Superpowers
The Ratmobile’s Origin Story: From Humble Beginnings to Legend Status
How one preggo’s beat-up Hyundai Accent became “The Ratmobile” and changed the trajectory of a young boy’s life
Son, if you’re reading this, it’s because your father and I are gone, and we wanted you to know the truth.
This isn’t easy to write. I hoped to tell you in person, perhaps over your favorite meal. How many nights did we sit, tête-à-tête at the kitchen table, while I sipped tea and you gnashed with your long yellow teeth at a slice of half-eaten pizza from the trash?
But I digress.
You’re different from the other kids. You’re special, like I told you nightly, tucking you into your nest of tattered fabric and sticks, your beady onyx eyes shining back at me. I hope you remember you’re loved, despite the taunting of schoolchildren, despite the relentless attempts of your grandmother to kill you with a broom.
Here goes.
You aren’t a normal child. You are…
Rat Boy.
How do I explain the inexplicable?
It all started at 69 Hooker Street, where you were conceived one steamy August night in 2021 in our Lower Allston apartment.
Yes, son, that was truly our address.
No one was more surprised than I when one pregnancy test after another was positive.
“Why are you surprised?” Your auntie Gale asked. “You didn’t use protection. You were trying for a baby.”
“I didn’t think it would be that easy!”
Although I had nausea and weird poops and my boobs hurt like the dickens, I only comprehended you were real when I saw you, a blurry wiggling blob, on the ultrasound screen.
Dammit, I thought, as my heart exploded with love, now I have to learn to drive.
I put off getting my driver’s license for almost two decades. It was my longest procrastination yet. Not world record-setting, but a significant inconvenience to the loved ones who had to drive me around. Namely your dad.
I already owned a car, a dinged-up base model Hyundai Accent from 2010. It had been sitting in our driveway for almost a year.
I called her “Chloe” after the “CHL” on her license plate. My aunt sold her to me for $2800 in the fall of 2020 when she moved down south.
Chloe smelled like cigarettes and stale coffee. She came with some scratched Mozart C.D.s and three pairs of Solar Shield sunglasses, which are wicked unfashionable, but do an excellent job of blocking the sun from every conceivable angle. Your dad (and senior citizens) love them.
Chloe was largely ignored. I told everyone I knew I had a car and I was finally (!) going to get my license, but I didn’t. Your dad took her out once in a while to keep her engine humming, but by the time I had to get serious about learning to drive, it was the fall of 2021 and several months had passed since she was last driven.
Your dad had the unfortunate task of re-teaching me how to drive. I’d learned twice before, even going so far as doing everything except get my license when I was 23 — I studied the manual, did all of the driving hours, and sort-of, kind-of (not really) learned to parallel park. After passing the written test at the DMV, I chickened out, and your grandmother drove me home.
Son, I don’t recommend this. Don’t skitter away in the face of fear. Chew fear’s face off, like you did to that dreadful Jameson’s who stole your Elmo stuffy at daycare.
On an unseasonably bright and warm November day, your dad dragged me out of the apartment and into Chloe.
I turned the key in the ignition and — kerchunk!
“What was that?” Your dad asked.
“I have no idea. That was weird.”
Your dad got out and checked the engine, but he didn’t see anything besides dead leaves. Nothing was smoking. Nothing leaked. The engine was running fine.
I guess I have to drive, I thought.
I backed out inch by inch onto Hooker Street.
“Turn the wheel hard to the left after looking both ways,” Your dad said.
I did, screwing up my face with effort. “I don’t remember steering wheels being so hard to turn,” I said.
“It’s a beater,” Your dad said, “The steering wheel isn’t great.”
Great.
I drove slowly through the neighborhood. Each turn of the steering wheel was increasingly difficult. I felt like I was steering the ship in The Little Mermaid during the storm where Ursula met her end.
“I don’t think this is right, Steve,” I said.
“You’re strong,” Your dad said, “Put some muscle into it.”
I had been using all my strength each time. Like, grunting strength.
“Something has to be wrong!” I turned, grunting, into a parking lot and parked. (Quite well, if I might add.) “You drive it, and tell me this is normal.”
“Sheesh,” Your dad said as we switched places.
He turned the steering wheel, swore, and sheepishly said, “I’m sorry for not believing you. Something must be wrong with the steering wheel belt.”
“I told you,” I said.
According to the What To Expect app, you were the size of a lime and couldn’t hear yet. That was for the best.
He popped the hood and took a closer look at the engine, where the steering wheel belt was. “Oh my god! There‘s a dead rat! It was snapped in half by the belt! You have to see this!”
“Ewwww what? No! Ewwwwwwwwww!” I shrieked, flapping my hands.
“Poor guy,” Your dad said. “He must’ve been killed the second the car turned on.”
Your dad drove back to our apartment, taking as few turns as possible. He reversed his garden hoe, pushing the corpse down in pieces out of the engine with the handle.
“You can see its spine hanging out,” your dad said, “Are you sure you don’t want to see?”
Here, son, I’d like to provide some context.
Allston is full of rats. I’d never in my whole life seen so many until we moved to Lower Allston. L.A., as the hipsters call it. The lower part of Allston Rock City, as Allston Proper is nicknamed, because of its heavy population of crust punks and musicians. Allston Rat City.
