Cockroach Shock and Awe Part Two: Beyond Therapy

July 3rd, 2005: At 7:10 this morning I was enjoying the sleep of the innocent when I felt something tickle my knee. The sensation did not resemble the occasional trickle of sweat I ignore these sultry nights without air conditioning; it was definitely heavier, and was moving up rather than down my leg or over the side—it seemed to have a deliberate path and not the random meandering of a bead of liquid. An inner alarm roused me. In the dim, it appeared to my bleary eyes that my cell phone had sprouted legs and embarked on an early morning hike, but I quickly realized that my new bedfellow was in fact the largest cockroach I have ever seen. I shrieked and knocked it off my leg and kicked my sheet to the floor. Suddenly awake and full of horror, I hoped against hope that the last thirty seconds had been a hideously vivid nightmare, so I gingerly picked the sheet up off the floor to prove to myself that the beast was real. I found nothing under the blanket, and, thus relieved, might have believed the truth to be a dream and returned to rest, assured in my delusion that life was still beautiful; however, the brown mass clumsily scaling the side of my mattress robbed me forever of such peace of mind.
In the nine months I’ve lived in my tony upper west side apartment, I have never seen an insect in the building; I had almost begun to believe that domestic vermin were a thing of the past, like chamber pots and dial-up internet. My roach-infested childhood seemed centuries ago. To be woken by the mother of them all goose-stepping up my thigh was rude indeed, a cruel joke by fate on the most neurotic of victims.
I scrambled out of bed and out of the room. I had a friend staying in the living room and so could not seek comfort in the untainted fold-out there. The bathtub was too short and the kitchen table too cluttered. In the tiny one-bedroom apartment, there was nowhere for me to hide. I had to return to my room and face the beast. I pushed the door open and flicked the light on and waited. While positioned outside the room and peering in as the door slowly swung shut, I heard a ruffle and saw what I could have sworn was, were I not prepped to expect the worst, a butterfly, fluttering across the room to where my pants hang on hooks. The door closed, leaving me in a panicked dialogue with myself, “Wait,…. no, wait,..--I didn’t just see… what I think I saw,--did I??” The uncertainty was too terrible and I forced myself to kick the door open once more, and as I did, again the flapping of wings, only now the brown butterfly wheeled around and brushed against my forehead before it careened off towards my wall closet, landed, smoothed its wings, and bore back on its haunches, primed for battle.
Needless to say I “lost my shit.” A din of retching and lamentations replaced the early morning quiet of my abode, as well as senseless pleas to my bewildered guest to “shoot it”—we rushed out in our pajamas to Gristedes for roach spray but when we returned we found that we didn’t know where to aim it. The roach was gone. Or, I should say, it was still there, probably hiding inside the closet, nestling in my delicates, dropping a supersized birthsack in every bra-cup. Now my guest had to go to work and I was left alone with the monster. So I called the super. He served mainly to remind me of the hopeless futility of man, chuckling at my tears when I informed him of my unwanted visitor, and scratching his head and blinking when he opened my closet and found no mutant insect waiting in plain sight for a good clobbering. After a few timid sprays of Raid in the corners, and having picked up two jacket sleeves, only to find not a single mutant under either of them, he shrugged his shoulders, handed me the spray can, and shuffled away. I was left with a mounting horror at the realization that there was nothing anyone could do about this outrage. Momentarily I considered moving back to San Francisco (leaving all of my stuff behind to prevent stow-aways), but I realized that even for me that was unrealistic. I had to either find the roach and kill it or just wait for it to eat through all my skivvies, hoping it would eventually choke on some bit of synthetic lace and die. I decided to attempt an assassination, rather than risk its returning to my lap the next steamy night. I picked out a hiking boot, but then remembered a bit of wisdom I had gained as a child battling the legions: Sneakers and hiking boots are no good for roach-stomping, as their soles are ridged, and when one strikes at the insect with them, it often happens that part of the insect, or even its entire organism, falls in between the ridges and remains unhurt. The roach panics and flees under the nearest piece of immoveable furniture, usually a refrigerator or oak dresser, and, of course, you also panic, and start slamming the boot against the floor or glass tabletop or wherever you found the roach, and inevitably, wreckage ensues. Sometimes you catch part of the insect under the boot, such as a leg or wing, and have to keep from dry-heaving when you see the rest of it, flayed and dismembered, stagger off to die in a potted plant. No, one needs a flat-soled shoe, perhaps a man’s dress shoe or the standard flip-flop for the job. I chose one of my hostess’s mules and approached my poor room again, which now stank with the unpleasantly sweet odor of roach poison, like someone really sweaty stuck a sugar cube between his buttcheeks and farted through it. Suddenly a disgusting thought gave me pause—the roach was some five times as large as the average house roach. To murder it would leave behind carnage too vast and gory to simply mop up afterwards (if I owned a mop), and would surely ruin any garment against which I might kill it. I had to find another way.
July 6, 2005: I have been sleeping in the living room for the past three nights. I only visit my old room to select necessary garments (usually the ones nearest the top of my drawers) and shake them out before dressing. When I come home at night I undress in the living room, crack my bedroom door, throw the worn garments in the general direction of my laundry basket, and slam the door shut again. I dread running out of clean clothes to wear, as that will necessitate spending several minutes in the bedroom sorting through the dirty laundry. This terrifies me because I don’t eat in my room, and so there’s nothing much to keep vermin occupied with but in feasting on the residual body matter infused in worn socks, blouses, underwear. If the roach is anywhere, it’s drunkenly stumbling through the pile of my soiled clothes, addicting itself to my phermones, developing an ever-keener nose for my scent. Surely the moment I step into the room I’ll look down and find that cockroach humping my big toe.
July 8th: Yesterday, in a moment of incomprehensible forgetfulness, I breezed right into my bedroom with nary a thought as to the danger that lay in wait for me there. In my obliviousness, I turned to my wall mirror and picked my mascara out of the tin cup on the shelf beneath it. Just as I was lifting the wand to my lashes, I caught sight of something else in the mirror, to the bottom right of my face. I spun around. There, in full view, smugly eyeing me from atop my nightstand, was the cockroach. It made no attempt to scurry away, hide, or even take flight; it just sat there like a sphinx, unmoving except for its antennae, inches long and all a-twirl. I half expected to see a lonely tumbleweed drift past us and hear plaintive whistling in the distance. I reached down with my left hand, picked the plastic bag from Gristedes up off the floor, and slowly walked to the shelf. With wrath swift and god-like I swung the bag forward over the stand while with my mascara wand I knocked the beast into it, immediately tying the handles together in triple knots. Crunch, crunch,…..crunchcrunchcrunch it went, imprisoned and frustrated. This Gristedes bag was the kind made of unusually thick, crinkly plastic, so every step the leviathan took crackled like hellfire, which I interpret as heavily symbolic. I was about to take the bag outside and throw it into a waste bin when I realized that, as I was now safe, my molester all imprisoned, I could just leave it where it was and let it think on what it had done for a while. I turned the nightstand lamp on next to it, so it might contemplate its sins in the harsh glare of righteousness. I slept that night in the living room.

