The real, "Bat Girl," featured in her full protective gear.
I found it tough staying asleep in front of a 55 inch flatscreen tv, my wife just had installed in the spare room of our cottage. It was however the only thing that been mounted in the place in my recent recollection.
Rather than read a tattered classic hardcover, in the rustic charm of our cottage, which almost never happens, I'd opted instead for falling asleep in front of the jumbotron in the just cabin's spare bedroom, under an empty family sized bag of Swedish Berries.
My wife Madge, her cat and fuzzy little dog had long established their domain in the master bedroom. This was done with the purchase of an ultra soft pillow top Beauty Rest. Unfortunately the master can no longer spend a night on such luxury, without incurring temporary paralasis of his back.
On that night, as is the usual, the three of them were planning to leave such comfort, to watch classic TBN movies, with the old man, who would rant about the upcoming feature, only to be found asleep snoring, with all the subteness of a Husquvarna chainsaw.
And as far as Madge was concerned, what's left of Ted Turner's media empire on Turner Classic Movies, really isn't worth watching.
My wife, much like Ted's old partner Jane, has long given up on what was once to her was an interesting man full of adventure. She knew I was more apt to be yelling at CNN news , rather than actually making any.
But then again from my perspective, I hadn't seen a lot of her wool leggings for quite some time either...
So there I lay on my Sealy Posterpedic, the only thing left that is still rock hard after the last 25 years...
Semi-concious, with one eye closed and the other barely open, I detected something unusual fluttering around at the end of my bed.
Although not really with it, what I saw looked a lot like a bat, but that's mostly because, that's exactly what it was...
The furry, winged beast had somehow found it's way into my room at the cottage.
"Oh fuck. This is not good..." I thought to myself. I was quickly going to need a plan, before the stuation escalated.
Gone was a time, when I was once allowed to be a man, I would have loaded three, "Whizbang," 22 callibre shells into my Cooy repeater and toasted the little fucker and received a heroes welcome...
But we know that's all changed now. The,"No discarching firearms in the bedroom," laws are now in effect here in Canada and nobody wants another Oscar Pistoreus situation, although shooting your wife, right off the throne, seems a bit suspicious to me...
In todays world, even Arming myself with a tennis racquet to swat down, a bat, (Canadian Folklore) to protect my wife and more importantly, my dignity, would no less result in seeing David Suzuki at my door with a warrant for in any way encroaching on the rights of Mother Nature...
These are no longer the Ozzy Osburne days where biting off a bats head was just pure entertainment...
All I had on hand was a Blackberry, which is an ancient Canadian device, once considered useful for communication purposes...
I Googled, "How to rid a bat from your home," and as I figured, the primitive device was of no help, as after 10 years of trying Rim had not figured out how to connect the device to the internet... It was however easy to type in my cry for help on the Querty keyboard...
So there I was. Trapped under a thin veneer of cotton and feathers, in nothing more than my man panties.
Feeling somewhat vulnerable, I knew I needed to get the door shut before my visitor took it upon himself to leave my room and terrorize the rest of the place...
He wasnt going to just fly out the window. Those were shut tight and locked to allow the new AC unit to provide fresh cool air to our family and provide even more unwanted cottage noise to our community...
On top of that I'd wisely nailed the window screen shut, because that's always how I properly fix things around the place...
I thought of the poor hiker trapped in a similarly bad situation who sawed off his leg to escape from dying in the desert, which to me just seemed like a bad idea....
Well to go hiking that is. You rarely seem to hear of anybody sawing off a limb to get out a sports lounge...
I did roll off the bed although and some what more higher centered than in my youth, commando- crawled to the open door and shut it tight. I would deal with this tomorrow...
Well except there were questions...
"Whats going on in your room?" Madge asked, still half asleep.
"Well,... There's a bat flying around in there." I answered.
"A bat in our house? You've go to be joking?" she said in dibelief.
I told her not to worry and that I had the situation under control.
Well lets just say, she thought otherwise...
I backpeddled and try to calm her, like any man would who'd completely lost control of the situation, then even tried to go on the offence.
Whoever said the best defence is a good offence was complelety out to lunch on this one..
"Hey, first of all, didn't exactly invite him in here. The little bastard must have come in through the broken screen door." I said.
More importantly, I explained, bat's are entirely harmless creatures, that just eat bugs which is a good thing."... of course leaving out the part, where Pa has to go out to the yard and shoot a rabid, Ol Yeller...
But Unlike many urban envirogreen Moms of today, her perpective on the the little beast was less ecofriendly. I like to think of her, at Safeways, when choosing bags, as the," I'll take plastic and lot's of it," kind of gal. She didn't disappoint...
