August 24, 2002

I somehow thought that reading The Cockroach Papers would help get me over my fear of roaches. I thought wrong. Now it's no longer just an unfounded apprehension rooted in general revulsion. Now it's way worse. Now it's a justified phobia rooted in scientific facts exponentially more horrifying than any imaginary explanations I could have dreamed up myself. Hooray.

I've been reading The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore for almost two months now, and I'm only about halfway through. I can only read it a couple of pages at a time, and I have to hold the pages with pictures by the very edges. Reading it in bed is out of the question, as is reading it at night. In fact, I can't even read it in the house any more, so I get my installments at the gym, waiting in line at the post office, or before yoga.

I would just quit reading it altogether, but it's just so darn interesting, and so well written. Plus, I keep hoping that eventually there will be some good news. One little tiny fact that makes me feel better about roaches. But so far it just keeps getting more grim.

Now I see roaches everywhere. Not only do I see real roaches, but I see imaginary roaches: flashes of scurrying dark shadow zipping across a light background are always in my peripheral vision. A menacing antenna (which usually turns out to be a hair, a thread, a string of corn silk) sways tauntingly from every crevice. I hear scuttling that stops the moment I freeze, head cocked, to determine its source. Anything I brush against, anything that lightly touches my skin (my hair, the hem of my skirt, a blade of grass, my bed sheets) becomes a hideous and ill-intentioned cockroach trying to crawl into my clothes and, from there, to lay in wait, motionless and somehow undetected, until I foolishly let down my guard. That's when it plans to burrow into my ear.

I've had an on-again-off-again preoccupation with cockroaches crawling into my ears since seeing an animated short called The Silverfish King on HBO in the early 80s. Being unfamiliar with silverfish (all of which were no doubt devoured by the alarming Houston cockroaches), I immediately transferred the sinister role of Silverfish King to the enormous, shiny, and ubiquitous tree roaches of the muggy Texas gulf coast. That particular fear, dormant for years, was awakened in high school when I learned the story of Ehren's friend Toni, awakened in crippling pain by a cockroach that had burrowed too far into her ear. She had to go to the hospital to get it taken out.

For years I assumed Toni was a freak case. But last month, I met another woman who had been awakened by the excruciating torture of a roach in her ear. But her story was even worse. Because her story included a fact that Toni's story did not, a horrible and obvious point that had somehow never occurred to me: that she could hear it. She could really really hear it. Every tiny rustle of its crunchy exoskeleton was amplified in her ear, so that it was like the fucking thing was tunneling directly into her brain. Euugh. It makes me shudder every time I think of it. I haven't gotten to the part of The Cockroach Papers about how much roaches love to snuggle into your ears, but I did flip past a photograph of a mid-sized roach making its way into a human ear. I've taken to sleeping with little strips of Kleenex stuffed into my ears. And even then, I worry about my nose and mouth. Or worse.

So, no, I have not quelled my fear of cockroaches through better understanding. The more I learn, the worse it gets. For instance:

You probably guessed that cockroaches can live for some time (up to 40 days) without food. But did you know they can go for a week or more without water? Or that they can survive for several hours without air? Without fucking air! It's just wrong.

Oh, and "food," by the way, means anything from garbage to the glue holding your grocery bags together to their own poop to your fingernails and eyelashes. Yes, roaches are known to feed on living humans. They're particularly fond of toenails and calluses. Fine, so this is mostly in tropical areas or on murky ships, but still. Think about that next time you go to sleep.

I have actually censored a particularly upsetting tidbit on this topic out of sympathy for parents. I probably would have left it in, except that I ran into Brooke and her cartoonishly enormous baby a couple of hours ago at Ross. (Seriously, the baby--who is allegedly only nine months old--must be almost as tall as Brooke herself. It's alarming. It was suspiciously tiny the last time I saw it. I wonder what they're feeding it. But I digress... ) I decided it's got to be hard enough having one of those things without people like me feeding your neurosis even more. Not that she's neurotic; I'm projecting. But anyway, if you want to know what I'm talking about, you'll have to read the book.

Speaking of reproduction, here's another nice little fact. Female cockroach anatomy includes what amounts to a built-in sperm bank. A lady cockroach only needs to mate once to have all she needs to produce a lifetime of egg cases. So that solitary cockroach you see lingering near your trash can may well have the capacity to produce thousands of offspring, even if she never gets it on with another roach again. Next time you balk at squashing a roach, think about them apples.

So my phobia grows. It doesn't help that this has been a particularly wet summer, so the tree roaches that make a nightly 3am foray into my kitchen are bigger and more intrepid than any I've seen before.

By the way, in Texas we call those giant--and I do mean giant--they're typically about 2" long, but a 3" specimen is not at all uncommon (and if that doesn't sound big to you, you need to look at a ruler, or remember that a dollar bill is approximately 6" long--a handy fact for all sorts of reasons)--we call those giant cockroaches "tree roaches" or "outside roaches."

We've come to a understanding in Texas to all politely pretend that great big giant cockroaches like that could not possibly live inside a normal person's house, and that when you find one in yours, it has made its way inside for food or water, and will leave as soon as it finds it. Nevermind that there might be ample food and water outside your home. Those roaches live outside.

Although we still recoil at a tree roach in the house, our disgust is directed at the roach itself, rather than the housekeeper. We regard it more like you would upon finding, say, a possum, in your kitchen--yucky and filthy and disease-ridden and gross and alarming, but no one's fault. After all, they live outside, right? We somehow don't associate them with filth (as you would those tiny German roaches), because we have all agreed as a society that the big roaches do not actually live in our homes, despite any evidence to the contrary.

In fairness to the collective fantasy, there are way more of them outside than inside, and you never see them in the middle of the day like you will the German kind, and they don't actually get into your food or anything like that. And you'll usually only spot one in the kitchen or the bathroom, giving credence to the "coming in for water" myth. Otherwise, it will be one lone, enormous roach in the middle of the ceiling, seeming confused and out of place. In fact, if you go to bed at a reasonable hour, you'd never even know they made it into your house at all. But since I don't, I have to sleep with Kleenex in my ears.

I keep meaning to see if they make some kind of earplug that doesn't impair hearing, but that still effectively blocks your enticing ear hole. But buying specialty earplugs would be an admission that I really have flown off the handle about this whole thing, and I'm not quite willing to admit that just yet. I absolutely loathe myself for carrying on like this, and I'm filled with self-contempt each time I start awake from a roach-filled dream and, once again, tear off a little strip of Kleenex. But there it is.

The only trick that seems to allay my panic is to share all the horrible things I've learned with as many people as possible. As you may have guessed, my cocktail party banter is pretty limited these days. I'm even less popular than usual.

07.23.02