"Why yes, red pepper aioli does sound good."
King Edward the Longshanks of Braveheart fame said, “The problem with Scotland is that it’s full of Scots,” and were he alive today and working for the electrical utility in Boston, he’d have no problem revising it to “The problem with Chinatown is that it’s full of cockroaches.”
Which is only part of the truth. The truth is that no matter where you are in the city, if you’re below street level, you’re going to find cockroaches. I single Chinatown out because, based on personal experience, I find that particular area of town has the highest concentration of them.
Picture yet another scene, this time from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Gerry and Steve, two innocent workers, open up a vault hatch and Gerry shines his torch down (Gerry is Irish and calls his flashlight a torch so I’m not just romanticizing the incident). The floor was a rusty red, not uncommon for us to see since a lot of vaults do contain some water which rusts the transformers. But something looked odd about this water….
“Gerry,” I say à la Sallah. “Why does the floor move?”
Gerry took his pipe wrench and dropped it. We watched it fall as it hit the floor with a metal clang, and as it did the floor scattered. It wasn’t rust water. Literally thousands of roaches fled from the fallen wrench, disappearing into minute cracks in the wall, leaving the concrete floor completely bare.
My next question of course was how he was going to get his wrench back.
Most people fall into two categories when dealing with roaches – they are either immune to their disease-carrying ways or they scream like a little girl and run in the other direction. And contrary to popular belief, the size and girth of the person does not determine how he or she will react. Big, muscle-bulging 300-plus pound men who bench-press me on a regular basis will refuse to even think about going down a ladder if there’s even one roach down there, while the seventy-pound Mr. Smithers type will stroll down and do what he has to do and not bat an eyelash.
One thing is for certain though – those mothers are almost immune to everything. They’ve been around since the dawn of time, surviving everything from ice ages, meteor strikes and nuclear detonations (along with that other stalwart of the insect world, the fruit fly) to the latest single from Lady Gaga. We carry roach bombs on our trucks to use if a vault is really infested (and if I have to use the word infested you can imagine what a vile pit it must be). Pull the tab on the can, drop it down the hole, seal off the air vents, and come back in four hours. Simple, right? Until you come back and it looks like the roaches have set up a poker game and are using the smoke as some sort of ambiance. I even saw a roach once with the plastic green see-thru visor. He wiggled an antenna at me as he spread out his straight flush, collecting the pot which consisted of a piece of Slim Jim, some rat droppings, the corner of a McDonalds wrapper with some coagulated cheese, and a bit of roast beef au jus wrapped in lettuce with just a hint of red pepper aioli.
My experience for the most part has been uneventful, but I do I have one other decent story. It was in a vault underneath a loading dock ramp in the West End. I went down the ladder and clicked my flashlight on and wondered, what are those white spots on the wall? Not only did I see the biggest roach ever (about the length of your fist), but all the roaches in the vault were albino! There were about two dozen of them, sitting on the wall, staring me down. After some research later on I found out that they weren’t albino but had just finished up on their ecdysis, but still, the sight of these guys turned my stomach. It just wasn’t natural. I did what I had to do down there and could feel their eyes on me as I climbed back up the ladder. I didn’t look back because I was afraid they’d be glowing in the dark.
In closing, I’d like to take a look at the scientific name for the American cockroach. Periplaneta americana. Peri being Greek for around, and planeta, or planet, which is Greek for wander. Yep, pretty much sums it up. They just wander around America. (There are of course some people who would also say that America is also just a synonym for cockroach and therefore redundant, but I digress). No place is impenetrable. No place is safe from them. It’s really a fact one has to ignore in order to go on living. Need proof? I have been in nearly every basement in every building in Boston proper, including all those fancy restaurants. Shall I go on? I won’t, but based on my inside information, I’ll be glad to recommend a good place for you to eat.
