Kuro5hin.org: technology and culture, from the trenches
create account | help/FAQ | contact | links | search | IRC | site news
[ Everything | Diaries | Technology | Science | Culture | Politics | Media | News | Internet | Op-Ed | Fiction | Meta | MLP ]
We need your support: buy an ad | premium membership

[P]
The Cockroach Diary

By ktakki in ktakki's Diary
Wed Aug 23, 2006 at 10:54:17 PM EST
Tags: roaches, swarms of roaches, Boston, Texas girls, muh dick (all tags)

I was going to post this as a comment in Niha's diary, but that turned into a VictorianLoser me-me-me-me-fest, so here it is in diary form.

Twenty-five years ago, me and my girlfriend S____ set up housekeeping in a one bedroom apartment on Peterborough St. in the Fenway section of Boston. It wasn't a bad apartment for $175/mo., but the landlord had neglected the place. We had bats coming out of the suspended ceiling, and the neighbor's cat found its way up there, too.

But the place was swarming with cockroaches. Millions and millions of roaches.


Me, I grew up in NYC, and I could tolerate the occasional roach. Sure, a big mama roach extruding an egg case in my sock drawer got me a bit squicked, as did a baby roach showing up in my food, but when I was a kid I had fun herding them into the kitchen sink and then incinerating them with a Bic lighter and a bottle of alcohol-based spray-on deodorant. Good times, good times.

But S____ was new to apartment life, having grown up in the 'burbs. Her mom was from Texas, her dad from Mass., and she picked up most of her mannerisms and habits from her mother. One of these was a fondness for Dr. Pepper. We always had a case of the stuff in the fridge.

One night, S____ and I were in our bedroom, watching Dallas on TV. S____ reached over to the bedside table for her Pepper, took a sip, and began freaking out. A roach had crawled into the can and she swallowed it.

"I could feel its little legs in my mouth!" she screamed. Took me a while to calm her down. Then we had some freaky wild danger sex.

Our super, a habitual masturbator who inhabited a dank basement apartment, refused to acknowledge the roach problem, even after I brought him up to our apartment and showed him the roach droppings in the kitchen cabinets. "That's pepper," he said.

"Okay, taste it," I replied.

I had to hold back rent one month to get the attention of our landlord. He showed up at my place, denying that there was a roach problem in his building. I proved him wrong by turning on the oven.

Pre-heating an oven is a necessary step in cooking. In my case, it was also how I purged the oven of roaches. I'd turn the oven up to 450. Within a couple of minutes, hundreds of roaches would come crawling out, some jumping, some attempting to fly with their vesigial wings, trying to escape the heat. I demonstrated this to the landlord. He recoiled in terror, since he lived in the 'burbs and had never seen anything like this.

Hey, what do you expect for $175/mo. back in 1981? Concierge service? Deeded parking?

Two days later, the exterminator arrives. Not a name brand like Orkin or Exterminex. Just a grizzled old guy who looked like an 1849 Gold Rush prospector. He had the usual pressurized spray bottle and a satchel of goodies. Out of the satchel he pulled a squeeze bottle filled with a yellow powder. He squirted this inside the suspended ceiling in the kitchen, into seams in the formica wall covering, into the oven. Thousands of roaches came pouring out of these places, hitting the floor, running around in circles.

"Guess I got their attention," he said, flashing a toothless smile.

S____ and I left the apartment while the Toothless Terminator did his work. We went up to the roof and smoked a joint, which was not a smart move as it left us seeing roaches crawling around in our peripheral vision for a couple of hours.

"Let's stay at my sister's place tonight," S___ said. This meant a night on the couch for me and no nookie, but I wasn't complaining. Our place would be toxic for a couple of days while Roach Man did his thing. We finished the joint, got in our VW Beetle, and went for dinner at Bartley's Burgers in Harvard Square until her sister got home from work. S____'s sister lived on Harvard St. in Cambridge, between Harvard Square and Central Square.

After the roach problem was solved, there was the bat problem and the cat problem. We decided to move and found an apartment around the corner for $350/mo. It was in a neat, well-managed building. No roaches, but there were cats living in the basement that had managed to burrow through gaps in the foundation wall. We adopted one, a pure white cat with one brown eye and one blue eye. I called him David, after David Bowie, who has one brown eye and one blue eye.

The return of the Thin White Cat, throwing darts in lovers' eyes...

S____ and I broke up in 1985, after five years together. She kept David, who died in the mid-'90s.

Me, I've never had the sort of roach problem I'd had on Peterborough St. In the Allston St. house I rented for sixteen years we'd have people who'd move in from roach-infested apartments bringing in live roaches and eggs with their belongings. But agressive spraying and deployment of roach cups kept the roach population down.

Here, on Cape Cod, I haven't seen a roach in the three years I've been living here. There are bugs that look like roaches, but they can fly, and they're mostly outdoor pests.

But twenty-five years later, I still carry around the image of hundreds of roaches escaping our oven, and thousands bailing from the walls and ceiling when Roach Man sprayed his yellow powder. Scary.

