UB40 - Rat in Mi Kitchen
FTA: The year our small home housed 17 living creatures
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 insert a snarky comment about preferring white wine over red, but even though this is true today, I didn’t drink alcohol until I was 21, BECAUSE I WAS AN INTOXICANT-FREE, RULE-ABIDING CITIZEN.
As anyone who has read one of my many pot-smoking, Christmas-light-stealing pieces in the archives knows, after the age of 11, I was neither intoxicant-free nor rule-abiding. I was a teenage delinquent who dabbled in petty shoplifting and bong-load ripping. I’ll save some of those stories for future earworms (teaser: the first record album I ever stole was Metallica’s Ride the Lightning — which I still own, see below….I can’t be certain it’s the same copy).
Here are four actual reasons I didn’t drink before I turned 21:
I didn’t like carbonation and therefore couldn’t drink beer. Also, my parents didn’t drink, so I was never tempted at home.
The two times I tried wine, I thought it was gross.
I was too much of a stoner, and since most of my teenage and early college friends were drinkers, I thought I was a cool rebel by not drinking.
Turning 21 before most of my friends led to my eventual imbibification, spurred on as I was the buyer of said booze.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. UB40.
In my senior year of high school, while I was exploring new wave and punk rock, I also took a liking to a fair bit of reggae. Steel Pulse was probably my favorite, but I was big into Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley (of course), Burning Spear, Sly & Robbie, and many others.
Perhaps my preference for ‘da kine herb’ turned me off UB40’s “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 covers — “(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 released a song that I did genuinely like. A song I first thought was by The English Beat, who were quite popular at the time and were also known for incorporating reggae and ska elements into their sound.
That song? “Rat in Mi Kitchen.”
My Year of Being Snakey
After seeing the photo of me at the top of this post, you may have wondered, “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.
The long answer: I should back up a bit.
This is mostly 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, 875-square-foot house. The 2nd bedroom was my office until the garage was converted into my man cave.
The 2nd bedroom became the place we stored everything that couldn’t fit anywhere else, a sort of smorgasbordatorium. Our bookshelves, photo albums, file cabinets, modem/router, and assorted doo-dads.
One day, about ten years ago, my wife said to me: “I’m thinking of getting a ball python.” She said it in the same voice one might say, “I’m thinking of getting a lamp.”
I had known she had a history of rodent and reptile ownership. The extent, though, I was unaware of.
Wanting to be thorough, I texted my wife 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.”
Her favorite member of the rodent family, though, 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).
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. (Edit 2025: we now have a house nearly 3x the size. No capybara. Yet.)
“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 require a specific temperature range at various times of the day (see below). They need a warm area and a cool area, and the ambient temperature of the room needs to be kept consistently warm as well. Before I start talking out of my ass, here’s what I found online about ball python habitat 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.
The next day, Karen joined a couple of online ball-python chat 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 five ball pythons, and there’s a 5-drawer enclosure for them.
Jump ahead a few more months, and now there are nine ball pythons in the house, and most of them have 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 of our lives.
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 happier to be bald.
A couple of months later, there would be room for ice cream again, as half of the snakes refused to eat frozen rats. Do you see where this is going?
In addition to nine snakes, we were now keeping live-feeding rats in the 2nd bedroom. 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.
Time passed. Friends refused to visit. My mother refused to visit. The snakes got bigger. The rats got bigger.
That summer, we had to say goodbye to 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 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 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.)
Before long, we/Karen decided to add a second rat cage. One for feeding rats and one for the survival rats, who made it through the gauntlet unscathed. Karen would give these rats away as pets.
When we needed to go out of town for the holidays, our neighbors across the street, who had a four-year-old daughter, offered to watch our three ‘pet’ rats. When we returned home, all three rats had names. You’ve already met Joe. The other rats were named “Cabbage” and “Mama Rat.”
Oh, did I forget to mention that one of the rats got pregnant, so we ended up with even more pet rats?
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 desiring a canine companion, too.
But adding a puppy into the craziness of a house filled with snakes and rats was not something I was willing to accept. 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 (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, eventually, we had a second bedroom again.
And a brand-new American-Staffordshire/Bulldog mix named Bernie. (Edit: Bernie is now 9 years old! And making new friends every day.)
2025 Update:
At our new, much larger house, both Karen and I have our own rooms to do as we please. “I’m going to get a ball python,” Karen said to me today. And so the story continues on. I will post more photos of the new slithery addition/s (there’s no way she’s only getting one), when they arrive.
To this day, “Rat in Mi Kitchen” remains my favorite UB40 track. It’s got a killer bass line, and the laid-back guitar riff, 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, 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 UB40’s 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 exotic 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.
Ever since Gary Shteyngart wrote a piece in the New Yorker about the Capybara cafe in Tokyo, the sweet rodent’s popularity has skyrocketed. Maybe Oakland should be the setting for the first Cafè-Bara (it has to be called that, no?).
As always, thanks for reading - Steve
https://www.slowine.com/the-seagrams-wine-cooler-legacy/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/facts/cabybara-facts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capybara
I’ve had several pet rats. They’re incredibly smart and sweet and make great pets.
Oh Steve! Rats and snakes are two of my absolute worse fears! Rats pop out every once in a while in certain parts of Chicago at night (which is partially why we live in the suburbs!) I also don't like mice, which have occasionally made their way into our house. (If someone filmed me jumping onto a chair at those moments I'm sure I'd get more followers than I currently have on Substack!) I love hiking in Palm Springs but as soon as I see a sign about snakes or hear of someone being confronted by one, I try to avoid those hikes! So, I may not be stopping by your house any time soon....!