Rockwell and more Alfred Hitchcock. When we asked our neighbor for details, she said we needed to look up at the back of our house around dusk. So we did. For the love of all that is holy, we did. 

And at sunset we saw IRL what I imagine was a deleted scene from The Lost Boys—a shot cut because the editor was like, “Yeah, nobody’s going to believe that many bats can be in one place at the same time.” 

I recently learned that a buttload is an actual unit of measurement. In medieval times, a butt was a cask or a barrel, and it held between 105 to 130 gallons. Based on that metric, it’s safe to say our eaves contained a buttload of bats. 

Photo by Yoann Donzé on Unsplash. Visual demonstration of a buttload.

Bats aren’t like doves or butterflies. You probably aren’t going to see anyone release them to mark love or peace at a wedding or a birth or another Lakers championship. But we live in a rural area. From my treehouse (that’s right, it’s my treehouse because my kids didn’t help build it as much as they said they would) I can see a dozen breeds of dogs and barn cats, horses, alpacas, mini donkeys and mini horses, giant Sulcata tortoises, and a short walk down the street will bring goats, sheep, peacocks, and a llama into focus. 

All that to say, insects and bugs are abundant (they come with the critters) and bats eat a lot of bugs. A nursing bat momma, for instance, eats as  many as 4,000 bugs in a single night. That’s a buttload of bugs.

So bats are nature’s insecticide. You want them around the house. You just don’t want them in the eaves because as it turns out, if they’re in the eaves, they’re in the walls. We could hear them squeaking through the drywall in my son’s room, squatting like some obnoxious AirBNB guest with extreme entitlement issues. 

So we called an exterminator. The problem is you can’t exterminate bats. They’re protected. You have to abate bats. So we called a bat abatement company, and they sent out their rodent tech, which is a euphemism for sleazy salesman. People talk about politics and education and the opioid crisis, but the real problem with this country is that there are too many good salesmen. 

Here was his pitch: 

• Two-day job. 

• Seal the eaves and install a fabric cone on day one. 

• The bats fly out of the fabric cone to eat at night, and they can’t fly back in.

• Day two, remove the fabric cone. 

• No more bats. Easy peasy.

We tell him we won’t be home on the day he wants to schedule because we’re headed to Mexico for my father-in-law’s 75th. Even better, he says. You’ll leave for your vacation with a problem and return to a problem solved. Sounded good.

Turned out to be a buttload of bullshit. 

We did our week in Mexico, we drove home from the airport, and we opened the door to our recently bat-abated home to discover a scene of grisly horror. Dirt, spiderwebs, dead insects, and confetti caked the floor, the counters, and the furniture. The dirt, spiderwebs, and dead insects sort of made sense. When we put a new roof on the house, we experienced a similar thing to a much lesser extent when all the roofers’ footsteps shook it all loose. The confetti, though, was weird.

Photo by William Montout on Unsplash

We shoot a confetti cannon every New Year’s Eve, and some of it gets stuck on the beams. Every so often a piece will flutter to the ground and remind us of good times and Auld Lang Syne. This wasn’t that. It wasn’t a piece or two that had been knocked loose. It was much more—an aggressive amount of confetti. I used to associate confetti with fun and festivity, but now it’s a sign of horror, dread, and grotesque chaos. It’s been co-opted, sort of similar to how strippers converted glitter from a symbol of preschool crafts to evidence of bad decisions and a cocaine habit.  

Before we could draw conclusions, my wife screamed. Like, the scream of a person in mortal danger. Only it wasn’t her that was in mortal danger. It was a bat. And it was dying under the watchful eye of Sister Lightning Jenkins, our house cat. Sister Lightning had shredded the poor bat’s wings as if they were a cheap shower curtain.

The next few minutes played out like this:

1. We found a second bat in our bedroom by my wife’s desk, this one dead with shredded wings. 

2. We found a third bat in the upstairs bathtub, this one alive with shredded wings and attempting to crawl out of the tub. At this point, it occured to me that Gary Oldman absolutely nailed his role Bram Stoker’s Dracula, particularly when he was all gruesome and looked strikingly like Bea Arthur.

3. We found a fourth bat, this one dead with shredded wings and inside of the bathroom trash. I could hear the late great Chick Hearn in my head: “Sister Lightning Jenkins with the slaaaaaaaam dunk!” 

