Tom vs. the Cockroaches

When you live in Texas, you learn to live with cockroaches. you also learn that there are actually two types of cockroaches; each one is a tell-tale sign of something in your life. If you have the little bitty ones scurrying about, you might want to pick up a bit more around the house and not leave uneaten food out and about. If you have the really really big ones occasionally entering your home...well...welcome to Texas!

Not everything in Texas is bigger but we most definately have the biggest cockroaches in all creation. In Texas, a wounded cockroach is a dangerous animal. The big ones can fly and have no qualms whatsoever in dive-bombing you. (more on this later)

When you live in Texas, you never really quite get used to co-habitating with the most disgusting insects upon the planet but you do make peace with the fact that, like the war on terror, the war on cockroaches will never ever be fully won. You can only through eternal vigilance manage to stem the tide of these nasty little six-legged jihadists.

In my many battles against cockroaches, there are actually three that the enemy has won. I have decided to chronicle these three failures so that others may learn from my mistakes and future generations will benefit from the wisdom of my experience.

Battle One: Tom vs. The Dive-bombing Cockroach

When I was seventeen, my family lived in an apartment complex near a bayou in west Houston. The complex was nestled in a bucolic, park like setting and it was my mother's habit to place bird seed in dishes on our balcony so that she could watch the birds in the afternoon. Unfortunately, the bird seed sometimes also attracted some rather large rodents that lived in the nearby bayou who would make their nocturnal forray's to our balcony and eat up all of the bird seed.

Since my bedroom was adjacent to the balcony and the head of my bed was against the outer wall, I would occasionally be awakened by the sound of a dish of bird seed scraping along the balcony and then...well let's just say that I saw "Willard" when I was a kid and I've never been quite the same since. In order to get any sleep at all, I would have to grab a blanket and a pillow from my bed and go across the hall to sleep in a bedroom that my dad had turned into an office.

It usually worked out well but on this particular occasion, I had just come home from seeing a really stupid campy horror flick with three of my friends. The movie was called "Bugs" and it was all about these radio-active cockroaches. What damage can radio-active cockroaches do? you ask...well, it seems that the nestle in your hair and set your head on fire. It was a really stupid movie where only bald people were safe. My two friends and I laughed all through it and actually did a 1975 version of Mystery Science Theatre all through the show.

However funny the movie seemed at 10:00 PM when I was wide awake, it took on a more ominous hue at 2:00 AM when I was groggy with sleep and creeped out by the sound of rats scurrying about on the balcony; a mere six inches of easily gnawed through wall separating them from my head.

So, when I entered my father's office and turned on the light only to startle a huge cockroach crawling along the ceiling who reacted to my intrusion by taking wing and dive-bombing me, you will understand that it would be a completely normal reaction for me to run in place and scream like Little Richard with a broken nail.

My father rushed into the room only to see hysterical me running in place and screaming with the offending insect long vanished...I spent the next several hours convincing my parents that I did not do drugs.

Battle Two: Tom Loses His Peanut Butter.

I'm sure that Italy is much different now but, thirty years ago, there were several things that you could just not get. Hamburgers were unknown in all of my mission with the exception of a really bad place called "Whimpy Burger" in Rome. Peanut Butter and Kool-Aid were also rare commodities that could only be had by beneavolent relations sending them to you or by being fortunate enough to have access to the American Navel Base in Naples (which I did).

Just prior to my transfer from Naples, I had made a run at the base commisary and had purchased a large jar of Skippy Peanut Butter. When I unpacked my stash in my new apartment, my companion and the two other companions that shared our apartment looked at it like a couple of starving street urchins from a Dicken's novel eyeing a Christmas feast through a frosted window pane.

There was an unwritten code in our mission. A man's stash was his own and you could not help yourself to it. However, if the missionary ever partook of anything from his stash while you were within eyesight, it was considered extremely bad form for him to not offer to share with you. Because of this code, the other three elders in the apartment made certain that I was never EVER allowed to be anywhere near my jar of peanut butter if one of them was not present.

I did share with them but, my charity waned proportionate to the diminishing level of peanut-butter in the jar. As we got down to the last bit of peanut-butter, I set the jar into the pantry determined that I would not take it out again until I could enjoy it all by myself. So, early one morning, before the other three missionaries were awake, I slipped from my cot and padded to the kitchen to eat the last bit of my peanut butter in solitude.

When I pulled the glass jar from the shelf, a cockroach that had been on the opposite side of the jar scurried around and set up residence on my hand. Startled and disgusted, I whipped my hand back and forth determined to force the offending creature from off of me. Unfortunately, a cockroach's ability to overcome Newtonion physics is greater than my own and the jar slipped from my grasp and crashed against the far wall of the kitchen. I stared in horror at a glob of peanut-butter on the wall festooned with shards of broken glass and a nasty cockroach struggling to free itself from the sticky mess.

The other three missionaries rushed into the kitchen, surveyed the scene, and then, looking at me through narrowed-bitter eyes, pronounced my fate as deserving and left me to clean up the mess.

Battle Three: Tom and the Nuclear Option.

When we lived in Katy, my wife and I moved into a rental home. It was pretty normal as far as homes in the neighborhood went with the exception that, whenever night fell, we seemed to be over-run by the really big variety of cokroaches...the kind that you usually see only one or two at a time. Our first week in the home was a nighmare and it all came to a crescendo when I took the trash out one night and, there on the outside wall, was an army of these huge cockroaches. In the dark, it actually looked like the wall was moving. We had no idea where these roaches had come from and, when we questioned our landlord, he mentioned that the previous tenant had also complained and so he had the house sprayed.

We tried a series of bug bombs but that would only work for a day or two and then they would be back. We mentioned our dilemna to a friend who leaned forward and in a conspiratrial tone, told us about a product that he'd heard of that was guaranteed to get rid of any level of infestation.

We went to several chemical stores until we finally came to one who knew of the product. After locking the door and making us sign several release forms stating that we were through having children and we promised not to sue....the clerk donned a hazmat suit and went into the back of the store emerging again with a pair of tongs holding a package called, "Demon W P". He sold us the package and we went home and mixed it up in a sprayer and went all around our home treating it according to the directions on the label.

When we were done, there was still a huge amount of the stuff left in the sprayer and, not knowing what to do with it, I decided to dump it down a storm sewer grating that sat right at the edge of our driveway. After dumping the remaining contents, I turned to go back into the house only to be stopped by a cry of alarm from across the street. I turned to see what the alarm was all about and saw, to my utter horror that an army of huge cockroaches was boiling up from the storm sewer and pitifully dying on my driveway.

My neighbors came from their homes and witnessed this shocking scene with me. When it was over, I took the hose and washed the dead roaches back down the storm sewer and then, knowing that we would be forever after known as "The Roach House" went back inside and explained to my wife why we needed to move away as quickly as possible.