Roaches (Insects)

Posted on October 25, 2002 in College North Carolina

Barbara Fletcher wrote about facing her first live roach. The occasion caused me to rhapsodize upon one of my own favorite roach horror stories:

When I lived in North Carolina, I learned that the reason why people kept cats was to eat the roaches.

I lived in this one house where we noticed a few too many roaches gadding about the upstairs kitchen [more than the cat could eat]. So we dusted the cracks around the floor with boric acid powder. The next morning I got up and found one of my roommate picking up the corpses and dropping them into a jar. “Two hundred and sixty five,” she counted. “Two hundred and sixty six…”

These weren’t my first roaches. I’d lived with them before out in the California desert. The roaches inhabiting the environs of the Naval Weapons Center were huge: each carried his own can opener. I remember one night feeling very hungry and wanting a midnight snack. I got up to boil some water for instant oatmeal. As I walked into the kitchen, a roach scurried under the refrigerator. I could handle this. I was truly hungry. The mere sight of a roach did not disgust me.

I pulled out the box of Quaker Instant Oats. A roach hopped out. I didn’t worry: the servings were all in sealed packages. I started heating the water for my snack.

As the pot began to boil, I reached up into the cupboard to grab a bowl. Running around inside the bowl was a roach that looked big enough to seize ice cream cones out of the hands of small children. This was too much: I threw the little bugger onto the floor, grabbed the pot of boiling water, and poured most of it on the roach.

For a moment, I thought I had won. Then it shook its threadlike antennae as if to shout “What was that?” and ran under the stove, well beyond my wrath.

The next day my housemates and I held a meeting. “We have roaches!” I cried. “We have roaches!” Roy cried. “We have roaches!” Jonathan chimed in. And Eugene, who was studying entomology at UC Riverside said, delightedly: “Yes. I think I’ve identified three different species.