30) Batshit Crazy

You might not be able to heft around joists and flooring but… if there was one thing you could do, it was clean.

Once the majority of the wood cutting was done in the basement, you were able to get back to cleaning up the space. There was so much to be done. Everything was covered in a fine plaster and or saw dust: the walls, the ceiling, the floor, all the tools, anything and everything that was in that basement was covered in the stuff.

Top to bottom. Top to bottom.

Your ‘big brother’ had drilled it into your head from day one… “When you’re working on a room it’s top to bottom, floors to doors…” which meant exactly what it sounded like: start at the ceiling and make your way down, then once you got to the floor you were to start at the spot furthest from your doorway and work your way over to the door and out of the room. Basically he had been talking more about refinishing a space, but the same concept held true for cleaning a room too.

The basement was deceptively large without anything in there to give your eyes some sort of scale for reference. You and your husband were guilty of looking over the space on more than one occasion and thinking that you could have the floor washed in 30 minutes; or you thinking that you could have the wood ceilings free of dust and cobwebs ‘in no time’; or have those dusty stone walls clean in a jiffy… except that the basement was huge. Your eyes just didn’t get the memo.

You had figured out the square footage when curiousity got the best of you, and the basement area was just shy of 2000 square feet with towering ceilings almost 12’ high… the stone walls were roughly 4o and 50 feet long spans of craggy rock with lots of nooks and crannies for dust to settle. Cleaning this space was like cleaning a large sized home top to bottom… even more so on account that there was more area to clean on account of there being no furniture to break up some of that square footage and the non standard ceiling height.

You had thought about what might be the best way to clean the space… you and David had lamented that there wasn’t a big drain in the middle of the floor because you both agreed that a pressure washer or at the very least, the garden hose on full blast would have been the best solution. Without the drain though… and on account of the fact that you had spent nearly five months removing the after effects of water damage, that was completely out of the question. Which was too bad.

Then you had thought about a leaf blower. Just opening up the basement doors and putting that baby on full blast, blowing everything out… except that with the functioning kitchen just next door and being utilized, the reality was that the dust would get in there and cause an even bigger problem.

Unfortunately the only feasible option was to tackle the space the old fashioned way with a shop vac; a broom and dust pan; and a mop and bucket. There was no thinking your way out of this one… this was going to be a bitch of a clean up job and there was going to be no quick or easy trick out of it.

The first order of business was the ceiling, a gorgeous 130 year old maple wood plank surface that unlike the floors was rough to the touch… the perfect texture to capture dust and nearly a decade’s worth of cobwebs… also covered in dust… and because of the ceiling height, this was not going to be an easy task…There was the eight foot tall ladder that you could have used, but ladders made you nervous, especially teetering that high off the ground trying to reach overhead, and the amount of times you’d have to climb up and down again to move it from one spot to the next would have been and epic undertaking in and of itself. The ladder was out. What you did have though was the shop vac with the three foot long rigid plastic extension piece… which when you tried it, was still a good two feet short of the ceiling.

“Son of a bitch…” you thought, scanning the room for a solution. There was the broom… the kind with the aluminum handle where the broom head can be screwed on and off. You quickly spun the head off the broom and grabbed a roll of tape. The only thing nearby was painter’s tape, but you weren’t about to run back upstairs to the sanctuary to search for the duct tape. You wound the tape round and round the broom handle and the shop vac extension, binding them nice and tight. When you were done, you turned on the vac and gave your new extension cleaner a try and it worked fabulously. The unfortunate thing however was that you were only capable of doing small sections at a time on account of the neck and shoulder strain it caused. Twenty minutes in and your neck felt like it was going to snap in half, your shoulder was screaming and you had barely made a dent in the ceiling. “Jesus Christ… this is going to take fucking forever… what the fuck…?!” You said out loud as you massaged your neck and shoulder, the shop vac hose and broom stick on the ground.

