On the trail of those dirty rats

A man in a black Brooks Brothers suit walks the alleys of downtown Beverly Hills. It’s after 9 and things are pretty much shut down, the clothing stores, the smoothie parlors. The man could be on his way to or from a fancy dinner -- with his floral print shirt and matching tie, with his natty square cuff links. He could be scouting movie locations or walking off an unsuccessful date. That might explain why occasionally he kicks a dumpster.

But it doesn’t.

“This is great,” he says, peering down a tributary alley behind a restaurant. “Oh yeah, this is great.” His gaze traces the roofline, taking in the power lines, the maze of pipes that lattice the brick wall, his smile broadening at the sight of the open dumpsters. “Smell that?” he says, breathing in the rotting garbage, the rusty stagnant water. “Yeah,” he says again, “this could be our place. Only,” he says, suddenly disappointed, “no palm trees.”

Robert Sullivan is looking for rats. Specifically, the black rat or roof rat. Even more specifically, the Beverly Hills palm-tree-dwelling roof rat. Sullivan has just written and published a book called “Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants.” The book is doing very well, considering the high repulsion factor of its subject. Sullivan, who has a talent for presenting a lot of information in a very engaging manner, has gotten very good reviews and a fair amount of airplay, including here in Los Angeles. But the book is set in New York, and so are the rats. Sullivan has never seen an L.A. rat and he really, really wants to.

Los Angeles rats are very different from New York rats. New York rats are the fat, mean and ugly brown rat, or Norwegian rat. Los Angeles has some Norwegian rats who came West via the railroad and can be found mostly downtown, but the dominant species here is the black rat, sometimes called the ship rat because it arrived, along with many other unpleasant things, when Europeans discovered the coastline.

Black rats are sleek and graceful; they like to live in high places like attics and trees, to do a little traveling, though more often alone than in teeming ratty hordes. Black rats tend to have a healthy diet, eating fruits and vegetables whenever they can, which, given the state of L.A. backyards, is often. Their tails are quite long and slender.

Norwegian rats, on the other hand, are big and lumpy. They prefer subterranean living and garbage, especially cheesy stuff found behind Italian restaurants. Beyond the requisite alley scrambling, often shoulder to shoulder with lots of other rats, they are pretty sedentary, which may explain the weight problem.

To some, this pretty much sums up the difference between Los Angeles and New York. For Sullivan, it is just darn exciting to be in a place that has both strains of rats. The two do not always coexist easily; in New York, the brown rats drove the black rats out more than 200 years ago.

“This is a crossroads of history,” he had told a small group of people at Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore earlier that evening, gesturing with his hands like someone who has just been presented with a wonderful birthday cake. They smiled back, more at his boyish enthusiasm perhaps than the information he was sharing. Boyish enthusiasm is pretty much a prerequisite for a job that involved leaving his wife and two children most evenings for a year and hanging out in a particularly ratty New York alley; Sullivan has it in spades.

On his mind

At 41, Sullivan is a successful freelance journalist who has written two other well-received books, “The Meadowlands” and “A Whale Hunt.” The first book is about sifting through the old New Jersey swamp, ostensibly to find Jimmy Hoffa. (He didn’t find Hoffa, but he did unearth many other interesting things, including the remnants of the old Penn Station.) In fact, with his fair expressive face and short hair, Sullivan looks very much like the kind of kid who could spend all summer poking through an old dump with a stick.

But he wants people to know he is not some weird rat lover. “I just want you to know,” he says by way of introduction, “that I do think rats are vile and disgusting.” But still, he cannot stop talking about them, thinking about them, looking for them.

When he recently interviewed Ben Stiller in Paris for Vogue, Sullivan found himself prowling the alleys, looking under dumpsters. A few weeks ago, he went ratting in Chicago, where he found a surprisingly large rabbit population. “A year with the rats makes you look at things differently,” he says. “Squirrels, for instance -- rodent, essentially a rat with a fluffy tail. Rabbits -- again better tail and the ears, but still, rodent.”

