Skip to primary content

Combat | Oct 05 2001

Been having a problem with roaches. It’s my own fault for leaving dirty dishes in the sink. The roaches disappeared, mostly, when I stopped doing that. Then I got lax and they returned. This happened several times. Then the roaches didn’t disappear anymore.

Rachel, hardly the squeamish type, in fact a lover of gross stuff, urged me to act. I dragged my feet for weeks as the roach sightings increased, including and more and more baby ones (smaller even than ants). In my despair (at least I think it was despair), I took to talking to them. Well, not talking; threatening. I’d see one and say, “Listen, mister,” (for some reason, I assume roaches are male), “you and your kind better bugger off, ha-ha, or else I’ll, I’ll… you don’t want to know what I’ll do.” Tough talk. Which achieved nothing but make me feel ridiculous.

Then yesterday Rachel presented me with two packages of COMBAT, a descendent of the Roach Motels of my youth (who can forget that ominous tagline, “Roaches check in, but they never check out”?).

Here’s how COMBAT works, in dust-dry, back-of-the-box language:

Thus began Operation Silence Is Deadly. For as I joked to Rachel’s roommate Jessi, the time for talk was now over. Only action mattered, and only death would result from that action.

A single package of COMBAT contains 8 or 12 “bait stations” – black plastic disks resembling small, hollowed-out hockey pucks. With sadistic glee, Rachel and I placed them in strategic locations around the apartment. I laughed this special laugh I perfected as a kid – a deep, exaggeratedly demonic laugh, almost operatic, originating in the bottom of my throat.

This morning I found my first casualty. It (he) was flipped on its back by the sink. I knocked it (him) onto the floor with a spare sponge and swept it (him) into a dust pan.

More have followed. I am confident of victory, praise be to COMBAT.

But what’s interesting in this (and the reason I bother to tell it) is the weird way I find myself treating it as a military campaign, replete with that semi-facetious “operation” name. It’s weird, right? I find it weird. At times I catch myself doing these weird things and I think, “Hey, what the fuck is that about?”

I don’t have an answer. I just know that I delight in finding one of the little mothers and thinking, “Fucking told you to fuck off,” (knock roach off counter). “Fucking said it over and over,” (get dust pan and broom). “Fucking silence is deadly,” (sweep, sweep). “You little fuck,” (in trash).