When I started this blog I wanted to keep it authentic, which means at some point I had to talk about cockroaches. There are more of them than us. New York City is buggier than a swamp, not to mention the fact that is a swamp, and the other fact that it’s a swamp that is built on top of swamps, infilled with the very flesh of the land that was hollowed out to allow metal worms to tunnel below the surface, carrying millions of people from one slab of bedrock to another, for that which is not swamp is bedrock, without which the skyscrapers would have nothing to stand on. Unless you live in a new building, or a house, or are rich, you have cockroaches. Period. If you haven’t had cockroaches, you haven’t lived here.
Not all cockroach problems are created equal. I’ve lived in this city for twelve years, and I’ve lived in eight different places (many of those eight taking place during my first years here) in eight different neighborhoods. I’ve also couchsurfed and stayed at boyfriends’ places and had slumber parties with my friends. I once went to a friend’s place in the Bronx. She left her cat’s leftover food (wet) in the sink while she read my tarot cards. I went back to the kitchen to get a drink of water, turned on the light, and waves of cockroaches erupted from the tiny tin. I felt like the vice squad busting an orgy as each wave of cockroaches unpeeled a new layer of cockroaches as they scurried towards the cover of the cracks and crannies. When I say scurry I mean they flew with their legs. Did you know that the American Cockroach (also known as water bugs) can move 50 body-lengths per second?
My friend, a native New Yorker, laughed when I gasped in horror. “Haven’t you seen cockroaches before?”
Speaking of flying, the first time I met a New York water bug was in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan, so far north that people who don’t know better consider it the Bronx. It was the old open-window-in-the-summer routine. An open window in the summer is an open invitation for water bugs. It was so big it looked like it was from the carboniferous period, which it was. The ancestors of the water bug that flew into our apartment had probably flown with the pterodactyls. That’s why we’ll never defeat cockroaches. They’ve been on this planet much longer than we have.
A brief perusal of cockroaches on the Internet will offer a glimpse as to why they’ve been around for so long. They can eat anything. Even if you never ate food in your apartment and never had any dishes, they would still find a way to survive. Wikipedia quaintly says that cockroaches are “opportunistic feeders that eat materials such as cheese, beer, tea, leather, bakery products, starch in book bindings, manuscripts, glue, hair, flakes of dried skin, dead animals, plant materials, soiled clothing, and glossy paper with starch sizing.”
They also eat their dead and wounded.
The only places I’ve lived in NYC that haven’t had cockroaches were free-standing houses–one in Washington Heights and another in Kensington, which amounted to seven cockroach-free years.
But what about now? Now that I have a child? A child who drops food on the floor like it’s his canvas and like he’s the next Jackson Pollack? This child and his parents live, by the way, in a pre-WW1 tenement building with a 50-year-old plumbing system. How does our cockroach population rate, from you-must-live-in-a-house to tin can orgy? When we left our apartment to go to Boston for 4th of July weekend, it was something like a small dinner gathering, when we got back it was like a frat party.
Before we left for Boston we did what we usually do before we go to bed–or leave the house for more than a few days. I washed all the dishes, wiped the counter, dining table, sink, stove-top, swept the floor, and tossed all food glop stuck in the strainer into the freezer where we keep our compost.
We never leave our dishes in the sink. In an ideal world we would also religiously put the dishes away before we went to bed, clean the dish rack, and make sure not a single drop of water remained on it.
One of the first times I stayed in New York City was during Thanksgiving, while I was in college. My roommate invited me to stay with her family. After dinner my friend’s mom was cleaning up (She was not let us touch anything in the kitchen. Our help would be a hindrance, she explained). I thought she was finally done when she had dried and put away the last dish, so it was with great incredulity that I watched grab another paper towel and use it to dry the sink. Wasn’t a certain amount of wetness acceptable in a sink, as a general rule, being a source of water after all? But now I know, all these years later, why I kept seeing New Yorkers wiping their sinks dry. Cockroaches don’t need your food (they’ll invite themselves to it if you leave it out, but they’ll be fine as long as they can feast on their dead, or the binding in your books), but they do need your water.
But we don’t live in an ideal world, we live in a world with cockroaches and we are tired. The dishes can dry themselves, and so can the sink, I say to myself before bed many nights, because it’s already 11:30 and I just wiped Boo Boo’s artistry from the floor and Jer-bear and I are too damn tired to dry the same damn dishes that we just got done washing.
