The Fragile Ecosystem Of My Bathroom

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So, I came home the other night. And… how can I put this? I’d had a few. And then they got lonely, so I had a few more. Have you ever seen a drink separated from its friends? It’s like watching an angel cry. Then I walked home from Sunnyside at 3 AM, because that’s just how I roll.

First thing I did when I walked in the door at 3:08 (I can walk *very* fast when drunk, and really I left the bar at like 3:06 to boot, like Michael Johnson) was get in the (gold shoes) shower, despite my somewhat altered state of consciousness. You see, my dream has always been to be killed in a completely avoidable household accident, like Dave Matthews. (Hopefully, I mean.)

And when I finished toweling off, I very nearly got my wish, because there was a cockroach crawling around the sink. And not one of those friendly cockroaches from Song of the South that sing and dance and grant the wishes of lonely wooden dolls, no, no, not one of those motherfuckers. This cockroach was twenty-two inches long. It needed a haircut, badly. It bumped up against me, dropped its sunglasses, and said I had to pay for a new pair, cash. It said it could get me tickets to the Today Show. It cast racist aspersions on me for not helping out. Three days later, I saw it on the subway saying it was an Iraq veteran and selling Snickers for $1.50 out of a bunch of boxes held together with mailing tape. Then it breakdanced with its five-year-old brother. This was a total sociopathic motherfucking cockroach.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve seen me when I’m the worse for liquor, but I get jumpy, friendo. I sprinted out of the shower. My lovely co-blogger will testify that I actually stacked a bunch of books against my bedroom door while I slept, lest the clever creatures follow me the forty-one feet from the bathroom and come to my room while I’m asleep and lay eggs in my goddamn mouth.

This sort of thing stresses me out slightly.

The last time I saw a roach, I’d just woken up. It was about three inches long and it crawled out of my line of sight so quickly — and I was so unable to find it — that I wrote it off as a hallucination. And it’s okay to ignore them. Roaches are a vital part of living in New York, like worrying about terrorism and eating $6 egg sandwiches every day. Like power outages and subway strikes. You can forget about them for months, even years at a time, but they’re there. Oh, yes. The roaches are still there. They’re hanging out in the 1/8″ gap between the sink and the wall, demanding 32% wage increases and delivering rolling blackouts whenever the temperature breaks 80. They’re the rent-controlled tenants of the bathroom-kitchen boroughs. They are fucking everywhere and all I want to do is go to sleep without thinking about tiny legs on my face. Goddammit.

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Filed under Zach, general complaints, vermin