I guess it all began for me as a child. My family would lock me in the basement when they would go away for Sunday church and "togetherness" activities. You see, I was born with the mark of the beast on my scrotum, so I wasn't allowed at church. My family didn't like me much anyway.
So for the first year or so, I would just sit in the basement, in almost complete darkness save for the meager sliver of light coming through the locked basement door (which never did shut properly), and contemplate my mortality and the merciless revenge I would exact not only upon my family but humanity as a whole.
Then, one day, I heard a squeak. "What's that?" I thought. "Probably nothing more than an auditory hallucination elicited by my impossible-to-suppress, molten fury." Then I heard it again. And again!
"Who the **** is there?" I asked. That's when Squeaky showed up. He was neither a large nor a small rat; just a rat. But he had this gaze: a penetrating but not unkind gaze that saw through to the innermost reaches of your soul and from which you could hide nothing. I had seen that gaze somewhere else before. Perhaps... in the mirror?
So Squeaky sat there on his haunches, stared his stare at me, and squeaked. I considered killing and eating him, but... that stare...
Suddenly, Squeaky dashed off into an even darker than the normal dark corner of the basement. I gave chase. Almost immediately I crashed into an old, dusty (I felt but not saw), disused television set! Once I recovered from the collision, I was almost overcome with joy. Television! Thanks, Squeaky!
But Squeaky wasn't finished. As I sat in the dark, next to my newfound treasure, and rubbing my sore abdomen, Squeaky bit my other hand, which really pissed me off and made me chase him to yet another dark corner. I collided with the wall quite fiercely, and the pain was such that I just sort of slid down to the floor, moaning in agony. But you know what I found when I reached the floor? A power outlet! I felt it, but didn't see it, of course.
Within a couple of minutes, I had the television plugged in and a column of glorious, pixelated light piercing the darkness of my subterranean prison. And you know what was on that TV? A Bears game! Squeaky and I watched the Bears get their asses handed to them by the Lion in 1981, 48-17.
Well, folks, almost every Sunday from that time until my father was arrested for something or other and I was released from the basement, Squeaky and I would watch the beloved every Sunday, having quite the grand old time of it while my family enjoyed their ecclesiastical bonding and post-church ice cream while convinced I was languishing in satanic despair in the basement.
Squeaky was my friend.
(His nickname was Mike Tomczak)
