36) Lord of The Flies*

Bzzzzzzzzzz…. Zzzzzzt…. Zzzzzzzttt…

You scanned the room, your toothbrush in your mouth as you turned away from the double sink and mirrors. Where was that coming from?

Zzzzzzzz….. ZZZZZZZZtttt….

There on the floor, over by the pot of flowers and the tall white grow light there was a single fly belly up, struggling in a vain attempt to right itself. You had once read that dead or dying insects will wind up on their backs because of blood flow issues that make their legs fold, causing the top heavy creatures to flip. You found it difficult though to find any sort of compassion for the dying fly… you also couldn’t bring yourself to wad it up into a ball of toilet paper and toss it into the trash can. It wasn’t that you felt bad about doing so, rather the feeling of the live fly buzzing through the paper made you want to wretch. You’d let it die before you tossed it.

This had been going on since day one. There always seemed to be the errant fly in the bathroom or guest bedroom. Sometimes there would be two or three… they’d either be buzzing about the room, or upside down crawling across the ceiling before they dropped down and flew about the room, just out of reach and tormenting your cat. Sometimes the cat would win, catching the fly mid flight with a fury of sheathed claws and sharp teeth. Then there would be the dead flies… you’d find a few on the ground… sometimes one, sometimes two or more. There seemed to be a steady trickle of the disgusting things coming from some unknown source.

At first their occupation made sense… often times the doors would be left open to bring in boxes or sheets of plywood. Many of the few windows that actually did open had screens that didn’t quite fit tightly in the frame, revealing little gaps that bugs could easily slip through. There was never really any abundance or regularity to the found flies downstairs and their presence always coincided with propped doors while a parade of supplies was brought inside. Upstairs however they were a near (albeit small) constant.

At first you hadn’t really minded too much. In Florida you fought a never ending battle against termites and Palmetto bugs. When a switch plate would be replaced or a ceiling light removed, there would always be the accompanying rain of tiny black specks…. tens of thousands of termite droppings. It wasn’t just your home though, it was all homes, new… old… modest… multi-million dollar… the bugs were just barely kept at bay.

And it was the exact same thing with the Palmetto bugs, massive cockroachs. They weren’t anything like a German roach in that unlike a German roach where when you saw one there were thousands, the Palmetto bug was a ‘lone wolf’ that often found it’s way in; seeking shelter from too much rain or looking for water when there was too little. Also unlike German roaches, Palmetto bugs didn’t seek out dirty environments. You could keep your house in absolutely immaculate condition and yet they’d still find their way in. Sometimes you’d be watching TV and one would scamper across the floor sending you into a panic… you’d scream for your husband or your eldest son who didn’t seem at all bothered by them. They’d wad up some toilet paper or paper towels and chase the large roach across the room until they could stomp it out and toss the carcass, legs still twitching… into the trash can. Sometimes though the bug would escape and you’d have to leave the room… not venturing back in for hours. Every so often you’d just find pieces of them… the cat getting to the unlucky roach before your husband or son could.

Now in the church just out of both habit and expectation, you often found yourself bracing for an onslaught of frass every time you pulled out an old board… expecting the disgusting pellets to rain down on you. And every time you’d yank out a plank or remove a switch plate you’d be shocked by their absence. You still jumped months later, when an errant leaf had been tracked into the house… expecting it to scuttle away under a box or cupboard.

“I didn’t realize the bug PTSD I have from living in Florida for twenty years,” you had said to David one day.

“Oh I know! I keep thinking I saw a Palmetto or that I’m going to get covered in termite crap every time I pull up a board.”

The most shocking thing though, wasn’t that there were no Palmetto bugs or termites to be found… the shocking thing was that you saw virtually no evidence of any type of bug when you gutted the basement or pulled planks from any of the ceilings. Sure there was an occasional centipede (you could count the number of times you had seen one in the church on one hand) and a bizarre amount of ladybugs in the guest bedroom, a few little spiders here and there (they didn’t bother you in the least), and even the armored looking stink bug that intermittently snuck in…

But these disgusting flies were finally beginning to get to you. It wasn’t even that they were coming inside in swarms… the issue was the regularity… they couldn’t be written off as a “one off.”

