Leader of the rat pack

[Times photos: Carrie Pratt] Erika Johnson, 17, of Safety Harbor, left, is brought from the audience to be a rat assistant for Jim Greene as he performs. It was Erika’s first experience with employment along these lines.

By LANE DeGREGORY

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 12, 2001

You probably know him if you have visited a Renaissance festival like Largo's. Jim Greene is an actor who decided to take his ''rodents'' on the road in the name of comedy.

LARGO -- Over by the alehouse, across from the Round World Stage, a stocky man with muddy toes and blacked-out teeth is treading between wooden benches, spinning a stuffed rat over his head.

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, knights and gentlefolk of the king's kingdom," he cries. "Welcome to the Emrys Fleet Rat Extravaganza!"

Burlap bags are wound around his feet; his pants are torn and too short. A dozen rats dangle from a rope around his waist, and a weasel is draped across his hairy chest.

A crowd is gathering.

"I'm the rat catcher, Emrys Fleet. Two parts of the rat doth I eat. The body and head, 'twixt two pieces of bread. There's no meat in the tail or the feet!"

A nappy brown cap, with two tiny rats his wife stitched on top, clings tightly to his furrowed forehead. His gray beard is streaked with soot. Something green and sticky is dripping from his right nostril.

More than 40 people at the Bay Area Renaissance Festival are watching: adolescent girls with rosebud garlands wound around their braids; tattooed bikers gulping Budweiser from plastic cups.

"Centuries ago, way back in the medieval century . . . Hello, ladies!" he calls to three women sliding into the front row. "Did you come to see the show?" They nod. He wrinkles his blackened brows, leans into their startled faces and asks:

"Why?"

Scratching his head to chase imaginary bugs brings a twinkle to the eyes of Jim Greene, aka Emrys Fleet, the Rat Man, as he enjoys the crowd’s reaction to his uncouth behavior.

He asks himself that a lot, actually: Why do throngs of folks want to watch a vile-looking man do stupid rat tricks? Why do they laugh at his sophomoric jokes, let him throw stuffed rats at them, pay him in money and beer? Why do they come back, year after year, to cheer his dancing weasel?

How has he made a living like this for half his life?

And why?

"Actually, I try not to ask myself that last one," he says after a recent Friday show. "It's a real good thing I got going. It's like a career, like what I always wanted." He pets his balding rat, Pesky, squints his merry eyes and smiles sideways.

"Sort of."

His real name is Jim Greene. He's a 45-year-old father of three. He lives near Ithaca, N.Y., now, but he grew up in St. Petersburg.

His older sister, Laura "Lolly" Kreider, was recently elected to the St. Pete Beach City Commission. She mingles at the Pass-a-Grille Yacht Club, wears straw hats with bright ribbons, goes sailing and takes on civic causes. Folks have a hard time believing she's related to a rat catcher.

"I tell everyone my brother is an actor," says Kreider, who is three years older. "But then, I'll have friends find out who he really is, and they'll say, 'Oh, he's your brother? We looove him!' All these people you wouldn't think would, know him."

Greene didn't exactly aspire to be a rat man. It kind of crept up on him and spread slowly, like the sweat stains on his tattered linen shirt.

He doesn't look -- or feel -- famous. But he is.

"I follow him. Whenever he's somewhere I can drive to, I go see him," says Cindy Tidwell, who arrived 15 minutes early to get a good seat. She's 40, an Internet technician who lives in Tampa. She has seen Greene's show 16 times.

"He's silly, dumb, hilarious -- it's like you're with him on the inside of this inane joke," she says.

"He's an icon. He makes me laugh."

Eeeek! Janelle McGrath, 7, visiting Largo’s Renaissance Festival with her grandfather and great-grandmother, recoils as a plastic rat flies through the air past her head.

Greene throws his stuffed rat on the floor. "Play dead, Pesky." He beats the toy with a wooden stick. "Good boy. Roll over, Pesky." With the tip of the stick, he flips the rat over. "Good boy."

The audience explodes with laughter, applauds. Greene spins and scowls at a woman near the aisle. "It's a piece of rug and a bootlace, lady, lighten up!"

After high school, Greene sold tuxedos, waited tables, worked at a liquor store. In 1980 a friend called and said she had a job making costumes for a new Renaissance festival being planned for Largo. "You're a ham," she told him. "I bet you could get a job doing something."

A few years earlier, for Halloween, Green had dressed up as Aqualung, a character from a 1973 Jethro Tull album. Sample lyrics: Snot is running down his nose/Greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes/Oh, Aqualung! Green recreated this wretched street person for the Renaissance fair people.

They loved it -- sort of -- enough to pay him to play the part.

The rats came later.

