There for a while we had roaches. Not little oh-my-heavens roaches but big-as-puppies roaches. "Outside roaches," my friend Kelli calls 'em.

My friend James agrees.

Those big cockroaches," he told me, "they eat rotting vegetation. Unless you've got big dead plants in your house they're not real happy to be there."

I swear I could hear them skittering along the baseboards. One day I was sitting on the floor, talking to someone on the phone, when one of them walked up to me and asked to borrow ten bucks.

One morning I came downstairs and one of them was high in the corner of the living room. I didn't have any bug spray, so I sprayed him with Lemon Pledge. The motherfucker took wing and came after me, airborne style. I swatted him out of the air with a shoe and swept him out the door while he was still dazed. Horrible, horrible.

So the next time I was at Target I got roach traps (big traps for big roaches - they're the size of a hockey puck or bigger) and Raid. One night I was up late playing video games and there went one of the filthy bastards, climbing and falling off the bar. I got the Raid out and fucking douched him. Then I went around all the baseboards and cabinets, under sinks and appliances.