So the other day around midnight, my sister, Kathryn, and I were cooking a casserole. I’ve been staying with her for the last few months because my work schedule has me in Cali alot lately. I had gotten home early from my shoot and we needed to cook some chicken before it went bad, and hell, cooking is fun, so there we were.
We were almost ready to put the casserole in the oven but we needed something to top it with, so I go scouring about for some crackers or something when I peer into a cabinet and notice a bag of something that might work, so I go to pull it out from the back, and I ask her what’s this?
AT WHICH TIME I notice, not one, not seventeen, but ONE MILLION COCKROACHES of ALL SHAPES AND SIZES on and in and around this one stupid bag o’ stuff.
So I screamed. And then I screamed again, and then, just because I didn’t feel like stopping, I screamed some more. (By this time, I had climbed a ladder that was conveniently located in the kitchen).
You know in horror movies when the dumb bitch starts screaming and screaming instead of running or fighting, and you’re like, “Stop screaming you dumb bitch and run or fight!!” ? Well it was like that. I suddenly realized why they do that. Because when you see something sooooo awful, that you never expect to see when and where you see it, sometimes it just feels right to scream. And hell, I really just didn’t feel like stopping.
Kathryn had the frame of mind to grab the Raid from under the sink and we sprayed the motherfuckers like a black man on Cops, and then we sprayed ‘em some more.
So there’s this waterfall of roaches dropping out of the cabinet, I mean plop plop plop MOTHER, and they’s trying to run, but I’m still too freaked out to do much (by this time I had mostly stopped screaming), and we’re looking at one another in horror, both of us barefoot and neither of us with any suitable weapon apart from that blessed can of raid (when did they make roach-killer so effective?) and we’re like the hell do we do now?
The vacuum cleaner was outside in the car, to get to it, the path led UNDER the cabinet and OVER the myriad roaches, and I’m like, oh HELL NO. So she’s like, I’ll give you a dollar. And I’m like Make it Two, so she’s like $1.50? And I’m like $2 biotch, or you can get it your damn self, and she’s like $1.75? And I just look at her, so fine she agrees to my demands and I run screaming to the car.
Coming back with vacuum in hand I start the chore of vacuuming up live creatures, some of which are easily upwards of two inches and I’m damn glad we changed the bag earlier in the week. But you know, I can still hear the bastards in the cabinet, rustling around in the mystery bags still inside, and inside the plastic on our mac and cheeses (I’m still getting the howling fantods thinking about them), just this sinister rustle rustle, which DOESN’T STOP, not even for a bleeding second. I’m thinking this is the deformed drooly-man’s crap of nightmares, I’m never getting to sleep again. But Hell in a Goat’s Handbasket we have to deal with this or seriously move out of the damned house.
So we start in with the judicious use of suction and screaming to remove all food items into garbage bags from that side of the cabinet. Then we get to the other side of the cabinet, and I’ve only lived here for 5 months or so, so having not gone excavating in the closets I’m not all that familiar with the contents, and I’m pulling this stuff out, and it’s a grocery list of What You Would Want On Your Side In a Battle Against Roaches. Seriously, there’s three foggers, two boxes of roach motels, some weird “Roach Tablets” and two boxes of rat poison, (just in case). But there they are, happy as pigs in piggy afterlife, which our little piggies have skillfully learned to avoid. But I digress.
So we cleaned out that shelf, and then the ones above it, and then the three consecutive, and then bleached all the damned things, and started to caulk the betweensides, but ran out of caulk, so I guess that’s for tomorrow.
Afterwards we watched Xena Warrior Princess to calm the frayed nerves, and twitched a lot. I must’ve woken up about 6 times, to check my perimeter.
Thus the moral of my story is never EVER buy TVP (texturized vegetable protein), or as I like to call it, texturized roach food; or if you must, keep it in someone’s house you don’t like very much, if at all.
Oh yeah, the Last Roach… So we think we’re all finished, after 1.5 hours of this battle, sucking them up and spraying raid up the tube so they aren’t tempted to crawl back out; we finally take a breath and I crack open two beers and hand one to Kathryn, we’re about to take a smoke break, but of course, I’ve gotta piss like a racehorse (no rest for the plagued).
I walk carefully into the bathroom, I check all the walls, all the ceilings, behind the door, behind the tiolet and under the seat before I trust the room (one had made as far as the doorway earlier). I’m almost out of there, I turn on the water to wash my hands when, PLOP motherfuck PLOPS again into the sink, like through my hands, so of course goes the Screaming again, and Scream until Kathryn Bursts into the room like Bruce Campbell only with a Vacuum Cleaner instead of a chainsaw and I somehow intimate It’s in the damned sink, so that’s that.
It’s been quiet since then, but we’re prepared for next time.
Again, I can’t reiterate enough: AVOID TEXTURIZED VEGETABLE PROTEIN (they weren’t bothering anything else).
