Casual
Carlson, Tucker
Casual UP IN SMOKE It all started with the squirrels in the ceiling. They've always lived there, between the rafters over my office at home. For years, the squirrels and I got along fine, until...
...About six of them were sitting exhausted on the floor of my bedroom when I walked in...
...That's when I decided to fix the tin roof over my office, the very last project in a series of costly, drawn-out renovations stretching back over four years...
...A small yellow stain appeared on my ceiling...
...But in our case it wasn't really surprising...
...His insurance company agreed...
...Two hours later, one of my neighbors called me to say my house was on fire...
...That was it...
...This did not surprise me...
...I greeted them, then drove to work...
...Rodents loved the place...
...Actually, he said, both radiators, which had functioned perfectly well since the Taft administration, had blown up on the same day simply because, as he put it, "they're old...
...Just the day before, the contractor had been tinkering with the pressure-relief valve on the furnace...
...And not just conventional rodents, like rats, but large, unidentifiable, call-the-zoologist-type creatures...
...By last winter, the house was almost done...
...Sure it's unpleasant when your house catches fire...
...Like normal people, they didn't take it seriously until they saw the smoke...
...When the pressure built, the radiators burst...
...The kids seemed content, looking forward to room service, and I felt relatively calm, too...
...My Spanish isn't very good, but I think he claimed to be sober...
...About a minute later I heard the dripping...
...On the day the roofers showed up, I was in a good mood...
...By the time we bought it, the place was fairly close to falling down...
...Squirrel urine dripped onto a stack of papers...
...They could not have been friendlier...
...The basement was under water...
...Outside, the roofer who had accidentally started the fire with his propane torch was standing off by himself looking sheepish...
...Everyone got out safely...
...Finally, I took a tennis ball from the spaniel and bounced it off the ceiling as hard as I could...
...At first I barked at them to be quiet...
...Then one Saturday afternoon we came home from lunch to find it wrecked again...
...I thought I could hear the little creeps laughing...
...Even mummified, it was the size of a beagle...
...I knew immediately what had happened...
...For years, the squirrels and I got along fine, until late one night a couple of months ago, when two of them got into an argument...
...I decided to get rid of them...
...Obviously, he had disabled it...
...We found them everywhere...
...Two massive cast-iron radiators at opposite ends of the living room had exploded, soaking the ceiling, walls, and furniture, melting the varnish off the floors and sending untold gallons of steaming water cascading onto bookshelves in the rooms below...
...Two exterminators later, I learned that the real problem was the tin roof...
...One of the squirrels had relieved himself directly over my desk...
...An entire side of the building was covered with poison ivy...
...Just about everything in the house has suffered from a century of rodents and neglect...
...An act of God...
...My wife and children were in the kitchen when the alarm went off...
...Not so, the contractor explained when he finally called back from his weekend house...
...Bad luck...
...Slowly we began repairs...
...By the first of October this year I was over my bitterness...
...Then I yelled...
...I have no idea how it got there...
...By the time I got home, the firemen had put out the flames and finished hacking holes in things with axes...
...TUCKER CARLSON...
...I don't know what the fight was about, acorns probably, but it was incredibly loud...
...In the wall of the second-floor bathroom we discovered a dead furry thing so big I still think about it...
...There was no air conditioning, no washer and dryer, no windows without cracks, no working heat in about half the rooms...
...I didn't stick around long...
...It was riddled with squirrel-sized holes, the result of 100 years of rodents and neglect...
...That shut them up...
...It was getting dark and we needed to find a hotel...
Vol. 8 • October 2002 • No. 7
