I’m up at 5 AM, which is no small thing, since I went to bed just before 1 AM, and I am pregnant and relishing all the sleeping-in that I can. I can’t sleep because I had to let the cat out, and in order to let the cat out I have to go through the kitchen, and if I don’t want to trip, I have to turn the light on, and if I turn the light on, my eyes have to wander to the counter tops (the way you can’t help looking at a car wreck as you pass), and there I have to see half a dozen new cockroaches loitering on my counter like they are on a smoke break or something. When I turn the light on, they run like the cops just showed up, and if I were to pick up an appliance- let’s just say the coffee pot or my beloved KitchenAid- I would bust the party.
I stumbled through the kitchen ignoring what I could because it is just so much better to wait until daylight to deal with this in a few hours. Daylight gives that little extra dose of courage that enables me to react quickly and just get the job done- daylight, or wine. If I have a little wine, I have a lot of courage and just kill the suckers with my fist. Since I am pregnant, I don’t have any of the latter, and I would rather let them continue their partying and smoke-breaking on my counter a little while longer until I feel more fit to deal with the situation.
I went back to bed, but had barely settled into the sheets when I felt a flutter on my arm. I threw the sheets back and the light on at the same time, hoping to catch the culprit in his tracks. Of course, I found nothing. I should have been relieved. A thorough investigation of my bed revealed that I was crazy. I just have bugs on the brain. I talked myself down by going through a short list: it was probably just a hair tickling my arm, I just washed all the bed clothes yesterday; there is nowhere for a large black bug to hide in a white bed; and really this is my punishment for ignoring the situation downstairs in the kitchen; but most importantly, our bedrooms are the least likely rooms in the whole house where we are likely to encounter one of these bugs.
I choose to say “bugs” most of the time just because it wears me out to say “cockroaches.” I also don’t want my kids to go to school and tell their friends we have cockroaches in our house. It’s kind of embarrassing.
I was assuring myself and thinking about trying to lay back down when Lydia called from her room, “MOM!” I went to her quickly, glad I was already up, ready to sooth her from her nightmare and forget about mine.
“Mom, there is a bug in my room. A big one.”
“Are you serious?” I replied. I sounded like I didn’t even believe her. There are never bugs in our bedrooms. “How do you even know that? Why aren’t you asleep?” I accused her. I couldn’t wrap my mind around what she was telling me, and I imagined how long she must have laid there, awake in her top bunk, peering down at the floor for no reason, before she spotted the troublemaker on a small stack of books. I scanned the floor and grabbed a shoe while she explained,
“I had a nightmare, and then I woke up and saw a bug. Why is the light on downstairs?”
Ignoring her question, I moved the top book, revealed the bug, obliterated it with the shoe, and noted that it was awfully fast for a roach that should be suffering from post-pest control poisoning.
“I think it was a cockroach,” she said.
“Yeah, hon, I think so too.” I climbed up to her and kissed her cheek and said I was sorry, like we were going to commiserate, though she didn’t seem very phased by any of it.
I went back to my room, completely defeated. This really wrecked my mental checklist, so I checked my sheets again and decided that since I was thoroughly awakened now, I might as well try and start explaining about Larry. Lord knows, I’m not going back down into the kitchen.
*
I’ve been complaining about this bug problem for well over four years now. I’ve been blogging about it off and on for almost as long. A full year ago, I vowed I would just be done with the subject altogether. Ironically, this was just before we caved and finally called in the exterminator, who has been visiting our house once a month ever since. I’ve never, all this time, made a connection with Larry.
Larry is my unsavory neighbor who shares my West wall. His is the end home on a row of old brick homes in the city, where it is notoriously believed that bugs are just a part of city life. I sure believed it, based on my own experience, and I comforted myself by also extending that belief to all my neighbors on the block who were actually very shocked to later learn of my frequent trysts with the exterminator, or as we call him, “The Bug Man.”
Larry moved into the already badly run-down end home almost three years ago with his wife and his dog, a scrappy grey terrier mix named Lucky. We had our giant lab then and I remember thinking that Larry’s dog was much better behaved than mine. I saw Lucky come and go with some regularity that first summer, but after that he was relegated to the house mostly and I only heard him through the wall. They added another small mutt to the household at the time, but I never saw much of that dog at all.
His wife was a strange creature. I never learned her name. My friendlier neighbor to the East learned her name and told me, but it was unusual and I couldn’t remember. Recently, Lydia referred to her as “Larry’s Woman,” which was funny to me and oddly appropriate, because the wife behaved a lot like another of the family pets. She was like the first wife on the fundamentalist compound- the others being the dogs and all being regarded about the same.
