← Selected Shorts
Selected Shorts
Too Hot for Radio: Jen Spyra "The Ballad of Bagel Rat"
00:28:09
Actor Busy Phillips reads a funny fable about the razor thin line between good attention and bad attention, as told by a rat.
Loading summary
Transcript6 lines
- [00:02]
Nordstrom
Nordstrom is here to help you dress in a way that feels totally you with the best spring style from boho dresses and matching sets to must have bags and sneakers. Discover thousands of items from lots of your favorite brands like Mango Reformation, Veronica Beard and Farm Rio. It's easy too, with free shipping and returns in store order pickup and more. Shop today in stores and@nordstrom.com Are you.
- [00:28]
Discover
Still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99 of places that take credit cards nationwide and every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com credit card based on the February 2024 Nelson report.
- [00:57]
Aparna Nancherla
Well, hello hotheads, and welcome to another episode of Too Hot for Radio. This is your host, Aparna Nancherla, and if you know our show, you know we faithfully deliver the naughty short stories we wouldn't dare air on public radio. At Too Hot, we pride ourselves on being simultaneously low brow and high brow. Average it out. And the show is one steady middle brow, like a Frida Kahlo portrait or that reliable caterpillar of forehead fuzz. Neanderthals rocked back in the day. Yes, yes, Neanderthals rocked. I see what I did there. Now I will smoothly segue back to two other extremes, fame and infamy. From a distance, these things seem pretty different. But when you look more closely, fame and infamy are really two sides of the same coin. If fame is making billions, infamy is stealing billions. Fame playing cops in movies, infamy impersonating police officers, fame being pretty, infamy being pretty terrible. You get it? And the difference between good attention and bad attention is sometimes razor thin. Say you're trying to achieve your 15 minutes of fame, as promised by Andy Warhol back in the 60s. You may end up being asked to holler your catchphrase on command everywhere you go for the rest of your life. Good or bad, attention, it's attention. And that's what a lot of us want. All of this brings us to today's story, which is about distinguished vermin. It's about finding a shtick and exploiting it. It's about love, loss and vomit. I'm going to assume that some of you have heard of Pizza Rat and the image of a grizzled rodent dragging an entire New York slice down some subway stairs pops right to mind. If you don't know it, Google Pizza Rat before you listen to this story and join the rest of us in our admiration and terror. Yes, Pizza Rat was both intrepid and disgusting, and it perfectly threaded that fame and infamy divide. That rat was not the hero we deserved, but the hero we needed. Or something. The story called the Ballad of Bagel Rat is by Jen Spira. She's written for the Onion, the New Yorker, and the Late show with Stephen Colbert. After reading her short story collection Big Time, we not only brought two of Spyra's stories to the stage, but commissioned this one too. And we are so glad we did. On that front, this week's Content Warning Warning this story features hordes of New York rats doing really gross rat things. I mean real gross. They make the rats of NIMH look like a bunch of nuns. Actor Busy Phillips read this story on stage. You probably remember her from shows like Freaks and Geeks and Cougar Town, though these days you may know her from girls 5eva or the movie musical Mean Girls. Also, she is the best at social media, which gave her a strange kind of insight into the piece. Now let's hear Busy Phillips perform the Ballad of Bagel Rat by Jen Spira.
- [04:30]
Discover
Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? This sounds like you. You're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, and every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the Now It Pays to Discover. Learn more at discover.com credit card Based on the February 2024 Nelson Report, the.
