Deep in one of Tim’s journal entries, Rhonda (rightfully) chastised me for letting Houstonians in THE DEAL use the term “palmetto bug.” She also wrote entertainingly of her mother’s assault on these tree roaches with flip flops, then Rhonda shocked me by saying she goes after them with a rolled up newspaper. My answer, below.
A newspaper??!?!? And that works? When I try to hit them with anything readable, they take it away from me and peruse it with a slightly contemptuous expression on their faces while they’re having their antennae manicured. Bastards.
“Palmetto bugs” is what they are called in Florida. Yes, they are tree roaches, but “roach” gives people outside the hot coastal areas of the country the wrong idea, so I opted for the euphemistic term in THE DEAL.
Roaches are those nasty little fuckers that get in your food and your books and your clothes and EVERY SINGLE PART OF YOUR LIFE and won’t go away. Kind of like that nose-picking boy who got a crush on me in sixth grade and later went to West Point which sort of explains why we are in Iraq today.
Tree roaches… they just wander in on their way to somewhere else. They don’t want to stay. They generally won’t hang around unless you have a big ol’ bag of unprotected dog food, then Katie bar the door, because they will never leave and they will call all their friends on their cell phones and tell them where the new hot place is and your dog will starve to death because neither you nor any other human will get within ten feet of that Science Diet without epic war being waged. There are not enough flip flops in the world, and the only solution is to sell your house.
If an army of roaches ever invaded MY habitat…I’d f-ing move to another state. I am not afraid of anything…except roaches. Rhonda is even braver than I! The last time a live tree roach was in my house, I ducked behind the kitchen counter, extended my arm over the counter while aiming a can of raid at the roach on my kitchen floor and proceeded to spray…sprayed like my life depended on it! Within only a few moments I was able to kill/drown the horrible beast in a pool of raid. I then left it there for about three days as a warning to any others that they should NOT come to MY place looking for water…also because it takes me about three days to work up the stomach to pick up and dispose of a dead roach. Wanna see Lindsey scream and cry like a little girl??? –Put her in a room with a live roach.
Well…see…thing about the newspaper is this:
Use a thick section of the newspaper. Better yet, use two. Then, make sure the roach is on the floor. Hit the roach once to stun it. Then, like a hysterical madwoman, hit it repeatedly. Rapidly. It helps to scream, “Die! Die you scum-sucking, apartment invading disgusting mother fucker!” At the end of this process, if performed properly and for the appropriate amount of time, you will have something only slightly resembling a roach left. And you will still be pretrified that you only pissed it off and it will fly after you. Throw this, and the newspaper bat away in an outdoor receptacle as far from your front door as possible. Then smoke a cigarette.
Eternal Life
In all honesty, I developed a theory back in the 1980s while living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that tree roaches have eternal life. You can bludgeon one to death and then retreat to a corner to quiver with fear. You can stay in that corner for two days watching it twitch from a distance. But if you take your eyes off of it for a minute and look back, it’ll be gone. They don’t die, and they mock our attempts to kill them.
I’ve got so many “palmetto bug” stories I could write a book. I should have named my Live Journal “Musings on Palmetto Bugs.” It should be part of my family crest. Any of the coastal states should have made it their state bird. I hear if you live in Utah, you never have to see one again. But then…you’d be living in Utah, right?