You sighed loudly and knew you didn’t have a choice but to keep going… except that your body was protesting so loudly you decided to take on the walls… you could take a break from the ceiling and switch to the walls and then back to the ceiling…

The walls were no walk in the park either… once you got to high or too low the strain was awful… the middle strip was fine, but the top and bottom of the stone walls were brutal. You had to apply some force with the shop vac broom handle contraption too and really scour the walls to get the dust off. The work was shockingly hard… you cleaned often and yet this was on a whole other level, the only thing that really even kept you going was that the difference between the cleaned areas and the spots you hadn’t touched yet was so profound that it gave you just enough incentive to keep going.

The thing though that really blew your mind during all of this was just how much dust and debris there really was. David had bought shop vac bags to line the bucket and make clean up easier and you just kept going through bag, after bag, after bag… you wound up going through nearly a dozen by the time you finished.

A few hours in and you quickly realized that there was no way in hell you were going to be able to finish the clean up in a day. Probably not even two full days. You were already feeling every bit of the exertion on your neck and shoulder but you also weren’t ready to throw in the towel for the day. You looked at the floor… that wouldn’t be too bad on your body… but what a dumb thing to do the floor before the walls and the ceiling were done. What you could do though, were the windowsills!

The window sills had taken a hell of a beating during demo. They weren’t so much a sill as they were the openings in the stone foundation that the windows had been placed into. Over time the water damage had completely destroyed the plaster and so when the plaster was removed a lot of the stonework was crumbling and badly damaged. You had all done your best to keep as much of it intact as possible but they were a disaster. On top of that even though the floor had continually been swept throughout the demo, the window ledges were never cleaned, they were filled with loose plaster, stone, and so much dust….

On average you found that you were having to change out the vacuum bag every other window, they were that bad. You were making progress though, and you weren’t beating the hell out of your body so you kept on plugging along. When you finished the three huge windows on the north wall you had stepped back to admire your work. They looked phenomenal… at least considering their condition before you began. You had thought about switching things up and going back to the ceiling and wall, but decided against it and instead opted to finish up the three windows on the south wall. At least you’d be able to check something off your list.

The windows on the south wall opened up directly to the sidewalk and street and as a result had been covered in thick brown butcher paper to keep people from looking in. It felt strange to be going about your business down there and having people just peering in at you through the glass. The first window went off without a hitch. Every once in a while you would suck up an edge of the paper, the vacuum would make a high pitched groan in protest as the paper would block the hose up. Whenever that happened you would carefully pull the paper out while holding the hose so as not to pull the paper off the window. There were huge, deep crevices where the stone met the window’s old wooden frames. Sometimes the gaps were so large that you were able to stick the shop vac hose in there and suck out chunks of plaster and thick dust. It was so satisfying to watch everything fly up into the hose, leaving a wake of clean in its path.

When you got to the second window on the south wall it dawned on you that you should probably be filming this for your church’s social accounts. If you were getting a kick out of how well everything was cleaning up, you thought for sure that other people would too. You set up your camera and started with the sill. When you finished that it looked so much better, but you still had some pretty large gaps around the window that you could get the hose into. The first time you brought the hose up to that second window you inadvertantly sucked the butcher paper in… the vacuum protested and you quickly pulled the thick paper out before it could be torn away from the glass. When you were certain that the gap was clean you moved up to the next gap, just a little below eye level and jammed the hose in there. Once again you were greeted by the sound of the vacuum protesting as it sucked up the heavy brown butcher paper… you were so used to this by now that you weren’t really even paying all that much attention to the sliver of brown paper sticking out of the hose. You gave it a good tug.

Everything from that point on happened so quickly and slowly all at once…. The vacuum was whirring, that high pitched scream as it fought to clear the clog from the hose, and you were yanking on the paper, doing your best to pull it out before it got clogged up deep inside the hose. Except that as you gave the paper one final pull and freed it from the hose’s grasp, your brain eyes registered something that your brain didn’t pick up on quite as fast…

That wasn’t brown paper.

That was a brown fucking bat… in your hand… that you had just sucked up, then freed from the hose. Your mouth couldn’t catch up quite as fast as your hand did… you immediately dropped the hose and the bat… then you heard yourself screaming…

“OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!”

There was a bat laid flat out at your feet, wings sprawled as if it were gliding through the air only it wasn’t gliding, it was probably just as freaked out as you were, if not more so. You jumped back and began checking your gloved hand… ‘could it have bitten you?’

Were you going to have rabies?

