June is Cockroach Month. Or more accurately, Kill-A-Cockroach Month. It must be the general wetness of things, but these monsters just spring out of every available crevice come June without consideration or shame. When I took my car out of the garage yesterday it exposed twelve dead and two naghihingalong cockroaches on the garage floor. In the bathroom this morning: two baby cockroaches surreptitiously crawling out of the drain. But I had summarily executed them by directing a heavy stream of water to their under-developed exoskeleton. I then narrowed the jet of water with my thumb to pummel the nefarious baby roaches more sadistically. They swirled and swirled directionless around the tiny pool, but they were not dragged back into the drain. They just lay there on the wet floor, miserable, anxious, and fatigued. I then slapped them with my tsinelas and savored the satisfying crunch.

Obviously I need to apply Blatanex on random corners in the bathroom as well. The cockroaches in the garage had died of Blatanex poisoning, which, I think deserves the The Nobel Prize, specifically, Nobel PEACE Prize, because it affords peace among its users. Armando Garmando had recommended this tiny, miraculous product a few months ago, and since then I would always wake up to a fantastic view of a nuclear family of cockroaches lying massacred on the floor.

The worst Cockroach Siege happened back in June 2008. At around 8 pm I was resting in my boarding house room, which I had labelled The Coffin. I was listening to the 2008 album Flavors of Entanglement, when I noticed a cockroach crawling on the floor. I ran after it, but failed to crush it when it cunningly squeezed into a corner. A few minutes later I saw two more cockroaches on the wall. Then another one. Before I knew it roaches were crawling and flying in my room. It was a lost cause, so I ran the hell out of there and bought a huge can of Baygon in the corner 7-11. Sufficiently armed I sprayed the room with Baygon. I planned to spray the mist through a burning lighter, but I had a lot of things in the room, and there were other tenants staying there, and I did not want to go to prison.

I finished my toxicologic massacre around 10 pm. I swept all the roaches into a dustpan and counted them. Twenty-four roaches. I thought I had imagined it all, but the next day when I went on duty in the MICU I asked my batchmate Tessieloopagoparoop, who was also boarding in the same area, if her house had also been turned into a Joe’s Apartment the previous night. Yes, she said, she was also mercilessly, viciously attacked. Our veneers of strength and resolve then crumbled down, and we finally broke down together, weeping and shivering from this shared experience of terror.

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