"So, my job is to catch all the rats so they won't eat all the grain so we won't all get the Black Death and die," he informs the audience. "And, more importantly, we don't want the rats to eat the grain because we need that grain for . . . for what, folks?" He unleashes a leather mug from his waist and raises it over his prostrate pet Pesky. "That's right, for beer!

"Now, the king has instructed me to collect a beer tax. So you all ante up, now, or I'll have to loose my rats on the lot of you," he says, strolling between the benches and holding out his mug. The bikers pour in Budweiser. A middle-aged man in a polo shirt reaches over his son to make an import offering.

Greene jerks the leather string around his neck a few times and the peg-legged weasel does a jerky jig. He cracks up the crowd with riddles: "What's the difference between boogers and broccoli? Kids won't eat broccoli!"

Two girls are laughing so hard they're crying. "I don't even know what's so funny. But he was terribly, stupidly funny," Jenna Williams, 14, says.

Green performs four times a day at most festivals, does 10 Renaissance fairs a year, for six to eight weeks at a time, travels all over the country. Some places pay performers as much as $600 a day. Some places, such as Largo, pay them less, but let them pass their hats.

"I'm really lucky to have made a living doing this for so long. Who knew being a rat catcher would open so many other doors?"

After his first season as the Aqualung character, Greene ran into a magician pal who gave him a rubber rat finger-puppet.

By the next season, Greene was the Rat Man Emrys Fleet, which means "fast light" in Welsh, supposedly. With a belt of pelts he stripped from thrift-store furs and quick, bawdy banter he tossed at the crowds, he started attracting attention. A reporter from the Daily Independent interviewed him in a story in 1981.

"You dream about being a successful actor," he said during his second season, when he was 25. "There's always that hope."

He studied Shakespeare to learn 16th-century jargon, joined the Renaissance Guild and Society for Creative Anachronism to better re-create a Middle Ages mindset, added fake blood and frayed rope hair when his own red locks fell out.

Between festivals, he played other parts. He was a sidekick in the Indiana Jones stunt show at MGM Studios. He had small speaking parts in movies such as Gone Fishing with Joe Pesci and Fair Game with Cindy Crawford and once did a stage play with Jamie Farr. His favorite role was Bald Pirate Number Five in a 3-D movie for Busch Gardens starring Monty Python's Eric Idle.

But the Rat Man role has been the longest, most lucrative gig. Two years ago, Greene moved his family to Ithaca, gave up moonlighting at Disney and became the Rat Man full time. He's doing Moose Lodges and nursing homes for free on the weekends, booking private shows like a nudist resort in Lutz between fairs.

"What more noble way to make a living?" he asks.

"Now ladies, I know you want me. Don't blame yourselves," he tells three women in the back row, while stroking Pesky and grinning slyly. "That's one thing I love about these Renaissance festivals: Even I'm attractive here."

According to Morris Lieberman, who is known around medieval fairs as Muis Dreamsinger and was making harps at the Largo fair last week, the first Renaissance festival was in 1967 in Los Angeles. It was started by a bunch of hippies, he said, trying to raise money for a Pacifica Radio News Network station. Everyone dressed up as knights and ladies and wenches and drank mead and danced around a maypole. "The hippies had so much fun (you know hippies), that they kept the vibe going, and it has just carried on all over the country," Lieberman explained, stroking his Robin Hood-style beard. "Everyone can be whatever they want here. And everyone digs everyone else and all the pageantry, and it's like anything goes."

And amid the giant turkey legs and archery targets, after the belly dancers and before the minstrel show, the Rat Man keeps killing 'em.

"Can I have a volunteer from the audience?" he asks. He pulls a blushing teenager named Sarah onto the stage, puts Pesky in her upturned hands, orders her to take the sacred rat oath.

But before she can repeat the first part, the stuffed rat poops in her hand. She shrieks, dropping three black jelly beans. Greene retrieves them, pops them into his mouth, washes them down with swig of beer tax and a burp.

It could be worse. He could be the guy in the stockades who gets pelted with tomatoes all day.

"I embrace the banality of it all. I was doing a show about nothing long before Seinfeld was. And I'm still on the air, loving every minute," Greene says, stuffing Pesky and his friends into a canvas shoulder bag after the show.

His sister says the role suits him. Even out of costume, Greene is the Rat Catcher, she says.

"All his life, all he ever really wanted was to have fun and to take others there with him," she says. "He's surely making everyone happy."

Except, maybe, the rats.

IF YOU GO

The 22nd annual Bay Area Renaissance Festival continues Friday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., 400 Central Park Drive in Largo. Tickets are $12.95 for adults, $10.95 for seniors, $5.95 for children ages 5-12. Children 4 and younger are free. Call (727) 586-5423.

Jim Greene, a.k.a. Emrys Fleet the Rat Catcher, performs four shows daily on the Round World stage: noon, 1:15, 2:45, 4:15. His Web site is http://home.earthlink.net/~emrysfleet/

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