They moved in after a string of tragic families that were turned over in rapid succession by the slumlord who lured people with the promise of “renting-to-own.” He’d get them to pay way more than the property was worth and then tell them that since it was theirs, they were responsible for all the repairs. He’d usually throw in some church-speak too, just to seal the deal. I was angry about the deliberate way he duped poor families into further ruin by shuffling them in and out of the house. He has since been thrown into prison, but not before rent-to-owning his house to Larry.
When Larry moved in, he chatted and joked with us and with anyone who came by. He let my delighted girls pet Lucky, and he just seemed so much friendlier than anyone who had been there recently that we thought this time would be different. Dave even said to me, “I think these might be our best neighbors yet. They seem like they might actually stay.” We had no way of knowing then just how much of a hanger-on Larry would eventually prove to be.
I never liked him. I was not very successful at being nice to him either. I was never friendly or neighborly in anyway and I tried to avoid him as often as possible. For one thing, he stunk. For another, if I crossed his path or came within forty feet of it, he would accost me and heave and sigh heavily and want to tell me all about why life was so hard or why the Man was bringing him down. From these brief episodes, which mostly took place while I would shuttle the kids to or from my car, I learned: that he had twins once who were taken by the state, that his physical condition kept him from being able to hold a job, that he and/or the wife had diabetes, that the wife (actually, he did refer to her as “the wife” in this conversation) had a pregnancy scare (ew!), that they had the power shut off but he got the company to turn it back on again by telling them about his diabetes and his medications, that he learned the landlord went to prison and that was why he hadn’t been upset about Larry not paying any rent for the past four months, and finally that that York fairgrounds was a great place to get a real deal on a computer.
Now, Larry was a trustworthy source when it came to computers, cars, or fixing just about anything. He had up to three cars in his possession at a time. Two took up precious parking space on the street. One sat in his back yard, and one or none ever actually ran. He also had various car parts around the back yard like sculptures. One engine sat out in the elements for a year before he put it in some clunker and made it run- it didn’t just run, it purred. Then that car disappeared and another took its place up on jacks out front, to the consternation of anyone else with a working vehicle who might want to park there.
Other neighbors were constantly fed up with the lack of parking caused by the cycle of cars in and around Larry’s house. They called the police. They also called about the state of the backyard, which had a little grass when he moved in and only large jungle plants by the time he moved out. Oh yes, and the slow but steady build up of trash! I never had to call the Township or the police about Larry in all this time. My neighbors took care of that pretty regularly.
Once in a while, the police would come out and make him do something with his trash (looking back, I think he must have just put it in the house) or write him a citation about the excess of cars, none of which were properly tagged.
The first summer they were here, Larry and his Woman bought a giant, above ground pool which took up the half of the back yard, and they both floated around in it like overfed goldfish who were too big for their tank. When they were done with it, they left it there, and it leaked until it was empty, crumpled under the weight of the snow in winter and became a large soggy mass that bred mosquitoes and slugs the following summer. The neighbors called, and the police came and specifically made him go into the backyard and haul the pool up. Larry managed to crumple it into a pile and drag it out front, where it sat until he was in good enough standing with the garbage service to have it hauled away.
I could keep listing anecdotes about Larry. The times that he went door to door asking to borrow money for gas. The time he told Dave that if the power company shut off his power again, he planned to just dig a pit in the backyard and light a fire. The time he got a windfall from the state for some reason, and spent all of it on a turquoise ‘98 Camero only to trade it for another clunker a month later…. but honestly I’m getting weary of listing it, just as I’d grown weary of Larry himself. All this is just background. It says nothing of what has transpired over the last two weeks.
*
I was lying on the couch feeling sorry for myself when it finally happened. I was despairing that Friday afternoon, mainly because the past two months’ bug activity had been worse than ever, in spite of our monthly visit from the bug-man. A host of home improvement projects loomed ahead that were vital to making our house ready for our third baby, and I laid there thinking how impossible it all was, and how I was probably poisoning my unborn child with all the chemicals I allowed into our house on a regular basis, which weren’t even working anymore. At that moment, when I was so overwhelmed with defeat and despair, Lydia came bounding through the front door breathlessly saying, “Mom! Mom, the police came and took Larry away and put a big sign on his door…”
My heart stopped. I could only guess what she meant by that, but I had to see for myself:
A wave of relief washed over me as I read.
Relief? What did this mean to me, really? I had no idea, but I surprised myself by jumping and shouting as I read. My neighbors watching from a cross the street laughed as they saw this and I ran over to them as though we had been friends all these years and asked what happened.
Earlier that morning, the small dog was spotted trying to escape from the first floor of Larry’s house via the screen on the side of the window-unit air conditioner. The neighbor who spied the dog rescued it and called the police. The police came, and since no one was sure how many other animals were in the house, they went inside to find out. The unfortunate officer was confronted with a scenario inside the house worse than I even imagined.
