The other night, I lurched out of bed at 2 am. It’s not uncommon for me to wake up in the middle of the night, usually as a result of Spousal Continental Drift. For those of you unfamiliar with the phenomenon, it describes a situation in which both you and your spouse are on your own sides of the bed and then, hours later, both you and your spouse are on your side of the bed. Amy refers to it as cuddling. It occurs to me that I may already have referenced this in the blog. Chalk my forgetfulness up to sleep deprivation.
In any event, full disclosure requires me to state that Amy was not at fault here.
I woke up because I thought I heard voices. Psychologists sometimes call this hypnopompic hallucinations. Stoners usually call this the point of doing drugs. Although I was pretty groggy, I grudgingly headed downstairs to ask the burglars to keep it down when I saw a black three inch oval on the wall of the stairway. That’s odd, I remember thinking, I don’t remember a three inch oval there. An oval that MOVED. Skittered, in a way.
I leaped upstairs and turned on the light. I may have screamed. A three inch bug (four inches with antennae) skittered across the wall with the kind of speed you only see in Formula One racing.
It was a massive cockroach.
As we stared at each other, I felt a deep and profound homesickness for Maine. Beautiful, desolate, freezing Maine, where nothing can survive outside in February. For that matter, almost nothing can survive inside. I fantasized about sitting in a snowbank. I envied frostbite victims.
A plan, I thought. I need a plan. I’ll consult Amy. I ran to our room and used my Urgent Voice. “The biggest cockroach I have ever seen is in the stairway,” I whispered. “That includes the Discovery Channel.”
Amy’s plan was to remain inert in bed in the hopes that a) she was dreaming, b) that I might think she was asleep and leave, or c) that I might be eaten by the cockroach before she had to get out of bed.
Clearly, I had to deal with this myself. First, a weapon. Broom. Boom. Second, confrontation. By now, the roach had skittered to the ceiling of the stairway, which is about twenty feet high. Too high for my broom. But in times of crisis, I am not without innovation. A pile of laundry was on the landing. I threw a towel at the bug. Nothing. I threw the second towel. The roach “took wing” and swooped down at me. I’m not ashamed to say that I shrieked and ran upstairs.
After five more towels, I managed to knock the roach into a corner of the kitchen. What followed was an ugly two minutes of frantic broom swinging and cursing as the roach charged me repeatedly. There was a great deal of adrenalin - I later discovered that I bent the broom (a testament both to my strength and shoddy Australian craftsmanship) - but I was ultimately able to flip the beast onto its back and bludgeon it to death.
Later, Amy and I had a long laugh about how funny I sounded scrabbling up and down the stairs, though I think only one of us was laughing.
Much later, Amy pointed out some "bug art" on the wall of a shop and said “I thought you might like this” in the same way mobsters might suggest you’d like a decapitated horse head in your bed.
I scoffed. That’s TINY. But just to be safe, I paid the clerk $5 not to sell it to us.