The kids would vacuum the bathroom floor one day, sucking up the upturned insects only to find several more the very next morning. In the guest room, one of the front double paned windows was cracked clean through… the middle of the window was filled with dozens of dead flies. You kept the curtain closed. You couldn’t wait to replace those windows (unfortunately you had to).

When winter came you no longer found the dead, dying, or flying insects anywhere in the house but the primary bathroom and guest room. You could no longer assume, given the sub zero temperatures outside, that they were originating from the church’s exterior.

Even more strange was that their presence was confined to just those two rooms.

“The fly thing is really starting to gross me out,” you had said to David, drying your hands off with a bathroom towel before you pointed to the insect struggling to right itself up off the bathroom floor. “I really assumed that come winter we’d be done with them.”

“Me too.”

“It’s strange that we’re only finding them in here and the guest room too.”

“I had thought about that.”

“You think they’re coming from the attic?”

“I mean it makes sense,” he said looking up at the bathroom ceiling where the access panel to the attic was screwed in… an old hinge had broken and now the ladder no longer stayed in place on its own. One more thing to address on a never ending list. Above the bathroom was another room that the previous owners had wanted to turn into an office. That had made no sense to either of you, imagine wanting to go into your office or to come out of it only to find your partner sitting on the toilet? The space above the bathroom had high ceilings and 12 small windows, three on every side. The windows were each about eight feet off the ground David had guessed. He could just about reach the bottoms of them when he had gone up there.

“Well that’s going to be a whole other project,” he had lamented after climbing out of the attic last summer to inspect the little furnace that provided heat to the bedrooms and bathroom.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s nasty up there… you would be so grossed out. It’s pretty much a bio hazard situation; I’m going to have to go in there with a full suit and respirator.”

“What???”

“Yeah, It’s loaded with pigeon shit… the pigeons were getting in there.”

“Oh my god! That’s freaking gross! So then when the furnace goes on do we have to worry about it pulling air from the pigeon crap attic?”

“No… the air intake is coming from the exterior of the church… you can actually see it from the side yard…”

“Well I guess that’s a small win then…”

“The other win is that I don’t think the pigeons are able to get in there anymore. The droppings look really old. It looks like everything is sealed up… so once we…”

“Once you,” you corrected him, “I’m not going up there…”

“Once I clean it all out… we should be good to go…”

Remembering that conversation now you asked David… “Do you think that the flies are coming in from the pigeon crap or the attic up above us?”

“Well… I don’t think they’re coming from the old bird crap… it’s practically dust it’s so old and the only other thing I can think of is if something was dead up there but… if something was dead we would have smelled it… and seeing as this attic isn’t connected to the other attic, what would be the chance that there just happened to be two dead things in each attic that we couldn’t smell? So maybe but I don’t know Vaness… I’ve fully inspected both of the attics and there is nowhere that pigeons could get in. At some point they were getting into both attics (he had found the mummified remains of a few dead birds in the massive attic over the sanctuary) but not anymore.”

“Huh… well none of this makes any sense then… because flies are not going to be congregating on decade old pigeon crap, there’s nothing actively rotting… we would have smelled it… and there are no holes large enough for any new pigeons to get in…”

“Maybe it’s a plague,” David joked.

“I guess it beats locusts.”

****************************************************************

There was no explanation that either one of you could come up with and yet every day you’d find a few dead flies on the ground or one crawling across the bathroom or guest room ceiling. The ladybugs you could deal with, the occasional spider visiting you in the shower didn’t worry you in the least; you found the occasional stinkbug inhabitance fascinating… watching their little tank like bodies make their way across the slate floor and window sills… the flies though were really starting to get to you.

