La Cucaracha ya no puede caminar

The season of the big cockroaches has begun. I sidled into the pisser for a slash. It was one of those things where you don’t really realize you have to on the way home but once you’re back for a bit and starting to get your suit off and trying to hang it up you suddenly realize you really have to go. I’ve left the door open and right out of the corner of my eye I see this great brownish black thing creeping down the doorjamb at about the level of my knee, right next to me and then creeping down below the level of my knee. I let out a “Boah-ahh!” and a start worthy of a Danny Thomas or other such Golden Age giant of physical comedy. “Cucaracha…” I mumble as I carry on with business, never taking my eyes off of my unwelcome visitor and his long waving antennae during what was to have been “me time.” He seems to sense that the game has begun, I choose my weapon…perhaps badly. I try and whack him with the bottom of a can of spray air freshener. What an image it must have been – a pale florid and flabby hairy middle-aged white guy in only his boxer underwear trying in this pathetic existential ballet to kill two birds, to stave off these twin harbingers of ultimate decay, stench and cockroaches, with the one stone of this can of deodorizer. I rain down ineffectual blows upon the villain roach who flees to and then behind the small credenza supporting the disused toaster oven and a roll of toilet paper. Jockeying the small faux wood pedestal, upsetting the toilet paper to the floor, perception dawns that it opens only to the back and Pancho Villa is now holed up in box canyon. Drawing with inexplicable and hitherto absent quickness upon my years of having dealt with Japanese vermin and their strategies for evasion, I again seize up, not unlike Isildur, the hitherto impotent sword of my deodorizer can and spray point blank and copiously into the gap under the toaster stand. I ponder, grasping vainly for a next move during the pregnant pause that ensues, until, lo, the beast totters out, visibly shaken, and attempts to crawl a couple of inches up the side of the pedestal. Sensing feverishly that I must strike while the iron is at least still lukewarm, I snatch up a handful of the junk mail lying on the floor, roll it tightly into a lethal baton of unsolicited advertizing and whack the hapless Pancho where he clung and again on the floor below. Now he lay supine and twitching slightly, utterly vanquished. Returning victorious to my pile of junk mail, I selected a postcard ad for a 24 hour plumbing service and scooped Pancho up from the grimy faux wood vinyl field of his final humiliation and bore him back to the dingy porcelain and plastic altar where our feud was first sworn and joined. He lay upon his [beyer], one wing draped around its top edge, like some mortally wounded hero carried from the field of battle towards a final watery Viking rite, a funeral at the flick of a cheap chrome lever.