- [04:59]
Busy Phillips
Ballad of Bagel Rat. You've probably seen her picture. First the Post ran Meet Falafel Rat. Then New York Mag profiled her for reasons to love New York. Then the Times picked it up and the rest is history. For a brief period in 2022, everyone was obsessed with falafel rat. The city had falafel rat fever. Everyone was obsessed with her pluck, her cosmopolitan embrace of quick Mediterranean cuisine. I was also obsessed with her, but for a different reason. Falafel Rat had sex with my husband. Falafel was definitely ready for the camera, even before she dragged the chickpea fritter up the wheelchair ramp at Lincoln Center. Of course, that was another detail the press gave Gobbled up Falafel Rat treats self to evening at the ballet Falafel Rat Gets culture on. Please, we're not talking about a season ticket holder here. I bet she thinks Misty Copeland is a brand of vaginal douche. No, falafel. Rat was simply in the right place at the right place time. Apparently, so was my husband. Now, I might be a jealous piece of shit, but credit where it's due. Rachel, that's her name, is stunning. I'm not going to sit here and deny that whiskers for days pelts straight out of a Pantene commercial. Body that won't quit. She's the rat. I've always secretly wanted to be the rat I am. In my fantasies. She is outgoing and confident. Really? In her body. So he almost couldn't blame Richard when he went with her. Almost. But you want to know the truth? By the time he did, we were already strangers. Richard and I were high school sweethearts. I fell for him immediately. Not because he was the handsomest rat, but far from it. Part of his face was missing, actually, and he had a pronounced limp. An accident with an Uber driver severed three of his toes when he was a baby. Uber is killing this city, but that's another story. No, I was drawn to Richard's sense of humor. He didn't take himself too seriously. He had a confidence, a security in himself. That turned me on. There was just an energy around him, a sense that this kid was going places. He told me he was destined for great things. He told me we'd build an empire together. I thought he was just a big talker. I didn't care about any empire. He made me laugh. I wanted to be around him all the time. So when he asked me to marry him when we were two months old, it was a no brainer. We got started on a family right away. I have 38 babies. My older sisters all had over 2,000 by the time they were my age. It's one of the great heartbreaks of my life. I'd always dreamed of growing up in a family like my own, with thousands of little ones scampering around. But two months into our marriage, I had an accident that left me unable to bear more children. I was on my way home from the fairway dumpsters, carrying our groceries along 125th and Lex when my paw got stuck in a subway grate. As I tried to pry it out, I slipped through a dent in the metalwork and landed on my back on a moving train. I flipped around to get my balance, but I teetered, rolled off the train and then crashed down onto the tracks. Then the train ran over my body. And then another train came right behind it and also ran over my body. My recovery lasted almost two hours. I spent it on my back in our pipe. Richard sat with me the whole time holding my paw, dipping a fun size crackle wrapper into a puddle and then tipping it into my mouth to keep me going. I will never forget how his good eye misted as he stroked my cheek. How he told me that I was his soulmate and if I didn't pull through, he would never find someone that could replace me. I'll also never forget how when I briefly stopped breathing, he tried to eat my body. He stopped when he realized I was still alive. But I was hurt that he wasn't even going to take a moment to mourn me. Still, I forgave him. When we finally had sex three minutes later, it was the most tender, raw, vulnerable lovemaking we'd ever known. I think back on that day and my heart cracks open and I feel like I am going to choke. Rachel. That stupid shiny haired whore. I didn't want to mention this, but she was there. On our wedding day we had our reception at Crystal Plaza in New Jersey. It was an incredible evening. We had a lovely six tiered cake that my mother decorated herself with hundreds of cherry blossom petals she'd gathered from my favorite park up by Manhattan School of Music. Richard even saved the top tier of the cake and fed it to me on our one month anniversary. Which I recall spending mainly in a bed of wood chips with my legs in the air. Rachel got hammered at the party. It was open puddle so everyone, everyone was drinking. But I remember that she got so wasted at one point she climbed on top of a plastic piece table and flashed. My dad. I laughed at the time. What else was I going to do? But it was a harbinger of the storm to come for sure. Richard and I got a little place in Hell's Kitchen. Just a little sewer pipe and a Popeyes. But it was ours and we loved it. Everything changed when Richard found that unopened box of of Krispy Kremes. What do you do when your life changes in an instant? I'd never dreamed of being wealthy. I mean, I expected to be comfortable. Yes. I grew up middle class. I expected that level of security to continue. But then Richard got lucky with the donuts, invested shrewdly and we vaulted into the stratosphere. Everything changed so fast. We moved to a bigger pipe. Richard started working out. He became obsessed. Obsessed with space. He got into intermittent fasting. He said he was making his Body launch ready. Said the future for Rat civilization was on Mars. That's around the time when we started hanging out with celebrities. Richard's great great great great great great great great grandfather was Pizzerrat. And that is a fun little tidbit to break out at cocktail parties, but it's not like we ever had any real connection to famous vermin. We didn't know any actual real life celebrities, which suited me just fine. And I thought Richard was on the same