The Transformation, part V

originally posted April 15, 2007

Once in the bathroom, I tossed the last bit of the turkey bacon into the bathtub, watching as my visitor climbed in to join it. He consumed it, then took great interest in the drain, placing his face beside it and whispering again, still a nearly inaudible hiss. I wanted his attention, but had no food, so squeezed a small blob of toothpaste on the edge of the tub. He turned his attention to this and tasted it, clearly not enjoying its minty freshness.

From the drain poked the head of a cockroach. "Get the hell out, or I will blast your ass with water," I lisped in my most controlled cockroach voice. Both the insect and the man looked at me, antennae and eyebrows moving, hissing softly. Neither seemed to appreciate what I'd said. I noted that the cockroach did not have a lisp. It seems I'd been completely duped by the girl with the cockroach poems and her inaccurate representation of cockroach communication. The man looked down at his body, and then to the little intruder. Both hissed softly. Then the cockroach descended out of sight, and I quickly replaced the drain's rubber stopper, thwarting any return for the time.

I wasn't sure what to say, so I excused myself for a moment, closing the bathroom door behind me. I ran to my closet, pulling out the bottle of vodka I kept hidden inside a boot. This was a precaution I took to minimize the chances it would be consumed by my husband whenever he was stricken by a case of the Dostyevskies, fueling drunken, poorly accented demands for boiled potatoes and allegations that I am a filthy, capitalist whore. I drank from the bottle, and again considered the situation. I was not sure who this man was, but I knew who he wasn't. I tried to recount the facts. Hungry, hissing naked man. Affinity for cockroaches. Aversion to toothpaste. I simply could not do this. Adopting my husband's tactic for writing, I retrieved a tattered fedora from the closet and put it on my head. It was originally acquired during his Frank Sinatra phase, one that spawned no writing whatsoever, but plenty of empty scotch bottles and observations that I was a ditzy broad in need of a knuckle sandwich, ring-a-ding-ding. It later resurfaced during his stint as a writer of pulpy stories about private detectives who specialized in cases involving piano thefts and poisoned clarinet reeds, or 'private dicks' as he liked to call them. The irony of his use of this phrase bothered me, as I'd often wished he'd had more of a private dick himself.