The Exterminator

The exterminator was a little man. The sort of man who wouldn't mind his own business. Who busted in and ruined everyone's good time because it paid a few bucks and it was easy. He probably wasn't having sex with anyone. He probably had a Bible he read as he drank his milk, but The Ten Commandments were negotiable, and he'd put it down and jerk off to Vanna White on The Wheel of Fortune as she touched those consonants and vowels so luridly. But midstroke, there was Pat Sajak's leathery mit of a face, blabbering, and he'd lose it. At least, he wasn't looking at pornography magazines. This was wholesome. This was practically Lassie running through a prarie, getting help for little Timmy who'd fallen in a well. 

He was shaving years off his life with all those chemicals he was breathing in, despite the costume. He could have done a thousand other things. No one becomes an exterminator because they have no other options. It isn't like people who retread tires or wash dishes at some restaurant up the street because they want to work but aren't skilled enough to do anything else. No. It ain't like that at all. He could sell insurance or work at an airport or in a prison or teach history or math or work at the autoparts store selling carburetors to grease monkeys who all tell the same bad jokes. He could mow grass or plant trees. He could work at the motel and check happy people in and out. Make sure their stay was wonderful and their pillows were fluffed and their HBO worked. Make sure their Gideon's was neatly tucked in the bedside end table drawer, just in case they got the hankering. 

No. This motherfucker bursts in like he is Jules from Pulp Fiction, spraying the place, quoting Ezekiel. "The path of the righteous man," he proclaims. I know what he does when he goes home because I somehow survived one of his many massacres. I saw the grin on his face under the fogged-up mask. I heard his words through raspy muffled breaths. I caught a ride on his pant leg and when he took off that banana-yellow suit, I jumped to his jeans, the unoriginal bastard, and hid in the cuff of his pants. I wanted to see what his home life was like because I had an amateur interest in homo sapiens. I think too much for a bug, other bugs say. I am not simply the self-gratifying sort, eating food droppings and humping loose bugs on unwashed motel quilts. I want to know why we are being exterminated and I figured the cradle of that knowledge begins with a simple who. 

Who? This brainless instrument of death is but one of many. There are entire companies of him. Hives. Colonies. This purveyor of poison. This little man and his rubber boots who breathes in a tenth of what he sprays, despite the ventilator and suit and who will undoubtedly die ten, fifteen years before his usual expiry, all to kill bugs that other people dislike for whatever reason they do. To be an Adolph Hitler, a Josef Stalin, a Pol Pot of bugdom. But who aspires to kill? To slowly kill themselves in the act? I contend that one does not ever contribute to death without killing themselves in the process. To kill is to be killed. But to give life is to live.

I watched him for a week or so from the safety of a waxy leaf of a thirsty houseplant in a terrible brown plastic pot. One of those leafy green pothos plants that some call the devil's ivy that even the most inept of homo sapiens can't kill. Same usual routine. TV dinners, milk, and Vanna White. He never climaxes. His self-pleasuring fizzles and his erection goes limp and he sighs a discontented sigh and then falls asleep in his recliner with his pants undone and the TV dinner tray laying there like a discarded hubcap and he snores. Loudly he snores. 

I could have stayed there in that houseplant. There were other bugs there who seemed like good folks and who found it curious that I had hitched a ride on the pant leg of the white devil, as they called him. There was a very flirtatious ladybug and apparently no cannibals around. No killers. No spiders or ants or praying mantises. Fuck them. Just a quiet community of good bugs living in harmony. I asked them if they knew what his name was. 

"Who?" a flea inquired. 

"The white devil down there. In the recliner."

"No," a perturbed housefly scoffed. "Why would we want to know his name?"

"Well," I considered. "It is precisely that we do not know his name, and he doesn't know ours, so that our sentience is thus diminished, utterly negated, and his humanity is consequently and adequately numbed. There is no moral quandry to kill someone who is anonymous. There is no communication between us and them, therefore, there is a basic lack of understanding. Animals have it no better. Though they moo, though they oink, though they cluck, they don't get through. They are subjected to far worse than are we. This species is a peculiarly self-centered one. I know of their fondness for the honeybee, though even that is not universal, and that is only because they serve an interest. Without the honeybee, they all die. Our very right to live is negated by our perceived nuisance to them and their right to enjoy the pleasure of living without us. To be left alone. Arms, legs, antennas up for all the times you've been called 'a fucking bug.'"

"You're weird, young fella," an elderly cricket with only one leg replied. "You think too much. It's common knowledge they don't have intelligible thought or any sense of decency. Though they are human, they have no humanity."

Despite me seeing evidence to the contrary, I didn't argue with my elder. I once witnessed a child open a window for a dying fly at the motel. I witnessed a lady tell a man not to crush a beetle that was on the bedspread, and instead trapped him in a cup and relocated him to the patio. I've witnessed humanity, which, I suppose, is what is so befuddling to me that there exists the exterminator. Where is it lost? Where is it found?

"Well, maybe so, old timer," I said. "But someday bugs will be as big as dogs and cats. Fucking on motel beds in the middle of the day and watching free HBO of other bugs fucking other bugs. Ordering room service. And this exterminator will burst in like John Wayne, spraying for dear life. Rather, for dear death!"

"Here! Here!" they all cheered. 

Everyone laughed, satisfied by my playful prognostication, and I said goodbye and flew away. I don't suppose I'll go back to the motel. But, still, I can't help but to wonder where we're bound.