Zimmer, who lives in New York and is a contributing editor at Discover Magazine, says that — parasitically speaking — there is an embarrassment of riches all around us.

But it wasn’t pure science that first piqued his fascination (dare we say obsession?) with this world of bloodsuckers. As a kid, he always got a kick out of parasite-type science fiction movies. So, in the name of research, he not only traveled to far-off places but fired up the VCR and watched a gruesome marathon of jelly-like aliens, hairless bipeds and gut-devouring lizards vying — literally — for the heart of man.

The result? He knows far more about parasites than even he bargained for. Salon talked with Zimmer by phone about malaria, monster movies and the possibility of parasitic world domination.

“Parasite” is such a loaded, metaphoric word. We think of welfare mothers, ex-wives, dinner guests who don’t return the invitation, Hitler’s label for the Jews. Technically though, what is a parasite?

Anything that thrives at the expense of what it’s living on and living in. In the broadest definition, you include viruses, a lot of bacteria and things you don’t normally think of as parasites. A fetus in the womb actually behaves a lot like a parasite. It uses strategies to extract nutrients and energy out of its mother. And the mother, to a certain extent, has to defend herself against it.

In the scientific world, parasites have been cast as minor hitchhikers, not a serious force of nature. Yet, you say that parasites make the world go ’round.

Historically, they were viewed as agents of disease. Or they were seen as nature’s degenerates — animals and organisms that had devolved and lost all ability to live in the free world. Scientists thought you could look at the world and ignore the parasites.

But in fact, they are everywhere. Open up any animal — healthy or sick — and it’s just loaded. No one really knows how many parasites exist, but there are estimates of four species of parasites for every nonparasite. The vast majority of species are parasites. They may, in fact, have a very powerful evolutionary effect.

Does that mean that parasites drive everything from eating to mating behavior?

Sex is a good example. Why did sex evolve? If you look at it, it really doesn’t make much sense compared to just cloning yourself. So scientists consider factors that might make sex an advantage. One of the best theories is that parasites make sex desirable because they are always trying to adapt to their hosts, take advantage of and in some cases, kill them. Anything an organism can do to defend itself is going to give a good evolutionary advantage. The way that sex shuffles up genes can help give a species an edge.

You said that if you open up most animals, you’ll find basically a parasite hotel. How often are we humans offering room service?

It depends on the person and where in the world you go. In the United States, you might open up a person and maybe in their brain you would find cysts of a single-celled parasite called toxoplasma. Somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of the U.S. population carry it in their brains. In France, the proportion goes up to 90 percent or more.

Toxoplasma normally lives inside cats and they shed it out in their feces and then it moves to its next host, which is a rat or a bird or some other prey of a cat. Once the parasite gets into the intermediate host, it replicates and then builds a protective shell around itself. Each of these cysts contains a few hundred toxoplasma. The cysts can sit for years. The parasite is basically waiting for its host to be eaten by another cat so that it can begin its life cycle again. People pick up toxoplasma all the time, whether they are gardening or handling kitty litter. It likes to be in the brain.

Cysts in the brain? Wouldn’t we notice that?

The cysts will just sit there, waiting for us to be eaten by a cat. (Toxoplasma is usually harmless in humans, except for pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems.)

But there is some really interesting research. When toxoplasma cysts are in a rat, the parasite somehow does things to the host that makes it more likely to be eaten by a cat. For example, it takes away the rat’s healthy sense of fear. Rats with toxoplasma are less likely to run away in terror at the smell of a cat.

Does that apply to humans? Once infected, do we get an urge to sign up for a safari and put ourselves at the mercy of big game?

Some psychologists have actually done studies comparing people who have toxoplasma and people who don’t. They found very subtle personality differences. People who have toxoplasma may be more openhearted than people who don’t.

So a parasite could be responsible for altering the personalities of billions of people?

Hookworms are a definite example of that. Up until the mid-20th century, they were rampant in the United States, especially the South. They penetrate your skin, burrow into your body and live in the intestines. The whole reputation of the lazy Southerner comes from the fact that a lot of them had hookworms. They weren’t lazy. They were anemic. Up until recently, Americans had lots of parasites.

Confession time. I’ve had my share of parasites. Giardia, head lice and, OK, pinworms. How about you?

I’m basically parasite free. I’ve traveled a lot in the developing world. So far — knock on wood — nothing serious. If it’s any consolation, pinworms are everywhere, and in everything.

If you have to have something, that’s not so bad compared to what’s out there in the rest of the world. There’s a fluke called schistosome that lives in the bloodstream. It infects 200 million to 300 million people a year in Africa and southern Asia. There are 1.2 billion cases of hookworm in the world. Two or 3 million die of malaria a year. And many of these parasites are on the rise, not the wane.

What parasite ranks highest on your personal yuck scale?

A little crustacean that lives in the ocean. It swims inside the mouth of certain fish and devours their tongue and plants itself down in their mouth and proceeds to act like their tongue. Quite disconcerting.

Is there a pinup parasite?

Actually, when you look at them awhile, some of them are downright pretty. For instance, tapeworms have a little head that is adapted for letting them hold on inside their host’s intestine. Some heads look like ram’s horns. Some look like arrows. Some look like dandelions. They are all different and quite beautiful.

Give us a mini-biography, from birth to death, of one of the more sinister parasites.

The Guinea worm starts off its life cycle living inside a microscopic copepod that swims around in fresh water. When a person drinks the water, the stomach acid dissolves away the copepod. But the larva manages to survive and burrows its way out of the intestinal wall. It wanders around the abdominal cavity looking for a mate. The male Guinea worms get up to 2 inches long. The females can get up to 2 feet long.

