Rat.

Yes, New Yorkers should be worried about rats coming up through the plumbing.

In 1985, my boyfriend Brian and I, because we couldn’t find an apartment we could afford in the East Village, moved from his place on 11th and C (where the rent was, I think, under $200 but hadn’t been paid in months) to a floor-through in a Ft. Greene brownstone.

The apartment had a dilapidated romance about it and could, at night, say, decorated for Christmas, be kind of beautiful with its crumbling ceiling molding and painted wide-plank floors and Edwardian proportions, but in the light of day it was obviously, to say the least, worse for wear.

One of its charming features was that the bathroom and a tiny room over the stairs that we used as our music studio were outside the apartment, off the hallway. One night soon after we moved in, I got up in the middle of the night to pee, walked down the hall, opened the bathroom door, and, half asleep, flipped on the light to find a large rat thrashing and squealing in the toilet. Maybe it was me squealing.

I slammed the door shut, ran back into the apartment, and woke up Brian. We got a broom and, from as far away as we could get, pushed the bathroom door open with the broom handle. The rat was gone, and the floor and walls of the bathroom were splashed with water. There were piles of rat poop in the toilet and on the floor. The door had been shut, so clearly the rat had left by the way it came in.

I still think about that rat when I get up in the middle of the night to pee. Eventually, after many years, I got so I could sit on the toilet without turning the bathroom light on first, but for years I couldn’t.