The Cockroach Story
Texans brag about everything. They brag about their sky. They brag about their wide open spaces. They brag about their women. They brag about their women's hair. They even brag about things that most people would consider to be nothing to brag about. Like their cockroaches.
For a born and bred northeasterner like me, cockroaches are an occasional, albeit thoroughly disgusting, inconvenience. Basically, if you clean the dishes out of your sink at least every two or three days, you don't get them. Or, if you do, they're admittedly hideous little things, but for the most part easily dispatched and you don't give them another thought.
On moving to Waco, Texas to attend college, I was introduced to a wholly new breed of roach, something beyond my ken, something that should not be allowed to exist if there is a God, something that to this day inhabits a deep, stentorian chasm in my most petrifying nightmares. This being the infamous Texas Tree Roach. These mutant leviathans apparently decided eons ago that the pickin's were too slim down in the Orinoco Basin or wherever they were, and marched northward like entomological behemoths to settle and terrorize the Texas Metroplex.
Unlike the puny, pusillanimous Jersey variety (sp. roachus hobokenus), a fully grown Texas Tree Roach (sp. roachus godzillus) measures a gargantuan two inches at a minimum. On domestic recon missions I have confirmed sightings of more than one at three and a half inches bow to stern, not counting antennae. The bigger ones will actually register on a postal scale. For this reason, my acquaintances and I began making use of the NATO classifications for the Soviet naval vessels, a two inch roach being "Osa Class," a three-incher "Kiev Class," and so on.
But far worse than mere enormity, oh horror, these babies can fly. What sort of twisted, diabolical mood must have possessed the Maker when he elected to equip these monsters with wings??
One summer day after exams finished up, several of my friends and I moved into a house that had been vacated by what seems to have been a cult of male anti-hygienists. One of them was notorious for buying his clothes at Goodwill, and wearing them until they stank so badly that even he couldn't take it anymore, whereupon he threw them in a pile in the corner of his room and went out and bought new ones. And he did the same thing with dishes. I kid you not, he subsequently became a cult rocker in Houston under the rubric of "Stu Mulligan" and developed quite a following. I guess they couldn't smell him from the seats. Anyway, as expected, the cleanup took three of us two horrific days. Finally, the worst was over, and we settled in for the evening in a relatively spotless house (for guys anyway). We'd spotted a few telltale roach carcasses along the way, and a live one or two here and there, but it was an old house, and we fully expected to have to occasionally contend with the bewinged beasties.
The only place I hadn't cleaned out yet was an upper cabinet in the downstairs bathroom, where the previous owners kept three or four bags of dried dog and cat food for the menagerie that had lived there. I was doing my toilette and getting ready for the sack, when I heard the unmistakable, telltale skritch skritch that anyone who has had any contact with Texas Tree Roaches will immediately recognize. A roach on the move.
I surreptitiously scurried off to fetch the Raid Maximum Industrial Strength that is the only known means of killing these creatures (other than squashing them, but that's really disgusting and is to be avoided if at all possible). I stalked over to the cabinet, weapon at the ready, and gently opened the door. Yup, there he was, a full Kiev Class, minimum three inches, balefully squatting and glowering on the wall of the cabinet. I cut loose with a satisfying burst from the Raid can, a direct hit, the little sucker was toast, and I immediately slammed the door of the cabinet, since the automatic reaction of this type of roach is to do a Harrier vertical takeoff and attempt to land on you and crawl inside your clothing, for reasons I've not entirely divined.
I expected to hear the sudden skritching of the roach as he scurried around the cabinet on his horrible little legs in a death agony. But what ensued was an abomination against God and Man. What assailed my ears was the expected sound, multiplied what seemed a thousandfold. The cabinet vibrated, hummed with the skritching of a million legs, almost seemed to visibly shake with the violence inside. Apparently, Purina Cat Chow is roughly the equivalent of Godiva chocolate to your average Texas Tree Roach. They had nested in the bags, by the hundreds, and I had just turned their perfectly comfortable and well-appointed lair into a gas chamber.
I hurriedly screeched my roommate down from his bedroom, attempting not to lose my dinner in the process. And we both stood, in awe, in the bathroom, and then realized, in a moment of abject horror, that there was a small opening that led from the cabinet into the bathroom closet. We headed for the closet door, opened it gingerly, Raid can in hand, and saw, in one instant, what must have been fifty or sixty of the monstrosities crawling all over the walls, taking flight and landing, a vision from Hell that no horror movie could do justice to. We blasted the closet and slammed shut the door. Now the cabinet and the closet were thrumming with the death rattles of hundreds of the horrific things, what must have been a pound or more of gigantic roach bodies seeking an exit from the abode of death. From one small hole in the corner of the room near the closet, we started seeing them frantically exiting, one by one, the space being too small to allow more than one at a time. We headed them off at the pass, and opened fire there until the opening was drenched with poison, and the headlong exodus stopped.
After about fifteen minutes (it takes a long time to kill these babies), we finally opened up the bathroom cabinet to start the horrendous cleanup process. But lo, the hardiest of them were still alive. They skittered around crazily in the cabinet and then finally toppled out, one after the other in some semblance of a roachly swan dive onto the linoleum floor, until there were twenty or thirty of them writhing and clacking and watching their little roach lives pass before their beady eyes. One or two of them, probably the Mothers of All Roaches, whose progeny will surely one day be the only thing left alive on the planet, were actually still able to take off, and flitted aimlessly and dangerously about trying to land on us and gross us out while we attempted to illuminate them with the air defense radar and nail them again in flight.
What seemed like days later, the last ones laid themselves to rest, and we began a body count (we just had to know). All told? four hundred and forty six roaches, if laid end to end, approximately one hundred feet worth of sheer, unmitigated disgust.
And that's the cockroach story. God I hate those things. |