So the bat abatement happened on day 1 of our 7-day Mexican vacation, but the rodent tech failed to seal something, so apparently the homebody bats treated themselves to the inside of our house where Sister Lightning Jenkins played whack-a-bat for the better part of a week. In the melee, dirt, spiderwebs, and confetti were dislodged from the beams and the shiplap, leaving us with what looked like an apt visual metaphor for whatever goes on inside of Kanye West’s brain. 

It took a couple hours to clean up the mess and abate the bats, and all the while we were wondering if there were any more bat surprises waiting to be found. After all, it was a buttload of bats, and it’s hard to account for a full buttload.

I asked my wife if she needed a drink, and she nodded before she even heard the d-sound. We grabbed dinner and beers at a sports bar. The bartender committed the error of asking how our night was going, and while my wife regaled him with all of the gore and tragedy, I got a text from my daughter—my daughter who was literally sitting across the table from me.

The text read: “OMG. Mom’s trauma dumping on the bartender.”

I laughed. My wife asked what was funny, and I showed her the text. She immediately began to ugly-girl cry. Big heaving sobs. A buttload of tears. The overwhelm was real. 

In addition to the bats, we had a lot of other difficult stuff going on, but sometimes all it takes is a bloodthirsty cat named after a fictional nun to slaughter some flying rodents to break the emotional levee. 

We finished our beers and went home. No new dirt or spiderwebs. No confetti or dead or mostly dead and shredded bats. Sister Lightning Jenkins remained a little wired, but I attributed it to her busy week.

I crawled into bed and managed to fall asleep. My wife, not so much. She read beside me and attempted to shake off the rest of the trauma. You can only dump so much on a wide-eyed bartender. 

Just before 1 am, our daughter slipped into our room. “There’s another bat,” she said. I was reminded of learning about Rasputin, how he couldn’t be killed, how he just kept going. That guy had a buttload of moxie.

We went upstairs. Sister Lightning sat at the base of our fireplace and looked up toward the ceiling. Our fireplace was made of rock and stones pulled from the creek that runs behind our house—all shades of organic reds, oranges, purples, and browns. It’s charming. It’s also the perfect place to camouflage yourself if you’re a bat. We used our phones to zoom into the rocks where they met the roof. One of the rocks seemed to be breathing. Which rocks don’t normally do. Yes, a fifth bat. 

I tracked down my son’s BB gun. It took a while to find the BB gun in his closet, which looked more like the present state of Ukraine than, ya know, an actual closet. My son wasn’t any help. In fact, he had already bowed out and went to stay the night at my in-laws. He had a basketball game the next morning and needed his sleep, he said, which was code for, “I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do I do I do I do…” 

I hadn’t shot a BB gun in 15 years. I’m not much of a gun guy, in general, but I do fancy myself the kind of man who protects his wife and family, his hearth and home. So, in my boxer shorts, drained from travel and trauma dumping, I stood on my stairs—a few extra feet to close the distance between BB and bat—and raised the BB gun.

My wife stood by with a broom, ready to whack the bat if it came her way. My daughter stood by with her phone, ready to capture it all for social media. And Sister Lightning stood by with her commitment to the cause, ready to unleash feline hellfire whenever necessary.

Sister Lightning Jenkins. Don’t sleep on her. She’ll cut you.

I lined up my shot…

Okay, I told everyone. On three.

One…

Two…

THWAP! 

I pulled the trigger. Direct hit. Like an Olympian in that weird Winter Olympics biathlon event where you ski and shoot for some reason. I was an assassin with a BB gun and boxer shorts. 

At first, though, we didn’t know I hit it. It sort of fell from the fireplace, which is a good 18 feet up (we have vaulted ceilings) and then it started flapping its wings, haphazardly flying into one wall and then another before flopping to the ground. It wasn’t until we saw the blood on the walls and the hardwood that we realized I was basically Dirty Harry. 

When I realized I had hit it, my daughter and wife were teetering between laughter and screams. And I soon joined them, as my joy overfloweth—“I hit it! I hit it! Bahahahaha! I fucking hit it!” I cocked the BB gun and shot it a few more times to end its misery. To end all of our misery. 

Or so I thought. As it turns out, the mosquitoes have been off the charts this summer. And every time I scratch at a mosquito bite, I see a bat in my mind’s eye, and he’s saying, “That’s what we call revenge, you son of a bitch.”    

Fair enough. But when the shit hits the fan—or when the confetti flutters to the hardwood—I know I’m the kind of man who will protect his family so they can dump the buttloads of trauma and get on with their lives. 

---