July 10th, 2005: Crunch, crunch, crunch….The prisoner, whom I now call Gregor, shows no signs of wilting. Three days with no food or water has had little discernable effect on his vitality. I examine his bag every few hours and watch the almost beautiful play of light and shadow he makes as he crawls this way and that, his body silhouetted against the wrinkled plastic walls, now sharper as he bears down close to the wall, now blurrier as he ruffles his wings and stretches his insect legs. The scene is Chekhovian in its sadness: the seagull has wandered far from his home and rightful place and thus must die, unnaturally, and in a strange land. Crunch, crunch, crunch…I wonder how it all will end. I remember my mother telling me as a child that a cockroach can live for three months on a crumb of food too small for the human eye to see. Perhaps Gregor will enjoy such longevity, crunching away on my nightstand as summer ripens and fades into fall and the leaves start to change, as people marry and divorce, grandparents die and babies are born. He will wander till he expires in his crinkly white limbo, with only the memory of the bustling outer world, its sewers and basements, dropped icecream cones and spilt soda, sleeping females and closets filled with silks, to sustain him in his final hours. Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, my Gregor.

Note to self: Must buy new mascara.

Cockroach Shock and Awe, or, Why I Need Therapy, Volume One

My room has cockroaches. In the month I've lived in my East Village Apartment, I've not seen a single roach in the kitchen, bathroom, or even in any of the corridors of my marginally-gentrified Jimmy Carter-renovated apartment building, where some of my neighbors confoundingly leave their trash bags for days before hauling them down to the street. Just in my immaculate, well-ventilated, never-been eaten-in, barely-breathed-in bedroom. The first one sent me into the closest thing I've ever experienced to a panic attack when it scurried out of my make-up purse as I reached in to grab some lip gloss. I guess I should be embarrassed to admit that I burst into tears and called my mother in San Francisco and scooped up the purse into a garbage bag and threw it into the freezer, where it has remained ever since. The next day I bought Raid spray, roach bait motels, combat gel, and boric acid, and when I came home that night doused the roach I found exploring my bookshelf. Now I'll never finish Anna Karenina. I then had to throw away an entire box of feminine hygiene products after I found a roach sniffing at it like a bloodhound. That night I was woken up by a roach crawling up my arm (I'm pathologically ticklish, more on that later), as it was heading for my ear to lay eggs in my brain. I scrambled out of bed and attempted sleep on the couch in the kitchenette area, bothered by the injustice of being safer from vermin in the kitchen than in my own room. The next day I powdered down the floor around my bed with baking soda. I would have used the boric acid but that might have killed me overnight and left my body to be eaten by roaches. This created a pleasingly sacramental-looking area of insect-repelling purity. When in bed I can rest peacefully with the knowledge that I have a radius of several feet, the boundary of which deflects the doubtless legions of roaches seeking body parts to lay eggs in. However, although I have not been bothered by any more roaches in my sleep (and I have also been taking sleeping pills to dull my now heightened-to-freakish-proportions sensitivity to the touch of foreign living creatures, so actually, who knows how many regiments of insects have marched across my drugged sleeping body?), I continue to encounter them on my shelves, along my wall, patrolling the edge of my underwear drawer, and even, and this was especially discouraging, brazenly straddling the spout of my Raid can. These are no creatures without agenda; they are clearly campaigning to leave me faceless, pantiless, exhausted and illiterate. Lord knows I'd rather set fire to the building than go back into the apartment and endure that Hitchcock moment right before I turn on the light in my room and scan it for brown scurrying objects.
