As I may have mentioned earlier, I have been plagued by a rat problem for the past two or three months. I asked some of the maintenance staff if other tenants had had complained of this, and I apparently am the first. We had mice in the summer of course, and I bagged 11 with the Tomcat traps; but these are great big rats.
Perhaps because my apartment is near the elevator, and there are all sorts of little passageways around the building core. And I’m only 7 floors up in a 20-storey building, so this is as high as the rats can climb. I’ve had rats recently because of cold weather and all the construction on neighboring blocks: that’s another pair of rationales. Yesterday, walking up the West 57th incline, I noticed that the toothpick tower going up on the site of the old Calvary Baptist Church (Pastor: David Epstein) is already way up there, approaching the heights of the one over the old Steinway/Economist building (111 West 57th) and the older Hyatt 157 West 57th on either sides of it.
So rats we have. And today Jamie, one of the maintenance men, was there with a dark round-faced Amerindian or mestizo who’s the extermination expert. Very friendly. I showed the droppings in the corner (most had been been vacuumed up) and the egress points by the radiator. He laid down some glue boards (great big ones; I lost a sock while pouring myself a mug of milk a couple hours ago) and took some pictures, and will be sending someone by in a day or so. One person specializes in sealing up radiators.
Knowing these people would be coming by this morning, I made an effort to clean the apartment. Vacuum a little, and mop the kitchen floor. Going to the utility closet, I couldn’t find the squeegee I used last time, the one I bought at HomeDepot last July. I rummaged around in the utility closet, and as it suddenly occurred to me that I’d last used the squeegee in Moki’s bathroom, mine eyes lighted upon a big flat Kohler box in a Lowe’s bag, containing a toilet seat.
A toilet seat! Could this be Moki’s old toilet seat, the original one he took off when he bought some super-duper lighted LED seat? No, this seemed to be new, and sealed. I opened it up. All the parts were there, and instructions. This was a new seat, never installed. I took it into the Moki bathroom and started to install it. That did not take long.
Seat installed. Scat scene not completely cleaned.
I found two D batteries in one of Moki’s drawers in our captain’s bed. In the same baggie was the remnant of the scent pods used by this model of toilet seat. Yes, it’s a battery-operated, scented toilet seat. So this left me with three possibilities:
- Moki installed a seat like this, or rather had it installed by building personnel. Then ripped it out, didn’t like it, threw it out. This is the story he told me. Hence the D batteries and scent pod. Then he repented, went back to Lowe’s, bought another one. But never had it installed. Or mentioned it to me. Which it why it was a surprise to me today. And to think I came close to buying a replacement seat for $35 at Target!
- Moki originally bought two of these seats. One for me. The one I just put onto Moki’s cistern was intended for me. But he never mentioned this at all to me.
- Moki may have bought one or two seats originally. Doesn’t matter. But after he installed his seat, he got heavily into a “scat” scene, finding insalubrious toilets, with a lot of shit all over the place, very erotic. This would account for all the filth and toilet rolls and brown encrustations on the floor and around the commode, which I have not yet succeeded in cleaning up.
I’m afraid the third possibility is most likely. As I almost never went into Moki’s bathroom, I don’t have the timeline of the toilet seats or the filth. I certainly noticed the filth when fixing the toilet in October 2022 and I saw that it was worse in October and November 2023. When did he buy and install that lighted, scented toilet seat, anyway? Back in 2011, around the beginning of the madness when he bought the SentrySafe? Or more recently? You see, I don’t recall him talking about it at the time, merely speaking of it in retrospect. How he hated it and tore it out.
In the morning, resenting the need to get up in a few hours and clean up a bit for the rat-catchers, I watched the first half of Trainspotting after finishing The Great Escape. I loved this film in London in early 1996, not so much now. The Worst Toilet in Scotland episode, high hilarity, seemed very apt, putting me in mind of Moki’s filthy loo. But I had not yet connected the dots and considered that it was an actual scat scene Moki was promoting at some point.
And when was that? Well the answers will be in his text messages and perhaps email. I vaguely recall something like that in texts and photos only a year or two ago.
