Roach Motel

The cockroaches in Virginia are menacingly huge. Imagine an old school silver dollar with spiny legs, oily wings, and impossibly long antennae scampering around in the dark. You can actually hear the pitter-patter of their tiny footsteps. Over the course of the two years I spent there I was fortunate to only encounter roaches individually and occasionally in pairs. I never had reason to hunt or fear them. We peacefully coexisted.

I moved into a sublet in Chicago this past Sunday, and the woman from whom I’m renting mentioned that she’d recently seen a few tiny black bugs in the kitchen. No big deal, I thought, I’ll set out a couple of roach traps and they’ll be dead in a week. Sure enough, that night I noticed a couple of small roaches in the space between my counter and stove.


On Monday morning (yesterday), I popped into my local True Value and picked up a twelve-pack of roach motels. I set them out as the instructions indicated and figured problem solved. Later in the evening, however, it seemed the problem was a bit worse than I’d thought: Despite the dozen traps I’d placed in my 4’ x 10’ kitchen, I noticed between five and ten tiny specks retreating into my stovetop when I entered the room. No big deal, I thought, I’ll just get a can of bug spray in the morning and sort this out once and for all.

Witnesses can attest to the fact that I spent yesterday evening joking and gloating about how I was going to massacre the family of roaches using a series of shock-and-awe attacks. I didn’t care how many there were: Those idiot bugs [didn’t] stand a fucking chance.

Last night I had perhaps the first nightmare of my life about bugs, and that was when I thought I was dealing with a small handful of them.

I was waiting on the steps of True Value when the store opened this morning. Weighing my options carefully, I opted for the TAT brand household roach spray over the “Industrial Strength” Viper. It struck me that the all black can of Viper, branded with a pair of lurking eyes, seemed overkill.

I came home, shut off the gas to the stove, and set out to find the root of the problem. It was immediately clear that there were in fact roaches living under the stove as well as in the space between it and the counter, but I knew there had to be more. I pulled out the stove and opened it up every way I could, squishing the few bugs I found along the way. The roaches ranged in size from a tiny spec to a small safety pin. I then did a bit of investigating in the cupboard under the sink and deduced that the source of problem had to be the space between the back of the cabinets and the wall. So, naturally, I placed the hard plastic hose—the kind that comes affixed to cans of WD-40—into the end of the bug spray nozzle, and sprayed a few short burst into the gap.

I was right about there being more roaches and the spot where they’d taken residence, but I underestimated their number and the extent to which they’d freak the fuck out when I attempted to poison them. In fact there were hundreds of them, of varying sizes, and they fled, en masse, toward their only exit: The cupboard under my sink.

This post is already too long, so suffice it to say that the worst part of the whole experience was seeing cockroaches pouring into my kitchen from cracks in my cupboard and counter that I didn’t even know existed. I’ll never forget the sight of stepping back to see bugs fleeing in all directions into my kitchen from, among other places, the space where the counter meets my sink.

I called the emergency maintenance number for my landlord to say that I had a serious roach problem and, within minutes, a plump Mexican man with a thick accent showed up at my door with a can of Raid. He suggested that I use the entire can and come back tomorrow.

I think there should be a word in the English language to represent the specific kind of fear evoked by an onslaught of scores of some enemy invader. It’s been a long time since I've felt a firm slap in the face by nature, reminding me that she is in fact in charge. I feel fortunate to have, most nights, an insect-free place to sleep.

After killing an insane number of roaches, I went back to True Value and bought a can of insulating foam to seal the cracks and holes at the back of my cupboard. For now the problem appears to be under control.