""New York is great if you can pay the rent!"" Thanks, LCD Soundsystem.
But even if I could pay the rent, I still wouldn't live in New York City, despite its fashionable outlook and dream career""opportunities. My three-month stint living there in 2007, even if it was for an enriching summer internship, gave me a plethora of reasons not to live in NYC. Smelly. Hot. Expensive. Curmudgeonly cab drivers. Even crankier subway commuters.
But these factors pale in comparison to the genuine reason I loathe the idea of living in New York long term: The cockroaches.
Generally, I consider myself a fairly ""tough"" girl. I enjoy traveling, even alone. I did move to New York for a summer having never visited there before in my life. And I can ride a bike, take nasty spills on said bike—the last of which incurred large, handlebar-shaped bruises on my right thigh—and drink enough beer to keep up with the best of 'em.
""The best of 'em"" being my decidedly braver male friends, who have no problem stomping on earwigs, disposing of crafty, fire-jumping mice that infest their stoves and knocking down mud-wasp nests from their porches.
But make me face a shiny, dark, exoskeletoned creature with more legs than necessary, moving faster than any animal that size should, and I morph into Princess Shriek-a-lot.
The first time of four that I spotted a cockroach—albeit a baby one—in my New York summer digs, I fled to the Financial District and squatted in my friend Ira's NYU dorm with him for two nights.
Upon my return to 103rd and Broadway, armed with industrial-sized cans of spray, I nearly poisoned myself with the pesticide fumes by, uh, ""exterminating"" my apartment a little too zealously.
Flash forward to my post-undergrad years living in Madison—now.
In 2009, I moved into a new house on the near-west side, and my friend Patrick came over to enjoy a bottle of wine. As friends do, he politely asked, ""Is there anything I can help with?""
I hesitated.
""Well, yeah, there is one thing … could you kill that bug?""
I pointed at an insect on top of a bookshelf in our new dining room that I had been watching—but afraid to touch—for the last five hours. He laughed, exclaimed something about stereotypes and gender roles, and squished the bug with a paper towel.
Most recently, wrapped in a towel post-shower one morning this September, I combed my wet hair. Lacking contacts or glasses at that hour, I squinted bleary-eyed at a puff of dust and debris on the floor floating by my toes.
These Madison apartments sure do get dusty, I grumbled. Probably time to bust out the vacuum cleaner again.
My boyfriend burst into our bedroom hunched over, his right hand outstretching an insect-killing jar left over from his entomology course last semester. ""Did you see it??""
In a flash of insight, I leapt up onto the bed.
Shit. That wasn't a dust bunny. That was a centipede.
Now perched, squatting on the bed, making sure my bare feet are nowhere near the quickly crawling limbs of the bug, I called out, ""I think it went under your dresser!""
He glanced over his shoulder at me from his crouched stance in front of the dresser and cracked up.
""That's very helpful, Erica. You just sit tight.""
I shrug.
""Well, at least I let you put your entomology collection up on our wall. That's a step, right?""
He rolled his eyes. ""Those are already dead, Erica.""
We never did manage to catch that centipede.
