Los Angeles is a Fantastic Land Filled with Mythical Beasts

I found my second cockroach last night. My old roommate and reader of the blog, Florian (Hello, Florian) found the first one in our kitchen, and trapped it in a Pringles can (by the way, after you put the can on the cockroach, how’d you flip it over and get the top on it? Impressive). We studied the cockroach through the clear plastic lid, and then threw the sealed Pringles can into the dumpster outside.

And at some point, that cockroach escaped, and over the course of four and a half months, journeyed back to the same kitchen, this time with something to prove.

I smashed him with a metal sauce pot. In my defense, I tried to take a page from Florian’s book and trap him, and then I guess throw the sauce pot away with the cockroach inside. If I had started out planning to smash him I would have used the cast iron skillet, which is only for punishment, whereas the sauce pot sacrifices some of its smashing ability in exchange for the ability to contain things, leaving open the possibility of an insect’s rehabilitation and eventual release. But I missed when I tried to put the inverted sauce pot on him, and rather than risk him escaping, I re-inverted the pot and hit him with it. And then, because somebody (probably Florian) told me that cockroaches can survive heavy blows like being stepped on, I dragged the sauce pot along the floor for a few feet, leaving a long brown line of former cockroach. Which I immediately cleaned up, because cockroaches eat the bodies of other dead cockroaches, so the place where the line was is now actually cleaner than the rest of the floor.

My hope is that this cockroach was just a fluke, a bug in the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe a bug in the right place, right time, that wanted to die. The point is this apartment has had an infestation before, but with ants.


A lot of times around the middle of a commercial I’m working on, I’ll fall into a routine of eating dinner from a drive thru as I race home from work, so that I can get to sleep as soon as possible because I have to be back at work in seven hours. And then when the job ends, I’m faced with an indefinitely long weekend where I can reflect on how dilapidated my apartment has gotten while I was working on the commercial. This happened to me at the end of a set of two commercials, back to back, when I came home and found a line of ants coming into the kitchen through the window, and marching across the wall into my cupboard. They had found a box of cereal, and were covering the outside. I wiped up the ants with a paper towel, and threw the towel and the cereal box in the dumpster outside.

But an hour later when I came back to the kitchen, I found an entirely new line of ants, this time going into a bag of tortilla chips. My new roommate, Jay, (who doesn’t read the blog, because I haven’t told him about it) saw the problem, and said that using Windex on ants kills them by dissolving their exoskeletons. He said it as a joke, like “wouldn’t that suck?” but this turns out to be a really good strategy when you need to kill hundreds of ants in a short amount of time, and you’re running out of paper towels.


So I killed the second line of ants, threw away all the food I owned that wasn’t canned or unopened, and left a little puddle of Windex at the base of the window as a warning to new ants. And the next day, came into the kitchen and found a new line of ants, coming in the window and marching around the puddle, up the wall, into my cupboard and finally into a (sealed!) box of Honey Bunches of Oats. I Windexed the ants and threw away all my food that wasn’t canned, and went to Home Depot for ant poison.

The ant poison worked after about four days. The ants are supposed to take the poison out of the trap and back to the colony, and share it with all their friends, and then die. At first, ants were just climbing over the poison, up the wall, and into my cupboard, where there was no more food. I put a second trap by the window, and by day three the ants were congregating around the trap but not going in. I put a third trap by the window, and after the fourth day, there were suddenly no more ants, and I haven’t seen any since.

So I’ve survived one infestation here, but according to the internet, poison often doesn’t work on cockroaches, because apparently they taste their food before actually eating it (clever bastards). The other sticky traps you can buy attract the cockroaches and then kill them, but until I see more around, I don’t want to bring any product into the house that proudly proclaims “Attracts Cockroaches!”


You’re probably thinking that I live in a disgusting insect infested apartment and now you’re never going to visit me, and you’re right, but you were never going to visit me anyway. In my defense, my boss lives in a nice house, in a nice part of Los Angeles, and also has problems with Los Angeles beasts.

We often work out of his garage, which sits behind his house. One night, I was staring out the open garage door at my boss’s house, and saw something climb out of a tiny hole in his roof, run across the shingles, and jump onto a nearby tree. At first I thought it was a squirrel, but noticed the tail as it was running, and figured out mid-jump that it was, in fact, a rat. So not only do they approach the size of squirrels, the rats in Los Angeles can also climb trees.

My boss also has an iguana named Napoleon, whose cage he paid me to clean out once (for more on random tasks that have nothing to do with my skill-set, see the “Dirty Jobs with Mark Brinker” post.) While I was hosing the tank in the backyard, my boss told me that he had found the iguana burrowing under a neighbor’s house, trying to escape a stray cat. In other words, it’s a wild Californian iguana.

Or possibly my friend Emily Schmidt(who may or may not read the blog)’s iguana, which escaped into the walls of her house, where she assumed it died. More likely though, it traveled two thousand miles to California, where my boss found and recaptured it. The smell in your house was probably a decoy, left by the iguana, so you wouldn’t come looking for it. If you want Napoleon, or whatever his name was when you owned him, I can probably spring him for you, but you’ll have to come to Los Angeles to pick him up.

Well that’s enough shout outs for one blog posting. The moral of the story is that in Los Angeles I’ve discovered a magical garden of wonderous creatures, like that episode of TaleSpin where Balloo and Kit Cloud Kicker find an island where dinosaurs still exist, but have to keep it a secret so that the Air Pirates won’t exploit it. I know somebody besides me remembers that episode.