"Those fucking little winged rodents, shit all over her deck and are going to cause us cancer. Now are you going to do something about it , or should I just call Larry?"... Which is pretty much the emasculation knockout for me in our home.
Well, so now of course I snap...
"Oh, I'll get the little fucker out of here right now if that's what you want." I bravely announced, now completely out of my head.
"But I will need your help." I add.
"Fine, let me Google it." she said.
"Fuck Google," I said rather heatedly...
"I'm going in." and just like any husband scorned, I wrapped the duvet around me, and went back in to the room.
My field marshall, was now calling in the strategy, from the other side of the door.
"Step 1," she says reading courageously from her iPad. "Contain the bat in one room. "
I quickly reminded her, that was something I had already done...
Step 2, She tells me to "Open the window."...
My quick thoughts were, "Well fuck that. Little did she know, when I was fixing the screen on the window, I'd nailed it shut..."
I knew what the Duke would do in this situation and it involved a carbine, and more than a few clips....
Like Indiana Jones, I cautiously observed the cave, not knowing where that featherless freakish creature was waiting...
Maybe it had magically disappeared or somehow turned into a some kind of beautiful Kardashian witch...
But sadly not so.
There it was, with its creepy little bat feet, affixed to the popcorn ceiling-- yes, something I've been asked to remove for the past fifteen years...
Moving as quietly as a two hundred pound man under the influence of 5 cuba Libras can move, I reached the window and started cranking it open.
Panicking, I yanked on the screen, until it bent and with it in my grasp, I fell to the floor and crawled back to the door, where my trusty backup was peeking through the crack and was now screaming at what she was witnessing.
The bat failed to see my professionalism and had instead gone nuts, flying around the room like well you know, a Bat Out Of Hell...
"Quick, quick!" Madge yelled. "He's going to get out." with all the sympathy for me, as a season ticket holder to the Roman Coleseum...
So I evacuated the premise, and my trusted deputy, slammed the door shut.
She then informed me, with all the wisened knowledge of a CNN guest panel, that the light from the television would further bother the intruder, and it would soon on it's own vacate the premises. Her further internet research showed, it was now just a matter of letting nature and 55 inches of high definition plasma, take it's normal course...
So of course, even though she agreed to leave the situation alone....
But now , if life were that simple...
Laying in the "Master Suite," going over my recent heroic's over and over, my thoughts were interupted, when I heard Madge opening the door to the spare bedroom.
"Honey it's gone. Come and see." she said.
"Just leave it for now." I replied not really wanting to back in there.
"Let me check it out in a bit." I replied, wanting nothing more to do with it that night.
She came into the bedroom, briefly waxed poetic about how I used to be brave like that all the time... , and said. "Your little bat must have flown out the window. Come see."...
Well it's just never enough, is it?...
I got up and went to the other room. As an act of bravado, like some sort of matador I lay on the bed, as a display of confidence, of my recent work.
But unlike El Toro, there is no rest, after giving a brave performance.
Her suggestion was to now shut the window, just in case pestulance comes calling again...
So I arose, cranked the window lever extra tight to seal off us from our nightmare and as a final act of showmanship, for my bride, I pulled the old tattered cottage curtains tight.
Well, that's when that little-winged bastard emerged out of Sears polyester cotton drapes and straight into my face flapping it wings, then dropped down onto my chest just for extra effect...
This of course sent me screaming and running around the room like a little school girl, flailing my, while arms trying to get away.
Batgirl, witnessing the carnage, sensed this was a really good time to panic also, so together, panic we did.
Now like in Hitchcock's famous movie the Birds, I was now in my mind fighting for my life. The stuation was clearly beyond my control. I yelled to my wife,"Run Madge run."
Like prize fighter, Jake Lamata, The Raging Bull, I stood in their and took what I had to, until I re-opened the window...
In a last ditch effort, I pushed it, sprung the wood framed glass open and ran from the room. My deputy was long gone... When I found her, she was hiding behind a large glass of red wine, obviously shaken, but what she'd just witnessed.
I grabbed a glass, filled it full and requested of Madge, we not go back into, "The Stuation Room," to check on anything.until the bottle was done...
An hour later, with our wine gone and a new perpective, we together surveyed the situation. On our final sweep that evening, as in Hithcocks thriller, the protagonist had departed as abrubtly as it arrived...
The bat had it's freedom, and perhaps once again I could reclaim some sort of lost level of manhood, although I'm really not so sure what that is anymore...