At this point you had a social media account for the church on vitually every platform. Some you were far more active on than others. Most of your content was video based… nearly all of it… but every now and then there was church content that lent itself better to text. Last week’s bat encounter was one such occasion… though you had written the tale about rescuing a bat on THREADS before it died and you brought its corpse up to Veronica’s rescue, you had gotten so much flack for “not getting your rabies vaccine,” on the platform that you never bothered to go back and update the story. While the post didn’t exactly go viral it had been one of your more popular ‘threads’ with nearly two hundred comments… most of which were telling you what a moron you were for not getting your rabies vaccine (despite reassuring followers and strangers alike that the bat expert had told you that is was wholly unnecessary)… “SHE DOESN’T WORK FOR THE CDC… OBVIOUSLY SHE DOESN’T HAVE A CLUE… SHE SHOULD LOSE HER LICENSING… YADA, YADA, YADA…”. The last thing you were going to do was update it to let everyone know the bat was dead… They’d probably tell you what a jackass you were for not cutting off the bat’s head and driving it another god only knows how many hours to the bat head rabies checking location… wherever that might be.

But something made you check the notifications that day. “How many people were calling you an idiot today?” You had mused when you saw the little heart with the red dot letting you know that there was activity on the post. Always down for some public humiliation you clicked the heart to read the comments and yes, there were even more telling you just how dumb you were… but… one had caught your attention. It read:

“There was a church I read about that had a huge bat issue. The problem was so big that the nuns actually gathered up all the guano and sold it. They made a fortune off of it and used it to fix their church…”

HOLY FUCKING SHIT you thought, IT’S THE FUCKING BAT GUANO. IT’S THE BATS! THE PIGEONS CAN’T GET IN… BUT THE BATS CAN! AND THAT’S WHERE THE FUCKING FLIES ARE COMING FROM! WE DIDN’T SEE THE BAT CRAP IN THE SUMMER BECAUSE THEY WEREN’T UP THERE HIBERNATING AT THE TIME!!!

And with that you jumped up out of your chair and ran down the stairs…

“David! I figured out the fly problem! And it’s actually a bat problem…,” you yelled when you ran into the basement to find David up on a ladder.

******************************************************

Later that night as you laid in bed, you couldn’t help but think of the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” or “Bacon's Law…” a game where one would choose an actor whom they then connect to another actor via a film in which both actors appeared: this was repeated to try to find the shortest path to the actor Kevin Bacon. The game rested on the assumption that anyone involved in the Hollywood film industry could be linked through their film roles to Bacon within six steps. And you wondered if maybe there happened to be a “Six Degrees of the Big Brown Bat,” at play in the church…

The flies were easy: just one degree of separation from the bats… from roost to attic floor really… but you were asleep before you had a chance to link the bees, and the trees, and the neighborhood feral cats, to the Big Brown Bats… given a little more time though, you were fairly certain that at some point you could link them all.

Above: This is one of the two attics. This one is MASSIVE (roughly 3,000 square feet) and located just above the sanctuary. It took us a bit to find the access to this one. We knew this attic existed but we weren’t sure how to get in… our real estate agent wasn’t quite sure either. David eventually ended up finding the access off of the guest room… there is a door in there that leads to a little primitive “staircase” that takes you up to the belfry tower (I use the term “staircase” very loosely as it is far more just boards nailed to the wall in a diagonal direction than it is actual stairs). There’s a bunch of foam board insulation up in that access and David noticed a draft in there; when he moved the foam board, there was the attic on the other side. Took us a few weeks to find it… granted we weren’t really spending too much time looking lol… but still.

Below: Close up of the back half of the attic. The two windows on the right are original stained glass but you really can’t tell from this picture or even when you’re standing outside (we’d like to put some light boxes behind them at some point so that they light up at night). To the left of the windows is a chimney that ends in the attic (kind of weird). We suspect that the main leak in the sanctuary is originating from this area. At this point (if you can’t beat em’ join em’) we have decided to put a plastic liner up there that drains into a drainpipe that we will have drain out of the side of the building… we have been trying in absolute vain to find the source of this leak and while we haven’t given up… the reality is that it could be a LONG time before we figure it out and get this leak fixed… In the meantime we’re at the very least, hoping to keep the water from doing any more damage. Not exactly a conventional solution but this isn’t exactly a conventional endeavor!