And yet, with whom can I speak openly on this subject? New Yorkers laugh at people who object to the pervasive roach presence and seek to avoid them. I told one native I met that I found a roach in my bed and he said, "Just one? Where you live, Park Avenue?" Also, it is assumed that my horror of cockroaches is owed to a lifetime of sheltered, roach-free, immaculately-hygienic living. Whereas, this is NOT the case. My childhood years were spent in a cramped apartment in San Francisco's western addition (pre-gentrification Hayes Valley), where I was haunted by those brown scurriers, with their foot-long antennae and evil forward-bending knees. Have you ever seen a pregnant cockroach? Have you ever seen one give birth? A cockroach carries its future brood of thousands in what looks like a turd half stuck in its ass. The turd, no turd, almost drags to the floor when the gestation period nears its end; indeed, when the roach gives birth it must wiggle its backside ridiculously and take several graceless steps forward, depositing the sack to break open later. A hideous sight. I witnessed this abomination (that's right, abomination!!) of nature several times in my tender years and developed an ever-keener paranoia of the insects. I avoided door jambs after a roach fell onto my head from one. What would I have done in an earthquake? I never turned the light on in a room without immediately recoiling so that even though I could see eight or ten of them flit back into the shadows I wouldn't risk having one fall on me in its retreat. Roaches make a surprisingly loud thud when they fall to the ground from a height. It adds an awful tangibility to their personae when their simple visibility is offensive enough. When I found one in the sink I let scalding water run for twenty minutes, ignoring the pleas of local environmental groups to conserve water in the then-drought-blighted state of California. When I felt safe in having both boiled and drowned the beast, I proceeded to brush my teeth when the roach subsequently crawled back up the drain. Sometimes I'd fill a water-gun with bleach (not recommended) and pause outside the bathroom door, a la Mission: Impossible, and then burst in and flick the lights on, hoping no roaches were perched on the lightswitch, then blast the inevitable two or three caught giving birth or eating toothpaste. The roaches would fall to the sink or the shelf with a thud, shake themselves off like puppies after a bath, laugh at me, and frolic off to their corners, dancing a path across my toothbrush bristles or my sister's tampons and leaving a birth-sack in the soap dish. I became paranoiacally afraid of being touched, walked on, bitten, or used as a birth-place. Sometimes my horror flared up so intensely that I'd shake out a blanket over the fire escape and wrap myself up so tightly that only my head from the nose up peeked out from the blanket; I basically tried to seal-wrap myself. Of course, every faintest tickle, every piece of lint brushing my knee, every gust of air at my neck was a cockroach breaching my fortress and I swatted at myself like some epileptic Russian novelist and pulled the blanket tighter and buried my head further into my shoulders and pulled my knees up closer to my chest. Sometimes I'd sit there for hours, shrinking, twitching, swatting, and mystifying my parents, who I figured wouldn't feel enough of an itch to scratch themselves if the skies opened up and started pummeling them with giant tropical pregnant flying snap-jaw waterbugs. I remember my father once, having fallen asleep with his glasses on and woken up with a big brown cockroach covering one of the lenses, saying he thought momentarily that he'd gone half-blind in the night. I thought he was insane not to stab both eyes out.
So the terrible thing is that I feel myself reverting to that tortured, twitching child who was never at peace in her own home and could not be touched without flinching a little. I came to New York to start a new life and I find myself in very visceral ways resuming my old hysteria. And who can live in New York who cannot stand vermin? There's a line in Sybille Pearson's play "Sally and Marsha" that goes, "Everyone in New York has roaches, even Greta Garbo," and I try to console myself with this. But then I see a pair of those long, flailing antennae, peering over the top of my multivitamin jar, and know, just know, that this is insufferable. Greta Garbo did not suffer the roaches and neither will I. The boric acid is waiting, fellas.