When they mate, the male dies. The female starts traveling through the connective tissue of a person’s body, down into their leg. All the while, its fertilized eggs are developing. It crawls to the leg and starts releasing the larvae just under the skin. That creates a very painful blister that people generally want to wash off in water.

Which is exactly what the parasite wants the person to do! The blister pops and the larvae go into the water. When the Guinea worm senses the water being poured on it, it will slowly start pushing itself out of a person’s body and releasing more larvae. Once in the water, they go off looking for another copepod.

Assure me there’s a cure.

There’s no drug you can take if you get Guinea worms. The only “cure” is one that’s been around for thousands of years. As the Guinea worm is pushing itself out of your body, you slowly wrap it around on a stick. You don’t want to grab it and pull it out because it will break and die, and then you have a 2-foot-long parasite in your body that will cause infection and might very well kill you.

For thousands of years, people have lain around for days just turning these sticks. Some think that this procedure is the symbol of medicine — the snakes around the staff. There are references to fiery serpents in the Bible when the Israelites are wandering in the desert. Guinea worms. Fortunately, even though there’s no vaccine, they may be eradicated soon through public health awareness on how to avoid them [for example, using cheesecloth to drink fresh water and learning to not wash in freshwater sources].

Good riddance to Guinea worms — and pinworms and head lice, too. But, don’t we have to consider the big picture? If we are living in a parasitic world and they are such a dominant force, are we messing things up by eradicating them?

Truthfully, total eradication is just a dream. They are so resourceful and abundant. But in terms of medicine, there may be some unexpected results when you get rid of parasites.

Scientists are looking into the possibility that eradication might be responsible for allergies. There’s a pretty clear correlation. Places where parasites, such as intestinal worms, have been eradicated are the places where you see the most allergies and disorders like Crohn’s disease (an autoimmune disease in the intestines).

In Venezuela, scientists found that affluent city dwellers had high rates of allergies and very few parasites. Poor people living in the cities, because their sanitation isn’t as good, have more parasites but their allergy rates are consistently lower. Same with Indians dwelling in the rain forest.

Right now, these are tantalizing connections. You have to keep in mind that our ancestors have been grappling with parasites for millions and millions of years. In a sense, we have an uneasy truce with them. Part of that involves the way the immune system holds them in check. Taking away parasites all of a sudden may make the immune system prone to overreacting to things like cat dander, peanuts or even your own body.

Attacked by parasites and attacked by our own bodies. Sounds like a standard-issue horror story scenario. In fact, some of our deepest, most universal fears are based on parasite images. “Alien.” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Is there any possibility of some kind of catastrophic invasion?

There are certainly lots of parasites that we don’t know about out there, whether they are virus, bacteria, worm or fungi. There are lots of things in the natural world that make their living by invading other organisms.

A lot of them are living inside hosts that live in the rain forest and remote parts of the world. The more we disturb these environments and the more globalized human society becomes, the easier it is for something to hop out of its previous host and try to infect humans. It may find that humans are a perfectly good host.

If we hold up the mirror, what can we learn about ourselves from parasites?

If you think about the relationship we have with the rest of nature, the way we extract from the natural world, the way we use up resources without restoring them, the way that we manipulate nature in order to make it serve us better: These are all things that parasites do, and do very well.

After learning so much about them, I don’t think that it is necessarily a bad thing to be called a parasite. They are quite clearly the most successful organisms on the planet.

But it might be useful for us to get an idea of what they are doing right. Because if we humans are parasites, I don’t think we are very good ones. A parasite that kills off its hosts has got nowhere to live. Human beings only have one host. We have to treat it accordingly.

“It’s a myth,” I told them. “Like the lady who dried her poodle in the microwave.”

They nodded knowingly. “But we should still check all the candy, right?”

Right.

This is Halloween, America’s national holiday of parental terror. Sure, most of us grown-ups have stopped believing in ghosts; we are unmoved by spooky stories and glowing jack-o’-lanterns with demonic grins. But we do not greet this holiday with grown-up complacency. We are afraid — of Halloween weirdos, poisoned food, razors and kidnappers and child-torturing delinquents.

So tradition demands that we offer a few words of warning before sending our princesses and pirates into the dark. The short list:

Every Friday night, I spend a couple of hours teaching, coaching, cheerleading, bribing — essentially doing whatever it takes to inspire young men in detention to write something for the newsletter, which circulates to other juvenile halls in the area. We — I and the other workshop leaders — assure the writers: Spelling doesn’t count. Poetry doesn’t have to have “thou” or “’tis” to be real poetry. Use your own voice. Write your hopes, your dreams, your fears, your memories, your hates, your truths. Write what’s on your mind.

The young men in the hall write free verse about their mothers, their children (at 17, many of them already are fathers) and family — exalting in the good times with June-moon-spoon types of rhymes. Often, they write laugh-out-loud raps. They tackle a current political situation with the most thoughtful street analysis. They give heartfelt advice to others who are incarcerated, give voice to their dreams of a better life and make poignant vows to leave the vida loca.

Look thru my eyes and see the want; The want to change, but not knowing how to do so. The want to be something other than a statistic, a number, a felon. The want to become a better decision maker for myself, my family, my race Yet somehow I feel trapped in the hands of time, Replaying the same tune like an old record that skips. Trapped.

They can be meticulous in their descriptions of past crimes, enlarging and romanticizing themselves. They are the Robin Hoods of their ‘hoods. Their poetry, in particular, can run its cold finger down my spine. It goes unflinchingly into the void:

It’s not the thought of dying. It’s the thought of being dead. That’s the fatal thought I dread. The thought of living underground for eternity. The thought of living underground. With no one to remember me.

“Are you really feeling this way?” I asked Jason, the boy who wrote the poem.

“Sure,” he said.