If I had to choose between flies and Palmetto bugs there would be no question… I’d take the flies all day long… there is just something so incredibly disturbing about the sheer size of a Palmetto bug. Honestly before I moved to Florida I had never even seen a cockroach. When David and I first went down to Pinellas County to scout out apartments we stopped at one of the bridges that go out over the bay and got out to stretch our legs and admire the view. There were rocks along the jetty and I always loved walking on the rocks at my grandparent’s beach house in CT and their Florida condo. Which means that I of course had to walk along the rocks to see if there was any cool marine life or treasures that had been washed up into the crevices.

I remember looking quickly and seeing a bunch of tiny crabs scatter. This was pretty common in CT to see a bunch of little crabs running around on the rocks. I called David over to check it out… I think I said something like, “Hey David, come check out the baby crabs!” And he came over and looked at them, then me and said, “Uhhhh… those are German roaches…” and I obviously freaked the fuck out. Understandably.

We wound up moving to Clearwater a few months after that trip and into a cute little apartment complex shaded with huge oak trees draped in Spanish moss. After finding the apartment though, I saw a yelp review of the complex and someone mentioned having roaches in their apartment. I freaked out (again) because that is literally my nightmare. So when we signed the lease I made them add an addendum that if there was any type of roach infestation in our apartment that we could break the lease with no penalties and get our full deposit back. They were so insistent on not having roaches there that they let me add it. They also came by and sprayed for bugs monthly.

All of my fears were soothed and we moved in on Friday October 13th, 2006. A few weeks in and I was watching the Discovery Channel. There was a show on there about animal ‘infestations’ and before I could find the remote to change the channel (I had a pretty good idea what was about to come up)… they had a bit on German roaches. Basically the take away was that if you see one, there are probably 1,000 that you don’t see. If you see more than one you might as well just set the place on fire… I added that last takeaway but you get my point. Now up until this point I was not privy to roaches… I had just seen my first ones a few months prior. To me… a roach was a roach was a roach.

About two weeks go by and it was late. David had gotten into bed and I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. There was a shower / tub combo and we had a dark shower curtain so you could not see in or out of the tub when the curtain was closed. I always kept it closed. As I was brushing my teeth I heard a very faint sound. It sounded like something tinny coming from the tub. The sound reminded me of the sound I’d hear when I was fiddling with the drain plug at my old childhood home. When I took a step back from the sink to listen, the noise had stopped. I figured that either I was just hearing something or that maybe since David had showered not too long before I came into the bathroom, that I was probably hearing some residual water dripping from the faucet and into the drain. Except the dripping had stopped a bit too quickly and as soon as I went back over to the sink, the sound started up again… but this time I could tell that it wasn’t a dripping sound, more like something moving inside of the drain.

Now I don’t know what I was expecting to find. What should one expect to find (that wouldn’t be absolutely horrifying) coming up out of their drain? I don’t know… but what I did find, I most definitely was not expecting. I opened up that shower curtain and looked down at the drain and right in front of it, to my horror was a roach the size of my fucking pink bedazzled razor phone. The thing was so big in fact that when I saw it and it saw me, I saw it’s face turn up to look at me and could clearly see every single absolutely disgusting feature on its massive head. I jumped back and started screaming bloody murder at the same time that this thing jumped backwards then proceeded to try and scatter somewhere in the tub which basically meant that it just kept running in fast circles. I ran out of the bathroom and slammed the door just as David jumped out of bed… he had been sound asleep, and he was trying in his stupefied half sleep induced state, to figure out what in the ever loving fuck was happening.