page. Oh, how wrong I was. Wealth activated Richard's latent star fucker gene as soon as he struck it rich. You should have seen who we were hanging out with. Hot dog, Rat, Donut rat, Matcha Rat, who was actually just a muscular mouse from La Macha was the worst. He's an actor, plays a pet mouse on one of those teen sex shows on the cw. He made a big deal about how they had good Emmys, despite the fact that the CW gets snubbed every time. If you'd like to know more, I'm sure he'd be happy to tell you. Just strike up any casual conversation with him the next time you have a few hours to spare. It was always the same when we went out with those celebrities. They thought they were doing you a favor just by being there. They didn't try at all, you know. Gingerbread mouse, the nicest guy in Hollywood. He comes to the city and we go out for this glamorous evening in the alley behind Polo Bar. Richard met him at some space thing. Anyway, he probably spent 20 solid minutes complaining about the picture they used in this profile of him in Paste magazine. In the picture, he's, drum roll, please. Dragging a gingerbread man up some stairs in Prospect Park. Of course, that's the picture they used. That's why you're famous, buddy. But he doesn't want to be typecast. It's just one thing. He's more than his gingerbread work. I shot Richard a look then like, are you getting a load of this? But you should have seen my husband playing the sad clown, the head shaking, the sympathetic whisker. Pulling. It made me sick. Where did this ocean of sympathy come from? I mean, our eldest son was impaled on a nail that very afternoon. My first baby Judah. When I told Richard, he didn't even put down his churro. I wrote the eulogy alone on the back of a double mint wrapper and delivered it to the small group of family who had come to pay their respects and help us grieve. When I finished, I took a moment alone to mentally prepare myself to eat my son's body. And when I turned around, my husband was halfway through the torso and had started using hot sauce. I'd like to say that was the low point, but it wasn't too soon. Richard was too good for our own kind. One night he came home and said we were going out for a grand night on the town. I asked him what the occasion was. He said we were going out with Gyro Hamster and Fanta Squirrel. A squirrel now, I thought, looking at him in disbelief. Thinking back, I do see that as the turning point. Squirrels are the worst. Want to feel like a sloppy piece of shit? Talk to a squirrel for five minutes. They think they're so perfect. They're always redoing their holes, asking you where you're wintering this year or telling you about their fucking diets. I'd rather hang out with a pigeon. And that's saying a lot. But then I remember. I remember talking myself down and saying, pauline, you're not even going to get a word in edgewise, so just relax. You can just sit back and mentally redecorate the pipe. So I kept my mouth shut, hid my annoyance and groomed myself in a puddle, scurried beside him as we headed down the subway. That ended up being the most humiliating night of my life. We went to the cellar because Euro Hamster had heard Crackroach was dropping by to do an impromptu set behind the boiler. I loved crackroach before the MeToo stuff, but I have avoided him ever since. So I went into this evening with mixed feelings from the get go. Anyway, as we were strolling over to the theater, we passed a fresh puddle of vomit. Richard's favorite kind. Too neon. But we've never been in the habit of letting good food go to waste, so I hung back and shoveled some down, fully assuming my husband would be right there beside me. I even grabbed a pothole, held it out for him, expecting him to nuzzle into it with gusto. But then, after a couple of moments of frenzied gulping, I noticed Richard wasn't by my side. So I look up and I see him and his friends staring at me, stooped, face covered in vomit, eating vomit. And I just get this feeling that I did something wrong. Richard forces a laugh and goes, whoa, easy, tiger. I'll never forget the look that fucking Euro Hamster gave me, like I was so small. And then he smiled all superior and said in his weird continental European accent that all hamsters get after they live with humans, well, you know what they say. You can take the rat all over the subway. I ducked then, tensing my ears flat against my body as I laid in a low strip along the ground, certain that my husband would defend my honor against this racist insult. I braced for the spray of blood that would come when Richard jumped up vertically, sunk his teeth into the hamster's neck and tore until he bled him to death. But when I perked up an ear, there was only silence. I peeked up and saw Fanta and Nero looking at me, puzzled, while my husband stared at the ground, his hair bristling flat with shame. Later, when we were seated at the cellar, I turned my face away from Richard so he wouldn't see me cry. When we got back to the pipe later that night, we did not speak. I remember leaving early the next morning to go to a continuing education seminar in the meat locker of a citrella. When I came home that night, I found him with Rachel. I took my kids to my sister's that same night. He sent me a twig of cherry blossoms with the note. What can I say? Not exactly a grand gesture. Not even a straightforward I'm sorry. Secretly, I think he was relieved. So he agreed to a trial separation, and I started to figure out what life was like without him. Three weeks after he moved out, I hit a low point. Richard was living in a bachelor pad underneath a bench in the meatpacking district. Children stayed with me uptown. I ran into Rachel only once, at the LPQ by the sailboat pond. She was in heat that day. You could smell it a mile away. And I watched as she got railed by six different rats in the alley behind the restaurant, one right after the other. I'd stay up nights tracing back through our marriage to when Richard still loved me. It was still