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.

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