1979 : roach motel

The cat’s whiskers tickle my face until I wake up. It’s dark. Uh,oh I’ve slept and missed a whole ‘nother day. I push her away, jonesing for just a few more hours of nothing, but she’s curled up beside me anymore.

It’s roach feet. Not cat whiskers. Roach feets. Roach feets crawling across my ear and onto my cheek and as I realize that last night swooshes in and slams into my head in Technicolor. Surround Sound. 3D. Last night slams me into the wall and I realize that this is no hallucination. These fuckers are real & they’re everywhere.

Look, I freak out when the cat drags a half-dead waterbug up into the loftbed and now I’m sitting in the loft surrounded on all sides.  Mwaha-ha-wha-wha flies out of my mouth. What is that you say? It’s the sound you make to keep from losing your fucking mind, that’s what that is. Some ancient Ashkenazi tribal mojo spitting through my fingers pfeh pfeh like those roaches are the evil eye and like somewhere there must be something I can do to make them go away.

A roach wandered into my microwave oven once just as I was about to warm up a biscuit. I thought, gotcha motherfucker, slapped the door shut, turned it on high and I listened to him snap, crackle and pop.  At the end of six minutes I opened the microwave. The biscuit had turned into a rock, but that little roach shook himself off and toddled away like it was nothing more than a cockroach tanning booth. Nothing I do or say is going to change the fact that you can nuke a roach long enough to cook a hamburger and the roach couldn’t care less.

I know this as I’m in the loftbed, flailing my arms around, batting them off my face, shaking my hair and whoop whooping until I totally freak the cat out. She runs down the ladder and out of the room. The roaches are non-plussed and continue to scuttle about.

They’re everywhere. Have I said that?  It’s surreal and not in that oh, isn’t that interesting Salvador Dali kind of way.  In that I think someone spray painted my apartment with cockroaches way. I shake my head out, back and forth. I’m convinced the key is to keep moving, if I keep moving they can’t get me.

This is my general goal in life, to remain a moving target.

I shake my clothes out–a dozen roaches drop to the floor on top of dozens more.  Arms, head, legs & hair all flying in different directions to keep the roaches off me while I pull on the same clothes for the third day. This is an impressive feat in the confines of the loft bed, but I don’t want to go down. I mean I do, I want to get out of this bed of roaches, but there are more…down there. I brace myself, hop down the ladder, grabbing my dance bag as I run out the door crushing families. Entire cockroach generations and future dynasties die beneath my feet.

The cat is on her own.

Outside, the cool night air calms me down a little.  A few final shakes and shimmies just be sure there are no stowaways in my hair or my ears or my pockets.  When I was little, kids used to say that earwigs would lay eggs in your ears, the babies would be born in your head and then eat their way out. I’ve never gotten over that image.

An old checker turns the corner; I jump in, grateful for the big leather backseat.

Maybe this is my lucky. There’s not too many of these big old cabs left.  It’s a sign.  Yesterday the bus showed up in the nick of time, today, this cab. If I can just make it to Lola’s everything will be OK.  I can shower and change and figure out what to do next.

Lola was the one of the few things worth remembering about the two years between the Mardi Gras and Red Wolf. She was real life. We’d met when I was drinking my way through junior college and she was dreaming of stardom. She was the love child of Brenda Starr, Mae West and Etta James. The things that happened to me didn’t happen in her world. She was…a civilian. I wanted to be in her world just long enough to catch my breath.

I close my eyes and remember to breathe, in, out, in out.  I’ve almost got the rhythm down as we pull up in front of her building.

I know there’s a couple of bucks in my bag to pay the cabbie. It occurs to me, slowly. I look at the dance bag, sitting next to me on the seat. Innocently sitting next to me in this cab and I realize, it probably wasn’t a good idea to leave my bag on the floor last night. It probably was not a good idea at all…

Posted September 24, 2009 at 8:04 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, East Village, roaches. Bookmark this post. Follow any comments @ RSS feed for this post.