You Replaced Me With a Cockroach!?!?

I haven’t managed to hurt myself in a comical way this week, so I figured that I would tell you a story from when my sisters and I were in High School.

My sister Christina went on a student trip to Russia. Her twin, my sister Allison, sat moping around the house saying how much she missed her sister. My mom, hating to see her daughter so upset, asked Allison what she could do to cheer her up.

My sister thought for about 7.3 seconds before replying that she wanted a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach.

This is how Bugsy came into our lives.

My sister Christina came home from Russia to discover that her twin had used her absence as an excuse to get a pet that most people pay good money to have exterminated. “You replaced me with a cockroach?!?” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe you did that.”

We all hated Bugsy. Especially since Bugsy, according to Allison, loved spending time with us. On us. Surprising us. I would look up from doing my homework to discover that Allison had placed Bugsy on my shoulder and that she (the disgusting cockroach) was walking towards my neck (and, by extension, my easily grossed out face). “Bugsy wanted to play!” Allison would say. Goddamn Bugsy always wanted to play.

The worst was when I threw my back out playing Softball and lay, face planted in the pillow, with a heating pad on me. Allison came into my room.

“Open your eyes,” she said.

There, not two inches in front of my nose was Bugsy, crawling on my pillow towards my face.

I don’t know if you have ever opened your eyes to discover a cockroach so close to you that you can’t properly focus on them without going cross-eyed. I will save you the effort of going through such a unique experience by saying that the whole thing can be summed up in one word:

“AAAAaaaaahhhHHHhHhhHHHH!!!!!!”

If you do find yourself in a similar situation, I would highly recommend screaming and then hurling obscenities at your sister. I would not, however, recommend that you startle the cockroach or knock it off of the pillow. You don’t want to interfere with your sister catching said cockroach and putting her back in her cage. You do not want the cockroach scuttling into the folds of your bedding. Luckily for me, it’s hard to move enough to send a cockroach flying when you have thrown your back out. I may have screamed, but Bugsy was easily collected and taken out of my sight.

I often dreamed that Bugsy would suffer the same fate as so many of my sister’s hamsters. Namely, that she would die an untimely death, be briefly mourned and then be replaced with a hamster. I did not, however, wish that Bugsy suffer the same fate as the hamster Houdini who somehow made it out of her cage and clambered down two flights of stairs before eating rat poison and dying under my step-dad’s workbench. I wanted Bugsy to shuffle off this mortal coil at a young age, yes, but only if she did it while staying in her cage.

When my mom and my sister first bought Bugsy, they verified with the people at the pet store that Bugsy was a young cockroach and that there was no way that she could be pregnant. I think that we are all sensing where this is heading…

One day my Mom walked into my sister’s room to discover that Bugsy had made babies. A lot of babies. Hundreds of little creepy, crawly, totally disgusting cockroach babies. Needless to say, my Mom was less than thrilled. Allison was instructed to bring Bugsy and her babies outside and to squish them all. Sure, it was nearly impossible for Bugsy to bless our household with a further infestation of cockroaches. But, I don’t think that any of us really wanted to take that chance.

Two months with a cockroach in the house as an invited guest was more than enough for me.