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Were I to leave the door unlatched overnight, they would slip out of my dreams and join me in the real world, here in my loft above the eaves.

I chose this loft last fall as the perfect place to live and write. Getting up to the third floor and back down would be good exercise, I decided. The outdoor stairway, with its three landings, angles up and over an odd assortment of tacked-on additions to the main structure, then pierces the lip of the perfectly square roof. One of the four original dormers is now my front door.

One night soon after I move in, I get a phone call from the neighbor one floor below. “Just thought you’d want to know,” she says, “that there’s a thirty-five pound raccoon sitting on your porch.” I flip on my porch light. Sitting? Not entirely accurate.

The light startles him and he jumps up off his steaming pile. Just like that, he’s up on the porch rail and then he’s on the roof. He pussyfoots all the way around to the opposite side of the house, like a miniature cat burglar. I stick my head out of the window and watch him dive in through a hole in the roof.

“And, by the way,” warns my neighbor. “I wouldn’t open any of those little closet doors up there.”

Have you ever seen a raccoon close up? Gosh, they’re cute and cuddly little buggers. One of God’s most beautiful creations. But their crap is another matter.

I’m no stranger to shit. I grew up on a dairy farm. I’ve worked in nursing homes. I’ve paper trained puppies. I’ve potty trained children. My children have hauled home and promised to clean up after, and then not cleaned up after, dogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, gerbils, goldfish, ducks, chickens, rabbits, cats, birds, frogs, and iguanas.

Once, when I was five years old, I found a dinner fork in my sandbox, its tines pressed into a nice, wholesome, sand-encrusted cat turd. A fork. I wouldn’t eat for three days.

Don’t get me started. To me, “What kind of shit is that?” is not a rhetorical question. “My God! Where?” I’ll say, my eyes darting, my mouth going dry.

I should look this stuff up before I write about it. But raccoons must lick themselves more than cats do. Or, instead of having sandpaper tongues like cats have, they must have tongues made out of the stuff they make lint brushes out of.

Because raccoon shit is the hairiest damn shit I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen me some shit.

Now, thankfully, raccoons will not crap where they sleep. They will, however, wake you up at three o’clock in the morning with their drunken brawls. Papa Coon gets a snootful of fermented cabbage juice and comes staggering home all liquored up and catches Mama with some low-life trash from the storm sewer, and the little ones slink off around the corner so they don’t have to hear, yet again, how they don’t look like anybody on Papa’s side of the family.

Nocturnal creatures that they are, my raccoon neighbors are wide awake while I’m asleep and dreaming. This is how they can slip into my head so effortlessly, changing their identity, disguising themselves as rats or some wild snuffling, snarling things with wings.

One morning, I awake fully convinced that I have tiny little electricians pulling wires through my walls. Which is very unsettling to me, because they’re also peeping through into my shower stall and making snide comments to each other about my fat ass, and that’s not fair, is it? I mean, wouldn’t anyone’s ass seem big to a three inch tall electrician?

The dreams I’ll forgive them for, because, I’ll admit it, before I moved in here, my dream life was pretty dang dull. But one morning, I squish out onto my porch barefoot, and decide, “This shit’s got to stop.” 

I hop back into the house, open a closet door, and just like that I’m face to face with a masked bandit. He doesn’t bat an eye. He looks as tame as a house cat, but I don’t kid myself. If I’d reach out to touch him, he’d probably take my arm off.

“Listen here, you mangy flea bag.” I say. “You don’t fool me with that Lone Ranger get-up.” He backs up about three feet, then, and sits down, little-black-beady-eyeing me.

“You do realize the roof is getting replaced, in like, a couple of weeks, don’t you?” I ask. “And then, you’re out on your hairy ass, you overgrown masked rat bastard. But, for now, here’s the deal. You don’t crap on my porch and I don’t turn you inside out and make a gut-bag out of you. YOU GOT THAT?”

He backs up, fast, and disappears around the corner of the crawl space. That was at the beginning of the summer, and the roof’s still not started, and I’ve caught seven raccoons, now. I can only catch them right outside my door, because when the trap is placed on the lower landings, the coons tend to climb all over the back end to get at the bait and spring it before they can get inside.

So I start backing the thing up to my front door, leaving just enough space so I can get back into the house after setting it. I bait it with an old margarine tub full of leftover fruit and vegetables, throw in an ear of fresh sweet corn, and let it all ripen in the sun for two days.

And then, on the morning of the third day, I open my front door, and find that all this voodoo has produced a rather pissed-off looking captive raccoon. And beneath him is a nice, slippery pile of raccoon shit. Trust me, the raccoon is easier to get rid of than the shit. I haul him out into the country to become someone else’s problem. But the shit is still mine.

*      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *     *      *      *      *      *     *

On the way home from dropping off Number Seven in the country, I stop at the Goodwill to pick out a disposable metal shit scraper from among the pancake flippers and spatulas. It sets me back fifty cents, which is a lot, I know, but have you seen what they go for, new, at the K-Mart?

I return to the loft, hoping maybe I’ve just exaggerated the latest mess in my mind. This is the seventh, after all. Of course, he was going to shit. They all do. I’d taken precautions.

