Five Ways of Looking at a Cockroach
1. With disgust
One night in the shower, after a few glasses of wine, I leaned down to remove a clump of hair from the drain. I couldn’t see clearly because of the steam and dim light. It took the nerve endings in my skin a moment to process that the thing between my fingers was not strands of my brown hair but a giant cockroach. The roach’s exoskeleton felt like plastic as it squirmed in my hand. I yelled Fuuuuuck! dropped the roach, jumped out of the tub and ran.
Roaches have been around since 300 million BC, way before the dinosaurs. And humans have been disgusted by them since we had ways to document our disgust. Three thousand years ago, the Egyptian Book of the Dead included a spell to eradicate roaches. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, traveling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning from an anxious dream transformed into an insect—possibly a beetle, maybe a cockroach—and disgusts his entire family. Roaches are mostly harmless, but they can make us very sick with salmonella—and on the rare occasion, kill us. Aside from the diseases it might carry, it is the cockroach’s appearance that likely repels us most. Its greasy auburn body. Its long spindly antennae. Its hairy legs. The odor it emits, which causes food to taste bad and one’s allergies to worsen. Its speed. A cockroach can run three miles per hour. Disgust has evolved in humans as a disease avoidant behavior. Disgust is our brain attempting to protect us from harm.
2. With fear
The fear of cockroaches is called Katsaridaphobia. Katsarida is Greek for cockroach. It is speculated that Katsaridaphobia may be brought on by a home infestation or finding a cockroach in one’s food. Due to colonialism and cargo ships, roaches are coterminous with human existence all over the modern world. Where there are humans, there are cockroaches. Yet, out of the 4,500 known species of roaches, only 30 are found in human habitats. The most common roach is the small German cockroach that has so completely adapted to living with humans that it cannot survive without us. Other species include the enormous American cockroach (originally from West Africa), better known by its publicist-approved name, the water bug. These roaches can even fly, albeit clumsily.
No one really liked my high school drama teacher. Mostly because she was too militant. There was a lot of yelling when there probably should’ve been more trust falls and games of Zip Zap Zop. She later became a high school dean, which was clearly a better fit. I was afraid of her, of her dominance. Afraid of the shitty roles she would cast me in if she found out that I didn’t like her. One night, during a rehearsal of Harvey—a play about kindness and friendship in which a rich drunk befriends a giant invisible white rabbit—she suddenly jumped up from her folding chair and started flailing her limbs in all directions, gesticulating wildly. I had never seen her so animated, so vulnerable. She was screaming. “It fell down my shirt! It fell down my shirt!” “It” was a cockroach that had found its way to the ceiling of the auditorium and fallen 30 feet down her shirt. A statistical anomaly. We all stared, stunned into silence, grasping our shirt collars.
3. With compassion
The term ‘cockroach’ is a common racial slur. According to the Environment & Society Portal, the term ‘cockroach’ was originally used to demean African slaves arriving in roach infested slave ships. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu extremists called the Tutsi inyenzi which translates to ‘cockroaches.’ The slur has been thrown around more recently by politicians when discussing immigrants. The roach invokes infestation, uncleanness, poverty, disease, and reproduction and is seen by some as the perfect description of the feared migrant.
Experts agree that disgust is not only a biological trait but also a cultural one. We learn from society what to find disgusting. In the Black Mirror episode “Men Against Fire” a near future military operation gives soldiers a neural implant called MASS, meant to eliminate their compassion in the battlefield. Instead of seeing civilians as victims of war, the device turns these innocent people into inhuman monstrous “roaches.” MASS allows the soldiers to commit heinous crimes without guilt. In the episode, the protagonist’s MASS glitches and he is shown the reality of his xenophobia and feels compassion. MASS is not science fiction but based on an actual drug regimen attempted by scientists during the Iraq War to enable soldiers to take part in war crimes without suffering PTSD.
