UB40 - Rat in Mi Kitchen

The year our small house housed 17 living creatures

Me and my assistant, Joe, needing some coffee before attempting ratatouille

I was never much of a UB40 fan back in the ‘80s.

“Red Red Wine” was as ubiquitous as Seagram’s Wine Coolers¹ back when I was in high school. You couldn’t avoid it. It played on new-wave radio station KROQ, it played on soul and R&B stations, it played on classic rock stations. It was the gateway reggae song for white people who would soon purchase their first and only reggae album a year later, with the release of Bob Marley’s greatest hits collection, Legend.

I was going to make a snarky comment about preferring white wine, but the truth was I didn’t drink alcohol until I was 21, BECAUSE I WAS A RULE-ABIDING CITIZEN.

No, anyone who has read any of my many pot-smoking, Christmas-light-stealing pieces back in the archives knows that I was a bit of a young scamp. I was a teenage delinquent who dabbled in petty shoplifting and bong-load ripping. I’ll save some of those stories for the future earworms (teaser: the first record album I ever stole was Metallica’s Ride the Lightning — which I still own, see below).

Here are three reasons I didn’t drink before I turned 21:

1. I didn’t like carbonation and therefore couldn’t drink beer. (long story on the carbonation thing)

2. The two times I tried wine I thought it was gross.

3. I was too much of a stoner, and most of my teenage and early college friends were drinkers, so I thought I was a cool rebel by not drinking.

What eventually turned me to the dark side?

It might have been Peach Schnapps, but I think it was Peppermint. Yeah, our young dumb bodies can handle a lot of garbage booze.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. UB40.

Back when I was exploring new wave and punk rock in my senior year of high school, I also took a liking to a bit of reggae as well. Steel Pulse was maybe my favorite, but I was big into Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, and Yellowman.

Maybe it was my preference for ‘da kine herb’ that turned me off “Red Red Wine.” That and the song’s ubiquity. I didn’t even know it was a cover of a Neil Diamond song. I should have though, as UB40 would become more famous for their reggaefied cover songs — “(I Can’t Help) Falling in Love With You,” “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” “I Got You Babe” and “Breakfast in Bed” (with Chrissie Hynde) to name a few — than from any of their original compositions.

A few years later though, UB40 would release a song that I did like, one that I first thought was The English Beat, who were quite popular at the time and were known for incorporating reggae and ska elements into their sound.

That song? “Rat in Mi Kitchen.”

My Year of Being Snakey

You may have wondered, after seeing the photo of me at the top of this post, “Did/does Steve have a pet rat?”

The short answer: Yes, I had a pet rat. His name was Joe. Our young neighbor across the street named him. I’m not entirely sure it was a boy rat.

I should back up a bit.

This is really my wife Karen’s story. I’ll likely get some of the details wrong, but that’s what the comment section is for.

We live in a small, 2-bedroom, 880-square-foot house. The 2nd bedroom had been my office until I had half of the garage converted into my man cave. I am writing this in the cave now.

One day, about ten years ago, my wife said to me: “I’m thinking of getting a ball python.”

I had known she had a love for a variety of rodents and other animals (including snakes) and owned many in her life before me.

Not wanting to leave any out, I texted her to ask if she could share a list of pets she’d had throughout her life. She replied with:

“Guinea pigs, mice, rats, gerbils, hamsters, rabbits, ferrets, iguanas, a reticulated python, a garter snake, a basilisk, turtles, hermit crabs, a newt, and praying mantis.

Oh, and a horse, briefly. And a goldfish that I won by throwing a ping pong ball into a bowl at a fair.”

But her favorite member of the rodent family, one which she has tattooed on the side of her calf, is the capybara.² Adult capybaras grow to 106 to 134 cm (3.48 to 4.40 ft) in length, stand 50 to 62 cm (20 to 24 in) tall at the withers, and typically weigh 35 to 66 kg (77 to 146 lb).

Adult and baby capybara - Kevin Schafer - Getty Images

I’m quite certain that if we owned a house double the size, we’d have a pet capybara. It might be sitting next to me right now, pressing its giant flat nose into my elbow, barking out some sort of wet, honking sound to get my attention.

“Where would we keep the snake,” I asked.

“Oh, in the 2nd bedroom,” she said as if we had a 3rd bedroom. “Don’t worry,” she added. “I’ll get all the heating pads and tubs for it.” I wasn’t worried until she said that.

