Scream with Me, Baby.
So yesterday I was out and about, doing my thing, skipping around town and having lunch with my mother. We went to this great Japanese restaurant in Wheelock Place and I’d bought an album from Borders and everything was going well until we decided to walk to the carpark and park the car down the street to commence an afternoon of shopping.
The Wheelock Place carpark was pretty crowded by the time my mom got there at lunch, so she parked quite near a pillar and this bunch of pipes. As we were walking to the car, I noticed that this manhole in the ground had been left open, right by the pipes near the car. You’re thinking either my mom or I is going to fall in at this point, and were this a conventional day, you’d probably be right. As it was, things got even worse.
We got into the car and there I was, swinging my legs in the passenger’s seat and singing Fat Bottomed Girls when I felt a strange, light tickling on my foot. Now, this is a tickling I’ve felt a few times before in my life and you’ll know what I mean when I said my blood ran cold. Feigning nonchalance, I took a surreptitious peek in the general direction of my sandal-clad toes.
And yes.
There was a big, fat, black cockroach squirming around on my lovely, soft skin.
Turns out the manhole was the access to a sewer that some gook had left open with the half-assed idea that this would be a perfect way to air the carpark (fire the asswipe, Mr Wheelock!). Mr Periplaneta America simply decided to take an afternoon stroll and slid into the well-cushioned comfort of our Hyundai.
Okay. I don’t like cockroaches. And for some reason, the day that I was born, God had it ordained that I would be plagued by this scourge for the rest of my life due to my refusal to worship him whole-heartedly. You think Sodom and Gomorrah were bad? Try being surprised at every turn by what Wikipedia calls “very mobile” and “a capable flier”. I don’t mind looking at one and even sharing a space with one. But cross my personal space line and our relationship is OVER.
When I was in the Philippines, one such Blattidae ran over my ankle, tap-dancing gleefully as it went. When I was four years old and my nanny was giving me an afternoon shower, a cockroach ran out of the sinkhole and nibbled the sole of my foot, prompting my nanny to squeal, “It is kissing you!” delightedly. Imagine that. I lost my first kiss to an arthropod of the lowest order.
And way back when, during the time that I was living in the East Coast on the top floor of an eighteen year-old penthouse, a ginormous brown roach the length of my finger actually dropped from the ceiling onto my neck where we stared at each other in horror before it bungeed to the floor and scuttled for safety.
All this was racing through my mind as I stared at the six legged critter that was frantically pattering around on the floor of the passenger seat. At this point, I stamped my foot in an effort to get it off and instead, it slid into the space between my big toe and my sandal and wedged itself there while struggling in an extremely ungainly fashion.
I could feel its dry, crunchy wings beating in a papery way against my skin and the tiny hairs on its legs clawing at me. I could see the horror in its beady black eyes, a horror that was reflected in my own. And I just about died then and there.
“What are you doing?” My mother asked.
I told her and instantly she gave a shriek and shrank into the side of the cabin with one hand on the steering wheel. My mother supposedly did her thesis on giant grasshoppers in college but watching her face-off with this blighter, you wouldn’t know it to be true. “Stomp it!” She yelled. “Stomp it and kill it!”
“Are you kidding me?” I yelled back as the car swerved dangerously. “I’m not going to dirty my shoe! And it will go CRUNCH. You know it will!”
My mother glared at me as if I had done her some great injustice. “You’re a ninny!” She screamed. “A coward and a ninny! Stomp it NOW!” Someone honked at us in the lane running parallel to this one.
“You stomp it, if you’re going to talk so big.” I huffed.
“I’m driving,” she spat. “Do you want me to crash the car?”
Huh. She might as well have released the steering wheel and killed the cockroach anyway for how badly she was driving. I looked down at my little pillion rider who was lying on his back and throwing the most enormous tantrum by kicking his feet frantically in a revolting manner. “If you don’t kill it,” she continued, “And it gets up and flies around the car, I’m going to kill you.”
Funny how someone can’t stop driving for a minute to kill a roach but can strangle me whilst single-handedly executing a three-point turn.
“All right,” I sighed exasperatedly. “I’ll just drop the street directory over it.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“I will.”
My mother spent a good three seconds tossing used tissues and old receipts at me and begging me to use those in lieu of the street directory instead. Finally, I hit upon the idea of using the Borders bag that my cd was stored in. Operating with the speed and fluency of a secret agent, I whipped the cd from the bag and flicked it into the backseat, dropped the plastic bag on Roachie Mcroacherson and deployed the traffical tome.
As I predicted, there was a crunch. And for the rest of the afternoon, I kept feeling tiny feet on my skin in little staccato leaps. And just in case you aren’t already grossed out enough, imagine the moment when I finally peeled the bag away to reveal a nice Rorschach inkblot pattern of legs and endoskeleton which we gingerly kicked out of the car.
But I must say, I was very cool and James Bond-like, keeping my head and my ingenuity in such a cataclysmic situation. It’s not everyday one gets trampled on by a repugnant insect and I think I handled that one to the best of my ability. So, I know now that I am not what my mother calls a “ninny” and also learnt an important lesson: it is always best to be in the driver’s seat.
Oh, and I’ll never look at a Border’s plastic bag the same way again.
PS You may wonder what the real point of this story is. Well, the cd in question was Black Sabbath’s The Dio Years album. BECAUSE. I have tickets to Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell tour, starring Ronnie James Dio!!! And I figure I’d better swot up as best I can. Also, if you’re even vaguely interested, come with me won’t you? We will have an unbelievably moshing good time, I guarantee you. And I’ll bring my street directory just in case.
