The Night of Periplaneta Americana

Ask any New Yorker and she will tell you that it gets plenty hot and humid in the summertime. Starting in late May and extending into late September, the days get longer as the temperature and humidity rise, usually reaching unbearable levels in late July early August, when “90/90 days” are not uncommon-90+ degrees with 90+ percent humidity. On those days no amount of air conditioning seemed to matter, and taking two showers a day will still leave you stuck to your clothes and soaked with perspiration. It was on such a day that I shared a memory with best friend Tony that I have since retold countless times and will never forget. Boy was it hot. It must have been late July or early August because we were out of class and spending the summer going to the beach in Tony’s orange 1968 VW beetle, playing table tennis at Marty Reisman's until wee hours of the morning and enjoying the reduced summer population in the Upper West Side neighborhood surrounding Columbia University. Tony and then wife Barbara were typically the nucleus of our circle of friends because unlike the rest of us, they had a real apartment, real jobs, and all the trappings of a real life; heck they even had a dog-a lovable Dalmatian named Lukie who I have had the pleasure of walking down Riverside Park with on many an occasion. On any given evening a group of us could be seen cruising Broadway or Amsterdam Avenue, stopping at local haunts like the Gold Rail or Tom’s Restaurant, now made famous by the television series Seinfeld, where gnarly old career waitresses plied us with steaming bowls of cream of turkey soup that could have been mistaken for library paste, and tall glasses of cola which were ordered as “Stretch one!” presumably because they added soda water to cola syrup for each glass. It was on such a summer night, at the end of a particularly long hot 90/90 day, made even worse by the ripe aromas of a week-long garbage collectors’ strike, that this memory was indelibly etched into my mind.

It’s common knowledge that if New York City were a state its bird would be the American cockroach. Periplaneta Americana has been around for 200 million years, since before the Pleistocene Era, and its ability to thrive under the most hostile circumstances is unequalled in the animal kingdom. A cockroach can live for a month without food and two weeks without water. It can hold its breath for 40 minutes and run in excess of 3 miles an hour. Some female roaches mate only once and remain pregnant for life. A roach can live for up to one week without its head. The American cockroach is the largest cockroach found in houses. Females can hatch up to 150 offspring per year. Adults develop wings and can fly. American cockroaches are also known as “waterbugs” because they are commonly found near water resources, like puddles and water pipes. American cockroaches are nocturnal. They rest by day and forage for food at night. They will eat just about anything, including plants, your leftovers and other insects. American cockroaches congregate in warm, dark, wet places, because they like to be near water. For this reason they are often found in sewers and basements, around pipes and drains. Although their adaptability enables them to live in a wide range of environments, they seem to thrive in hot and humid climates, like New York City in late July.

Tony and Barbara lived in a nice apartment between Broadway and Riverside Drive. Multi-story apartment buildings occupied by graduate students and faculty lined both sides of the street, and most had basements, typical of residential buildings in the area, where garbage rooms, laundry facilities, unconditioned storage and a variety of utility spaces were located. Most were true basements, for the most part below sidewalk level and accessible by a few steps down from street level. Typically connections with the city sewer, water and other utilities were located in the basement, with risers extending up to the residential floors above. In other words these were dark, dank, damp and uninhabited spaces. Not human inhabitants at any rate.

I don’t quite recall if we were venturing forth from Tony’s place after one of Barbara’s usually excellent dinners, or returning from some outing, but we were making our way along 114th Street that night, either to or from some unknown destination. The air was thick and moist, still bristling from the heat of the day, and you could see circles forming around the street lamps like the rings around Saturn.  The air was still, as if all the energy had been sucked out of the world by the oppressive shroud of heat and humidity. We trudged along, each step requiring effort we begrudgingly expended. The follicles in our nostrils reacted defensively to the pungent vapors emanating from uncollected bags of trash gathered at the curb, awaiting resolution between angry parties still far from agreement.  At this moment, on what may have been the hottest day of the year, the following exchange took place.

“Man is it hot.”

“You can say that again-I’m sweating like a pig.”

“When do you think the strike will be over?”

“I don’t know, but it’s been almost a week and I don’t know if I can take much more of this.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean-the bags are piling up from here to 110th Street-it’s really getting bad.”

“I know, but the rats and the roaches are loving it-have you seen the size of some of them?  Rats the size of chihuahuas and roaches almost just as big- the really big ones come out at night.”

“God I hate roaches-they make my skin crawl.”

“Hey, what’s that smell? It’s not garbage-it’s more like some kind of gaseous odor. I’ve smelled it before, but it’s particularly strong right here.”

“Hmmm-yeah, I smell it too. Some kind of chemical maybe.”

“Wow-look at the size of that cockroach-that’s a big one-even bigger than Herman.” (another story for another time)

“Look-there’s another one, and another one-wow-there’s a lot of them right there by that basement door”.

“What do you think is in there? It’s unusual to see so many congregating in one place like this.”

“Yeah-hey, I have an idea-why don’t we light a match and see what happens?”

“That’s a great idea Tony-here-I have one.” (we all smoked during college)

I’m a little fuzzy on what happened next, but I think Tony lit the match and tossed it in the general direction of that basement door. I distinctly remember a loud PHHMMMMMMPHHHH!!!!!!!- the sound of a match igniting a large, highly flammable gaseous cloud. The ground beneath us instantly turned a bright orange blue, and then the gates of hell opened up. Every cockroach in Manhattan must have been there that night because the sidewalk transformed instantly into a writhing mass of shiny brown bodies, twitching antennae and hairy legs. There must have been millions of them, all forming an unstoppable wave of angry Periplaneta Americana fleeing for their lives. To this day I remember the clicking sound of millions of legs against the hot concrete, like a deluge in the Amazon rainforest.

Witnesses tell of three individuals-two Chinese and a Greek, who broke the speed of sound that night. I don’t think our feet touched the ground until we reached Broadway, several hundred feet away. To this day I’m not sure which was more terrifying-the possibility that the entire building may have exploded, or the thought of being overtaken by the largest swarm of hostile giant roaches I had ever seen.  It was insect fear at its most terrifying and a memory that I can share and recall now years later. I’d sooner spend four days in a shark cage surrounded by great whites.