Skunkers and the Cold Apartment. An unfortunate, yet true, story...

Skunkers and the Cold Apartment

Shane and I were first introduced to Skunkers on Shane's first day in the apartment. The skunk in question meandered across our backyard every evening and situated himself comfortably under our back deck. Shane's brother, who was visiting on this day, named him Skunkers and we agreed that this was a fitting name. For months Skunkers never bothered anyone. From roughly August to November, we barely knew he was around except for his nightly walk home through our backyard. Beginning in early November when the stars were set and the moon was right, we would find ourselves gracefully welcomed to some rather foul smelling skunk nonsense. Considering that Skunkers lived under our deck and the violating smells were mild (for skunk standards) and few and far between, we thought ourselves lucky.
After a few months of Skunkers living somewhere under the vicinity of our house, I began hearing him through the vent in my bedroom. My bedroom, which was located in the very back of the apartment, was rather secluded and much less properly insulated than the rest of the house. I think it was originally intended to be some sort of storage room but because there was a bathroom adjacent, I had no problems turning it into a bedroom. Anyway, there are very few things more unsettling to a newish resident of an old apartment than being awoken after 2 a.m. by the sounds of a skunk going ape-shit on your ventilation system.
Coincidentally enough, it was also roughly this time that our heater stopped working at full-capacity. Because of this, the temperature in our apartment was rarely over 62 degrees. Furthermore, because my cave of a bedroom was so poorly insulated, my bedroom rarely climbed above about 55 degrees during this time.
Because living in a very cold, putrid smelling, skunk-haunted home proves rather uncomfortable; Shane and I left an abundance of frustrated voicemails for our landlord to endure, because it was difficult to catch him answering his phone. Most of the time, when we called to leave an annoyed message, he would reply back to us in the form of a text message letting us know that someone would be over in the morning to look at it. This continued for a few weeks. This was a few weeks of an anonymous maintenance guy showing up every few days to temporarily fix the heat and comment on the smell, only to find it going out again in a few hours.
“Hello, Mr. Tennerd? This is Ross Sharkey calling.”
“Hi, Ross. How you doing?”
“Well, I’m cold.”
“Yes, we ordered the new blower motor for your heater and it should be here in the morning. I’ll have someone come by as soon as possible to replace it and have it working again.”
“Well, alright. I guess it sounds like you’ve got it sorted out, then.”
“Yes. The part will be here in the morning. I’ll talk to you then.”
The apartment was cold. It was mid-January and the apartment was cold. It also happened to be around this time that Skunkers turned violently insane.
It was a Friday night and Shane and I had some friends over for a few drinks. I, and a few others were playing cards in the living room, and everyone else was playing Jenga in Shane’s nearby bedroom.
“Ross you have to come listen to this. What the hell is in there?” A few of my female friends darted out of Shane's room followed by Shane and apparently the rest of the party. When I held my head against the vent to examine the noise, I was greeted by some of the most horrid sounding noises imaginable. It sounded like there was a 12 foot tall, rabid raccoon on PCP stuck in the vent.
“Oh, that's just Skunkers. He'll tire himself out,” I remarked coyly.
Several of the girls looked genuinely concerned about the well-being of my apartment after this monster was finished ravaging it from the inside out. It was then that the smell erupted. I say erupted because the smell may as well have emitted a thick, green fog like all horrible smells do in every cartoon. All at once, our apartment went from fun party house to complete cesspool of hatred, rendering the house uninhabitable.
“Oh dear god,” everyone seemed to gag in unison. We all made our way into the living room ten feet away with high-hopes it didn't smell there. If anything, it smelled worse.
“Wow guys. This is really bad. Does this happen a lot?” Our friend known only as Fozz asked.
“It's not normally this bad,” Shane replied.
“So, this happens often then?”
“It's happened a few times recently but never this bad.” I turned around to find Shane drowning the room with Febreeze.
“I dunno if that's gonna do it, Shane?”
“Think positively. I don't smell any skunk do you? All I smell is the warm scent of lavender and rain water emanating out of this bottle.” Of course, by this point the Febreeze combined with the skunk into one unruly, disgusting, anti-Christ of a putrid smell.
“I dunno Shane. I'm pretty sure that a skunk who goes off in a field of lavender during a summer sun-shower still ruins all life in a five mile radius temporarily.”
Just then, a couple of our friends emerged through the front door, having just smoked a cigarette.
“Hey you guys wanna- holy hell does that smell awful. Is that skunk? Christ it’s terrible. It doesn’t smell outside at all.”
I walked onto the front porch and lit up a cigarette after inhaling deeply into the night sky. It didn’t smell at all.

****

The trapping of Skunkers began after I text-messaged my landlord late one night when Skunkers was upset with me:
“It's 2 a.m. And it smells so horribly of skunk in my apartment for the third day in a row. It's so awful I can't sleep and am therefore texting you to let you know how upset I am.”
“No shit...”
I got up the next morning for work to a text-message from my landlord saying that he was coming to set a trap in our backyard.
“Hey, Mr. Tennerd,” I greeted, opening the front door. Tennerd was standing on my front steps holding a large trap, which resembled a cage.
“Hey, just letting you know that I'm here with the trap. This outta catch that little fucker.” Although I could not argue that Skunkers was indeed being a “little fucker,” I still felt a brief aside of sympathy when I realized we were gonna beat his ass.
“Oh, and I sent a tiny guy over earlier to get under your porch and see if he could spot where the skunk's been living. He had a rather cozy little home nestled up against one of the heating ducts under the floor in your bedroom. He was sleeping directly under you every night.”
“That son of a bitch.”
“Im'a get him.”
Tennerd set the trap up not far outside my bedroom window. The trap laid on top of the hardened snow for four days. Each day before work I would treat myself to a morning viewing of the cage to see if I would be greeted by a trapped and helpless skunk. After day one, the trap laid dormant and undisturbed. By day two the cage had been knocked over and because I was in a hurry to get to work, I left it that way. I of course forgot all about it by the time I got home from work and had a beer in hand. By day three, not only was the cage on its side, but it had also been triggered, and I saw no skunk inside. Discouraged, I again did nothing in my rush to get to work. By the morning of day four, the cage was now on its side, triggered, and half filled with snow from the storm the night before. I shrugged this off as a loss, and made my way to work that morning.
A few hours after I arrived at work I received a new text from my landlord:
“Skunk is going by-by.”
This text message baffled me. Merely a few hours before, the cage was buried and triggered. I didn't ask how he caught the skunk, because as long as it had been caught I didn't care. I decided that the only logical solution was that Tennerd showed up at the apartment with three-day old five-o-clock shadow, whiskey on his breath, and a large mallet of some kind and chased down poor Skunkers, bludgeoning him to death.
I arrived home from work to find Shane drinking a beer in the living room.
“You get that text from Tennerd?” I asked, dropping my coat on the couch.
“Nope.”
“They caught Skunkers.”
“The trap worked? Way solid. It's about time,” Shane replied, tossing me a fresh Pabst.
“I wonder what Tennerd is gonna do with him. Think they'll put him down?”
“Are you kidding? Tennerd has to be the back-alley abortionist of skunk removal. Your normal, professional exterminator might spare his life, but I doubt Tennerd has the connections to “properly” dispose of a skunk. He's dead for sure.”