The Wheelock Place carpark was pretty crowded by the time my mom got there at lunch, so she parked quite near a pillar and this bunch of pipes. As we were walking to the car, I noticed that this manhole in the ground had been left open, right by the pipes near the car. You’re thinking either my mom or I is going to fall in at this point, and were this a conventional day, you’d probably be right. As it was, things got even worse.
We got into the car and there I was, swinging my legs in the passenger’s seat and singing Fat Bottomed Girls when I felt a strange, light tickling on my foot. Now, this is a tickling I’ve felt a few times before in my life and you’ll know what I mean when I said my blood ran cold. Feigning nonchalance, I took a surreptitious peek in the general direction of my sandal-clad toes.
And yes.
There was a big, fat, black cockroach squirming around on my lovely, soft skin.
Turns out the manhole was the access to a sewer that some gook had left open with the half-assed idea that this would be a perfect way to air the carpark (fire the asswipe, Mr Wheelock!). Mr Periplaneta America simply decided to take an afternoon stroll and slid into the well-cushioned comfort of our Hyundai.
Okay. I don’t like cockroaches. And for some reason, the day that I was born, God had it ordained that I would be plagued by this scourge for the rest of my life due to my refusal to worship him whole-heartedly. You think Sodom and Gomorrah were bad? Try being surprised at every turn by what Wikipedia calls “very mobile” and “a capable flier”. I don’t mind looking at one and even sharing a space with one. But cross my personal space line and our relationship is OVER.
When I was in the Philippines, one such Blattidae ran over my ankle, tap-dancing gleefully as it went. When I was four years old and my nanny was giving me an afternoon shower, a cockroach ran out of the sinkhole and nibbled the sole of my foot, prompting my nanny to squeal, “It is kissing you!” delightedly. Imagine that. I lost my first kiss to an arthropod of the lowest order.
And way back when, during the time that I was living in the East Coast on the top floor of an eighteen year-old penthouse, a ginormous brown roach the length of my finger actually dropped from the ceiling onto my neck where we stared at each other in horror before it bungeed to the floor and scuttled for safety.
All this was racing through my mind as I stared at the six legged critter that was frantically pattering around on the floor of the passenger seat. At this point, I stamped my foot in an effort to get it off and instead, it slid into the space between my big toe and my sandal and wedged itself there while struggling in an extremely ungainly fashion.
I could feel its dry, crunchy wings beating in a papery way against my skin and the tiny hairs on its legs clawing at me. I could see the horror in its beady black eyes, a horror that was reflected in my own. And I just about died then and there.
“What are you doing?” My mother asked.
I told her and instantly she gave a shriek and shrank into the side of the cabin with one hand on the steering wheel. My mother supposedly did her thesis on giant grasshoppers in college but watching her face-off with this blighter, you wouldn’t know it to be true. “Stomp it!” She yelled. “Stomp it and kill it!”
“Are you kidding me?” I yelled back as the car swerved dangerously. “I’m not going to dirty my shoe! And it will go CRUNCH. You know it will!”
My mother glared at me as if I had done her some great injustice. “You’re a ninny!” She screamed. “A coward and a ninny! Stomp it NOW!” Someone honked at us in the lane running parallel to this one.
“You stomp it, if you’re going to talk so big.” I huffed.
“I’m driving,” she spat. “Do you want me to crash the car?”
Huh. She might as well have released the steering wheel and killed the cockroach anyway for how badly she was driving. I looked down at my little pillion rider who was lying on his back and throwing the most enormous tantrum by kicking his feet frantically in a revolting manner. “If you don’t kill it,” she continued, “And it gets up and flies around the car, I’m going to kill you.”
Funny how someone can’t stop driving for a minute to kill a roach but can strangle me whilst single-handedly executing a three-point turn.
“All right,” I sighed exasperatedly. “I’ll just drop the street directory over it.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“I will.”
My mother spent a good three seconds tossing used tissues and old receipts at me and begging me to use those in lieu of the street directory instead. Finally, I hit upon the idea of using the Borders bag that my cd was stored in. Operating with the speed and fluency of a secret agent, I whipped the cd from the bag and flicked it into the backseat, dropped the plastic bag on Roachie Mcroacherson and deployed the traffical tome.
As I predicted, there was a crunch. And for the rest of the afternoon, I kept feeling tiny feet on my skin in little staccato leaps. And just in case you aren’t already grossed out enough, imagine the moment when I finally peeled the bag away to reveal a nice Rorschach inkblot pattern of legs and endoskeleton which we gingerly kicked out of the car.
But I must say, I was very cool and James Bond-like, keeping my head and my ingenuity in such a cataclysmic situation. It’s not everyday one gets trampled on by a repugnant insect and I think I handled that one to the best of my ability. So, I know now that I am not what my mother calls a “ninny” and also learnt an important lesson: it is always best to be in the driver’s seat.
Oh, and I’ll never look at a Border’s plastic bag the same way again.
PS You may wonder what the real point of this story is. Well, the cd in question was Black Sabbath’s The Dio Years album. BECAUSE. I have tickets to Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell tour, starring Ronnie James Dio!!! And I figure I’d better swot up as best I can. Also, if you’re even vaguely interested, come with me won’t you? We will have an unbelievably moshing good time, I guarantee you. And I’ll bring my street directory just in case.
She said, she said at 11:53 pm
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