Ball pythons need to live in a very specific temperature range, which requires not just a heating pad and a cool area but also the room to be kept at a particular range of degrees. Before I start talking out of my ass, here’s what I found online about ball python habitat temperatures:

courtesy of: https://reptifiles.com/ball-python-care-guide/ball-python-humidity-temperatures/

I should also mention that at the time of this request, we were living with a very senior dog, Cassie, a pitbull/black lab mix.

Not wanting to be an unsupportive husband, I agreed that Karen could get a snake and convert the back bedroom into a ball-python habitat.

Karen had joined a couple of online ball-python boards and figured out which types of heating pads to get, the best room heater to keep the space evenly toasty, and which variety/type of ball python to purchase.

Jump ahead two months.

We now have three ball pythons, and there is a 5-drawer enclosure for them. Shortly thereafter, all enclosures house a ball python. Soon, there would be nine ball pythons in the house, and most of them had names. The only one I can remember is Hawi, named after the town at the north end of the big island of Hawaii, where we’d had the best sushi dinner in our lives.

My wife with four of our nine snakes. I think four, at least.

I know what you are thinking. Or what you should be thinking.

What do ball pythons eat?

What’s that? Rats? You would be correct!

Our freezer was suddenly half-filled with frozen rats. Karen would thaw them with a hair dryer and feed them to the snakes. I was never more happy to be bald.

Soon there would be room for ice cream again, as two or three of the snakes refused to eat frozen rats. Do you see where this is going?

Yes, we began keeping live-feeding rats at the house. In a cage right next to the snake boxes.

It seemed somewhat cruel to house the rats so close to the creatures who would soon be crushing their bones and swallowing them up. But our house was tiny. Thankfully, the snakes fed around once a month, often less than that. So it’s not like our 2nd bedroom was a full-time slaughterhouse. Only very part-time.

Okay, time passed. The snakes got bigger. The rats got bigger.

We had to say goodbye to dear Cassie, who coexisted with all the snakes and rats amazingly well. It was extremely sad to be dogless, but I will admit that having all the snakes and rats made it a little easier.

I learned way more than I ever wanted to about ball pythons and feeding schedules. I discovered that if the snake doesn’t stun/kill the rat within a short period of time after the rat is “introduced” into the enclosure, the rat might end up killing the snake. We’d often have to remove the rats and put them back in their cage. (And by “we” I mean Karen.)

Soon, we had to add a second rat cage. One for feeding rats and one for survival rats, who made it through the gauntlet unscathed. Karen would give these rats away as pets.

Once, when we were going out of town, our neighbors across the street who had a four-year-old daughter offered to watch our three pet rats. When we got home, all three rats had names. You’ve already met Joe. The other rats would be “Cabbage” and “Mama Rat.”

Oh, did I forget to mention that one of the rats got pregnant, and so we ended up with even more rats than we intended?

It was around this time that Karen said she was ready for us to get a dog again. Six months had passed since Cassie died, and I was ready for a canine companion too.

But adding a puppy into the craziness of a house filled with snakes and rats was not something I was ready to face. I put my foot down. “We can get a puppy as soon as we (aka: you) get rid of the snakes and rats.” I was not going to budge on this.

By then, the honeymoon period had ended for Karen (with the snakes, not with me; that ended years prior) so she agreed. It took a couple of months to sell the snakes (the rats were fairly easy to give away as pets), but finally, we had a second bedroom again.

And a brand-new American-Staffordshire/Bulldog mix named Bernie.

To this day, “Rat in Mi Kitchen” remains my favorite UB40 track. It’s got a killer bass line and the laid-back upbeat guitar strum in combo with the horn section makes my body sway in all the right ways.

The extended, 7-minute version has a killer trumpet solo, which was performed not by the band’s regular trumpeter “Astro” Terence Oswald Wilson, but by Jazz legend Herb Alpert! Astro wrote the track and sang the lead vocal so I suppose he was plenty busy.

Over the years I’ve come to appreciate more of UB40s catalog. Sure, there were a ton of reggae bands I wish had the sort of success that UB40 did, but maybe one of the main reasons they did succeed, was because they were a pop group. They took familiar, iconic songs that everyone knew and loved, and made them their own.

They were reggae reinterpreters.

They were able to take a song and bring it into an environment where no one ever thought it would belong.

Like a rat in a kitchen.

• Did you ever have any uncommon animals as pets? Which ones?

• What are your feelings about UB40?

• I didn’t go into the band’s history (which is long and quite interesting), but they are still playing to this day.

• I hope you have a joyous holiday, whichever holiday is nearing for you (depending on when you read this)!

as always,

thanks for reading - Steve

1. https://www.slowine.com/the-seagrams-wine-cooler-legacy/

2. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/facts/cabybara-facts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capybara