Imagine if you will, it's Poland, 1939, and you are under siege. Only instead of invading Nazis, its...
Cockroaches.
That's pretty much how we've felt the past week.
We moved here in late summer, and as bad as it seemed, little did we know the roach high season had already been winding down for awhile. They had evidently been moving out for weeks to wherever they "winter".
Probably Boca.
Within a few weeks the weather turned cold and damp and the roaches seemingly vanished. Not completely - we'd find an occasional straggler, a night watchman left behind to keep an eye on the place over the winter. But we quickly were lulled by their absence into a state of complacency.
But that's now shattered.
It started about a month ago when the weather suddenly turned warm and immediately they were "baaaack."
Every morning you'd wake up and find them.
Dead.
Always dead.
At first it was only one or two, conspicuously located in the center of the kitchen or bathroom on the "Fine Imported Italian Tile", like a roach mob hit, left as a warning.
It quickly escalated, and most mornings you'd find half a dozen or more little carcasses, like stumbling upon the aftermath of roach gang drive-by. Maybe we lived on disputed turf and the little roach Crips were settling a score with the little roach Bloods.
We'd occasionally find them in the carpet, but for weeks all the action was centered around the "Fine Imported Italian Tile".
Maybe that was the problem.
I remembered reading an article years ago about a cement plant in Mexico that was putting out product that was just "slightly" radioactive.
Hmmm...
Our tile may in fact be imported, but maybe it's from South of the Border and it's nuclear? Lord knows the lax building codes of Kern County would allow it. Conventional wisdom is that the only thing to survive nuclear Armageddon would be the cockroaches, but perhaps they aren't so impervious to radiation after all.
But before we had a chance to really ponder the possibility, the next wave hit, and this time they were LIVE.
We still wake up every day to the dead ones, now in greater numbers. The house looks like a roach minefield most mornings. But for the past week we've had to content with the lives ones, practicing their ninja moves in the unlikeliest places. I found one in the crotch of clean underwear, in a drawer. And I almost had a heart attack one night as I went to brush my teeth. As I turned on the tap, a leviathan one crawled out of the drain. They saunter across the floors, taunting us, knowing there's really nothing we can do.
But the worst is at night, in bed. We've both been jolted awake as they skitter across bare arms and legs, or the worst, your face. I felt one in my hair as I tried to drift off to sleep a few days ago. I went to make the bed one morning and they scurried out from under the sheets.
We've complained to the management company repeatedly and they don't care. Why should they? They know what we evidently fail to comprehend... it isn't the property, it's the city.
Bakersfield is roach nirvana. That they can thrive in a city that's perpetually coated in a layer of aerial pesticide is an impressive feat. If anything, it's probably making them stronger.
We're not even a month into Spring, and it's only going to get worse. Much worse. The only thing getting us through the ordeal is the slight hope that we can somehow use the roach infestation to break the lease and get out of this hellhole sooner rather than later.
Maybe everything does happen for a reason.
Maybe the roaches are our ticket out of here.
