If aliens exist, they look like cockroaches. Trust me.
I have a J.Crew catalog in my kitchen that I’ve never opened. Its only purpose has been to kill cockroaches. Never has a catalog filled with overpriced cargo pants been so functional.
(Full disclosure: I love J.Crew. I get the catalog because I enjoy the company’s clothes and plain-faced models. Just because I’ve taken to smearing pale pink cardigans with bits of brown bug guts doesn’t mean I’m making a statement. It was there when I needed it and for that I’m grateful. However, now that I’ve used it for mass roach killings I can’t stomach opening it to look at clothes.)
Florida is a disgusting place to live in the summer. You walk outside and your face melts into a puddle at your feet. You dress to avoid pit stains. The sun is so blinding you wear sunglasses on top of your sunglasses, your husband’s deodorant over your pH-balanced deodorant.
But this is just heat. Heat I can handle.
Swamp ass might tickle when it starts to spread, but at least it doesn’t run across your kitchen floor when you’re baking a chocolate cake. At least it doesn’t crawl out from between the folds of your washcloth when you’re about to scrub your face. At least it doesn’t have antennae.
Floridians call cockroaches Palmetto bugs.
Palmetto bugs sound adorable. Palmetto bugs sound whimsical. Palmetto bugs sound like something that might teach you a life lesson in a Dr. Seuss book.
Calling a cockroach a Palmetto bug is like calling a maggot a creepy crawler. A maggot is a maggot. A cockroach is a cockroach. People who call cockroaches Palmetto bugs are delusional.
Personally, I think New Yorkers living in Florida invented the term because they couldn’t deal with the fact that cockroaches also retire in paradise.
I used to relocate cockroaches. I used to trap them under a plastic cup, slide a piece of paper underneath and lovingly walk them to the alley, where I would fling them to their freedom. Oh, the naïveté! Now that they’ve started storming my house like the Red Brigades, I annihilate them. Bug guts and ooze. I don’t care how much bad karma I’m racking up.
Cockroaches are stealth motherf@$kers. They’ve forced me to perfect my aim and reaction time. Roaches rarely stick around for a second swat. I’ve also had to upgrade my bludgeoning tool from rolled-up newspaper to rolled-up magazine. (Enter J.Crew.) The roaches I’ve seen crawl across my kitchen floor are the size of small mice. A newspaper blow is hardly enough to level one.
But I feel like I’m an army of one here. Joe treats the cockroaches in our house like they’re paying rent.
“It’s summertime in Florida,” he shrugs. “What do you expect?”
“I don’t expect to reach for a dish towel and have a COCKROACH crawl out!”
“I’ve lived here a long time. Everyone has cockroaches.”
So I started asking people: “Is your house infested with cockroaches?”
And they’d look at me like I had bugs crawling out of my hair.
“Seriously? You don’t have roaches in your bathtub? My husband says this is normal Florida living.”
I don’t know which is worse: last summer’s ants or this summer’s roaches.
Last week I clobbered a roach the size of small child. The aftermath required a Hazmat suit and the creature was STILL moving. When I bellowed for Joe to come into the kitchen and finish the beast, he begrudgingly rose from the couch, dabbed at the mess with one square of paper towel, brushed his hands on his pants and considered the job done.
“It was a big one,” he replied flatly, as I furiously finished his poor clean-up job with a bottle of Lysol.
“A BIG one?” I shrieked. “It was GODZILLA. We have a roach INFESTATION!”
“No we don’t,” he said. “It’s just summertime in Florida.”
His blasé attitude was infuriating me, so I headed to the grocery store to buy roach traps.
Here’s how you know you live in a jungle: the grocery stores have expansive and well-stocked pest control aisles. Florida has so many bugs it’s basically crawling away from the rest of the country. Without pest control and air conditioning no one would live in this state.
Thankfully roach traps come in two different sizes: normal and elephant. I chose elephant.
I planted them every where in my house. Behind the coffee pot. Under the couch. Behind my dresser. Under the kitchen sink. Under the bathroom sink. Above the kitchen cabinets. Anywhere I was sure the pug couldn’t reach. Then I went to bed feeling good about my plan of attack. I figured I’d wake up in the morning surrounded by half-dead roaches pleading for their lives.
I fell asleep content. At about 3 a.m. I felt something crawl across my face. Now remember, I’m a bug ninja now. Even in my sleep I’m hunting roaches.
Joe was snoring. Out cold. On his back like a little lamb, oblivious to my nightmare.
I reached for my face. The reaction was knee-jerk. Instantaneous. I plucked the bug from my cheek in the dark and calmly, ever-so-calmly, walked into the bathroom, convinced I had caught a spider.
I turned on the bathroom light, opened my hand over the toilet and a big, brown roach fell into the bowl. I wanted to scream, holler for Joe, rip the sheets off the bed, but I was so impressed with my catch that I simply flushed the handle and watched the cockroach swirl away.
In the morning I shared this story with my husband. He told me I was dreaming and thanked me for not screaming. I told him his empathy was charming and dared him to find a wife who could catch a cockroach in her sleep.
Then I called an exterminator.
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PS. Photo by Neil T via Flickr.
PPS. My apologies to Loren, who is easily grossed out by many of my stories.
No. No no no no no NO NO NO NO! We do not have them here. I would die. OMG. I think I might die just from reading your post. Nonononononooooooooooooo! Ew.
The one an only time I have ever seen a cockroach was when I was in Orlando visiting friends. They are truly disgusting. You have my sympathy. The only thing that would make this whole thing worth it is if Billy the Exterminator shows up at your house. Mullet and all.
