by Tyler Knox
The tall man puts a hand on his cheek, turns to Kockroach, gives him a long look. “Oh my. Oh yes. Lucky you, we just received a load, headed for Des Moines, that never found its way over the bridge. Poor Des Moines. And they could use it so. Let us see.”
The tall thin man slips a yellow cord out of his pocket and dances around Kockroach as he stretches the cord along Kockroach’s arms, his legs, around different parts of his thorax.
“Mr. Average, isn’t he?” says the man, nodding with a smile. “Which is good, because that’s what they grow in Des Moines. Forty-two jacket, best as I can tell. Seventeen-inch neck with thirty-five-inch sleeves. Waist thirty-four. I have some nice blues for you, or a lovely gray.”
“What color you want, Jerry?” says Mite.
“Color?” says Kockroach.
“That’s right, palsy. It’s your choice.”
Kockroach steps forward and reaches toward the tall thin man. His skin fascinates. It is the color of his old chitin. He misses his chitin, the strength and stiffness, the color. Running around with this white skin, he feels lost and frail, like the weakest of nymphs. He wishes his skin were like this man’s, dark and rich and full of protection. He reaches up and touches the man’s cheek. “Color,” he says.
“Oooh,” purrs the tall thin man. “Just so happens I have a forty-two in brown pinstripes, double-breasted. You want to see it?”
“Don’t want to see it,” says Mite. “I just want to buy it.”
“No checks, Mite.”
“No checks.”
“My, you did find something better, didn’t you?”
“How long to get it altered?”
“If you have time, I’ll do it right now.”
“Clive, my man, you are magic.”
“Yes, yes I am.”
Kockroach is lying back in the chair, a thick white cloth tight around his neck, surrounded by humans, all grooming him. One man in a red vest, having already smeared Kockroach’s face with hot white foam, is now scraping his cheeks and chin with a brutal-looking edge of metal. One man is whipping a cloth back and forth across the shiny brown things on the ends of his legs. One female is cutting and scraping and rubbing the hard tips of his claws. Being so close to so many humans is frightening and yet comforting too. Kockroach feels as if the proper order of things has been established, as if these humans have indeed seen him for exactly what he is and, in lieu of squashing him, have exalted him to his rightful place.
But Kockroach knows it is not his inner self that has caused all this to happen. It is the little pieces of green paper Mite has been giving to all he meets: the human behind the counter at the schvitz, the human with the dark skin who gave him the new brown cloths and hat, the human with the brutal edge of metal who cut and greased his hair and now is scraping his cheeks. He is beginning to understand the power of the little green pieces of paper. He can use them to maintain the proper order of things. He can use them to get the humans to serve his needs. He wonders how many there are and how he can get hold of them all.
“You play chess, Jerry?” says Mite, sitting in a chair set against the wall across from Kockroach.
“Chess?”
“It’s a great game,” says Mite. “The game of kings, which is what you and me, we’re going to be. An old geezer learned me the game in Philly. It teaches you how to use your noggin.”
“Your noggin,” says Kockroach as the man in the vest takes a towel and starts wiping what’s left of the white goop off his face.
“That’s it, baby. That’s how to get ahead in this world. When this is all over, I’m going to teach you how to play. We’ll have usselves a game, you and me.”
“You and me.”
“What do you think here, Mite?” says the man in the vest when all the goop is wiped off Kockroach’s face.
“Nice, Charlie,” says Mite. “Very nice. He cleans up good, don’t he?”
“Yes he does.”
“It’s like looking at someone new without the beard. You want a look there, palsy?” says Mite. “Spin him around, Charlie.”
The man with the vest dusts Kockroach with a sharp white powder, brushes the back of his neck, pulls away the towel, spins around the chair until Kockroach is staring at a man in a chair staring back at him. He moves his shoulders and so does the other man in the chair. It is the thing he saw before, in the small white room, the thing that shows him himself. He hasn’t seen his face since the early days of his strange new molt, and never before without the little hairs on his cheek. He examines himself carefully. He reaches into a pocket of his new jacket and pulls out the picture of the humans he took from the room at the time of his molt. He compares what he sees now with the face that is his in the picture.
Yes, this is the way he is meant to look.
“What you got there, palsy?” says Mite. He steps toward the chair, looks down at the picture. “There you are. I didn’t know you was married. Boy, she’s a looker, ain’t she?”
“Hubba hubba hubba,” says Kockroach as he stares at the female in the picture. She has light hair, like the female known as Sylvie, but she reminds him of the female known as Celia.
“Where she at now?” asks Mite.
Kockroach shrugs his shoulders.
“She die on you or what?”
“Or what.”
“Oh man, women will get you every time, won’t they? That’s why I stay away from them. I gots a weak heart, the doctors they told my momma that when I was a tyke. But that’s what’s so good about them girls in the Square. They’re always there for you. Even when theys with someone else, grab a cup of joe, a cig, and next thing you know it’ll be your turn at the wheel. You ready for some trucking?”