“Really really?”

“Naw,” he said. “I’m doing all right.”

I wonder. I worry. These young men seem to change week by week, sometimes minute by minute. I am often left questioning what’s real and what they put down for shock value. I don’t know sometimes if these young men know the difference between the two. They can follow a poem about death with a love letter so gushy and hopeful that I almost blush reading it.

As I look at you from head to toe,

I can tell there’s something about you that people don’t know.

As I dream of your body next to mine

I still can tell there’s something about you that people don’t know.

As I dream of rubbing your body down with the sweetest oil

I still can tell there’s something about you that people don’t know.

As I dream of you kissing me and me kissing you

I still can tell there’s something about you that I don’t know.

Over time, I have gotten used to their contradictions. They have the remarkable ability to hold fast to two opposing realities with equal passion. The Latino kids write proudly of their commitment to brown pride. They make serious political points about how difficult it is to be a person of color in white America. Then, they end their idealistic pleas for solidarity with vows to “kill every Norteqo.” When I point out that the last time I checked, Norteqos also had brown skin, they look at me as if I am nuts. But maybe, just maybe, it makes a dent.

I remember one boy, blue-eyed and quick with the one-liners. On occasion, he wrote a line or two about white power, which made me squirm with discomfort. Still, I couldn’t help but enjoy being around him each week. He was so smart and crackled with energy. One night, I saw him looking at me, carefully studying my frizzy brown hair and the map of the shtetl on my face. “You Jewish?” he asked. I took a chance — You have to choose your “teaching moments” carefully around here — and told him. “Yes, full-blooded as far back as anyone can remember.” I prepared myself for the reaction: taunts, jeers, a cold silence?

I wasn’t prepared for a cheer. “My mother is Jewish!” he announced proudly to the entire group. Then he raised a fist into the air: “Dreydl power!”

I figured he was putting me on. He wasn’t putting me on. The following week when I brought him a dreydl, he taught his Latino buddies to play “this cool Jewish gambling game.”

And just when I think I’ve heard every possible, convoluted prejudice, someone like Jeremy, a 17-year-old who has been in and out of the hall for years, gets creative. Jeremy is one of the really fine, write-from-the-gut poets in the group. When things are slow and no one else is writing, I can always count on him to whip up a rhyming couplet or two. Last week, he handed me his latest epic:

I want to express how I feel about people changing the English language. People who say “Wolfin” [slang for lying] and other stupid words like that really piss me off. It’s the stupidest word I ever heard. People that can’t talk right really piss me off.

Harris, too, seemed to have a thing against people who misused English, like those who said “pacific” for “specific.” It’s almost bizarre how intolerance falls into predictable, and mundane, categories.

“So what do you think of my article?” Jeremy asked.

“I think I understand how you feel,” I tried. “You’re a writer. Writers respect the language. But you know, not everyone here writes as well as you. They need to feel free to write in the way they feel comfortable.”

I decided to stick with only one teaching moment and not point out his own grammatical desecrations. He thought a minute. “Yeah, but they really piss me off.” He did, however, seem just a little less pissed off than before.

When I first started coming to the hall, I had readied myself for a steady dose of gloom and doom. I don’t have what anyone would call a light and sunny personality. If there’s a reason to feel down, I’m usually down with it, claiming it as my own. An evening with mouthy, depressed, powerless, over-empowered, abused and abusive delinquents sounded like a prescription for a weekly crying jag to me.

But Friday nights are often one of the high points of my week. We laugh, we share moments. I typically leave in better spirits than when I arrived. It’s not that I’m fooling myself with some save-the-world fantasy. In the big picture of alleviating social ills, I know that I am about as effective as a gnat against the hide of an elephant.

Yet every week, there’s something to hold on to. Jeremy tosses off a great metaphor. Someone who has shown no previous signs of life writes a life story that makes me inhale sharply. A young man who has done nothing but blame others, writes: “I can’t believe I had forgotten all the things I worked for and all the people who love and care for me.” An angry boy who has always filled his paper with violent rants suddenly writes: “I feel sad.”

I like setting goals for myself. I often target the boy who is the most resistant to writing, the one who snorts at the mention of writing, the one who makes life miserable for anyone else who is trying to write.

I homed in on Miguel because he is so large and silent, the kind of leader who can change the entire atmosphere of the room just by cracking a smile. He never caused trouble in the workshop; he was more of a passive protester. He just sat there staring down at a blank piece of paper. One week, it dawned on me that maybe he didn’t know how to write or he was embarrassed by his spelling. So, I offered to be his personal literary assistant. Nothing. But after three weeks of offering my secretarial services, he finally said, “OK, you write what I say.”

I was ready, pencil poised.

“You said get real, so write, ‘bitch.’”

I wrote, “bitch.” He nodded his approval. The other guys at the table became very interested.

“Write, ‘whore.’”

I felt them watching me to see if I would blush or launch into some schoolmarmish snit. I wrote, “whore.”

“Write, ‘rich cunts.’”

When he was done, we had, I believe, the complete edition of terms for female genitalia in several languages.

“So what am I supposed to do with this?” I asked him.

“Publish it in that newspaper,” he said.

I don’t know what made me say it, but I did. “Miguel, did you just break up with your girlfriend or something?”

He looked down. He didn’t have to say a word. The following week, I sat with Miguel and he dictated a lovely, melancholy homage to his hometown, a place he had not seen since his father abandoned him.

Week after week, the young men come and go. Sometimes, they are released to their families and I never see them again. That’s the good news. Others write essays about how they are getting out soon, how they will never, ever be back. Their words are so strong and sincere. We all want to believe them. But for many, juvenile hall is part of the revolving door they call home — the streets, a group home, the streets, back to the hall and I am reading their words once again.

