The Roach That Would Not Die

Don Marquis, a columnist for New York's The Evening Sun and later for The New York Tribune, wrote nearly 500 sketches about a cockroach named Archy and his feline friend Mehitabel.  Late at night, Archy, a free-verse poet in a former life, bangs his head on the keys of Marquis' typewriter. He uses no punctuation or capital letters. He tells of Mehitabel, the alley cat who had been Cleopatra in a former life, and he complains about a rat named Freddy, also once a poet, who eats Archy's poetry whenever he gets a chance.

i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat
or get a cat that is onto her job
and i will write you a series of poems showing how things look
to a cockroach
that rats name is freddy
the next time freddy dies i hope he wont be a rat
but something smaller i hope i will be a rat
in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach
i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then (www.donmarquis.com)

Anyone interested in reading the Archy columns can buy The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel from Penguin Books. The humor and satire are delightful!

As much as I get a kick out of charming Archy, I have trouble dealing with him. Why? Because I hate roaches. I despise them, I abhor them. I despise them so much, in fact, that I have great difficulty killing the vile creatures. I don't like to hear the crunch.

My phobia dates back to a nightmare I had as a child when I was living in Louisville, Kentucky. My home, with two exceptions, was quite lovely. Built in 1886, the brick edifice was three stories high. It had built in cherry bookcases, a hand-carved walnut staircase, fireplaces in almost every room, even a stained glass window. But it also had an enormous shadowy, scary basement. When it was dark, roaches would crawl from the basement into the kitchen, where they would scurry around if anyone turned on the light. I hated going into the basement, and I certainly avoided the kitchen at night. Whether my avoidance caused -- or was caused by -- my nightmare, I do not know.

At any rate, one night I had perhaps the worst dream of my life. For some reason, I had to go to the basement. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, I encountered a monstrous roach, as big in relation to me as I was to a roach. He stood upright, his body covered with roaches. The basement floor was a carpet of roaches. It would have been impossible to take a step without coming into contact with a roach. As I stared in terror, he thundered, "Just as you have stepped on my brethren, I am going to step on you!" At that point, I woke up.

.

Perhaps I remember my childhood nightmare so vividly because I told my students about it each time I taught Kafka's Metamorphosis, a story in which the main character awakens to discover that he has turned into a human-sized cockroach (also translated "beetle" or "vermin"). Poor Gregor Samsa does not worry about his transformation. Instead, he worries about how he will get to work on time. The book is very symbolic, revealing much about dysfunctional families, including Franz Kafka's. I guess the book's many merits are what caused me to continue teaching it, even though I tortured myself as I vividly recalled my childhood nightmare.

Each year I pay a small fortune to a pest control company to keep my home free of bugs, especially roaches, but because I live in Florida, every now and then I encounter one of the vermin.  If there is anything I dread more than killing  a roach, it is having a live  one residing in my home!

A few nights ago, while I was reading in bed, I glanced up and spotted a roach at the top of the wall next to the cathedral ceiling.  As I gasped in terror, I realized there was no way to reach him, even with a broom!  I also dreaded the thought that if I did try to knock him off the wall, he could fall into my hair - ych!  For two hours I watched the disgusting thing.  He did not move.  Perhaps he was napping?  At one point, knowing I have poor distance vision, I decided that maybe he was not a roach after all.  Perhaps he was a huge spider.  I got my binoculars and zoomed in on him.  Big mistake!

Finally, around midnight, the roach started wearily making his way down the wall.  Thirty minutes later, when he was within striking distance, I grabbed a bedroom slipper and hit him so hard it is a miracle I did not make a hole in the wall.  The roach fell behind the stereo, but at least he did not land in my hair!  I knew he must be dead because I could see a stain on the wall.  By now, having used up all of my courage, I decided to postpone the disposal of the body until the next morning. 

The next day I crawled out of bed and dragged myself to the kitchen for a badly needed cup of coffee. As I returned to my bedroom, coffee in hand, what did I see on the frame above the door I had just walked under but the roach -- the roach that had not died! I panicked. I simply could not bring myself to go beneath the roach. I craved a cigarette, but my cigarettes were in the bedroom. What was I to do?

"The bug spray," I thought. " I'll zap him with the bug spray." I took the plastic bottle off the shelf, forced myself to move within two feet of the roach, aimed, and sprayed. Nothing. I tried again. Again nothing. The spray mechanism did not work. The roach, meanwhile, was absolutely motionless. Taking another nap?

Under the sink was an aerosol can of spray for flying insects. "Maybe that will suffice. I'll try that." No luck. That can would not work either. The roach still had not moved, I was even more in desperate need of a cigarette, and my coffee was cold.

Eventually I thought of the morning paper. I would go outside, grab the paper, and leaving it in its plastic bag, use it as a killing machine. I also would be prepared to jump back to prevent the dead roach from landing on me. These steps I followed. The roach plopped on his back on my carpet. He did not move. Not even his spindly legs jiggled. "The roach is dead, the roach is dead!" I cried.

Jubilantly, I removed the paper from its polluted bag, heated my coffee, sidled past the had-to-be-dead roach into the bedroom, lit a cigarette, and ignored any thought of getting rid of the body. After several more trips to the kitchen, always checking on the corpse that was still on his back, still not wiggling, I decided to run errands to postpone the disposal of the body for a little while longer. A couple of hours later, I returned home to find the roach remained exactly as before.

Unable to procrastinate any longer, I folded three tissues in half as I inched my way toward the corpse. Gathering all my gumption, I reached down and grabbed him. He started moving! That blasted roach who had played possum for four hours was alive! Wildly, I dashed into the kitchen, threw him onto the tile floor, stomped on him, swept him up with the tissues, and tossed him into the garbage.

I worry. I really should have carried him into the bathroom and flushed him down the toilet, but I could not bear to carry him that far. Could he have survived his last death and managed to crawl out of his garbage can coffin? Is he in hiding? Is he truly the roach that would not die?