But You Can't Check Out

The first thing I noticed immediately when we walked through the door of our soon to be future home was the cockroaches. Dozens of them. All shapes and sizes. Dead, belly up on the "fine imported Italian tile" - that's what it said in the listing. If by "imported", you mean "Home Depot", and if by "Italian", you mean "China". But there they were, a roach graveyard steps inside the front door.

And surprisingly, I wasn't alarmed. And I hadn't even popped a Xanax. I figured the place had sat empty for awhile and perhaps they had just fumigated. No matter - the management company had everything all spic and span before we moved in. There were no cockroaches.

Until the next morning.

In the bathrooms, in the kitchen, they literally seemed to come out of the woodwork. And my attention quickly turned to our neighbor. Mary. What kind of slovenly hoarder were we living next to? How many feet of rotting garbage were piled up against our common wall? How in the hell... wait... Turns out, they are EVERYWHERE. Go out to mail, whoops, hey, how ya doin', roach in the mailbox. Pick up anything outside and whoosh, away scurry god knows how many. Is this a Bako thing, or did we just happen to pick the wrong neighborhood? All the neighborhoods here have names, and I hadn't bothered to catch ours, but for all I knew it was "Roachville".

So I decided to ask a local. I'd become quite friendly with a few of the woman at one of the agencies I'd gotten work from. I tried to figure out the polite, politically astute way of inquiring about the, er, roach issue. Had it all planned. Gonna ease into it, not offend anyone. But when the moment arose, I blurted out "So what's with the ROACHES here?"

P R E G N A N T P A U S E

"Oh.... you mean the Water Bugs?"

Water Bugs? Are you fucking kidding me? WATER BUGS? What the fuck is a Water Bug? I'm talking about C O C K R O A C H E S. No, she patiently explained, they were "Water Bugs".

Delusional. It's become my "go-to" explanation for all things Bako. The woman was delusional. But the more I thought about it over the next few days, I came to appreciate the brilliance of it. She wasn't delusional. She works in marketing. She had... re-branded the cockroaches! "Cockroaches" are gross and icky and carry disease and pestilence. "Water Bugs" are cute and fun and probably have a Saturday morning cartoon on the Disney Channel (or could... if we play our cards right... hmmm... I know people... ). You'd let your kid play with a "Water Bug". I could see "Water Bug" back packs, lunch boxes. Maybe they weren't so bad after all. Part of the circle of life and all that.

And then in the middle of the night, a "Water Bug" crawled across my face.

Fucking cockroaches. So much for the new "brand".