At first, my part in this pattern used to depress me. Until I realized that this workshop was respite. Here, for a few hours, they can let go of other identities — gangster, fuck-up, loser, delinquent — and become writers. Just writers.

Usually, I don’t make a point of learning too much about why these guys are in the hall. But six months ago, when a boy named Frank arrived, it was impossible not to know his crime. Every detail of it — the unbridled anger behind it, the mind-boggling heinousness of it — was all over the front page of the local paper. Before I even saw him, I knew what he was capable of. I also knew about the crimes that had been perpetrated on him: by his family, by the systems, by living on the streets.

At first, he was a bright-eyed young man who seemed right at home. Two weeks in a row, Frank didn’t write anything, but he seemed to enjoy listening to the others.

Then, suddenly, he stopped coming to the workshops. I saw him in the dayroom playing ping-pong and when I approached, he snarled at me. Then, more and more, I saw him sitting off alone by the TV. He seemed to shed every façade, every illusion of hope.

“Don’t ask me to write again,” he snapped at me one night. “I don’t write. It’s a mistake I’m in here. My lawyer is going to get me out. Next week, I won’t be here. It’s a mistake.”

The day before, there had been another newspaper article about Frank. The evidence against him was solid. The prosecutor had gotten his way. Frank would be spending at least a year in the hall before his trial. Then, he would be tried and sentenced as an adult.

For several sessions after that, I didn’t see him at all. Staff had their reasons for locking him down in his room: He wasn’t following the rules, wasn’t getting along with the other kids. He mad-dogged everyone, went off at the slightest provocation. He drained the already weary staff of energy and humor. The details of his crime and of his life had leaked out and the other young men were using them against him.

Whenever Frank was out of his room, they taunted him. They began writing poems with thinly veiled references to his shocking life. Of course, I refused to publish them. In Frank, the white, black and brown kids had found an equal opportunity scapegoat.

“I feel bad and everything, but it’s chaos when he’s around,” one staffer, a particularly caring and patient woman, told me. “But he brings a lot of this on himself. I’ve never met one like him. The other kids, I always see hope. There’s a sweetness in them. Frank’s different. He’s a really scary kid.”

A couple of weeks ago, as I was walking across the basketball court into the workshop room, I heard a voice calling me: “Hey, you. Writer lady.” I followed the voice to a barred window. I couldn’t see him, could only hear him. “I wrote a poem. Read it. Tell me if it’ll get in the paper.”

Staff allowed Frank to slip the poem under his door and I felt his eyes through the small window as I was reading it. It was jarring, raw, even by juvenile hall standards. “Do you understand?” he asked. “Do you know what I’m writing about?”

I didn’t and I did. Taken as a whole, the poem didn’t make a lot of sense, but individual phrases — “luxurious darkness,” “untrusting fear,” “suffering into emptiness” — held so much pain that I felt my eyes brim with tears.

Last week when I got to the hall, I was eager to show Frank that his poem had made it to print. Staff wasn’t sure I should be allowed to talk to him. For the past few hours, he had been screaming and pounding at the door. The medical staff had placed him on suicide watch. It was a really bad week, a staffer told me. “He’s really melting down.”

They finally agreed to let me see him because he knew it was Friday night and he had been asking for me. When they unlocked his door, I felt myself recoil involuntarily. Frank was shirtless and folded into a fetal position, his tattoo of a dagger bold on his arm. He was sobbing uncontrollably like only little kids can sob. He was rubbing his eyes with hands that were black and blue, swollen from trying to punch his way out of his room. “Take them! Take all of them!”

Sheets of paper were scattered everywhere.

“Poems! I can write poems all day!”

I felt limp and useless in the face of such misery. I sat on the cement floor of his small room and silently gathered up the papers. It was something to do. I noticed I was holding them gently, as if they would fall apart or explode at the slightest breeze. There were a dozen of them, many decorated with montages of photos clipped from magazines. Pictures of wounded children, a menagerie of skulls, missiles and bombs exploding.

Next to a picture of a man being shot, Frank had written: “This is my thought. A guy getting shot. He must be happy. No more worries.” On another paper: “Today, I hope I don’t hurt the staff. All I want to do is make them laugh.” Next to a picture of a mushroom cloud: “This is my mind in a riot. With all my anger, I shut out the quiet. Why?”

“Why do you do this?” he blurted at me.

“Do what?”

“Write. Why do you tell me to write? I write and it’s still there. The pain is still there. Fear! It doesn’t go away. What good does writing do?”

That is the question, isn’t it? I thought of all the answers that I have given to other kids who have asked this same question, the answer to why I am here on Friday nights. I thought of the answers that I give myself when I wonder why I am spending a good part of my life in front of a keyboard.

I could have told Frank that writing can help sort through the chaos of your own mind. It can bring order to a world that so often feels like it is whirling out of control. I could have told him that in writing, you can be as angry as you want, full of hatred that goes inward and outward. It’s better not to hate so much, but if you have to hate, go ahead and hate on paper. Paper doesn’t bleed.

I could have told him that writing is a way to say to the world: I exist. And everything I feel, you have felt to some degree at some time in your life. I could have said writing makes you not so alone.

But none of these were the answer that Frank was so desperate to hear. He wanted his writing to save him, to release him immediately. I know that it is possible, but there are no guarantees. He would need to make the leap from ranting to truly writing, from blasting outward to looking inward. It was not time to tell him that he would need more time and that he would feel more pain and more fear.

I didn’t know what to say. So that’s what I said. “I don’t know why you should keep writing. I just know it’s what you have right now. So keep writing.”

He didn’t say anything. He watched me make his papers into a neat pile. “You’ll read them?” he asked.

“I’ll read them,” I said. “And I’ll see you next week.”

