Bugs

I am, all things considered, a rather fierce woman.  My mother, whose parting words to my sister and I every morning as we left for school, were "kick boy butt!," carefully cultivated me to say "pardon," to write thank-you notes, to aspire to financial independence, and, most importantly, to not take shit from anyone.  A dutiful daughter, I have tried to embody these formidable guidelines for life.  Although "pardon" has unfortunately been replaced by "what was that?" and my financial independence is at present anchored to unearned wealth, I still do write thank you notes and, at all possible moments, don't take shit from anyone.

Except bugs.  When it's me against the bugs, the bugs always win.

Even writing this is making me a little anxious, like my life is a horror film and the things I type into my computer will suddenly start happening in real life.  But I am sorry to say that my gender socialization has left me woefully incapable of dealing with bugs.  (Can I blame gender for bug-phobia?  I blame gender for lots of things, so I might as well.)

I spent the last two and half years living alone in an attic apartment that turned out to have some...pest problems.  My mother once described it as "a sieve for bugs."  There were cracks and holes everywhere, especially in the bathroom, which had a fire escape door that, when I moved in, had a one-inch gap between the warped wood and the door frame.  A bit breezy come winter.

Although I fixed that problem with some insulation tape, there was really nothing I could do to keep bugs out.  I wasn't even sure where they came from, just that they did.  The first year I was there, it was more of a spider issue, ones that were big enough to be slightly concerning to me.  They'd pop up in the corners of the ventilation units, and as soon as I took care of one another one would move in.  The next year I had mice, which only exacerbated the bug issue.  Once the mice were dead and gone, I started to get flies.  I never really had a problem with flies before, but now I think flies are a bit possessed.  Sometimes I'd find two in a row in the same spot, and I was sure they had come back to life after I killed them.  In a month's period, especially the spring and the fall when the season's changed, I would kill upwards of 20-30 flies, even with my windows closed.  I started keeping a paper towel, cleaning spray, and a shoe beside me at all times.

By the end, I was killing strange bugs I'd never seen before.  Beetles with funny flat feet.  Some kind of six-legged freakish spider hybrid.  And then I think some little momma spider had little babies in my bathroom, because I had to start squishing little spiders a couple times a day.  Randomly, I killed two bees in my bathroom, both of which I presumed had come through the poorly-caulked window on the poorly-insulated fire escape door.  I covered the corner of the window where the pane wasn't meeting the frame with eight layers of packing tape.  My showers got shorter and shorter.  I picked up the technique of shampooing with one eye open, just in case.

Over the time I lived there, I killed many of God's creatures, but it had to be done.  There was no way we were going to co-exist in that apartment, although I was pretty sure by the end that the bugs were collaborating to slowly drive me to the brink of insanity.  I know I was averse to bugs before I lived alone (especially tree roaches, which I have never been able to stomach, and have always reacted to with shrill helplessness), but I have memories of blithely killing pests when I was under 22.  Now, I'm dangerously neurotic.  It's like I have PTSD, except instead of scanning the room for potential assailants or land mines, I'm looking for dark spots that I might have to disable before they jump me.  I literally do a room scan whenever I walk in.  The sound of a fly buzz now instinctively makes me hunch my shoulders.  I have jumped when people come around behind me to ask me a question, and not because I didn't know they were there, but because, for a fleeting, terrifying moment, I thought they might be a bug.  I have come to associate all movements out of the corner of my eye with panic and horror.

So I killed many things, in an exhausting, adrenaline, profanity-filled battle that often ended with me having my arms wrapped around my chest, rocking myself back to normal breathing.  I just don't have the masculine bravado required to do the deed with less shame.  I was especially reminded of this when I encountered something I simply couldn't kill - a hornet.  Or at least I thought it was a hornet, it was that freaking big.  This hornet, for it shall forever be a hornet in my mind, was the Hulk Hornet, because one day I was heading to clean the bathroom, toilet bowl cleaner in hand, and I heard the sharp sound ripping tape.  I peeked inside, and oh my god, the Hulk Hornet had busted through the eight layers of tape.  Like the Kool-Aid man with blood lust, the Hulk Hornet was going to make me pay for trying to keep it out.  I could see no other reason for its presence in my bathroom other than that it had been sent to kill me.

