Fiction

A Cockroach of the Mind:
a fictitious remembrance told in green and orange.
by Phil Rockstroh

She had been built too close to the railroad tracks to have ever been truly respectable; although, I suspect she had once been attractive, if not elegant, in her day. But as the years passed, she had become a sad, old girl, beset with miseries, decaying around us, creaking and cracking in heat and cold, sighing and moaning in the wind, this crumbling Victorian house my young wife and I had rented, sans lease or any other accouterment of attachment, in that, what would proved to be for us, a watershed summer of anxiety, exhalation and tumult.

Vines of ivy crept up her facade; in the late spring, wisteria would twine around her porch, festooning her in layered necklaces of suffocating purple, causing her to resemble a decrepit Mardi Gras queen, who, stricken with acute dementia, had gone wandering the streets during Lint. Her attic, as well, had been reclaimed by wilderness where squirrels, possums, even an errant family of raccoons took up residence. The house, while far past its days as prized real-estate for humans, had become a palatial mansion for the zoological set. But this was not what was extraordinary about the everyday tragedy of her dissolution: Another phenomenon would transpire with the frequent rumbling of passing freight trains: The house, due to its close proximity to the tracks, would be shaken mightily, and, to the extent, vast numbers of cockroaches would be driven from their dank hiding places and would scurry and scuttle over and across all the walls, floors and surfaces of the house's interior. Any and all measures we had undertaken to alleviate the manifestation of this entomological St. Vitus' Dance had failed. And in addition to these troubles pertaining to our crumbling habitat, our lives had become mired in doubt and apprehensions; we had both recently dropped out of art school, were chronically under-employed, and too broke and demoralized to move.

Compounding these troubles, the bright, but troubled woman who was my wife at the time was growing to detest me. And not without good cause and reason. In my self-doubt and confusion, I was becoming a bit of a bore and a compulsive phony. I hadn't planned it this way. I didn't stay up late into the night rehearsing ways to be a more effective and masterful disingenuous dipshit. I just had found, that, at least, in the short term, it seemed to be working to my benefit. And besides, I seemed to be displaying a certain talent for it. Now don't get me wrong: I wasn't reveling in new found wealth, influence, admiring friends, nor had I acquired any degree of heighten sexual attractiveness to my fellow land mammals...But I did seemed to be getting along better with my family, and, with people in general, plus bartenders did seem to be mixing me stronger drinks. I had discovered that by benumbing my self with pot, shellacking the grin of an obliging imbecile across my face, and straining to be an agreeable presence in any circumstance, even when in the company of jerks and idiots seemed to have, at least, in the beginning of this campaign of amiable fraud, made my life easier and less stressful.

But then the free-floating anxiety arrived: And this caused me to smoke more pot and kiss more tyrant butt. But the duration of the effectiveness of these acts of self medication and reflexive obsequiousness were diminishing as the frequency and duration of the pummeling anxiety attacks were increasing. Then, as if my waking life was not intolerable enough, the bizarre dreams arrived. One of the worst involved being raped by a bull elephant, and, worse yet, the dream was graphic in its detail. The events transpired as this: The aroused elephant came crashing through the front door of the house; my terror and subsequent flight followed; his pursuit of me through the house; then being rundown and mounted by him—and this act involved full, agonizingly painful, anal penetration by his leathery, sinewy, pachyderm penis. I awoke mortified; for, I fully expected to find myself crumpled upon wet bed sheets, lacquered with elephant semen and rectal blood. Then came a series of the extra-terrestrial rhododendron pimp dreams, in which, walking tropical plant space aliens, dressed in vintage, nineteen seventies' pimp outfits were dosing me with L.S.D. in order to have me turn tricks for little, gray alien dentist conventioneers. In one dream, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrored ceiling of a tawdry, U.F.O., pay-by-the-hour motel and I saw my face had broken out in psychedelic acne, which, then phantasmagorically bloomed into flowering vines of wisteria.

Upon awakening from one of these dreams, I had staggered into the kitchen and flipped on the light switch, just as the earth had begun to rumble with the approach of a passing freight train and the house, itself, seemed to have fallen into a nightmare of its own as vast armies of roaches began to scuttle from its recesses. My vision was blurry with exhaustion as I fumbled for the spray cans of insecticide we had stored beneath the sink. I knew the effort would be futile— but still I needed to make a stand against all the forces of chaos that had enveloped my life. I grabbed two cans, spun on my heels, and drew them up as if they were double six guns, aimed, then sprayed jets of toxic mist at a clutch of cockroaches that were seething from beneath the stove. The advance of the six-legged horde was not stopped nor did it flag; instead, it somehow had simply turned green and orange. For a second, I thought that I must still be asleep and dreaming: I feared that next they were going to transmogrify into alien roaches, wearing green and orange pimp suits, and a drunken elephant John would emerge from the pantry. Upon looking down at the cans that I had retrieved in my blurry-eyed desperation to wreak a massive, bug body-count, I saw I had, inadvertently, grabbed two cans of spray paint Defeated, I slouched back to bed.

For the next couple of days, my wife and I spotted the odd green or orange roach scattered among the ranks of the invading insect hordes during their frequent, train-induced rampages. Then, first my wife, next, I began to zap a few more of their number with aerosol paint. Over time, we tagged a few more, then few more...This activity then escalated into a consistent campaign, in which, we sprayed as many of them as we could find, marking them with as many different colors of spray paint (including varieties of day-glow) as the local hardware store had in stock. Soon the surfaces of the house were coursing in motion and color, infested with, what resembled an outbreak of crawling hard candy. To me, it appeared as if the house had broken out in the psychedelic, alien drug-induced acne of my nightmare, but this phenomenon grew less and less horrific as the days passed. In fact, the crusade became enjoyable (we invited friends to be an audience to the floor show) and I noticed the activity was not only helping to alleviate my panic attacks but my phony smile was being replaced by a grin of amusement.

This was not only amusement that pertained to the aesthetics of the preposterous, multicolored cockroaches we were residing with—but to all the ridiculous obsessions, fears, fantasies, delusions, white lies, confabulations, resentments, sins of omissions, perverse and perverted drives and longings, ridiculous whims, real and imagined grievances, murderous impulses, and all of the vast, variegated, and mutated drives that I have discovered exist within me and will not reveal themselves, unless the freight trains of contretemps and coincidence rattled them from their hiding places.

If ignored, denied, and covered up—these bug-ugly, internal entities can mutate to elephantine proportions and will cause much distress for myself and those close to me. A warning: Ignore, at your own risk, that elephant, with the calamitously large hard-on, who is furiously stamping and trumpeting in the living room of your soul. I've blundered into the knowledge that I can't even come close to exterminating all of the tiny, creepy-crawly, disgusting beasties who inhabit my inner most recesses, much less out run the massive buggers who literally come looking for my bony ass when I act the phony. I suspect within me exists a entire bestiary of crawling character defects and howling pathologies and I would be practicing the black art of false candor to make the cloying claim that I have only few squirrels nesting in my attic.

I have grasped this much: I must learn to coexist among the varied and multitudinous creatures who reside within...and when they come swarming out of me in such alarming numbers that I can no longer pretend they don't exist and when they resist all mean to send them on their way (as if they have somewhere else to go)—I have learned that I have been given no other option but to then light-up those vile bastards and turn them into art.