At the time, we were new to the street. My first instinct was to lock the door, corral them all, until I figured out who was wacko and just how wacko this particular wacko was. But I didn’t move fast enough. The front door flew open again and Debra came rushing in. Debra is their mother, a pleasant enough woman from our brief, front-yard conversations. Her daughter inherited her apple cheeks and a smile that takes up half her face. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone smile as much as Debra.

But right then, she was a wild woman, nostrils flaring, her skin both ashen and blotched. In her arms, she balanced her curly haired infant daughter.

“This is it!” Debra yelled. “I’ve had it. I mean it. I’ll go to the shelter. He’s gonna kill us all one day.”

I felt those words — “kill us all” — like a slap and I saw that
they’d had the same effect on my children. They stopped talking mid-sentence. Their eyes scanned Debra’s face, waiting for her to wink or to do one of those reassuring adult things to prove that she wasn’t speaking literally.

On the other hand, Debra’s kids could have been watching a boring rerun. The infant was too young to understand the words, but I expected her to be reacting to the emotion in her mother’s grip. Yet the baby was smiling, doing an infant’s flirt with me. The 7-year-old said to my daughter, “Want to play Monopoly or something?”

I was especially taken aback by the 5-year-old, who kept repeating the word, “wacko!” with delight. He obviously loved hearing such a kid word being spit from a grown-up’s mouth. Then he rolled his eyes skyward. When he did this, he suddenly looked like a 35-year-old who has seen more life than he cares to remember.

I know people have trouble reading stories about domestic violence. We switch the channel, fold the newspaper against the victim’s face to block the ripples of her suffering. I assure you that nobody gets hurt in this story, at least not physically.

It’s been more than two years since the police showed up that day. They listened to her side, then listened to his side, then handed her a card with a phone number for domestic violence counseling, then suggested that he take a walk around the block to cool down. The two officers glanced at the kids and when they didn’t see blood or broken bones, they didn’t see any victims. Then they said something into their radio, wrote something in their book and pulled away.

Later, the elderly woman who lives sandwiched between Debra’s house and mine leaned over the fence to fill us in: That wasn’t the first ugly scene and — welcome to the neighborhood! — it wasn’t going to be the last. “It’s a lovely street, quiet,” she assured me. “Except for … well, the rental house.”

She used the term “rental house” the way people talk about a haunted house, as if that explained everything. Every neighborhood seems to have one of each. The haunted house is usually some dilapidated, boarded-up building where ghosts supposedly run amok and children dare each other to cross the threshold.

The “rental” house usually means trouble in a more flesh-and-blood way. There are too many children, too little discipline, too many emotions spilling into the street. Debra’s front yard is often littered with broken refrigerators and assorted car parts. In the summer, hundreds of pieces of fruit drop from a gorgeous plum tree and stain the sidewalk with leaking red pulp. Our street is populated with roller-curled widows who learned their frugal housekeeping skills during the Depression. This waste of perfectly good fruit drives them nuts.

And don’t even get the neighbors started on Debra’s teenagers, who come and go, slamming doors, yelling obscenities at their mother and her partner.

I have to admit that I too would rather not have to witness this
kind of family chaos day after day. It’s not that I don’t know it exists. As a journalist, I have buttoned up my emotional armor and gone into battered women’s shelters and juvenile halls. I have looked into the haunted eyes of beaten women, abusive men, children in hip-to-thigh casts.

I understand why the neighbors peek out from behind the curtains, shaking their heads in disgust or frustration or pity when the shouting at Debra’s house begins. Why doesn’t she throw him out? How does she live in such a mess? How did she get herself into this situation? Those poor, poor children!

Yes, helping other people is a wonderful thing. Isn’t that what we always say as we bag up our used clothing for the homeless shelter and donate a turkey on Thanksgiving? But the situation is different when the need is right on your street, right in your face, and you can see that a sack of groceries doesn’t even begin to satisfy the real hunger. Try telling your children that things would be easier if we kept our distance.

You can’t. I couldn’t. I told Debra and her children: If you’re ever scared, if you ever need help, just knock.

They knocked. My husband and I helped Debra pack up and move to the
women’s shelter. My children, so ready to feel useful, spread out
sleeping bags so her kids could stay with us. A few days later, we helped Debra unpack and move back home. We talked to her partner, who swore up and down that he was determined to take care of his drug problem. We offered encouraging words when Debra said that she really does love him and things are going to be better now. When she went into labor with her seventh baby, we moved the younger ones in with us for a week. We lent her eggs and sugar. We lent her money.

Every time Debra’s partner saw us, he made a little bow and thanked us for our help. “We have no one in the world,” he said. “We are trying.”

I saw how truly alone a family in America can be.

“So why can’t I go over to her house to play?” my daughter asked.

I was standing in the kitchen, up to my elbows in dirty dishes. Debra’s daughter, her face eager and ingenuous, waited for my answer. My daughter is a master of bad timing.

“It’s just not a good day for that today,” I said.

“That’s what you always say,” my daughter pushed. “When’s a good day?”

“But you two are playing so well here.” I pretended to be casual but the girls didn’t buy it.

“What’s wrong with playing there?”

Nailed. What was I supposed to say? That her friend’s house is too
dirty and chaotic? That people in that family call each other “bitch” and “bastard” the way we call each other by our names? That Debra’s partner is battling a drug problem and an incendiary temper?

Over time, I had come to really like Debra. She surprised me by shrugging off all the labels I tried to put on her. She isn’t wimpy,
oppressed, stupid. She isn’t even depressed, though from my perspective, she has plenty to be depressed about. In fact, she’s upbeat. She’s got a vibrant spirituality, a ready sense of humor and a college degree. She is the only woman I know who is always ready to have a long, leisurely chat about absolutely nothing. Everyone should have a friend like that.