He has heard a lot about the Los Angeles tree rats, how they freak out patrons at fancy restaurants by scuttling overhead along power lines, or pop from date palms like an al fresco nightmare to greet backyard party guests. He has read reports that they have moved into the posh suburbs, taking midnight dips in pools and Jacuzzis.

According to local exterminators, the rat population actually remains pretty steady year in, year out, in neighborhoods posh and not, although a drought will produce more swimming pool fatalities among all types of rodents. The only thing that changes, they say, is the media attention.

As you might imagine, people like to tell Sullivan rat stories. As with fish stories, everyone has one and the creature gets bigger with each retelling. This night at Dutton’s for example, John Robertson, a local artist who does work for Dutton’s, told about seeing a rat dragging a trap emerge from under bookshelves a few feet away from where Sullivan did his reading. The rat, Robertson said, making a gesture that might indicate a Persian cat, was “like this big.”

Later, looking up at the wires that crisscross the sky like an urban rat freeway over a residential stretch of Rodeo Drive, Sullivan tries to wish a rat into view. They’re here, he can sense it, can see the signs, the droppings, the tempting container of old hearth-baked matzo in one bin. Surely a rat or two will come down from the trees to dine. “How cool would that be?” he says to the tousled heads of the palm trees, to the Big Dipper visible faintly behind them.

Part of city life

Every city has rats -- that’s how you know it’s a city. More than traffic, more than high rises, more than city council corruption and prostitution, rats are the truest indicator of high-density population.

Conventional wisdom has it that in most urban environments, the rat population is in direct proportion to the human population, an equation that gives everyone a rat doppelganger. And considering that when the average rat is not eating or sleeping, he or she is having sex -- up to 20 times a day, sans Viagra -- your rat is probably having way more fun than you. (The females, of course, must pay the price for such hedonism; under ideal rat conditions, a female can give birth four to six times a year to litters that can top out at 12 for a Norwegian rat, eight for a black rat.)

Based on his research, Sullivan thinks the 1:1 ratio is inaccurate, allowing for far too many rats. Robert Corrigan, who runs a pest management firm out of Indiana and is considered the country’s leading authority on rats, considers all numbers dealing with rats to be “gobbledygook.” There is just no way of knowing how many rats there are in any given city, he says. Could be less, could be more.

If Corrigan had to guess, he would say Los Angeles probably has fewer rats than other cities simply because it’s younger. “The infrastructures, the sewers, the ports, don’t have as much congestion, so the pressure is not as great.”

But, he says, “people in places like Beverly Hills are going to have a different level of tolerance.”

Although people like to tell their rat stories, they often don’t like to admit they live with or near rats. Sullivan thinks this is a class issue -- rats are dirty, rats live in garbage, rats live in slums, so if you have rats, then you are dirty, have lots of garbage, possibly live in a slum. In Los Angeles, though, there may be something else at work.

“Rats indicate citiness,” Sullivan says, and this is exactly what many Angelenos don’t want, preferring to see themselves as part of some grand experiment, a series of satellite neighborhoods. This is not a city like New York or Chicago are cities, with their sanitation issues and their ancient tunnels, their dark histories.

“In a lot of ways, Los Angeles is a very unnatural kind of place,” he says. “With the freeways and all the neighborhoods, but it’s also really wild. People are always dealing with nature literally coming in.”

Rat denial

As night settles in over Beverly Boulevard, there is no immediately noticeable rat activity. Sullivan finds a dumpster that is open, near a grease slick and a tangle of ivy, which he finds very promising. Something rustles and he jumps, perhaps a bigger jump than you might expect from someone who has spent a year walking with the rats, but it is only the wind inflating a plastic grocery bag. “That’s what most of ratting is,” he says. “Staring into the dark saying, ‘Wait, what’s that? What’s that? Oh man, just a rock.’ ”

Black rats are much more elusive than Norwegian rats, says Corrigan. “With brown rats, a whole family can be found foraging in an alley, but black rats tend to leave the nest one at a time, scurry down the power lines and disappear into the darkness.” They are Angelenos after all; they don’t like crowds.

