2001-09-10

One time, when I was taking not-for-credit college courses during a summer vacation from high school, I had one of those really horribly experiences that you never forget. The event I am talking about is not when I went to Showtime at the Apollo with 25 other white people and got heckled on our way out. This was by far worse. Because of this one day of my life, part of a day, within the space of 15 minutes, I am forever changed.

The summer program was at Barnard; it was in this month that I fell in love with the school. Those four weeks made me determined for the next 2 years to go to that school. We each took 2 classes at 3 hours each, four days a week. We had the weekends off, a midnight curfew if you weren’t out with one of the staff members, and “field trips” on Wednesdays.

Most of the Wednesday trips involved meeting with such-and-such alum at some big whoop-de-do place to expose young minds to the exciting world of some stuffy office environment. I avoided these trips as it just meant you and 15 others stood around an office looking comfortable and bored while listening to the drone of the speaker. I went for any trip that required I do something.

One of the trips I went to involved the Parks Department and replanting the steep slopes of Inwood Park. I realized then that a lot of the other girls were doing these things because their prep schools required a certain amount of hours of community service before graduation. I was a public school monster and doing it because that was the type of work I wanted to learn about.

On another trip, on the hottest day of the summer, we were restoring old Brownstones in Central Harlem. Most of the work required cleaning out construction dust on the first floor in a floor-thru where all but one window was boarded up. It was approximately 500 degrees in there, and full of dust. As a result, even the roughest had to step outside to the cooling 105 degrees to breathe. The young man who was leading us on this project thought we were being lazy white folks. He didn’t like our trips for fresh air and was disturbed by our request to know where the nearest deli was so that we could buy water.

During one of my trips to the front stoop, he walked asked if we would do something else for him. There were 5 girls out there. Two of us (myself being one of these two) were covered in sweat and dirt. The other three were the above-mentioned prep school girls trying to clock in community service hours so that their senior year schedule would allow for optimal socialization. The two of us dirty ones got volunteered for the job.

He said that there was a room upstairs that needed to be cleaned out. We just needed a shovel, a broom and a couple of black garbage bags. Our instructions were to clean out everything. We got our supplies and walked up the narrow brownstone steps into the room that changed my life.

The room contained a single bed, a desk, a small refrigerator, empty crack viles on the floor, dirty sheets piled on the bed, a spilt milk container, roaches, dirty condoms, and all the necessary props to be living the life of a crack addict. Crawling down from the slightly ajar refrigerator door were roaches, feasting on the high-protein contents of the used condoms were roaches, cuddling in the soft cotton sheets were roaches, wearing red crack vile tops as hats were roaches. The yellowed wall looked wall-papered with a faded brown polka-dot pattern made up of roaches. Every single centimeter was covered in roaches from the tiny baby ones with almost translucent exoskeletons to large 1 or 2 inch ones with shiny brown armor. And I had to hold the shovel as the other girl with me swept trash and roaches, then lift the shovel with as much roaches as garbage into a black plastic bag.

Needless to say, I showered for about 2 hours when we returned. I could not get the vision of roaches out of my head. I was completely freaked. And since then I have had a great fear of the little brown fuckers. When the show Fear first came on, I asked everyone what thing would terrify them. I thought myself above all the spiders, snakes and haunted houses of my friends. Until I remembered: you can scare the life out of me you put me in a room with a roach. I stopped asking people this because I did not want to think about my fear. Thinking about it was too much for me.

Throughout college, never saw a roach in any of the various places I lived. My roommates would mention they saw one about every 4 months. This would force me to the supermarket to get roach baits, roach spray and all other roach killers. For one roach, scurrying across our hallway. When Angel said he saw a roach in his room, I suggested he clean up all of the boxes he lying around from when we moved in. The only time I’d seen roaches in our neighborhood was near the service exit to the few apartment buildings in the area, on trash day. I liked it this way.

I went into the kitchen last night to make tuna, for lunch today. I even got the tuna out of the cupboard. I walked over to the sink and noticed the most terrible thing ever: a huge inch-an-a-half roach scurrying across my kitchen floor. In my apartment that I diligently clean. A roach! I froze, so did the roach, about 4 inches from stove. Not even a breath passed my lips as no antenna twitched on the roach. We were suspended.

I knew my only choice was to kill it or prepare to spend the night elsewhere. I was in socks, a can on tuna in my hand and an empty sink next to me. I stood on one foot for a while, I’m not sure why. I did not take my eye off that roach. I wondered what my aim would be like with the tuna can. Then I recalled some type of bug killer that was under the sink when we moved in. I knew there was only a certain range of movements I could do, a speed in which I could reach under the sink before the roach was under the stove and I was packing my bags.

The bug-killer was luckily within reach, no need to move my feet. It was hornet and wasp spray. It would do the job. The roach was still, 3 feet away. The can said “can shoot up to 20 feet.” I began with a circle 4 inches outside it, knowing if I hit it’s huge body first, it would be under the stove. I spiraled in, finally hitting the roach which then ran for the stove. But I managed to speray a straight line at the stove's edge first. He went under the cabinets. I had him trapped now. I sprayed until he went belly-up. I watched as he twitched.

Then I got my cell phone. I needed someone to talk me through getting the roach off the floor. My little sister was there, staying on the phone through the entire process. I did not want to use my brooms, my dustpan. I could only use something I’d never want again. Luckily, I’d finished milk that morning and I had an empty carton in the recycle bin. Luckily, I recycle. I managed to get the roach in the carton using a spray-paint bottle bottom. I shoved paper-towels on top, dropped it in the trashcan and went immediately outside with the bag. And my sister listened to each moment, letting me know I’d killed my one fear and now I only had to get rid of it. Of course, I spent the next 2 hours cleaning the apartment. Even though I’d cleaned most of it the morning before. And by the time I was ready to shut off my lights and go to bed, I laughed. Hard. I laughed at my fear, I laughed at the Early-West style showdown I had with the roach. And how I managed to plan ahead in spraying to make sure it died. And how I won. It was dead, I lived through the cold-sweat of my fear.

But I better not ever see a roach in my apartment again.