real that night. I almost died from the fall. He still loved me that night. We went out with his fancy friends from la. He impersonated Matcha rat when we went out for shake shack garbage alone that night. And he cracked me up. We made love that night. He loved me that night. I needed Richard. I didn't know how to live without him, didn't want to live without him. But there was no way in the world I'd just take him back casually. I needed a reconciliation on my terms. I needed him to crawl to me with his tail between his legs, to want me again, to feel the. The brutal absence of me. Once I hit on the idea, the plan came together pretty quickly. I know a bagel runner, this rat, Anthony. He takes Bagels that fall off the trucks and runs them as fast as he can to wherever you pay him to. He owed my brother a favor, so I instructed him to leave me a bagel egg, ideally for its photogenic color. On the sidewalk outside the New York Times building around noon, I waited in the garbage at Schnipper's, where I had a view of the street. When I saw Anthony running up with the bagel, I darted out, sunk my teeth into its soft, golden meat, and started dragging it toward the bagel building's big glass doors. Within seconds, I could see a sea of phones. Bingo. Bagel rat blew up. I started getting noticed. I got an invitation to go on Rata, a dating app for celebrity rats. I set up a profile, had a one night stand with Crape Rat. He was actually a lot of fun. But there was only one rat I was hoping to attract. I sat back and waited. Of course, I am not the first rat to orchestrate their big break. It's an open secret that hot dog rat staged his photo. You can tee up a viral moment, but you can't make it happen. A million things need to go right. A human needs to take a picture at the exact right moment and angle. They need to tweet about it at a heavily trafficked time of day. Influential users need to updraft it, and then your press coverage has to snowball. So that that's why it felt so unsportsmanlike. When Rachel tried to diminish my success by telling anyone who would listen that I was a fame hung star fucker, I chose not to engage. All I'd say was that I could see how it might look that way to a husband. Stealing has been with a pussy so loose, it's like throwing a pencil through the Mulholland Tunnel. But that's all I'd say. Unlike Rachel, I have class. A couple of days after the picture was taken, he shows up. A twig of cherry blossoms in one hand, a clump of neon meat in the other. Richard. That's what it took. That's what it took to remind my soulmate of my worth. Getting my face on the Internet. And when my plan went off without a hitch and I saw him standing there for the first time, everything that had been right in front of my face really sunk in. His sense of humor had masked it. Our sexual chemistry had masked it. But now I saw him for what he was. And it repelled me. I ate the meat immediately, but refused the cherry blossoms. That day, I got a lawyer, a sparrow named Diana, who specializes in high net worth divorce. Diana and I have become pretty good pals. She's a lot of fun, an easy laugh down for whatever. We went to check out the new wing at moma the other day. It's a buffalo wing. By the time we pushed through the crowd, the meat was pretty much picked clear off the bones. But it was fun to be out doing something different with a new friend. As we scurried toward the horse and carriages lined up along Central park south to grab a quick, quick puddle of urine, I thought without judgment, I miss him, but I don't need him. You know, I've grown so much since the divorce. I'm over it. I've accessed depths that I didn't know I had. I feel wise, ripe, at peace with my body. I actually started meditating and I feel a connectedness with my fellow beings, like we're all suspended in a warm subway puddle of pure love. I don't feel bad for a second about pushing Rachel in front of that train. Diana told me straight up, do not tell me if that was you. I just raised my eyelids like me. I wasn't trying to kill Rachel, of course. Just teach her a lesson about the sanctity of family. Rachel didn't take my husband. She took my light, the breezy optimism that used to be my trademark. After I had my revelation about Richard, I thought I could close that chapter, be a single mom date. But I am different now. I'm hard, I'm bitter. I want to feel that lightness again. That's the real me. But I don't know how to get back to her. Rachel has a limp now and a missing eye just like her celebrity dick sucking former lover. Bet she's still a knockout. I happened to see her the other night, scurrying through Riverside with half a marshmallow. I watched her from my usual place behind the fire hydrant, which gives me a perfect view to the little holes she uses to access the nest she lives in with Richard and their thousand fucking kids. I saw him come out to greet her. They nuzzled and then started tearing into the sticky white goo of the marshmallow, almost eating each other's faces in the process. I crouched at my lookout and I watched, panting, my paws tightening around the hydrant. Just a twisted, broken bagel rat watching a couple of marshmallow whores in a big city that doesn't.
- [28:16]
Aparna Nancherla
That was Busy Phillips reading the Ballad of Bagel Rat by Jen Spira. Thank you to her, to Jen Spira, and to rodents everywhere for teaching us about perseverance, creepy though that perseverance might be. And thanks to you hotheads for listening. Whether it's fame or infamy you want, may each of you find your gimmicks. I know I've got mine. It's being incredible and fucking humble about it. Our show is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Mary Shimkin. Our podcast producer and editor is Colleen Pelissier. This episode was recorded at Symphony Space in New York City by Miles B. Smith. Matthew Love is our consulting producer. Our theme music is by Poddington Bear. I'm Aparna Nancherla. Thanks for joining us. For selected shorts, Too Hot for Rad.