The rats mostly scurried in the shadows. Walking home late at night from the restaurant where I bartended, I’d see glimpses of one or another out of the corner of my eye sporadically.
Blink-and-you’d-miss-’em rats.
I even delighted in — I’m reluctant to say now — the “flat rats” I saw on my walks to work. Rats each hit by one car, run over again and again and again until they were two-dimensional, more pavement and tire tread than flesh.
There are more than a few of these #flatrats on my Instagram page. Your auntie Cath threatened to unfollow me due to them.
Allston Flat Rat City.
But I couldn’t stop posting. Death is part of life, and those fugly flat rats reminded me that life is precious.
You are precious.
During the pandemic, the rats in our neighborhood swarmed. The restaurants shut down, and the ol’ reliable overflowing dumpsters with succulent trash juice and bags of half-eaten greasy dinners were no more. Even in the sun, their compelling aroma was none, nada, zilch.
Rats had to find new sources of food. They beelined to residential backyards and feasted on the local trash with its anxiety-filled attempts at zesty sourdoughs and homemade pastas.
Not only did your dad make the proverbial breads and roasts, he also poured his frayed attention into our back garden. He planted kale, turnips, corn, tomatoes, carrots, raspberries, radishes, squash, and more, filling a huge barrel with tangled weeds in the process.
The rats were grateful. They nested in the rotting weeds. They ate everything that grew. Your dad became too scared to go back to his garden. We already feared this mysterious virus, and we had a rat-infested backyard, too.
The months ticked by. Covid numbers fell and rose, rose and fell. The number of the dead rose and rose, ceasing to have any meaning.
By the fall of 2021, the garden wasn’t a garden anymore. Your dad occasionally barbecued in the backyard, but only before nightfall. You, rather than rats, were on our minds.
Your dad brought Chloe to get her steering wheel belt fixed, and the next time he asked me to practice driving, he asked if I wanted to take “The Ratmobile.”
Chloe was out, The Ratmobile was in.
For the rest of our tenure at 69 Hooker, before driving, I banged the hood of The Ratmobile with my fist to make sure there were no rodent squatters.
Your dad says the memory of his wife swollen with his child, banging on the hood of the car, is his favorite from my pregnancy.
Not when we saw you with your eyes open during my 3-D ultrasound, like you could see us, too. That was my favorite memory.
The Ratmobile became a joke between your dad and me, but the scent of the rat corpse remains lingered, mingling with the aroma of old coffee and cigarettes. Sometimes I wondered if bits of fur might blow out from the heat vents.
You didn’t become Rat Boy the day Chloe became The Ratmobile. The day I split the rat in half. I don’t believe that.
But the stage was set.
In March 2022, one month after I got my driver’s license, and two months before your birth, we moved to Billerica, a suburb 40 minutes northwest of Boston.
This is starting to read like a math problem. The logistics are banal, but matter. We made much happen before you were born. I started a new office job outside the restaurant industry after bartending for a decade. I got my driver’s license (huzzah!), and we bought a house in the knick of time before the mortgage loan rates went up.
The latter is a humblebrag. Sorry, not sorry. I’m proud your dad and I scraped together the down payment for a single-family home in the Boston metro area as a catering chef and a bartender, respectively. We’re scrappy! You get that from us, not from your rat side!
I chewed fear’s face off.
In April, a month before you were born, I left for work. Billerica didn’t have a rat problem. Banging the hood wasn’t necessary. I scraped the Ratmobile’s windows of a thin late-spring frost and went on my merry way.
The sun was shining. Waze told me I-495 was the fastest route, and although I hated merging onto the highway, especially this exit with a super short on-ramp, I thought, Why not? I’m already late for work.
You can’t be afraid forever, I thought.
It’s a wee two miles from our house to the exit. As I drove, a big truck loomed closer and closer to The Ratmobile’s rear bumper.
I should pull over and let this moron pass before I get on the highway, I thought.
But I didn’t. Something made me keep driving. Pride, perhaps. Or the fact that I was late already.
The skin over my knuckles tightened as I gripped the steering wheel. I drove up the on-ramp, my right foot pressing down on the gas. I looked over my left shoulder and the sun blinded me.
Fork. Why wasn’t I wearing the Solar Shields?
An 18-wheeler blocked the sun zooming up behind us. That stupid truck was still right on my buns.
In an instant, the 18-wheeler flew past, and the truck slipped right behind him. I kept driving, right into the guardrail.
I can’t say what exactly happened the moment The Ratmobile made contact with the guardrail. I heard the screech of metal tearing like frosting swiped by a finger, first the front of the car, then the rear. All come undone.
Out of nowhere, I smelled the singe of burnt fur.
A Marvel movie would slow this scene down, show it frame by frame in all its anguish and import, but I can’t say for sure that this is the reason you were born with a long hairless tail and faint whorls of fur on your narrow shoulders. I only know that after Chloe became The Ratmobile, your sonograms were normal.
It was only after The Ratmobile was totaled that you became…
Rat Boy.
Author’s note: This story is mostly true. I will leave it up to you, dear reader, to suss out what is real and what is super-real.