I tried to kill it first.  First, I slammed the door shut and prepped for battle.  I steeled myself, trying not to cry with panic.  You have to take care of this, I kept saying to myself, you have to do this.  But when I opened the door and took another look at it, I decided that this was where I draw the line.  I was simply not fierce enough.  Someone else was going to have take care of this for me.

And so, with very little pride and rather a lot of desperation, I opened up my phone and started phoning anyone who I thought could come and kill the Hulk Hornet, preferably someone who I felt I could be extremely vulnerable with, as I wasn't sure how much longer I could feign holding it together.  Turns out this was four people.  One was out of town.  Three didn't pick up.  I began to reconsider the depths of our friendships.

When I ran out of names, the panic started to take over, but a friend saved me by calling back.  Turns out she couldn't come over (she was with her parents, who were visiting that weekend), but her roommate, another male acquaintance of mine, could.  Even though he didn't meet the "I can fall apart around you and still look you in the face tomorrow" standard, I was so desperate at that point that I didn't care.  Yes.  Absolutely yes.  I'm sure I'll never live down the guilt of this, but please send the man friend in.

I had all of the necessary catching and killing instruments ready by the time the man friend arrived, a bit sweaty, twenty minutes later (he had jogged over, since he was already out for a run...killing the Hulk Hornet was but a mere diversion from his daily dose of cardio).  He glanced at the battery of weaponry I'd assembled, and said, "hmm...do you have a container?  I don't really want to kill it."

I stared at him in shock.  Not kill it?  Not kill it?!  What the heck other option was there, keep it as a pet?  But I gave him a Tupperware container, stood twenty feet back at the edge of the kitchen, and pointed vaguely at the darkened, closed-door bathroom.  "It's in there," I whispered my B horror movie line.  "And I can't look while you do this."

He opened the door, glanced at it, then - and I'll never believe this except I saw it happen with my own eyes - he turned around to tell me that it wasn't technically a hornet while the door was still open.  Man friend turned his back on Hulk Hornet, and lived to tell the tale!  Masculinity, apparently, makes one invincible.  Also well-versed in bugs, as he told me it was actually a wasp.  "Not even a very big one," he added, rubbing salt in the wound.  "More like a small to medium sized one."

I'm telling you, readers.  That thing was the Hulk Hornet, and I'll never take that back.

"Whatever you say.  It's definitely a wasp." I nodded.  "Yep, yep.  Just please get it out of my bathroom!"

And in the time it took me to say that sentence, he had caught it in the container.  I opened my apartment door for him, and he wandered down my stairs to the bottom floor, where we headed outside.  He walked down to the street, just a few yards from the front door.  Man friend removed the top of the container and, with all of the delicacy of launching a wedding dove, he released the Hulk Hornet into the sky.

The next day, I had a hard time looking him in the face.  How could something that rendered me completely useless be so effortless to him?  What kind of feats could I conquer if I had such unshakable nerves?  Why the hell didn't I get those?  And where I could I sign up to get me some?

The answer is to try to deprogram myself, but I even I know my ephemeral tactics and pre-kiling pep talks aren't fundamentally changing my response to bugs.  If anything, I'm getting worse.  Although I used to regularly kill house centipedes when I was a senior in college, now I am completely undone by them.  They are pretty useless bugs and I know they can't hurt me, but I lose it when I see one.  Anything with that many legs has got to be the work of the devil.  One friend, a fierce woman who had a roach problem when she and her partner first moved to their current apartment, told me that the secret is a combination of force and speed.  She described it, lifting her hand over an imaginary roach, "You get your paper towel ready, position yourself, and then..." She slammed her palm on to the table. "THE WRATH OF GOD!!!"

I know if she can do it and my partner can do it, I can't blame it entirely on gender socialization.  I have to be an adult, take care of business, and start exacting the wrath of God.  But that seems unlikely anytime in the near future, since I don't think I'll even be able to re-read this post.