When I finally managed to make coherent sounds, words, and sentences come out of my mouth I screamed that there was the biggest roach that I had ever seen in my life in our tub. Which David probably found ridiculous considering I had only ever seen those tiny ones with him a few months prior… but he humored me and didn’t point that out. Instead he sighed, told me to go in the other room and that he’d take care of it. He went into the living room, grabbed one of his flip flops and went to the bathroom. He opened the door, prepared to do battle with the thin rubber sole before closing the door behind him.

I was beside myself waiting for the kill to be over, too afraid to even step on the floor barefoot, but I did manage to hear him open the curtain and a brief pause before hearing him exclaim, “HOLY SHIT!” And then the curtain closed, the door flew open, he flew out, ran into our utility closet and ran back out with a massive hammer before running back into the bathroom. The only logical explanation at that point, based on everything I had seen thus far was that the roach had probably grabbed the sandal out of his hand and tossed it at him before lighting a cigarette and telling David to “get fucked.”

Then a second later David came back out of the bathroom with the hammer, he looked a lot less sleepy at this point, practically threw it onto the table then started frantically searching the kitchen for something. “DID YOU GET IT???” I wanted to know… and he told me “NO, AND SHUT THE BEDROOM DOOR!” So I did and ran back to the bed then held myself while I rocked back and forth while chanting, “there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…”

In the bathroom I heard what sounded like a struggle, or two grown men fist fighting and then I heard the bathroom door open. I heard David walking into our living room. I heard our sliding glass door out to our little second story balcony open and then close. Then a few minutes of silence before the slider opened and closed and I heard footsteps walking back towards the bedroom door. At this point I braced myself just in case the giant roach had won the scuffle and tossed David’s carcass off the balcony to his friends before coming to collect me. Luckily David opened the door… “Well that thing was fucking huge,” then he got into bed and closed his eyes. I was still rocking back and forth and started yelling about not being able to be in that apartment and I was going to go sleep in the car until the office opened up in the morning at which point I’d be breaking our lease.

I don’t know what exactly David said to calm me down because I was freaking the fuck out. All I could think of was that show on the Discovery Channel about the infestations and how if there was one… there were at least 1,000 more waiting for the lights to go off. Then my imagination got the best of me (I know… hard to believe), and I pictured that old Sesame Street skit where Bert and Ernie are trying to get to sleep and Bert starts counting sheep and the next thing you know there were dozens of sheep in their bedroom and they carry off Bert’s bed with him in it screaming to Ernie for help (“We’ll Dance Ourselves To Sleep” is the Sesame Street skit if you’re curious)… Except my vision didn’t include sheep… it included that massive freak of nature in the tub and 999 of his friends and relatives.

The compromise ended up being that I was not going to go sleep in my car (point for David), but that I was going to go down to the office the second they opened (point for me) and that we would also be ‘sleeping’ with every single light on in the apartment (point for me… though is anyone actually winning anything in this situation? The answer is no… there were no winners here). Neither one of us slept well… David because every single light was on (including every flashlight I could find) and me because I was still terrified that those thing would just come back in ski masks totally bypassing the bright lights and carry us both off… besides David never told me what he had done with that thing and honestly I didn’t want to know.*

The rental office opened at 9:00 am but I was already there at 8:30 am when the leasing agents got there and was yapping a mile a minute about gigantic roaches and needing out of my lease while that poor woman was just trying to unlock the front door and enjoy 30 minutes of solitude before lunatics like myself started showing up. When I told her the harrowing tale of the previous night and told her that the roach was at least the size of a cereal box and that my husband practically had to hog tie the thing and drag it outside (I guess this was like the equivalent of the fish story where the huge one got away, but “you just had to see it” and with every new telling of the story… the fish managed to grow another six inches). By the time I had explained everything to the maintenance man that had been called into the office to calm me down… David was riding this thing like a bucking bronco.