I’d found an old blue sled, you know the kind they had years ago, just a long rectangular plastic sheet with a handle, like your mom would buy you in February after you left your real sled out in the driveway and it got run over and there probably weren’t going to be enough snow days left to gamble away a lot of money on another real one, especially for a stupid idiot child who didn’t know the value of a dollar.

Three or four coons back, I start sliding that underneath my trap before baiting it. And then whatever falls, or oozes, out through the wire mesh can be wiped or hosed off, just like that.

But, standing on my top step, I can see exactly what had happened in the night. I can imagine Number Seven, poking his dainty little snout up out of the hole in the roof and getting a whiff of decaying Grandma Isley’s “Extra Cherry” Fruit Cocktail in a Natural Cherry Flavored Heavy Syrup, and three day old sweet corn. I can see him waddling around the edge of the roof, just above the eaves, then plunking down onto my porch.

He ducks his head and follows his nose . . . Mmm. The aged fruit and sweet corn combination plate. Me likey! and SNAP! He’s trapped. He probably doesn’t even realize it, until the food is completely gone and he’s licked off most of the hair from his forearms, just to make sure he hasn’t missed any of the Heavy Syrup.

And then he starts struggling so violently that he sets the cage to dancing, and the moment he gets it completely off the plastic mat, he explodes from both ends.

Anyway, that’s the story my porch tells, and it’s sticking to it. Literally.

I’m tempted to go back down and get a garden hose. But a few feet beneath my porch is the gabled roof of a one-story addition, and whatever hits the slant of that roof is going to bounce right back up and stick to my second floor neighbor’s windows and screens. So, this is going to be a dry cleaning job.

I assemble my equipment very carefully, and, if you’ve never had the pleasure, let me assure you that it takes some degree of skill to negotiate a three foot swath of rotten fruit and sweet corn and hairy raccoon shit while carrying a tub of hot soapy water through a screen door. (Although, no one gives out awards for that. But someone should. Mark my words, you’ll never see that contest, unless the participants are required to compete in bikinis or wet t-shirts.)

Most of the mess I clean up with a dustpan and the disposable metal shit scraper. To the lay person, this tool would look suspiciously like a pancake flipper, but we aren’t going to talk about that anymore, because I like pancakes, and would someday, in years to come, like to go back to eating them again.

The crud between the slats I reach with a plastic picnic-ware knife. I dunk clean, white t-shirt rags into the soapy water, ring them out and swab half-heartedly at the wooden decking, but I have no rubber gloves and don’t want raccoon crap under my nails, so it’s slow going.

And then, honestly, I don’t know what comes over me. I just say, “Forget this,” and dump the entire tub of water out over the porch landing.

Why? Why would I do that?  As I watch the water pick up little bits of corn and cherries and raccoon shit from between the boards, before cascading down the side of the house and splashing onto my neighbor’s window sills and back up onto her white lace curtains, I come to the realization that I have got to hurry -- hurry! -- into the house. NOW!

Because at this moment, it’s not going to help the situation to remain where I’m standing and explode from both ends.

But I’m frozen. I remember pouring out the water, and the tub getting lighter. The tub is empty. Oh, my God. What have I done? I squint down, between the slats of the landing.

It’s a waterfall. But perfect-- shaped like a comb, all made of water. Teeth made of grey, shit-flecked liquid, with chunks of corn and fruit, raining down. The teeth elongating, more like the bars of a prison cell now, in front of the windows. Will I go to prison for this? The splash now, the blowback, the curtains flying back into the house as if buckshot.

Downstairs, fast footsteps are approaching. The only parts of my body which will move are my eyeballs. I feel them growing, bulging out of my head. SLAM! SLAM! The window sashes come down, and the spell is broken. I tear myself away and reel into the house. I lie there in the cool darkness, beneath the massive ceiling fan spinning in the peak of the roof, breathing hard.

I am too stupid to live.

The fan gyrates wildly. It could come down at any time. Now that would be a freak accident. A commercial jingle runs through my head -- Salad Shooter! I picture the mess it would make of me. There’s a lot of corn involved. I throw one arm across my eyes and take refuge in the soft blackness of the inside of my elbow.

“What is wrong with you?” I berate myself, over and over.

I am so impulsive. That’s all. It’s not that I’m a bad person. It’s just that I don’t think things through. I mean well. Most of the time, when I mess up really badly, it’s when I’m just trying to do the right thing -- something difficult, you know? And I’m just overwhelmed and then I screw up.

Can’t my neighbor understand that? Wait. Maybe she will! I get a piece of paper out of the printer and scrawl the following note:

Please, forgive me. I am border-line retarded. I was just so grossed out and overwhelmed by my raccoon shit mess that I forgot for a moment how close I was to your windows, and I made a dreadful mistake.

I’m not going to set the trap, anymore. If the point is to get rid of the raccoons because they shit all over the place…well, they shit a hell of a lot more when they’re caught in a goddamn cage than when they’re free, so what’s the point?

And, trust me, I have a vivid picture of yours truly by this winter, if I can’t pull myself together.

I’ll be one flipped-out frightening-ass monster, stomping down my stairs in a coonskin cap -- a necklace of claws a-clanking, shod in a pair of fuzzy baby raccoon slippers --

NO. I give up.

I tuck the note under her door and go to bed early. I’ll feel better in the morning. Certainly, I can’t feel any worse.

I wake up at two o’clock in the morning and remember that she has two small children, and that they can read.

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