There are some New Yorkers who only eat take-out because they are afraid of cockroaches. And they have a point. We are not those people. There are others who bomb their apartments every few months to keep the population under control. We are not those people, either. We have a baby. Sometimes I don’t know what would make us crazier–the cockroaches, or the cockroach mitigation rituals.
At any rate, we left home, not thinking very much at all about our cockroaches, and if we did, it was probably something along the lines of, Hope they don’t burn down the house! Or maybe we were thinking that they’d be bored at our place without us and try to hang out somewhere else.
When we got back home late on a Saturday the first thing I saw when I opened the door was a cockroach skittering on the ground. Less like it was greeting us and more like it was going to run off and tell its teenage friends to hide the kegs because the neighbors called the cops.
I hoped the little guy was an aberration, but there were more, a hangout out by our shoe rack, a few ambling down the hall toward the kitchen.
GOD DAMNIT! HOLY SHIT! NO FUCKING WAY! Having no weapons at hand, I just started stomping on them. I dropped my luggage to the ground and hoped that would kill some as well.
Boo Boo, who we had not taken out of his car seat yet (Jer-bear had lugged him up four flights of stairs in his armchair sized car seat) started laughing uproariously. (Mommy is making a big noises and smashing things! Mommy sure does put on a good show sometimes!)
I saw one running into our power strip near the kitchen table. I grabbed an unopened envelope from my bank–probably one of those credit cards they were trying to get me to sign up for–and tried to smash it, but it scurried under the power strip. When I lifted the strip an intergenerational crew of cockroaches emerged from it. Medium-sized fast ones, slow and oblivious juveniles. I screamed and began pummeling the floor with the mail.
What Boo Boo saw was a mirror image of his behavior. Shrieking, loud noises, smashing any kind of thing against any kind of surface, and he found it to be hilarious. He laughed like a drunk at a bar and started clapping.
After a few moments of this, we decided that most of cockroach kegger guests had either been pulverized, polishing the floor with their smeared carcasses, or had scampered to their dark lairs. We wiped up the smudged bugs from the floor and then released Boo Boo, hoping that there were no remains that would get stuck on his little feet.
As soon as we released Boo Boo he trotted to the kitchen* and started stomping on the the floor like he was macerating invisible grapes, which must have been what I looked like earlier. His stomping sent a lone lingering cockroach scampering across the tile. Boo Boo noticed it and started chasing it, laughing as he tried to smash it, sending it in a zigzagging trajectory across the floor until if finally found sanctuary in the crack between the floor and the cabinets.
I don’t remember exactly what time it was when Boo Boo finally settled down enough to get ready for bed, but it was far past his bedtime. He had done much that day–he romped on the trampoline in this grandparents’ yard, he’d taken the train from Boston to New York, passing idyllic seaside towns, and wildly tooted at all trains he saw along the way. But it was clear that the biggest thrill he had was watching his mother kill cockroaches, and even better, getting a chance to stomp on some himself.
For better or worse, he is increasingly and irreversibly becoming a native New Yorker.
Epilogue
For those who were considering coming to our place before reading this piece, and are not definitely not consider it after reading this piece, I’m happy to announce that our cockroach levels have receded back to a dinner gathering level. It’s also understandable if that does nothing to placate your fears and eliminate your hesitation, because a dinner gathering is not zero.
We would like to have no cockroaches but this in this blog we keep things real. I’d settle for a nuclear family game night gathering level, or single person eating in front of the TV level. We have started drying all the dishes again and also drying the sink and dish racks before we go to bed. We continue to routinely clean our drawers and cabinets for good measure, and every once in a while will wipe down and tidy the areas under the sink. Anything within reason.
We will never win the war against cockroaches. Extreme measures are only worth it if your enemy will be demolished forever, and that will never happen, so even though an exterminator comes to the building once a month with a fogging machine to offer his services, we always decline. The fog might kill some cockroaches, but will cause others to disperse. Also, chemical fogs and toddlers are not compatible. And it’s not like I need the population to be zero. All I want is to be able to pretend that the cockroaches are not here, but I feel like even that is too much to ask for.
Let me leave you with this New York Times article about how cockroaches defend themselves against wasps who want to turn them into zombies that their young can feast on.
*By kitchen I mean also our living room and dining room because our apartment has three rooms and a bathroom. The space we refer to as our “kitchen” is merely the place with the stove, oven, fridge and sink, which are all aligned on the same wall. Basically our kitchen is a wall, plus like two feet of tile that extend from it. If you live here, you know the routine.
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