I think she adores her children and they obviously adore her. I see it in the way they snuggle shyly into her hip. But, to put it mildly, she’s not always in control. I don’t know who would be with seven children, two of them still in diapers, and no outside help. I worry about my children being in her house. I worry about them getting caught in the crossfire of a flying kitchen table. Debra herself has stood among her piles of dirty clothes, filthy dishes, crying babies, cursing teenagers and said to me, “I can’t imagine why anyone would let their child come play in this madhouse.”

“So why can’t I go?” my daughter insisted.

She had drained me of excuses, so all I could fall back upon was a tight-lipped, “Because I said so.”

Later, we had a family meeting on the subject. Our children listened as my husband and I explained that Debra tries hard and we respect her for that. Her partner isn’t an evil person. He has a mental disability and a drug problem. Which means that we don’t think it’s safe for them to play over there. My daughter actually looked relieved and admitted that being in the house scared her.

“Debra’s kids are welcome here any time,” I emphasized. “Any time.”

Then my son gave voice to the thought I had been trying to keep
quiet: “If it’s not safe for us over there, is it safe for them?” I didn’t have an answer. My husband and I made a pact. If we ever saw
any sign of physical abuse, we would personally get those children out of the house, even if it meant calling in the police. Every time
Debra’s children came over to play, I ran my eyes over their bodies. Is there a black eye? Are there welts or pinch marks? What is under that Band-Aid? I started asking them directly and they answered just as directly: “Naw, nobody hits. They just scream all the time.”

I’d known another family like this one. They lived a few doors down when I was growing up. The father was short and wiry. The mother had skinny legs and a wild mane of hair. Boy, could they lay into each other. The neighbors called their shouting matches the Friday Night Fights.

Their four daughters, close in age to my sister and me, would
come thundering into our house, never crying, but whooping with exuberance. The oldest girl had a wicked wit and could do a viciously accurate imitation of their mother. Her face would screw up and turn all red. Her voice quivered as she blasted us with: “You … you … douche bag!” That made all us kids howl with laughter.

As the girls got older, one by one, they dropped out of school. They drifted from boyfriend to boyfriend to husband to another husband to one crappy job after another. One was a heavy drinker and almost died in a car crash. Another was a junkie.

I don’t think that anyone ever laid a hand on these four beautiful, bright children. But from that family, I learned that words can also warp the heart so that it never again regains its normal shape.

The pattern of domestic violence sounds like a weather report: Clear, tranquil skies followed by a buildup of increasingly high pressure until boom, all hell breaks loose.

Over the years, I have found myself weathering my own internal
storms in relationship to Debra’s family. I talk, offer, suggest, pontificate, give, listen — thinking that I can somehow “save” or “fix” these people. And like so many “social workers,” I burn myself out.

My husband and I ranted to each other that we needed to set up better boundaries. It’s embarrassing to admit, but there were times when the doorbell rang and I actually hid behind the couch, like a criminal in my own home, because I could not face another of their problems. Then I’d kicked myself over my lack of compassion.

For many months now, the rental house has been relatively peaceful. Debra’s partner has been clear-eyed and even-tempered. He’s even
working part-time. She has taken a job at a day-care center. I marvel at how she gets four little kids ready every morning and then heads off to a day of minding a dozen toddlers. When she pulls in at night, she’s exhausted, but always waves. Even her teenagers seem less tumultuous.

Not long ago, Debra and I were having one of our impromptu sidewalk
conversations. All our kids were running around. Things are definitely better, she said. Then a darkness passed over her features.

“But I worry — what if something happens to me? Who will take care of them? Not him. He’s just not capable.”

She’s right. There is no one. No grandparent or sister or cousin
to step in. She has no close friends. There is no will, no trust fund, nothing tucked away for “just in case.” I know what can happen to children in foster care. I know how they are ripped from their siblings and put wherever there is space for them. I know how they can bounce from home to home. I know how abysmal some of those homes can be.

Debra looked at her feet. “I’ve been wanting to ask you … If something happens to me, would you … ?”

When I didn’t answer right away, she laughed nervously and tried to make light of it. “Oh, nothing is going to happen to me,” she said and shuffled a little. Then she changed the subject.

I was off the hook, and I was relieved. There are so many nights
when I feel that my own two children have stretched me and my husband to our limits, that we have nothing left to muster. The thought of more children! The thought of children who have been through so much and obviously need so much. I don’t want Debra’s or anyone else’s family dropped at my doorstep.

But knowing what I know and hearing what I hear over the fence, can I ever really be off the hook?

There is a Buddhist deity, the goddess of compassion, who has about a thousand arms radiating out from her center. It just goes to show where I am in life that I always envision her arms waving around sippy cups, baby wipes, vacuum cleaners, science fair projects, homework slips that need to be signed. Cut off one of those arms and it is said that a dozen more pop out to take its place.

But I’m no goddess. I think about what I would do if those children stood at my door. That’s when I say a silent, fervent prayer for Debra’s health.

I didn’t answer right away. That’s because I was praying. Please, please, please, let it be a ghost. Let it be Aunt Minnie who promised to come back and haunt us for not visiting her enough in the nursing home. Let it be Christmas Past. Let it be anything except for what I knew it to be.

“Mom, why are your lips moving?” my son asked.

“It’s not ghosts,” I said. “It’s rats.”

We humans don’t call it going “rat-fuck” without good reason. The next few days, despite my prayers that the rats would decide to just pack up and leave on their own, they continued to raise hell in our walls. One night I jolted out of bed thinking, Earthquake! Evenings were especially wild. I have since learned that early evening, the cocktail hour, is also the preferred rat nookie hour, with female rats going “into season” every four to five days and remaining hot for action 12 hours at a time.

