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Goofy Dad Stories (5) – The Bat Man

Goofy Dad Stories (5) – The Bat Man

Goofy Dad Stories (5) – The Bat Man

There I was, minding my own business, innocently lying in bed late at night, window open, sweating because of the mid-summer heat in our bedroom that didn’t have air-conditioning. This is in our Newburyport, Mass. home, stacked right next to our neighbor, not more that 10 feet away, window-to-window.

Suddenly I hear a nervous little voice out my window in a loud whisper, “Ste-e-eve, Ste-e-eve?” At first I thought I was dreaming, but then that nervous voice came through my screened window again. So I get out of bed and looked through my window to see that my neighbor is standing between our homes in her robe, looking much afraid. I called out my window and said, “Kay, what’s the matter?” She said that her husband Danny is gone for the weekend, and she needs me to come over right now and help her with something.

I had no idea what she was talking about, so I threw on a pair of jeans and went outside into the dead of night and asked her what was going on. Kay said that somehow a bat had found its way into their apartment, and it’s in their bedroom, and she wants me to get it out.

Now, I hate bats. I hate rodents of all kinds, especially the kind that fly into your hair and suck your blood and give you all kinds of funky diseases. But being the good neighbor, I swallow heavily, breathe deeply, and said I’d look into it. I asked Kay if she had any tool or implement to catch the bat, and she gave me a little child’s plastic snow shovel. She said that was the only thing she could think of. So there I stood, hot and sweaty, the middle of the night, holding a miniature plastic curved snow shovel, ready for battle.

For some reason, she had all the lights off inside as I slowly crept up their stairs, weapon in hand. She said it’s probably still in the bedroom, and I see that she had closed the bedroom door. So I slowly approached the door in the darkness, and creaked it open with much fear and trepidation. I expected the bat to fly out of the room and through the doorway at any second. I continued to grip the shovel like it was a saber.

So now I finally have the door fully open, and no flying bat as yet. I stick my head into the room to locate the beast. And sure enough, there it was against the opposite wall. It was a huge, dark, hairy bat, clinging to the crucifix above their bed. It was beyond creepy, reminded me of an old Dracula movie, and I had no idea what to do. I decided to swing the snow shovel and knock the bat unconscious, or at least stun him, so that I could remove him from the house. So, I swung with all my might at the bat on the crucifix, only the curved part of the shovel was such that it barely grazed the bat. All it did was wake it up and annoy him.

As I backed up from the bat, I noticed it was not harmed in any way, and in fact it slowly turned its head to glare at me for waking it up. The bat considered me inconsiderate. So there I was, in a stare-down with a big hairy bat clinging to a crucifix. I continued to back up, scared out of my wits, not liking the way this was going, when all of a sudden the bat’s wings extend outward, alights from the crucifix, and heads straight towards me.

I reacted out of pure Little League instinct. As the bat headed my way, I swing the shovel at it, hit it in mid air, and knocked it clear into the living room. Sure enough, it lay on the carpet stunned, unmoving. Homerun! I quickly got a garbage bag and shoveled the bat into the bag and took it outside.

I went to bed shaken to my core, sweating in after-shock, and determined from then on to always sleep with my window closed. My good neighbor policy has its limits.