A Story with Way Too Much Information

Anger sometimes helps you overcome your fears.

 

At least that’s what happened to me in my epic battles with cockroaches.  In our family’s many moves in search of lower rent apartments, there was a period, around when I was in 5th grade, when we lived in a particularly badly roach-infested apartment. It was 5 of us in a 1 bedroom apartment, and the landlord was a good man for letting us have it for $150 per month with all of us living there.

 

One of my uncles worked at a Shell gas station, and he would give us industrial strength insecticide that he got through Shell.  The stuff actually worked, by which I mean that spraying it into the cracks in between the kitchen cabinets, and other dark crevices caused the roaches to stumble out of their hiding places by the hundreds.  The Black Flag stuff you bought at the market back then worked only if you had a cockroach utterly cornered with nowhere else to go (which never happens in real life, given their size and speed) and you sprayed it directly on the creature, more or less drowing it with the insecticide.  But, of course, that’s what the can actually says: “kills on contact.”  Which was always odd to me, because if you could get that close to a roach, and it was willing to stay put while you sprayed it, then you could also just crush it with a shoe.  My experience is that if you are not going to crush the thing, spraying wimpy bug spray on it is a bad idea, because generally it will just stumble away and disappear under some furniture. You hope it dies, but you never know, and if you have an active imagination, to have a stumbling, half-dead roach out wandering is the last thing you want.  I don’t know if this is TMI for many of you, but a fit, in-shape roach can run at high speeds upside down on the ceiling.  But I’ve seen sprayed roaches attempt this, and lose their footing and fall straight down onto the floor.  That’s when you realize that as bad as it is to encounter roaches on the floor, you don’t want them falling from the ceiling, especially if you sleep facing your ceiling.

 

Anyway, this Shell bug spray was powerful enough to cause half the colony to come stumbling out.  Roach abatement was a regular part of the Kang family household routine.  My mom would announce days in advance that we would do this on a certain night.  My mom and dad would move things and spray.  My sisters would wack the stumbling roaches as they came out.  My job was to vacuum up any they missed.  We had an old Electrolux canister model, and I would stand in the middle of the room with the vacuum hose sucking them off the walls.  I’d scan the room and monitor their progress up the walls,  being sure to get to them before they got to the ceiling. I had to move fast.  It was intense work.

 

I think we were all afraid of roaches at some level.  I know I was.  I think roaches manage to scare you mainly by employing the element of surprise, I think.  You’d pick up a newspaper, for example, and as you are concentrating on a story a roach races silently up the the other side, and suddenly darts across your story.  The emotional and physical impact this has on you is very powerful.  After several such incidents, you learn to fear them.  After several hundred such experiences, however, the feeling of being startled leads to anger.  It happened one day for me when I spotted a roach running down the wall behind the sofa.  I knew that given it’s trajectory and speed that I did not have time to grab something to hit it with before it would disappear behind the sofa.  And I was NOT about to let that thing go only to surprise me later by turning up in my shoe.  I ran across the room and struck it dead with my bare palm, inches away from it reaching safety.  I had never done this before.  We all admired our dad for his ability to strike roaches with his bare hands at need, but the rest of us were limited to objects.  Magazines were good, but only if you had time to roll them up.  You never looked away, either.  Only novices did that.  If you look away, even for a second, to grab a shoe, the roach vanishes.  That first time I got the thingwith my bare hands, I think I used way too much force than was necessary.  But then, you don’t want to feel the thing either, so hitting it really hard is a wise approach, though it makes for messier clean-up.

 

Anyway, if you find all of this TMI already, then do not read on.  OK.  For the rest of you, remember I mentioned the vacuum?  Well, after one of those nights of major roach abatement work, I’d have some concerns about them crawling out of the vacuum bag, and all of them, hundreds of them oozing out the end of that vacuum hose.  So, U would vacuum up some detergent after them–thinking maybe that’ll slow them down some–and then close up the end with some masking tape.  

 

But they did eventually have to come out.  Why?  Because the Kang household did not believe in buying new vacuum bags.  Why buy new bags when the old one was perfectly fine?  How did we re-use vacuum bags that were packed full?  By emptying them out, of course!  And guess whose job it was to take the bag to the trash and empty it by sticking his fingers into the small circular opening and digging out the dust and hair … and dead roaches by the hundreds?  Me, of course.  Either because I was the youngest, and therefore got the most menial job, or because I was the only son, and this was hazardous, manly work.  I prefer to think the latter.  Cockroaches manage to look menacing even when dried and dead and tangled in hair and dust.

 

There’s a book a lot of our youth are reading in our church by two teen boys.  It’s called Do Hard Things.  I don’t know what they suggest in that book.  Internships, probably.  For me, doing hard things was part of my daily life.  And for that, I am thankful. 

 

~ Pastor Ed Kang, Gracepoint Berkeley