Trash and broken overturned furniture waste deep throughout the first floor. A Christmas tree. Part of a toilet. The overturned couch was covered in cat shit. There was a narrow path from the front door to the kitchen where you could almost see the floor. The back door had been boarded shut with two by fours. Most alarmingly, cockroaches covered every visible surface. They dropped by the half-dozen from the door frame upon entry. They scattered beneath your feet- only rather than hiding, they just moved out of the way.
The real clincher on the first floor was the kitchen sink. It was overflowing with a congealed substance which had trapped various pots and pans in an upright position some very long time ago. Over this greasy sculpture, masses of cockroaches swarmed. Up the walls, over the piles on the counter, spilling onto piles on the floor, in and around the microwave, and over the door leading to the basement, the bugs thrived. The basement and the second floor were much the same. Notable differences were the piles of bagged trash in the basement and the layer of dog excrement which covered the floor which had been there long enough to turn white. On the second floor, it was discovered that there was no working toilet in the bathroom- the thing actually had no tank attached. (There were, however, at least two fully assembled toilets among the rubble elsewhere in the house.) Not a room or a surface within was safe from the swarms of roaches.
Recall that Larry’s house mirrors my own. We share one great, bearing wall from the basement to the bathroom, and his kitchen sink sits opposite my own, separated by about eight inches of time worn brick and mortar with a dash of plaster on top. It’s really a wonder my “bug” problems aren’t much, much worse.
Anyway, the police saw all of this when they came looking for the other dogs. Unfortunately, there was also the matter of the way this purification smelled. From outside the house the stench hit the alley through the open window and doors and singed the nostrils of all bystanders. It is indescribable- a gagging, toxic, rot.
When I caught wind of it, I knew the smell right away. The rest of the neighborhood stood horrified with eyes watering, but we had been used to the toned-down version for the last two years. It would come and go from our hallway upstairs along with the weather, and we could never figure the source. We called it “the Rot,” and attributed it to old pipes that needed to be replaced. Dave tore open the ceiling below the bathroom and replaced some of the pipes, but it didn’t help the Rot. Now, with the innards of Larry’s house exposed, we knew.
The police experienced all this in the morning and came back later that afternoon with backup and a condemnation from the Code Compliance officials. Amazingly, Larry and his Woman couldn’t fathom why the police should have cause to ask them to vacate the house. They felt they were being treated unfairly. Contrary to what Lydia told me in the beginning, they drove off in a huff in the most recent beat to Hell car, of which the only description I can give is that it was spray painted black. ( I need to interject here and note that a cockroach just fell with a light smack onto my keyboard as I was typing. Here’s to another sleepless night for me…)
After they drove off in their spray painted car, we didn’t see them again for more than a week. It would be another two weeks beyond that before the authorities had everything they needed lined up to ask Larry and his Woman to hand over their keys. It seems they are allowed a certain number of chances to clean up their act and their space before being kicked out and/or going to jail. It’s these weeks that have filled my Facebook status updates with cryptic phrases like:
“Sara’s whole neighborhood is having a block party that started last Friday when Larry left.”
And:
“Sara is trying to digest this statement: (Larry to other neighbor) ‘My bugs were in perfect harmony until you called the police.’”
And:
“Sara is distressed because Larry's ‘rights as a citizen’ seem to trump her own.”
And:
“Sara is happy that the garbage people came for Larry's dumpster, but a little distraught that it broke and left half the infested contents behind. It broke my fence as well.”
And just this morning at 5 AM:
“Sara can't sleep. Side effects of the bug situation.”
*
Where it stands now? Larry and his Woman are officially gone. The property has been locked up and a new condemnation sign posted.
A realtor and someone from the state representative’s office came out to finalize the process and took my name and contact info so that we could co-ordinate the extermination process (my house should be done again at the same time as Larry’s). I spoke with the Bug Man on the phone today who said their forthcoming visit would be complimentary, since we had been such regular customers all this time and who assured me that, “It will get worse before it gets better- but it will get better.”
I’ll be sure to update my status and let you all know.
***
This is a shot of my completely unloaded kitchen. I do this once a month in prep for the visit from the Bug Man.
These are my neighbors across the street who provoked a fight with Larry on one of the days he showed up to make like he was cleaning for an inspection he had with the Code Compliance. I missed the fight because I was at the store.
This little f***er (sorry people, that’s what I really call them. I go straight from “bugs” to “f***ers” It depends on how upset I am in the moment) was on my leg. Like, when you think that you feel a bug, but you really don’t, only this time I DID. So, I took a picture of it.
This is the dumpster that Larry ordered. It was part of an effort to show Code Compliance that he was cleaning the place up. Unfortunately, he spent only half a day filling it to overflowing and then it sat out in the heat like that over the weekend. When the disposal company came to pick it up, the back end broke and half of the stuff fell out.
I will not be posting a video. In fact, no one can prove that I have such a video ;). But if you want to stop by my house, I may or may not be able to find such a thing for you (as long as you don’t mind a few bugs).