Behind the houses on Rodeo and Camden and Bedford, Sullivan is very impressed. “The garbage containment here is just excellent,” he says in a truly admiring voice. “It makes New York look really bad. In New York, it’s all just plastic bags, which are essentially rat spas.”

“You are looking for rats in Beverly Hills?” says a man who is hanging out in the alley with two buddies. “Try South-Central. What are you really doing here?”

Behind the businesses, people approached have similar reactions. “There are no rats here,” said one young man in a white serving jacket.

After hearing this several more times, Sullivan laughs. “I’m looking at rat droppings, surrounded by rat [trap] stations, seeing dumpsters open and full of broken eggs, and they’re telling me no rats. It’s like interviewing the East Germans in 1983.”

Sullivan was drawn to write a book about rats because, as a native of New York City, he had seen a lot of them and because when he had started thinking about them in a nonrepulsed way, he realized they were tied to the history of civilization like no other animal.

Readers of his book learn about the role rats played in the sanitation workers’ strike in 1968 (they essentially ended it), the bubonic plague (they and the fleas that rode them carried it), the riots of 1967 (according to Mayor John Lindsay, they helped cause them), even the Revolutionary War (to find out how rats sort of, kind of, helped win the war, you’ll have to read the book).

Down a rathole, he believes, one can find the history of a city or a country. He wrote “Rats” as a sort of opposing mirror to Thoreau’s Walden, as another way to look at the relationship between nature and civilization. “I also knew there were no books about rats,” he said. “So I would be at the top of the heap.”

As a rule, rats don’t get starring roles in literature. They are more often used as signals that something is about to go terribly wrong (Dracula had a nice relationship with rats, so did Willard) or as anthropomorphized bad guys -- in the children’s book and television series “Redwall,” rats are the evil brigands. Jo March had a pet rat named Scrabble in “Little Women,” and Templeton the rat provides Charlotte with the verbiage for her pig-saving web, but a good rat is pretty hard to find.

Sullivan has a stuffed rat that his publisher gave him before he went on tour, and he takes it out, with much hesitation and apology, at his readings. It is a big fat Norwegian rat and looks very much alive except that its coat is shining and scab free and it smells quite minty because Sullivan carries it in the same satchel as the plastic rat-decorated mint packages his wife thought would add a great touch to his readings. “Rat mint?” he said to those waiting in line as he signed books at Dutton’s.

No boundaries

In Beverly Hills, he peers into foul-smelling dumpsters -- garbage knows no ZIP Code. “We need rats because we need something to horrify us. “Rats are everything that is disgusting and vile about civilization, which is us, and we need to hate and loathe them because we need to hate and loathe something.”

The way in which we hate and loathe rats varies, though, often from city to city. Angelenos, he says, sometimes talk about rats almost as if they were squirrels, backyard nuisances, threats to the fruit trees, the trash can lids. “That they’re above ground makes them a bit easier to deal with, psychologically,” he says.

New Yorkers take a different approach, more along the lines of “Yeah, we got a lot of rats, but we’re handling it.” In Washington, D.C., he says, people are quite competitive: Tell them New York has a lot of rats and they want you to know that D.C. has more. But in every city, the favorite rat stories are those set in the posh neighborhoods. “Everyone focuses on the high-end rat,” he says. “Part of it is just paranoia. People think, if Beverly Hills has rats then there must be lots more in my neighborhood.”

On this night in Beverly Hills, there are no rats to be seen, not even a telltale rustle. “It takes a lot of time,” Sullivan explains, adding that people seem to think he can now conjure herds of rats by his mere presence, as if he were the Pied Piper.

Walking down one more alley, he asks two guys if they have seen any rats. “In Beverly Hills?” one says. “I don’t think so.”

“But some guy just wrote a book about rats,” the other one says. “I think it’s supposed to be a good book.”

If Sullivan is startled, or pleased, he doesn’t show it. “Some people,” he says deadpan, “will write books about anything.”