“Ready for some trucking.”
“Good. Let’s go find Sylvie.”
The female with the yellow hair known as Sylvie holds Kockroach’s claw as she leads him down a hallway. The shiny black leathers strapped to the tips of her legs, with their sharp spikes, clack on the rough wooden floor but he can barely hear the sound beneath the roar in his head. He sniffs the air, her sweet floral scent, shakes his head, the roar grows louder. This is more like it, absolutely. He slows his step to watch the twitch of her tail but the woman pulls him forward. He lurches into her and the roar turns into a tempest.
She stops at a door. He lurches into her once again. He rubs against her as she fits a key into the lock and turns it. She spins around until she is facing him, her arms behind her, her mounds against his own flat chest. She grimaces at him and brays. He places his claws on either side of his forehead and reaches out two digits like two antennae. She tilts her head and brays again.
“You’re a crazy one, you are,” she says.
“Sweet pea,” he says, wagging his digits.
“You’re certifiable, you are.”
“Sweet pea, sweet pea, sweet pea.”
She stares for a moment at his wagging digits and then places her claws at the same positions on her own head, raises two of her digits into antennae. He reaches down to rub his antennae against hers. She rubs back, her braying turning to squeals.
“Sweet pea, sweet pea, sweet pea, sweet pea.”
He leans down to bite her. She pushes him away, turns, opens the door, falls into the room.
He lunges in after her.
The mating ritual of the cockroach differs slightly from species to species within the order, but is generally initiated by the female, who raises her wings and secretes powerful pheromones from a special membrane on her back. Sensors in the male antennae pick up the sweet pheromonal scent from as far away as thirty feet and direct the male to the ready female. This release of pheromone can be accompanied by stridulatory singing or hissing by one or both sexes to help bring the partners together. Some cockroach songs comprise as many as six complex pulse trains, a melody more musically advanced, actually, than many Ramones songs.
When a sexually receptive female and male cockroach do finally meet face to face, they begin whipping a
nd lashing each other over and over with their antennae. Antennae fencing serves to excite the varied sensory receptors up and down the antennae, which begin to tingle as the two cockroaches are near overwhelmed by tactile and chemical stimuli. This electrically charged S&M foreplay can last as long as two minutes among certain European species, though it has been observed to be remarkably abbreviated or ignored altogether by the male American cockroach, which often simply charges and thrusts its genitals at the female. Scientists have wondered if this behavior explains the infestations of female American cockroaches in the holds of transatlantic flights landing in Paris.
Foreplay over, the male cockroach displays a peculiar lack of interest by turning his back on the female. It is a feint of course, unalloyed sexual interest is the singular characteristic shared by males of all animal species. With his back turned, the male cockroach curls the tip of his abdomen downward, bends his legs to lower his head and thorax, and raises his wings to a sixty-degree angle, revealing a lobe on his seventh abdominal tergite. This lobe, called an excitator, releases the male’s sex pheromone, called seducin. The male’s excitator is small and bristly and yet irresistible to the female, like a cone of rocky road or a medical degree.
Overwhelmed by the seducin and fooled by the male’s submissive posture, the female steps forward, climbs upon the male’s back, wraps her legs around his torso, and begins to nuzzle and lick the excitator.
Suddenly the male pushes backwards, arches his abdomen, and extends his genitals toward those of the female. The longest of the male’s genital hooks reaches up and clamps itself onto the abdominal tip of the female. Once this connection is made, two other smaller hooks reach into the slim genital orifice of the female and grab hold, forming an unbreakable bond between male and female.
The female, as if in reaction to the male’s sudden brutal move, tries to escape from the male and break off contact. She is able at first to move only sideways, stepping off his back and around and around until, still hooked up, she is facing directly away from him.
In this position, tip to tip, the male’s genitals reaching deep inside the female’s, the struggle stops and male and female this way remain, for an hour at least, sometimes far longer, one inside the other, together, motionless except for the slow internal humming of their bodies. They stay connected long enough for the male to slowly transfer to the female an oval-shaped packet called a spermatophore, filled to the brim with sperm.
After copulation, it is cockroach tradition for the female to relax with a dose of urates, a supplemental source of nitrogen donated by the male. In some species, the urates are contained in the shell of the spermatophore itself. After the sperm cells are drained, the spermatophore is pushed out of the abdomen and devoured by the female. In other species, after copulation, the male will raise its wings, direct the tip of his abdomen toward his mate, and from special glands secrete a whitish urate-rich ooze, which is swallowed by the female in a feast that can last many minutes. This part of the process can often be seen, late at night, on the tiny televisions in arthropod motels. With no females to swallow this whitish ooze, an excess of urates can accumulate in the male’s body, bit by bit in a toxic swell, until the male’s own urates eventually poison him, or so young male cockroaches often claim.