Sara: I a friend on Facebook just referenced Billy the Exterminator. I hadn’t even heard about him until this morning, now all I want is his mullet and extermination skillz in my kitchen. Like now.
I’ve had luck with the traps and pretty much only come across dead ones. It’s the flying kind that kind of freak me out….but it’s Florida!?!
Hi there I was hoping you may be willing to chat with me abut your story?
I’m looking for case studies to be featured in a series for Animal Planet, and I think your story sounds fascinating.
We are based in the UK, but I can be reached on kate.boddington@darlowsmithson.com
Thanks
Kate
Ummm, we had ants a couple of weeks ago and I had a total meltdown. I’m glad roaches are not common in Washington because I don’t think Jonathan could handle another “episode.” You are made of sterner stuff than I.
Note to all bugs: Bugs outside… fine. That’s your territory. You come in my house and it is game on. No more natural remedies and gentle encouragement to relocate. I will poison your entire family and do a little jig whilst your body twitches it’s last death throe.
Just for the record: If you tell me you live in Florida and you don’t have roaches, you are either a liar or blind.
Second, my lovely wife loves to rail against our “infestation,” but has no trouble leaving the front door (sans screen) opens for minutes at a time. My feeling is, we be a little more diligent about keeping doors closed and add some weather-stripping to the bottom of the door to the back porch and we should be golden.
And yes, I really don’t have that much trouble with the roach. It’s defining characteristic is that it runs away the second it notices me. That’s a critter I can get behind.
holy crap! It was on your face!! I can’t handle this! We have roaches here too in SC, but I don’t ever see them in the house. They are on our front porch all the time though. Well, we may not have roaches, but do have alligators in our backyard and freakin’ copper head snakes in our trees. Yikes- I’m afraid of our backyard now.
Heelya: A man’s body was found last week in a nearby canal — in the mouth of a gator. Seriously.
OMG that’s hilarious! (and disgusting).
The first time Wendy visited me in California after she moved to Florida, she brought me a present – a huge dead cockroach wrapped in foil. She wanted to see my reaction, but I think she forgot about the roaches we lived with in the 70’s when we rented a duplex in Venice, CA. So I barely batted an eyelid, but I have to say – that foil-wrapped mother was HUGE.
Oh hell no.
I share a similar nightmare with you living here in Arizona. I think Florida may win every so slightly on the huge cockroaches and other critters but not by far. My stipulation for moving to AZ was that we would have a monthly exterminator. I feel slightly guilty every month over the satisfaction I get waking up the next morning to dead cockroaches all along the outside of our house.
But scorpions eat cockroaches and we all know how I feel about scorpions.
I am so impressed with your composure unfolding your palm to find a roach…..blah …. i think i would of flipped a bit….lol good luck with your last stance …….exterminators are Floridians best friends.
having grown up in south florida, i’ve seen those godzilla roaches. it was habit to visually check the shower before stepping in, finding dead roaches behind furniture, and yet they still freak me the f@ck out. i’m the big chicken that throws a bath mat over the roach and lets someone else deal with it. so now living in atlanta, we have them in the summer here as well!! plus, living alone, there was no one to turn to and i’ve had to man up and smoosh them myself. i feel empowered.
Definitely shouldn’t have read this one… Make sure there aren’t any roaches in those cookies you are baking for us this weekend!!! 🙂
Funny thing is, I lived there for a year, and don’t remember the bugs. And I am a BUG-HATER! I too, have no mercy when it comes to any type of icky creepy crawly bug/roach, except lady bugs, because they know how to act like a lady. However, when I lived in Mexico, one crawled up my leg in bed, face wins though.
So last night while I was sleeping I had an itch on my back…no big deal…I itched it. Then I had that itch again…but I realized it was moving. I squished the itch and went to the bathroom and shook out my shirt and what was left of a spider fell on the floor. After a few moments of near panic, I had to turn the lights on and inspect my sheets, ceiling, and wall for his brothers. I finally got back to sleep and had dreams (nightmares) of big spiders hanging from the ceiling all of the house… Did I mention that I killed a mama spider and her bazillion babies with RAID above my shower yesterday too?
Brilliant blog. And I hope you have better luck with your exterminator than I have. I live in central Illinois, and when it comes time for those millions of acres of corn and soybeans to be harvested, you better run for the hills … I actually saw more roaches and spiders in my apartment AFTER they bombed the place. Though I somehow got sick from the chemicals, it didn’t seem to faze the Roachzillas that are crawling all over my coffee-maker every morning (which is sooo cruel!). Best of luck!
Oh man – you apparently hate them as much as I hate mosquitos! A mosquito landed on my baby’s head the other day while I was getting him out of his car seat in the back seat of our car. Our CAR for crying out loud! Is there no place that’s immune? Needless to say, I swatted the hell out of it (too bad I missed). Just this morning one landed on my arm as I was changing Henry’s diaper in his nursery. Swatted the hell out of that one too. This time my aim was dead on.
Have you ever read Metamorphesis by Franz Kafka??? Now thats one freaky roach.
I am impressed by your bug annihilating skills. Truthfully I have never seen a cockroach before so I was very intrigued by your story. Maybe they are less common in Canada- maybe the cold winters have something to do with it???
Delilah: The cold winters have EVERYTHING to do with it. You Canadians get off easy when it comes to bugs.
I’d do anything to be in Canada right now.
I came home from work the other day, walked into my kitchen and saw a cockroach the size of a gorilla on a pile of clean dishes I had laid out to dry earlier that morning. Needless to say, I re-washed the dishes.
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