“You know, you can’t just ignore rats. You have to do something,” my husband said. “Rats have babies. Lots of babies.”

“We can capture the babies and make them our pets,” my 9-year-old daughter, the family nurturer, interjected dreamily.

We are, in fact, a rodent family, the way some families are cat or dog families. Our current pet, Hamsterdam, lives in a swank cage with a wheel, slides and a salad bar of gourmet rodent food. He is one fat, spoiled hamster. Not long ago, we made the mistake of getting a second “male” hamster to keep him company. Before we knew it, the new friend had given birth to a litter of eight. There are never enough loving foster homes for all the world’s unplanned hamsters. So, suddenly, we had another litter. (As my daughter said at the time, “Yuck, that means Hamsterdam had sex with his granddaughter. That’s like me having …” I stopped her there.)

I did some swift mathematical calculations. Rats become breeders in only two months. The Wilt Chamberlains of the animal world, rats can mate up to 20 times a day. I read somewhere that New York City has about 28 million rats running around, a rat-to-people ratio of four to one. Considering the pitter-patter in our walls, we were well on our way to matching Brooklyn.

Willard! Evil beady eyes, sharp teeth, a face that escorts you to hell. Rats who swim through the sewers and enter the finest homes via the toilet. Rats who chew through aluminum siding, concrete, electrical wires. They burn down homes! They leave their droppings in the hors d’oeuvres! Rats who climb into cribs and suck out a baby’s breath! No, wait — those are cats. But never mind. What about the Black Death!

“OK,” I finally agreed, “you can’t ignore rats. What do you do?”

You go to the Yellow Pages. Excavating and Exercise and Eyelets. There was Evictions, but no Exterminators. I was puzzled until I caught on to the linguistic diplomacy. The word “exterminator” exudes darkness, concentration camps, Arnold Schwarzenegger with a machine gun. Modern Americans prefer more subtlety to their pogroms. I turned to “P” for Pest Control.

In my Northern California town of 50,000, there are 10 pages devoted to pest control services. My town, like New York, is also a harbor city, which makes it a haven for rats. Clearly, our family was not alone in our little problem. But which pest control specialist to call?

I considered a full-page ad for a company offering the Nazi-esque “Complete Solution.” A wholesome family of four beamed gratefully at a man holding a 30-gallon spray can of poison, enough, I figured, to mutate the genes of my children, their children and their children’s children. Another ad took a more whimsical approach: the Piped Piper leading away a line of cockroaches, sow bugs, earwigs and termites. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that story didn’t have such a happy ending.

For $69.95, I could purchase a Rat Zapper, “composed of a power supply and an electrocution chamber,” which claimed to be clean (no blood or guts) and more merciful than snap traps and glue boards. This struck me as a peculiar boast — like death penalty advocates alleging that fryin’ ‘em is more humane because it’s less messy than a firing squad.

“Definitely not that one!” my daughter said, pointing to an ad with a cartoon rat dressed in a jaunty, big-city hat and wise-guy pants — Joe Mantegna playing a rat. Looming over him, eight times the rat’s size, was a cartoon relative of “Spy vs. Spy.” He beckoned friendlylike to the rat, but hidden behind his back was a huge mallet.

“No fair,” my son said. “The rat doesn’t even have a chance.”

He had a point. The rat was a rat, but the human, sneaky and poised for overkill, was obviously a rat, too.

“Yeah, you say we shouldn’t hurt animals,” my daughter said. “We should respect them.”

I started to squirm. Why didn’t they want to talk about something less complicated, like, say, my own personal drug experiences? “But the rats are in our house.” I sounded lame, even to my sensible middle-aged ears.

My son, the lawyer-to-be, didn’t miss a beat. “Don’t you mean that our house is on their land?”

My daughter also aimed and fired with liberal rhetoric. “Yeah, is it the rat’s fault that he wasn’t born in a pet store like Hamsterdam?”

I had obviously taught my children well. Respect for life. No killing just to kill. Stand up for the downtrodden. After all, doesn’t a rat just want what the rest of us want, a roof over his head and a little something to nosh? I had talked to them about why I’m a vegetarian and why, if they were going to eat meat, they should be grateful to the animal that sacrificed its life for their burger.

Years ago, when our vegetable garden was under siege by snails, my son and his friend decided to save our harvest by giving the culprits “snail flying lessons” (they all flunked). It was me, friend to the snails, who insisted that we hand pick them and drive the snails to a field where they could live out their lives in slimy happiness. That was the Jainist in me, the person who’s perfectly willing to seek an I-Thou relationship with a rat.

But there’s also the part of me that’s my mother’s daughter, and that part of me wants nothing to do with an urban wildlife encounter. My mother shivers involuntarily at the sight of a spider in the bathtub and actually shrieked, “Eek! A mouse!” when one dashed across the garage. I wanted to set a good example for the kids. I wanted to do right by the rats. But I also wanted them off my real estate.

I found an ad for Critter Control that boasted “exclusion, prevention and humane removal.” There was hope in any place that calls vermin “critters.”

- – - – - – - – - -

“Rats, rats and more rats. Boy, everyone’s got ‘em this year,” said the
woman who picked up at Critter Control. “We are getting so many calls.
It must be El Niño.”

Like males under age 18, El Niño gets the blame for everything bad.

“All that water last year,” she explained. “That means rats this year.”

It also meant that she couldn’t “send out a man” to do an inspection
for at least a week. The inspection would cost $100.

“What do we do till then?” I asked.

“Are you squeamish? You could set traps yourself and save money. We
charge $80 for each rat we get.”

“Traps?” I asked.

