"What the HELL are you doing?"
That was the shouted inquiry.
A perfectly reasonable one, of course, if shouting is ever reasonable.
It was last Sunday night, Easter, actually, when my boyfriend found me squatting between our toilet and the bathroom wall holding roach carefully wrapped in toilet paper and examining its undercarriage.
"I am going to close my eyes and I am not going to see you holding a...BUG...and looking at it that way. And then I am going to wipe my memory of the whole thing," he told me.
OK, so I am completely weird sometimes and I like to look at animate objects. I am also a huge animal lover and ultimately curious and that shit even extends to the roaches in our house that we had been trying to get rid of for the past three months.
Let me preface this with the fact that we are both anal-retentive clean and neat freaks. Well, not me as much as him but we're pretty much both slightly nuts on not having bugs in the house.
So the arrival of a roach in our very clean house was a bit of a shock. I saw it in the bathrooom one night on a midnight foray and nearly killed myself tripping over my robe to get back to the bedroom,
"We have a roach!" I breathed into his sleeping ear.
And, as Jesus raised Lazarus, the man was on his feet in twenty seconds.
He followed me into the bathroom long enough to see the bug scramble for all it was worth underneath the sink/vanity.
"FUCK!!" he exclaimed.
Every moment of his carefully constructed image of being "the neatest man on the planet" had been shattered; his expression said, "It was all for naught!!!"
I am a little less nuts on this sort of thing having once had a baboon shit on my thigh in Rwanda and a monkey throw its own vomit at me in Costa Rica.
Plus dozens of other animals have puked, shit or pissed on me in my years as a vet tech in Philly or volunteering at the local Audubon rescue shelter as a child.
I am pretty hard core that way.
I figure it makes up for not having kids.
At least I hope so.
But roaches were too much for Chas, the penaultement "neat freak."
And, to be honest, they are a little too much for me.
Like Chas, I have had it drilled into my head since childhood that roaches = unclean people.
We both couldn't live with that image, even if only between ourselves.
So the next day we repaired to the local Walmart and he armed himself for battle...if there is a chemical or repellant known to mankind that he didn't buy that day, then I do not know it.
He bombed the house, he bugged the house, he took them on, one-by-one.
"I will not, NOT, have roaches!!!" he promised.
I temporarily moved me and the dog out fearing that we would grow two heads or get some exotic form of cancer from all of the chemicals.
When all was said and done, it seemed like we had triumphed. No roaches to be seen anywhere for the next two months.
And then, last Sunday, the roach reappeared. And it was the same roach. The original granddaddy of them all.
How do I know this?
Because when Chas caught me picking up the roach last weekend, it wasn't my first time. I had actually picked him (or her, it's just so hard to know about these things with bugs) up before because I had never seen one that big and I was wondering what freaky anatomy had led to a five inch roach.
This roach, Granddaddy Roach, had odd yellow spots on his undercarriage. As did the one I was holding last weekend.
Mind you, I haven't manhandled a lot of roaches in my time but I am pretty sure they don't usually come with yellow spots on their bellies...or whatever you call the flip side of a roach...
So what I was doing last weekend was merely ascertaining that this was the same roach who had started our population and trying to figure out how he had survived the chemical holocaust that had happened in our home.
"Put. It. Down. Now!" Chas said to me.
"Then I am going to step on it and we're going to be done with this and go back to bed...after you take a shower and wash your hands in bleach," he finished.
Oddly, I couldn't accept that.
Not the shower and bleach thing, of course, I was not intending to go back to bed with...roachy hands. But the killing. The blatant killing.
That I couldn't accept.
Why, when I had stood idly by, and even encouraged, the mass chemical campaign in the house for months beforehand and not now? Not in the simple stepping on and killing the Master Roach?
Because I felt like he deserved to survive. He had beat the odds. He had made it through. He was a fighter, a survivor. And I had held him in my hands. Twice.
I conveyed this all to Chas who looked increasingly more horrified with every argument I put forward to save the roach's life.
"I am calling your mother because this is beyond ridiculous" he said, "I cannot reason with this but I bet she can."
My mother is possibly even more of a neat freak than Chas so him calling her would certainly not be to my advantage.
(My mother, being Italian, has no compunctions about using guilt to get me to do things. I could already hear the conversation: "I always KNEW you were the dirty child of the two of you...and YOU were the one who would end up with roaches in your house...")
No, that couldn't happen.
"Wait! I will put him outside. It's nice outside now and he'll like it better out there," I said.
Looking exasperated, he said, "Just get rid of the damn thing and come back to bed. Shower first."
So I picked the prettiest part of my newly planted gardens and set the roach free, some theme music to "Born Wild" or "Free Willy" playing in my head.
Back inside, I carefully checked under every counter, vanity, and dark space to make sure there were no "relatives" lingering around.
Then I made myself a cup of herbal tea, too restless to go back to bed immediately.
Finally, about two hours later, I got in the shower and proceeded to scrub my hands thoroughly.
Stepping out, reaching for the towel, my foot landed on something hard.
That gave way in an unpleasant crackle and a distinctive SPLAT.
Knowing before I even raised my foot to look at the inevitable, I closed my eyes and sent up a hasty prayer to try to ward off any unpleasant karma.
Then I looked down.
Granddaddy was dead.
And you know how I knew it was Granddaddy by now, of course.
Stepping back into the shower for Round Two with my foot, I felt dreadful. Like really, really bad.
Waking Chas up for the second time that night, I told him the deed was done: Granddaddy was dead.
"Patti, I love you for many reasons and your kindness towards animals is one of them. HOWEVER, I do not want to spend another moment of our relationship talking about roaches or roach karma anymore. Actually, I don't ever want to talk about the ethics of killing roaches again. Is that OK?" he said.
I suppose he is right.
But I still said a second prayer that night.
I prayed that my boyfriend didn't reincarnate as a roach.
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