You quickly scanned your gloves looking for bite marks. What a ridiculous thing though to think… you had only grabbed the wing then tossed the poor flying mammal onto the ground in complete shock, fear, surprise… and there was no way that poor thing had any time to protect itself on account of nearly being sucked into a dark vortex of black hose.

You weren’t even sure if the bat was alive. It didn’t look so hot all sprawled out on the floor like that… you didn’t want to get too close, but you also couldn’t just leave it there…

OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! JESUS CHRIST FRIEND… OH MY GOD I AM SO SORRY! I DIDN’T KNOW YOU WERE THERE! OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD…. OH MY GOD I AM SO SORRY! OH NO… OH NO… OH NO! I AM SO SORRY LITTLE GUY… FUCK… WHAT DO I DO… WHAT DO I DO…?!

The bat didn’t do much except to move its head and stare right up at you, its little mouth with tiny sharp teeth wide open as if to say, “WHAT THE FUCK LADY? I WAS FUCKING HIBERNATING IN THERE AND YOU JUST SUCKED ME UP WITH A VACUUM YOU SICK PIECE OF SHIT! WHO EVEN DOES THAT? WHO EVEN DOES THAT! LOOK AT ME WHEN I’M HISSING AT YOU!”

At least it was alive…

Which was both good and also problematic. Now what? Was it hurt? You weren’t about to administer CPR or check it for broken bones… but you also weren’t going to let it suffer. Was there someone you could call when you suck up a bat with a vacuum?

“Hi uh yes… is this the bat vacuum hotline? It is? Oh good… Uh yeah… I.. I just accidentally sucked this bat up and I don’t know what to do?”

That was ridiculous. There was no bat vacuum hotline because you were almost certain that this had probably never, in the history of all of humanity and bats, ever happened before.

Jesus Christ.

You had to get the poor thing off the floor, especially before someone let the dog down here and he came barreling over to sniff the pissed off, hissing, and rightfully so… bat splayed out on your basement floor.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck… ok buddy… I’m just trying to help you… I’m just trying to find something to put you in and then I can figure out how to get you some help ok? So like don’t come at me or anything fucked up like that ok?”

“Oh you mean like how you just sucked me up with a fucking hose? Like that kinda ‘come at you’ type of thing… or…?”

“I told you it was an accident. Listen just don’t fly in my hair or bite me or something fucked up like that… I said I was sorry, and I totally am… but if you bite me… then we’re going to have two problems… and I didn’t mean it…”

“I had no problems until YOU sucked me up!”

“Fuck. I know… just stay there… ok? I’m going to get a box to put you in… just hang on right there…”

“Where the fuck do you think I’m going to go? I just got the life nearly sucked out of my body… wait what? You’re going to put me in a fucking box now??? What kind of monster are you!?”

You ran around the basement like a chicken with no head, keeping one eye on the bat the other looking for a suitable box… what kind of box is suitable for a vacuumed bat anyhow? Would an Amazon box be good or?

“A box is a box dipshit… I can’t believe you sucked me up… now a fucking Amazon box… the indignity… I ought to give you fucking rabies just on principle…”

You grabbed a small box and two more pairs of thick gloves just incase the little guy decided to come through on the whole rabies threat thing and then a thick piece of cardboard and you did your best to scoop him into the box without getting bit…

The last time David had scooped a bat up into a container to release outside the two of you had marveled at that sound the little creature had made… it sounded like styrofoam rubbing against styrofoam… a high pitched plasticky squeak…

This time was no different. The bat put up quite a fuss, its wings stayed open… an unnerving site… you could barely stuff it into the box, not that you were trying to stuff the poor thing in there but you surely didn’t want it flying into your face and tearing your eye out or whatever a pissed off bat that had been sucked into a hose might do… and no one could even know what it would do because no one, you were certain, had ever been in this position before, ever.

When the bat was in the box you quickly closed it up, the bat screaming in styrofoam speak the entire time.

Now what?

Fuck.

You certainly didn’t want to traumatize the poor thing more than it had been traumatized already. You also weren’t about to toss it outside in case it had a broken wing or something like that.

“Think Vanessa…. Think… how do I fix this?”