The mating ritual completed, the male cockroach parts, quickly, washes his claws of the entire enterprise, and hurries off. Male cockroaches are positively Washingtonian in their determination to avoid foreign entanglements and hold no interest in the newborn nymphs that emerge from the female’s egg capsule many days later, except as a quick snack if hunger strikes. Once safely away, the male cockroach feeds and defecates, scratches his belly, lays a few bets on the silverfish, and awaits the next intoxicating whiff of female pheromone.
Kockroach, feeling more himself than he has since the strange molt, stares at his face in the mirror. He rubs his teeth with a digit of his claw. He twists his ears. Fully dressed now in his cloths, he squeezes his tie tight and places his hat on his head at the jaunty angle. It is time, he knows in his bones, to leave.
Something scurries across the sink. He lifts a glass, turns it over, traps the small brown thing. He leans forward to examine his prize. It is a cockroach. Slowly he lifts the glass. The cockroach remains motionless.
Kockroach reaches down a single digit and gently pets the back of the arthropod. The cockroach seems to lift higher on its legs, responding to the touch.
On the pad where they mated, he sees the female with the yellow hair, Sylvie. She is lying naked, twisted in the white cloths. Her eyes are open and they follow him as he walks about the room. Her grimace is soft and dreamy. As she looks at him, she opens her arms, revealing the mounds on her thorax, two large whitish things, one slightly bigger than the other, both with dark brown tips. Kockroach feels roaring through him the strange desire to fall upon his bent legs and place the dark brown tips in his mouth. But even stronger is the craving to flee. It grows within him like a sickness.
“Gotta run, sweet pea,” he says.
“So soon, handsome?”
“Blatta, blatta, blatta.”
“You know where I’ll be.”
“Lucky me,” he says.
Before he leaves he takes from his wallet a few green papers, as a tribute. He places them on the small table next to the pad, beside the glass which he filled in the bathroom, its amber fluid reaching almost to the rim, its uric acid rich in nitrogen.
Kockroach finds Mite outside the building, leaning against the wall by the door, tossing a silver disk into the air.
“Took your time, didn’t you?” says Mite.
“I’m from out of town.”
“Aw hell, it’s the same everywhere, ain’t it? Except maybe in New Orleans, what with all the Frenchies there.”
“Want to have some fun, honey? You look like you could use it.”
“I got no time for such distractions,” says Mite. “There’s business to attend. You ready?”
“Ready.”
“Remember what I told you? How to play it?”
“Nothing personal, pal, just beeswax.”
“Absolutely.”
Kockroach takes out his wallet and from the wallet takes out the green pieces of paper. “This,” he says.
“Oh yeah, don’t you know it. We’re going to be drowning in it, you and me. That’s what it’s all about.”
“What it’s all about.”
“The pineapple pie.”
Kockroach sticks out his long pink tongue and licks his lips.
“You got it, palsy. It’s you and me, partners to the end.”
“Partners.”
“Attaboy.” Mite pushes himself off the wall and starts to walk down the street. “All right, partner, it’s off to see the wizard.”
8
Was a geezer what hung around the Square name of Tony the Tune, on account of he was always humming to hisself. Missing half his teeth, bent back, wild white hair, voice like a frog, hum hum hum, crazy old Tony the Tune. Had enough money from somewheres that each night at the Automat he would buy hisself from the steam table a Salisbury steak, with masheds and broccoli, two rolls with butter, pick up a cup of joe from the big metal urn, a wedge of lemon meringue from the wall. Many was the night I nursed my single cup of tea and stared longingly as the old mope sat alone and hummed some cheery song to hisself whilst he sopped up the gravy with a thickly buttered roll.
“Hey, Tony. I got something coming down this week, but I’m a little short right now. You got thirty-nine cents you could lend me just till Tuesday?”
“Get away from me, you little scalawag,” he’d spit at me. “I got no time to waste on the likes of you.”
Tony the Tune.
So one night, Tony started coming into the Automat with some beefy-looking pretty-boy blond with dark eyes and arms like legs. Old Tony would shuffle in and the blond would follow behind with his bouncy step. When they sats down at Tony’s table, the blond boy’s tray would be groaning
with sandwiches and fruit and heaping helpings from the steam table while Tony’s tray would have a single orange and a cup of water. Whatever money he had coming in, see, was enough to feed the boy but not hisself in addition, see. They’d sit together and Tony would spend the whole meal patting the boy’s hand, whispering in his ear, opening his milk cartons, humming some Sousa march, fetching straws and napkins, buying more food if the pile on the tray wasn’t enough to fill the boy’s gob.
I figured Tony for a queen in love, simple as that, but it was Sylvie what set me straight. Tony styled hisself a boxing aficionado, spent his days picking up towels at the Gramercy Gym on Fourteenth Street, looking to get his mitts on a palooka with a chance. Now any fighter with any kind of promise could find hisself a sharper manager than old Tony the Tune, so Tony was left to scrape the canvas for the sad saps with slow hands and glass jaws what were dead meat afore ever they stepped into a ring. A no-chancer, such was Tony’s boy, a colorful pug only so long as the colors they was black and blue.