Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.
I spent two hours Tuesday evening writing an entry, and when I’d finished it all up and spell checked it, Blogger fucking ATE IT right as I hit the “Publish” key. So now it’s Tuesday night at ten o’clock and I’m still at the store and I should go home, but damned if I’m not going to rewrite the whole thing as best as I can. On Microsoft Word.
God, I hate roaches. They are proof that there can not be good in the world without there being absolute evil as well. I loathe them with a fervor that borders on pathological. Back in the days when I had boyfriends, I used to grimly warn them all that teasing me with any form of roach other than the smokable kind, be it real, plastic, or on tv, would not be appreciated on any level. I sat through the X-files episode about roaches with my eyes completely closed, hearing my friend Toby hiss “Bastards!” at the screen as she watched between her fingers.
If I was Winston Smith, and happily for me, I’m not – but if I was, I’d have betrayed Julia in Room 101 a lot quicker than he eventually did. All O’Brien would have to do was mention roaches and I’d crack like cheap china.
For a big city, Chicago isn’t such a bad place to nurture a roach phobia. I come from South Carolina, where they grown sleek fat black roaches with shiny oily exoskeletons and wings. Wings! They divebomb you, the nasty fuckers. Here the roaches are a pale brown and a much more manageable size, although still bile-inducing.
In my first year of residence in Chicago, I got cast in a low, low, oh-so-low budget production of Romeo and Juliet that was staged in the basement of a vegetarian restaurant. What the acting troupe lacked in finances they made up in backstage melodrama. The actor playing Romeo began a torrid, sloppy affair with the actor playing Juliet. They’d neck in the parking lot that doubled as our backstage area, on a weather-worn picnic table, in full view of Romeo’s wife, the Production Stage Manager. She quelled her fury by ripping seams out of their costumes and misplacing their props. I coped by laying as low as possible. When I’d run out of places to hide, I crept upstairs to the restaurant and hid in a booth, drinking coffee and pretending to be a paying customer who just happened to be wearing Renaissance clothing. I became friends with Oscar and Jack this way. Oscar and Jack were two other cast members who would also try to creep into the restaurant, desperately trying to muffle the clanging of their swords as they’d knock against the restaurant walls and chairs. We’d hide and bond until the owner would discover us and boot us back out to the parking lot in order to make room for customers who had more money and fewer velvet capes.
When the production finally ended, the Stage Manager filed for divorce and Oscar, Jack, and I exchanged phone numbers, promising to get together in the near future. True to their word, Oscar and his wife, Sarah* invited me to a party the following month in December.
The night of the party, I took the El to Jack’s apartment, where he lived with his girlfriend, Laura, in Rogers Park. Jack, Laura, and I had dinner together, then bundled up in our coats to walk the two blocks to Oscar and Sarah’s house.
Oscar buzzed us in, then met us at the door where he graciously took our coats.
“Sarah made some winter stew,” he said. “The kitchen’s off-limits to guests, but she’ll be happy to bring you some.” He disappeared with our coats into the back of the apartment.
His wife appeared with glasses of Coke for us.
“I’ll get you some stew,” she said, smiling.
“That would be great,” I said.
I looked into my glass. There was an oily film on the surface of my drink. I peered into Laura’s cup. Film.
I whispered to her, “What’s on the Coke?”
She frowned into her glass. “Ew. Jack, look at your glass.”
“It must be soap residue,” he said. “I’ll go rinse out the glasses.” And with that he threw caution to the wind and moved toward the kitchen, breaking Oscar’s no-kitchen rule.
I began mingling with the crowd of about twenty people, most I knew through the play. As I began talking to the actor who played Mercutio, I spotted a roach working its way across the far wall. I froze, then pretended I didn’t see it.
Jack returned empty handed and touched Laura’s elbow, bending to whisper in her ear.
She blanched.
Moments later, she was at my side.
“Eat nothing. Drink nothing,” she said tensely.
I looked over at Jack. He was tucking his pants into his boots. I saw another roach behind his head.
I looked at Laura. “I need to see that kitchen.”
She nodded.
Relying on the old “Girls-go-to-the-bathroom-in-pairs” routine, we headed back that way, down the hall and past the closed kitchen door. We smiled and nodded to a couple we didn’t know, and caught the words “fucking filthy” as we passed. When the coast was clear, Laura pushed open the kitchen door.
