Midnight Mutterings | Roaches

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS BY JACKIE BATES |||

Note: I wrote this—now lightly edited, which will, no doubt, mess up the spacing–more than four years ago in the early days of the Trump Administration. I was reminded of it recently while watching the January 6 Congressional hearings. Some things have changed. Sybil-the-Cat now roams wherever bad cats go after death. I am older and no longer surprised about who (? whom) We the People will elect in spite of what they say or do. And I can pass up the occasional verbal roach that skitters past. Maturity? I doubt it. More likely I have finally learned to preserve my sanity just a little bit better. jb

Roaches

A half century ago, I was living in New York City, sharing a fifth floor walk-up studio apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with my shiny new husband and a big black cat named Fred. This was years before the same area became the trendy East Village.

We shared this small space with a whole lot of tiny, almost transparent roaches, euphemistically called ‘water bugs’ by the locals. The ‘locals’ were the inhabitants of the no name bar on the ground floor of our building who were–as far as we could tell—only cops and criminals. Both groups of men–only men in those days–except when I crept in to use the public phone, fell silent the moment I opened the door to ‘their’ bar and invaded their territory. The phones on the streets of our neighborhood had been long reduced to bare cords hanging from the graffitied walls of the pretty red boxes that served as street toilets that did not flush.

Fred-the-Cat loved the roaches.

Fred spent his days and nights obsessively catching and eating the small bugs but seemed to make no dent in their numbers. I suppose they came in through the cracks around the exposed pipes. He would eat as many little roaches as he could. After that, he would continue
catching roaches until his mouth was stuffed with bugs he could not swallow. Pale legs hung from his mouth, limply struggling.

After a while, when yet another group of roaches tantalized Fred when there was no more room in his stomach or in his mouth, he resorted to a sort of elaborate coughing and spitting to rid his mouth of bugs. Then he resumed the chase and again stuffed his mouth with bugs he could not swallow.

I hadn’t thought of Fred and his roaches in decades until the current political season. A lot has changed in my life. I now live 3,000 miles from New York City on an inconvenient, semi-remote island off the west coast near Canada. My house sits on the shore of the Salish Sea, There are no roaches inside it and Sybil-the-Cat is a very fussy eater who ignores the few harmless spiders who find their way inside each fall when the rains start. The early marriage faltered and failed years ago and the middle-aged children from it have their own lives on the mainland. Both of the bars on the island have names but no criminals to speak of and we all have cell phones and no need of a public pay phones.

Our new president has brought back the memories of Fred the Cat and his roaches. Each day, Donald Trump says, or Tweets, so many outrageous things: statements that are hard to hear, much less swallow. I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, obsession with what Trump says and does is overwhelming.

Before the election in November 2020, I had, for many years, read four or five books a week. Since then I have read a total of three and a half books. Instead, I am addicted to radio news, to YouTube, where I listen to President Trump’s remarks with the predictable rise of blood pressure and outrage.

From day to day, I am unable to process the utterances, or even remember them. But still I stuff more of them into my inflamed brain and bore my few remaining friends by repeating Trump’s statements in my disbelief and rage. It is as though I have turned into Fred-the-Cat, with pale legs and lies hanging from my mouth and ears and no room to swallow the next outrageous statement or deed that scuttles across my path and begs me to bite.