“Put them where you find droppings. You’ll see them. Some places –
whoa! — it gets as thick as bat guano.”

“But your ad says humane,” I try. I’m not sure what I expected:
eviction notices, maybe.

The Critter Control woman really wanted to be helpful. “I’ll tell you
what you shouldn’t do. You shouldn’t use poison. It can cause all kinds
of problems when you have something dead sealed up in a wall.”

Having a pest problem is like having a sexual fetish. You think you’re
alone. But just mention yours and everyone wants to tell you theirs. One friend went into more detail than I wanted about an invasion of fleas. Another friend used every known synonym for “vomit” to describe
the smell of the dead possum in her chimney. A neighbor held his hands a
foot-length apart: “The rat was this big! This big!”

“I’ll handle it,” my husband said.

I should mention here that my husband is a writer and his father is a
minister. But his great-grandmother — old family photos show a
craggy-faced bootlegging type — earned her living
trapping muskrats for Sears-Roebuck company. My husband, flush with
purpose and genetic pride, hurried off to Ace Hardware and came back
with five old-fashioned rattraps, the kind that always got Moe, Larry
and Curly by the nose.

“They go crazy over peanut butter — the crunchy kind!” my husband
reported. “Now, I have to think like a rat. Where would a rat go?”

He placed the baited traps under the deck, in the garage, by the dryer
vent. Evidently, rats can mash themselves down and squeeze in anywhere.
He found a gnawed-up sky blue crayon in the kids’ secret hiding place
(“Maybe not-so-secret!”). He placed the final trap by the
crawl space under the house. Rats have been known to shinny up plumbing
pipes.

Over the next few days, I knew that my son and daughter were
surreptitiously setting off the traps, but I didn’t call them on it. One
morning, a trap was actually missing, although the kids
swear up and down they didn’t touch that one. My husband, puzzled and
increasingly respectful of rat intelligence, grew depressed about his
manhood: “If I were trapping for a living, we’d all be starving to
death.”

The children begged and pleaded for rat clemency. We went on the
Internet and sent out several group messages asking for eradication
alternatives. There’s a world of rat lovers out there. The Rat and Mouse
Gazette is full of “cute and informative rat stories.” On personal Web
sites, we found photos of tiny rat faces peering Anne Geddes-style out
of fields of daisies. There’s the Rat and Mouse Club of America with its
“Squeak Rooms.”

We immediately heard back from Virginia, Lisa and Bill who applauded
our efforts to “think twice about killing an animal others consider
vermin … Putting out traps or boxes of poison
just victimizes individuals — usually an inexperienced little baby out
for its first romp.”

They recommended all the preventive measures we had already taken:
removing potential food supplies (nuts, acorns, yummy snails), putting
tight lids on garbage cans, cutting back rose bushes that cling to the
side of the house, trimming the tree so rats can’t go swinging
onto the roof like superheroes. “You must find where the rats are actually entering the building and
put dense hardware cloth mesh (Not window screen — ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! I eat
that for breakfast’ — Representative Rat Person).”

And then, we were let in on a dirty little secret. Don’t ever bait! the message warned us. It seems that rats lay down a
urine trail that tells other rats, “Free buffet this way. Follow me.” It
doesn’t matter if the trail ends in death; that
information is not in the rat urine message.

The e-mail explained: “For the few that you succeed in killing, the
hordes will follow. It is a well-kept secret in the rat-kill industry.
Why? Because it is like drugs — a little leads to a lot.
What I mean is, an exterminator who puts out bait and produces one or
two occasional dead rats is just guaranteeing a permanent customer
(sucker!).”

So what do we do with the rats in our walls? Virginia and Lisa and Bill
were a lot less clear about that. They discouraged us from making them a
part of the family. “I’ve heard of babies being tamed and raised as
pets, but I’m not sure if the adults could be tamed. After all,
they are wild animals. It would probably be much better to release them
somewhere far enough away from your house that they can’t return.”

And how do we do that?

“Peanut butter and live traps. But that’s a pretty hard thing to pull
off.”

We were back to the beginning. My husband and I had a hard talk with
the kids. We didn’t see any other choice. We didn’t like it either, but
the rats had to die. Everything is killing something else all the time.
Something lives; something else has to die. Rats kill snails.
Vegetarians kill plants. With every breath, we kill bacteria. That’s the
way life is.

My husband kept up his diligence with the traps. My son stopped
disarming them. My daughter stopped giving her father dirty looks. We had all accepted the inevitable.

One morning when the kids were in school, my husband announced, “Got
one! Come see.” He was triumphant — not a lick of sympathy, a dutiful cat
that deposits a battered bird carcass at its master’s feet.

The rat’s eyes were open, but it was seriously dead. The fur was
actually quite beautiful. I never knew rat pelt had an orange underbelly,
like the time I tried Sun-In on my brown hair.

We considered having a burial ceremony when the kids got home, the kind
of modern parenting event that we held when pet turtles died or when we
found a hairless baby bird fallen out of its nest. But that afternoon,
my daughter had gymnastics after school and the next day my
son had tae kwon do. Three days seemed excessive to keep a dead rat on
ice.

My husband dropped it into the garbage can and reset the trap.

When we told the kids that we had caught a rat, they were, to our
surprise, not particularly upset. At first, we were proud of their
maturity, their acceptance of what we had called the natural order of
things. Then I felt something nagging at me.

I guess I preferred their whining and outrage, their sabotage, their
impractical empathy. With their compliance, we all seemed somehow
lesser.

Three days, three more dead rats. And then silence in the walls.

And that’s it. The story of the rats. I suppose it would have been
nicer if everything ended with some miracle solution where rat and human
found a way to peacefully co-exist. But the truth, as truth often is,
was a lot messier.