Okay, you know what? I thought I was a lazy ass when it came to changing the cat litter. I concede defeat. The litter box, in the middle of the kitchen, was in fact a box of solid shit. The cats would have taken to shitting on the floor, but there was no visible floor exposed. Every square inch was covered in festering garbage. The cats shit on that instead, and it squirmed with roaches and maggots. There was a beaten down trail of garbage that led from the door to the refrigerator. The empty, open cabinets above the sink teemed with life. A large saucepot bubbled with thick, gray stew on top of a range completely encrusted with dried food. A roach, clearly oblivious to the heat, teetered its way around the rim of the saucepot. I stopped counting roaches when I started feeling like I was going to throw up. I counted up to 85 but there were literally hundreds visible through the crack in the door.
“I told you not to go into the kitchen,” boomed Oscar behind us.
“We were just taking our stew to the sink,” said Laura quickly.
“On our way to the bathroom,” I added.
Oscar took our mugs from us. “You didn’t eat it.”
He looked hurt. “Didn’t you like it? Sarah’s a very good cook.”
I cast around wildly. “We’re vegetarians,” I said, praying there was something other than roachmeat in the pot.
Oscar looked aggrieved. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. “We should have thought of that,”
“Don’t be sorry,” we assured him.
Laura dragged me down the hall.
“That is it; we’re leaving!” she said. “You go pee and I’ll get the coats and we’ll meet you at the front door. Jesus, I hope they don’t eat in their bedroom,” she muttered as she headed off, gingerly opening closed door after closed door looking for our coats.
At the door of the bathroom, my neuroses came to a head. The door was broken, and stood permanently ajar. I have no problem peeing in front of women I barely know, but I really don’t like running the risk of peeing in front of strange men, even ones that spent every weekend sticking their forefinger between my breasts so I could tie my corset together tight enough to push my boobs up to my ears.
Looking at that bathroom was one of the few times I wished I were a man. Even then, it didn’t occur to me to be willing to pee in that bathroom. No, I wished I were a man so I could go take a leisurely piss in the relative clean of the alley outside the apartment. Me, my penis, and the nice fluffy rats and hypodermic needles. Ah, bliss. I counted twelve roaches in the tiny bathroom. The toilet was clogged and stinking. The seat was broken, which was okay because there was no way in hell my dainty bits were going anywhere near that bowl. But I really had to go. Really. There was nothing else for it. I propped the door shut with one foot, balanced with the other, and leaned back over the bowl as far from it as I possibly could. When I finished, I pulled the toilet paper roll to remove a bunch. The roll spun slowly, moving to the top of the roll a roach that had been hiding on the underneath of the toilet paper. Panicked due to its abrupt appearance under the fluorescent lights, the roach leaped from the toilet paper roll and landed squarely on my naked thigh.
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAUGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”
The party goers fell silent as I flailed wildly in the bathroom, skirt hiked around my waist, underpants around my ankles, door swinging open as I batted wildly at the one real roach on my leg and dozens of imaginary ones that I was sure were scuttling under my clothes.
Jack’s voice, tinged with concern, appeared on the other side of the door.
“Are you all right?”
“Roach!!!! On my leg!!! Right on my leg!!! Get it off me!!!! Must leave!!!”
Laura stuck her head in the door as I came barreling out, yanking my skirt back down.
“I’ve got the coats,” she said. “But, um, I wouldn’t put it on.”
I fled in horror, Laura and Jack trailing coatlessly behind.
We ran all the way back to Jack and Laura’s apartment. Laura puffed alongside me.
"There was a old gallon milk jug in the bedroom. I think it was filled with pee! Pee! The whole bedroom stank of piss! How do they sleep at night? They must put cotton in their ears to keep the roaches out!"
At the door, Laura and I stripped down to our underwear. Laura ran into the house and returned with a large black plastic garbage bag. We dumped our clothes into the bag and Jack went to the basement with our coats and clothes and ran them through the washing machine. Shivering, we dumped our purses out onto the cement and rooted through them, looking for travelers.
Satisfied that no one came back with us, we went inside. Laura let me shower first while she took a bathrobe down to Jack so he could wash his clothes, too. I stood under the scalding spray, scrubbing my skin with Laura’s loofah until I was pink as a cooked shrimp. I dressed myself afterwards in Laura’s clothes while Laura and Jack showered. We sat around the living room later in sweatpants and wet hair, drinking whiskey and jumping at any perceived movement seen out of the corners of our eyes.
God, I hate roaches.
*Pseudonyms taken from Sesame Street and a Shel Silverstein poem, whose opening couplet goes like this: “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout/ Would not take the garbage out.”