You decided the best course of action was to put the box in one of the windowsills you had already cleaned on the far side of the basement. This way the bat would be away from you… and you could give yourself a minute to debrief yourself from that whole bat vacuum thing…

“Alright… well… shit… I am so sorry… now I don’t even know if you’re going to be ok… and what am I going to do now? I’ve got a frickin bat in an Amazon box and I don’t even know if you’re going to make it or not…”

You pulled up a bucket, turned it upside down and took a seat to collect yourself. You were still shaking. You double checked for bat bites. Then you saw your phone… shit… you had recorded the whole thing! You tore off your gloves, no broken skin (what a relief) and you jumped up to grab your phone before sitting back down on the bucket.

You replayed the video.

“Holy shit… no one would ever believe this for a fucking second if I hadn’t gotten this on video. Why would a bat even be there… I thought they liked high places… not frickin holes near butcher papered windows less than five feet off the ground… pfffft… what was the chance of this…?”

After watching and rewatching the video several times, and then viewing it once more in slow motion you were certain that the bat had not bitten you and that you did not have rabies… but that you still had a fucking bat in a fucking Amazon box.

You looked up wildlife rescues and rehabilitation centers. Of course there were none nearby. You decided that before you spent the rest of your afternoon calling around that you might as well wait a bit and see if the bat was even going to survive. He didn’t look so hot when you scooped him into the box.

“I’d like to see how you look after someone wakes you up mid-hibernation by sucking you up with a goddamn vacuum hose…”

That was fair.

You could do nothing at this point so you went back to vacuuming, not before carefully checking each and every single crevice around the remaining windows. You decided that you would finish up and if the bat was still alive when you were done, you’d find him some medical attention…

Thirty minutes later and you had finished up the windows without sucking up another bat. It was go time… time to check on the bat. You were fairly certain the poor thing was going to be dead… on account of you sucking the life out of him, but just in case you put on three pairs of gloves before you walked over to the other side of the basement. You didn’t hear anything when you got to the box on the windowsill. You weren’t really sure what to expect… a dead bat?

Carefully you picked up the box… you just had to open it enough to peek in… either it was dead or it wasn’t… in which case you were going to be a bat nurse or whatever… but you weren’t taking any chances… carefully you pulled open one of the flaps on the box… just to get a little look in there and just as suddenly there was a flurry of wings and that styrofoam squeek and the little bat took flight, wings erupting in a desperate chance at escape… the bat flew out as you tossed the box and ran… the bat flew after you…

You screamed and took off, running in circles around the basement, waving your hands wildly over your head to keep it from dive bombing you… the bat was in hot pursuit… just overhead… wings flapping as you yelled and dove onto the floor to get as low as possible.

The bat sailed past you overhead… did a few more laps around the basement… then darted off into the corner of the basement, grabbing onto the wall just below the ceiling before quickly climbing into the small gap between the ceiling and the wall and disappeared somewhere into the little space.

“Holy…. Fucking… Shit…” you said out loud to no one but yourself… and then… “I guess the bat doesn’t need a doctor or whatever… No one is going to believe that any of this just happened.”

You stood up, dusted yourself off before walking over to inspect where the bat had disappeared. On the next floor up was the ground floor of the north tower, the half bath still in construction. ‘Could the bat have made its way up into the next room up,’ you had wondered… then decided… ‘Probably not… It’s probably just in that little gap trying to go back to sleep… well I just won’t vacuum this area until the spring and we should be good to go…’

You went back to work vacuuming a little bit more of the wall being careful not to go anywhere near where the bat might be roosting… Poor thing was probably sound asleep by now…

You were just about done when you thought you heard some commotion upstairs above you… shortly thereafter the basement door opened up, it was David, he was back from running errands.

“You’re not going to believe this shit…” he said, as he walked through the door… “I was just up there going to the bathroom and a bat flew out of the wall… I thought they’re supposed to be hibernating… scared the absolute hell out of me…”

You laughed… “Oh I believe it…”

“Huh?”

“But YOU ARE not going to believe this…. It’s batshit crazy… let me show you this video I took today…”

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Here’s the poor little guy hissing at me… I don’t know which one of us was more freaked out by the whole experience…