Sunday, June 12, 2005

raising the bar

If you've lived in New York long enough, you've probably got a good cockroach story or three. I happen to have about ten but it's not because I'm a dirty person, I swear! I'm just a little messy. Anyway, as Drone and I were leaving my apartment building this evening to go for a walk, I heard him mumbling behind me. "There's something in my shoe...I've gotta get it out now or it's going to bug me." (Pun not possibly intentional at this point.) I turned around to see the shoe be thrown to the ground and Drone say "oh my god" for about three solid minutes with a look of sheer panic on his face. Clearly it was a bug in there, but I didn't know the gravity of the situation until he collected himself enough to dump out a two-inch, intact cockroach from his New Balance sneaker. I had phantom "something in my shoe" feelings for the whole walk. And stomach pains from laughing so damn hard. I'm still a little creeped out since the cockroach clearly came from my apartment, but vermin are pretty unavoidable here, as evidenced by the footlong rat we later saw scurrying into a nice brownstone on 77th. Oh, New York...

3 comments:

P/O said...

man, that so beats any of my own "best of" cockroach stories!

how about rat stories? i've got some doozies...

Anonymous said...

A similar story: I have a friend in Cleveland who had a mouse problem in his apartment, and cats that used to leave mouse parts in shoes, dropped gloves, etc. One day at work, as five o'clock rolled around and he was thinking of leaving, he felt something in his shoe. When he removed it, a small mouse fell out of it, stood still for a moment, and then made a run for it past the water cooler and my friend's fellow employees headed for home. How the hell my friend spent the entire day with a mouse in his shoe and didn't notice it, and how the mouse survived that airless, stinky captivity for 8 plus hours, I still don't understand.

Gina said...

wow he must have had some damn high arches!