Recently, the food blog, Eater, unveiled Gross-out Fridays, a pictorial series centered on the varmints, insects and inedible ephemera that worm into our food and drink. The debut entry was milky-brown, iced Starbucks java, a cockroach bobbing in the cold, caffeinated water. “SICKKKKKKK!!!!” the Gross tipster noted.
Drama queen. Back when Giuliani reigned, I possessed both idealism and an Astoria, Queens, railroad apartment plagued by cockroaches. People claim no one’s a true New Yorker until they’ve lived here a decade or some arbitrary number. Poppycock. You’re a New Yorker when you kill cockroaches with a rolled-up Post. My journey into New York–hood began with wine. My then-roommate was a lackey for a men’s mag specializing in T&A and diminishing the collective male IQ. Understandably, he capped most workdays with cheap cabernet.
“There’s plenty more where that came from,” he’d say, with the confidence of a man who knows his liquor store’s stock. “Have a glass, Josh.”
Oftentimes I’d partake, because I’m a cheap-bastard boozehound; free alcohol is always welcome in my belly. After finishing each bottle, my roommate would follow a school of interior design I like to call “Early Alcoholic,” “Frat Boy” or some kooky combination. He’d display empty vessels on top of our fridge and kitchen cabinets.
“They look so pretty,” he said.
He thought the bottles’ labels, inscribed with florid, French titles, lent our apartment a bohemian elegance—like a tortured, chain-smoking poet’s garret. Somehow, I don’t think Rimbaud bunked in a fourth-floor walk-up with maroon linoleum floors, Ikea furniture and Mexican neighbors blasting “Hotel California” at 11 a.m. To blunt the daily Don Henley, I greedily downed gin and tonics in East Village dives like Holiday Cocktail Lounge. My goals those nights were twofold: find someone with whom I could exchange deep conversation and, ideally, penetrate them deeply. When my quest failed (as was par for those blubbering, stumbling days), I’d shamble back home long past midnight, experiencing a sexual frustration typically relegated to monks who, too late in life, realize their dreadful career choice.
After returning one particularly well-soused eve, I disrobed and stomped to the kitchen to grab a glass of water. It was pitch black. Something went crunch. My toes felt slick. I flooded the kitchen with light and observed a moving carpet of cockroaches skittering toward cracks and dark, dirty places—not unlike me when actually copulating. I grabbed a useless section of the Times (“Home and Garden,” I believe) and thwacked roaches into brown paste. I counted seven dead. I went to sleep happy, and awoke worried.
“I think we have an infestation,” I told my roommate the next morning. I was hungover and warming up my hand-me-down espresso machine. My father bequeathed it to me so he could upgrade to one with additional whistles and doodads, as middle-aged men with disposable income are wont to do.
“Hmmm,” my roommate croaked.
“Hmmm,” I said, spooning asphalt-colored grinds into the machine. At the time, I drank cheap Central American coffee, sold in compact bricks like uncut cocaine. Why not buy snazzy coffee? Because I spent surplus funds on alcohol, which meant I could only afford the crappy coffee I needed to eliminate my hangover, thereby letting me work to make money to buy more booze. It was a neat, tidy circle that lent itself to my days’ dulling sameness of work, drink, kill cockroaches, drink coffee. Murdering the roaches distracted me from my lonely nights and caused no small amount of concern.
“Josh, what are you … doing?” my roomie asked, after he stumbled upon me in flagrante delicato: crouched on the kitchen floor, wearing boxer shorts and wielding two rolled-up magazines like baseball bats. I flashed my happy smile, made ominous by the killed bugs polka-dotting the linoleum.
“I think I’m going to go … do that thing … in my room,” he said, inching away. I spent the next hour butchering insects with the same fervor Israel’s Mossad agents applied to snuffing the Munich Olympics terrorists. In my homicidal zeal, I tracked one fat sucker to the top of the cabinets, where he hid behind a few wine bottles. They were dark, musty, coated with cabernet sauvignon residue—and teeming with enough roaches to re-create Woodstock, if one had such an urge.
“I guess I forgot to wash out the bottles,” my roommate said the next day. We banished more than 50 vessels to the recycling bin, the roach equivalent of a home-wrecking tsunami. But the buggers’ revenge would be executed with self-sacrificing cunning. One morning, I decided to tidy my espresso machine’s water tank. I removed the gun-metal-grey, opaque container and, as is the current fashion, vomited in my mouth a little bit.
Waterlogged cockroach carcasses bobbed in varying states of decomposition. There was a thorax here, an antenna there and legs, legs, legs everywhere. That night, I finally had a real excuse to get real drunk.