When I was in my early 20’s I worked at a retail store in Santa Monica. I sold overpriced ballet flats to supermodels, Helen Mirren, and the woman who wrote the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. I got the job because the store was managed by a gorgeous energetic Bulgarian girl. She loved that I was also Eastern European, and I wasn’t bad at selling shoes. I became her assistant. The owners were a cruel posh British woman and her hot son. When the British woman was in town, she would make me her servant. I would buy her Mocha-Frappuccinos from Starbucks and bring her sandals to the nail salon. One day, when my Bulgarian manager and I were working on a holiday window display, I tripped over a shoe box. “Clumsy girl,” the British woman berated me with pursed lips before continuing to list all the times I’d been clumsy until I couldn’t take it anymore. I cried in the storage closet and left. All I could think about on the drive home was what my manager had told me the other day, how she had overheard the British woman refer to Eastern Europeans as the cockroaches of Europe. I’m sure it didn’t help that I was also a Jew.
4. With respect
Cockroaches are survivors. They can live for over a month with their heads chopped off. They can survive on dead and decaying matter. They are cannibals, capable of eating their squished cousins when there’s nothing else to forage. They can hold their breath for up to 40 minutes. It has been rumored that they can survive a nuclear war and take over where humans left off. And while moss and flour beetles can handle more radiation than the common cockroach, roaches are still up there on the list of nuclear survivors. Once, I accidentally boiled a cockroach while steaming some clothes and watched its little legs squirm to life in the bowl of the steamer. In the realm of animal symbolism, the cockroach is associated with resilience and adaptation. They can crawl between the narrowest openings, through the darkest of sewers, and survive. What is disgusting about survival?
Roaches played a big role in a complicated romance in my 20s. He would eventually become my ex. The score card was always pulled out during our fights, and we would stand there shamefully rehashing all the ways each had wronged the other. Before we moved in together, he lived in an apartment by the freeway on a dead-end street in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. His neighbors were Chinese immigrants who played mahjong and ate dried fish and grew scallions outside. Sometimes my boyfriend would exchange his cardboard recycling for Chinese melon or leafy greens or “canned meat in juices.” When we opened his front door and turned on the lights, a sea of small German cockroaches would scurry away in all directions. We didn’t care much about the roaches as we were too preoccupied with our long nights of drinking and arguing. One night, I was so pissed off that when an enormous cockroach scurried by my foot, I smashed it dramatically with my boot. I wanted it to die along with my unhappiness, but it lived and scurried away a little flatter but not yet dead.
5. With wonder
There is a story my uncle likes to tell about me as a baby in Belarus. How curious I was. How my parents and I lived above a pelmeni shop. How little we had but how we made the most of it. How when I learned to scoot and then crawl, I would chase the roaches. Uninhibited, I would try to catch them with my stubby baby fingers and make them my little friends.
The famous song “La Cucaracha” dates from the time of the Mexican Revolution. The first verse translates as: “The cockroach, the cockroach, can’t walk anymore because it doesn’t have marijuana to smoke.” The end of a joint, where the harshest last numb of weed lives, is called a roach. This term for a partially smoked joint likely first came from a New Yorker article about a writer at a 1930s marijuana party. You often cough after hitting a “roach.” It’s a big dry cough that is rumored to make the high stronger, to make it reach your brain faster, to glaze your eyes red, and to give you that funny floaty hungry cosmic feeling of wonder that only weed can offer.
After moving into a studio apartment, I went to war with roaches. They were the kind that flew and were unafraid to crawl on my bed to get away from me and my attempts to murder them. On a hot Los Angeles summer night after a teary phone conversation with my mama about the roaches and the ex and the pandemic and the yellow sky from nearby fires and the power going out because of rolling blackouts, I decided to take a bath. I lit some candles and hit a joint and pretended my new apartment wasn’t infested with roaches. I hoped the bath could be a sort of baptism. But a roach found me in the bathtub. Before I could get up and lift my slipper to murder him, I felt that funny floaty feeling of wonder and began to laugh at the cosmic joke of it all. The roach stuck around watching me. Together, we survived.