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A long time ago, while still living in Montreal, I had occasion to rent a basement apartment in, how can I put this...a low-rent part of town. As a result of some abrupt changes to my situation I was pressed for time in my search for a place and did not have the luxury of being particularly choosey.

While touring the prospective apartment, I noticed a couple of cockroach corpses in the kitchen cupboard and the apartment manager assured me that the entire building had recently been sprayed. That assurance coupled with my need for a speedy roof over my head sealed the deal and I moved in the next day.

For the first few days I busied myself with unpacking and setting up the waterbed I had at the time. It was a queen-sized affair and took forever to fill and heat...but there's nothing like a sleeping on a giant hot water bottle during a freezing, damp Montreal winter.

About a week into my residency, I spotted my first live roach in the kitchen.

"Hmmm...," I thought, " they must have missed that one". Being ignorant about the lifestyle and durability of your average cockroach, I figured that seeing one meant that there was only one to see.

I mentioned it to the building manager and he gave me a couple of roach traps to put in the kitchen. If you aren't familiar with the product, they're basically a small cardboard box, roughly the size of a large box of matches and open at both ends. The inside is covered with a very sticky substance upon which the hapless roach walks, causing his little feet to become stuck. I set them out and went to bed, curious to see if they'd work and nab the little sucker.

The next morning I awoke as usual and wandered into the kitchen to check. Imagine my surprise when I glanced into the box, expecting to see one lonely roach, and discovered that the trap was so filled with cockroaches that I could barely see the other open end of the box. Yeesh! Talk about your heebie-jeebies! The other box was no different. It looked like some ghetto version of Barrel of Monkeys. Suitably repulsed, I again spoke to the building manager, who expressed much surprise and shock over my announcement. Then, in a sotto voce he said "it's those damned Vietnamese!". About this time I began reconsidering my choice of places to live, but I was going to have to live with it until Spring so I settled in for a long siege.

Over the winter I must have gone through hundreds of those roach traps but it was like there was a free-flowing pipeline that led from the Acme Cockroach Factory straight to my kitchen. All my food was sealed in plastic and stored in the fridge - even my saltines. I kept the plug in the bathtub except when I was showering and all my glasses and cups were upside-down on the shelves. I was even shaking my underwear out before I put it on. Laying in bed at night, I'd be awoken by the skittering of little feet across my uncovered chest or arm.

April couldn't come fast enough and it was a happy day when I found a new place to live. Since i was determined not to bring any of the little fuckers with me, preparing to move was a laborious process as I has to search everything before sealing it in plastic and putting it in a moving box - which was then put into a sealed garbage bag. The last thing to go was the waterbed - which took a couple of days to empty of water. As I folded up the emptied mattress and removed the plywood supports I discovered that all through the winter, I'd been sleeping above a seething, boiling mass of cockroaches - all happily breeding in the dark, humidity below my bed. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it looked as if someone had dumped out a five-gallon bucket of them. With a loud "Yaaarrrgh!" I abruptly decided to leave the bed where it was and get the hell out of there.

My last memory of the place is the building manager puzzledly waving goodbye and wondering why I'd leave a perfectly good bed behind.


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