One day when I was in the ninth grade, I was eating food from the school cafeteria. It was a tray of school nachos. It didn’t taste too horrible, just as bad as you would expect from stale chips covered with questionable beef and ultra-processed cheese product. As I progressed to the bottom of the tray I noticed something that looked a little like an olive. At first I thought, “That’s strange. It’s an olive. I have never seen an olive in a school nacho tray before.” After further inspection I came to find it was the back shell of a cockroach. At that moment I seriously considered bulimia. Needless to say, I never ate a school lunch after that again in my life.
About a year after that just after school got out for the summer, I was walking home from open gym at the school basketball court. My route took me by the front steps of the high school near the cafeteria. When I was far away from the steps, it appeared as though the sidewalk was moving up ahead. As I got closer I found that it was roaches leaving the school by the millions. I felt like I was in a scene from “The Mummy” with those bugs that swarm and eat people. I could not get past the mass migration without stepping on a few thousand of them. This experience was truly disgusting and insured that myself and none of my posterity would ever eat at a school cafeteria again. Immediately following that, I would sometimes sing Adam Sandler’s “Lunch Lady Land” with the words “Sloppy Roach, Slop-a-Sloppy Roach” in the place of “Sloppy Joes”.
At another point in time, around the end of a school year. I was in our family kitchen and saw about five roaches. We lived near the school and, as evidenced by the previous experience, the roaches have no more nachos to swim in when school is out. So they would come to their summer home which was our house. As the aforementioned five roaches scurried under the garage door, I stepped on one and killed it. Then I swung the door to the garage open to hunt down the others. They ran past our washer and dryer over to our water heater. When I saw the closet for the water heater I turned around and ran away in fear. I grabbed a giant can of Raid and my little brothers with whatever they could find to kill roaches. When we returned to the battle ground it looked worse than before. The whole closet was crawling with roaches. I started to spray and my brothers started to swing. It felt very satisfying to watch the front line of roaches drop off of the wall as I sprayed them. It was a battle royale. I used an entire can and still did not have enough to kill all of the roaches. I started kicking them off the walls and crushing them. The fumes started to get to me and I had to retreat with my brothers. I like to think that there were about a million roaches that wouldn’t make it back to school in the fall because of us. But as we cleaned up with trash bags and dust pans later it was maybe in the thousands. They must have dragged away their wounded. In Texas the roaches are pretty gigantic. Of course, growing up I just thought it was a part of life that roaches were so big, nasty and everywhere you look. Of all the places I have lived those are still the worst roaches. Actually I have only seen three roaches outside of Texas and two came in a package that came from Texas. If someone dropped a nuclear bomb on Texas all that would be left is roaches and alcoholics.