The maintenance man told me that there was absolutely no roach problem because he was constantly working in the apartments and had never seen them and they sprayed monthly and my jaw just about dropped because why the fuck was this guy gaslighting me… I knew what I saw… but then he explained that there was the occasional Palmetto bug…

Of course I wanted to know then, “WTF is a Palmetto bug and why does it look exactly like a thoroughbred 17 hand high cockroach?!” And he explained to me that it basically was a cockroach… but not the infesting kind. That every once in a while one would make its way up the tub drain or under a door and that they didn’t come in a pack or herd or whatever I had been stammering on about and that I should probably seek psychological help and would I please get the fuck out of the leasing office so that they could enjoy their coffee before the next psychotic lunatic walked in to yell about trolls in their pantry closet. I still was not buying it… I have to say they were incredibly patient… I wasn’t being a jerk about it… but I was terrified… and they were kind enough to hop on the computer and look up Palmetto bugs and read about how they don’t hang out in groups of 1,000 and that it was safe to go back to my apartment and that I should just get something to put over the drain.

Like I said, these folks were pretty nice about the whole thing which kind of made me feel bad when months later, David brought a shoe box filled with bloody, nearly headless rats into the leasing office and plopped it on the agent’s desk (after she and the maintenance man told us there wasn’t a rat issue… turned out that WAS gaslighting… and we had the receipts, or in this case 3’ of rats crammed into a work boot box to prove it). Also turned out the maintenance man who had sworn there were no roaches (or rats) had the same visceral reaction to rats that I had to roaches and was psychologically disturbed after having to take the box off the horrified leasing agent’s desk to toss into the closest dumpster… and we found this out because we saw him a few months later at a local bar and we bought him a few rounds of drinks to make up for the scarring. In all fairness though, the rat situation that we “didn’t have” and had complained about for weeks was solved in exactly 15 minutes after that work boot box of rodents was plopped down onto the leasing agent’s desk… but here I am getting off onto a tangent because this story was about Palmetto bug and not giant rats.

So anyway… crisis averted… I did not break our lease, I did buy the drain cover thing that very same day, I did finally sleep that night and I didn’t even make David keep the lights on. I did eventually have my first real roach infestation introduction a few years later when we went to a party at a friends’ house. They had a really cool little apartment and a big party and on account of the party being big and the apartment being small, we partied in the courtyard under string lights. They had made a huge spread of food. There were finger sandwiches and little puff pastries with spinach and cheese and a cheese and meat board and pie and cupcakes…. I had come hungry (per their instructions) and I proceeded to feast on everything and anything there. It wasn’t until later on in the evening when the wine caught up with me that I went into their apartment for the first time to use their bathroom, marvelled at how cute it was (old claw foot tub, soaring ceilings, transom windows over the doors) and was given a quick tour. In the kitchen on the table and counters was the rest of the food that was periodically being brought down to replenish what was eaten… along with several roaches that scattered from the food and back into the toaster when they noticed they had company.

Was that a definitive life changing experience for me?

Yes.

Have I eaten food from a person’s kitchen without personally seeing said kitchen in the almost two decades since?

That’s gonna be a NO from me.

I guess all of this is to say that yes… flies are definitely disgusting… but roaches AND Palmetto bugs are nightmare fuel. And I’ll gladly take the guano guests over the toaster tenants any day.

*One last note because you may be curious about the roach that David disposed of. He did not in fact ride it out to the dumpster and shoot it in the head like some sort of hideous old Yeller’ tale. What he did do though was catch it in a huge Tupperware container, box it up then slip the container under the grill’s top out on the balcony so I wouldn’t see it (because I don’t grill and also he didn’t want me to lose my shit again)… except three months later when it was finally cool enough to grill outside on our little balcony, David who had forgotten about the Palmetto bug in the Tupperware container opened the grill to find the freak of nature STILL ALIVE in the box. Anyway… scarred all over again. Fuck those Palmetto bugs.

Jackie likes to tease me about never wearing the appropriate footwear but…. Maybe she’s been hanging out with me too long!

Here’s a full tour of the church and the floorplan. The attic is shown at the very end.

L