Sponsors

Voxel dot net
o Managed Hosting
o VoxCAST Content Delivery
o Raw Infrastructure

Login

Poll
Scariest bug...
o Cockroach 10%
o Ant 0%
o Spider 40%
o Beetle 0%
o Hornet 0%
o Wasp 20%
o Yellow Jacket 0%
o Bee 0%
o Aphid 0%
o Dust Mite 0%
o Pubic Lice 10%
o Dust Mite 0%
o Them motherfuckers from Starship Troopers 20%
o VW Beetle (old) 0%
o VW Beetle (new) 0%

Votes: 10
Results | Other Polls

Related Links
o ktakki's Diary


Display: Sort:
The Cockroach Diary | 19 comments (19 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)
A bit extreme but (3.00 / 7) (#1)
by jangledjitters on Wed Aug 23, 2006 at 11:00:59 PM EST

the best way to control the roach problem is to get a fruit jar full of scorpions and let them loose on a Friday morning. Then, go on a weekend trip somewhere. When you come back on Sunday evening, bada bing, no roach problem.

The scorpions will then take care of themselves in about a week.

hi

Missing option in poll -- mem overwrite :-( n/t (none / 0) (#5)
by BerntB on Wed Aug 23, 2006 at 11:42:49 PM EST



ITT guess his girlfriend's name "S____" (2.33 / 3) (#9)
by loteck on Thu Aug 24, 2006 at 12:19:41 AM EST

i guess Slut
--
"You're in tune to the musical sound of loteck hi-fi, the musical sound that moves right round. Keep on moving ya'll." -Mylakovich
"WHAT AN ETERNAL MOBIUS STRIP OF FELLATIATIC BANALITY THIS IS." -Harry B Otch

a cockroach is a bit like a small animal... (3.00 / 2) (#10)
by magic curl on Thu Aug 24, 2006 at 02:05:42 AM EST



Last sighting of a black cockroach (none / 1) (#12)
by Marvaud on Thu Aug 24, 2006 at 03:32:12 AM EST

slithering rather elegantly from
my black chintzy bag
used only
for nightclubs.
And no, I'm not a goth.

I hate roaches. (3.00 / 2) (#13)
by creature on Thu Aug 24, 2006 at 05:24:41 AM EST

Not because of the insects themselves, but because they cost me about 40 quid.

A couple of tenancies ago I had the flat to myself one night. I had been doing something in front of the computer and got distracted. Around 10PM I realised I hadn't eaten that night. "Well, it's too late to cook," I reasoned. "But I could go make myself a salad and some dips."

My room was right next to the kitchen so I left my music playing and went to go cook. I was in a good mood and was on autopilot. I opened the cupboard door below me and reached in to get my chopping board. As I pulled it out, I saw something black run across it out of the corner of my eye and felt something run across my fingers. I screamed like a girl and threw the board onto the floor.

After the fraction of a second it took for my rational brain to kick in again I felt pretty stupid. "It's only a spider," I said to myself. "You fucking pussy." I lifted the board, and underneath there was not a spider. There was a cockroach.

In the UK, we do not get cockroaches. They're unheard of. I'd never encountered one before. In the more squalid central urban areas, sure, but this was a quiet small town without dense population. We kept the place neat and tidy. I had no idea where this thing had come from. The flat below us was unoccupied, and had been for around a year. Visions of every room down there teeming with cockroaches, swarming up the walls and across the ceiling, filled my mind. I put them out of my mind and transferred my new friend to an old plastic takeaway box.

The next week or so was the standard palaver. The roach was reported to the letting agents; pest control was called. He placed a variety of cockroach detectors around the flat. These are cardboard triangular prisms with a sticky floor, in the middle of which a pellet of cockroach sex pheremone is placed. The bondage cockroaches love it. He also stuck some poison cockroach-paste around some places. Despite all this, we never saw another cockroach, alive or dead.

At the end of the tenancy, the letting agents said we had been responsible for an infestation of cockroaches and charged us around £120 as a result. I argued that an infestation couldn't consist of a single cockroach, but they were adamant.

I bet that cockroach felt pleased with himself.

No offense... (none / 0) (#19)
by Niha on Thu Aug 24, 2006 at 12:51:10 PM EST

  ...but I'm glad I wasn't your girlfriend at that moment. (It would have been a bit difficult anyway. Age thing.

The Cockroach Diary | 19 comments (19 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
Display: Sort:

kuro5hin.org

[XML]
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. The Rest © 2000 - Present Kuro5hin.org Inc.
See our legalese page for copyright policies. Please also read our Privacy Policy.
Kuro5hin.org is powered by Free Software, including Apache, Perl, and Linux, The Scoop Engine that runs this site is freely available, under the terms of the GPL.
Need some help? Email help@kuro5hin.org.
My heart's the long stairs.

Powered by Scoop create account | help/FAQ | mission | links | search | IRC | YOU choose the stories!