It’s already begun. It’s barely May and I can hear a bug out there in the dark, no doubt some relative of the
little bastard that is chewing up my green beans as soon
as they peek out of the dirt. It starts out an innocuous, barely-noticeable
screeeeeee in the background, something I certainly wouldn’t hear if I had the
AC running. “Cricket,” you’re probably thinking, but that’s what they want
you to think. By mid-July (and, God forbid, August), that dainty
nightime screeee has become a roaring Rrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. It’s the
sound of bugs celebrating. They’re after me, and every summer, they think
they’ll win.
My paranoia is not without foundation. With only one exception, I’ve spent
every summer of my life in Texas, the first 15 years without air
conditioning! My youth was spent in a world where a tear in the window
screen was an issue, believe you me. If one bit of mesh had a rip that
could be seen only with the aid of an electron microscope, I could be certain
that every mosquito in five counties would not only squeeze through it, but
also take the time to personally visit my ear as I attempted to drift off into
sweaty sleep. Zzzzz, Zzzzz, Twack!
As a girl, I’d walk in the woods, everything still damp from the morning.
Displaying all the pastoral harmony of a mugger, nature would test both my
depth perception and self-preservation instincts. As I plodded along, my eyes,
at a calamitous moment, would lock into perspective on a spider web the size of
a parachute. A giant black and yellow spider, hanging from the trees,
floated inches from my face. This monster would look at me with the voracious
glee of a Hard Copy reporter locked in a room with a camera, fresh
batteries, and a recently released O.J. juror. Great Zen masters and Siegfried
& Roy are not the only people on earth who can levitate – I’ve propelled myself backwards at mach five with many a woodland creature as
witness.
(An aside, then, on my sole bugless summer. London – no bug could live there; it’s far too wet and cold, and, as the British would
say, “It just isn’t done.” You need sun for bugs, something I didn’t realize
until I lived in England. Even roaches, night creatures that sneeze at
radiation, lose spirit in the dreariness and make their way to port cities, to
board ships and head for climates more conducive to insect life. These
migratory patterns go a long way toward explaining conditions at my first
garage apartment in sunny Austin – I’d turn on the light in the kitchen, and 12 billion of my antennaed housemates
would look up in unison, cry out “‘Ello? Bloody ‘ell!,” and then, umbrellas in
hand, scatter in an orderly queue.)
I still try to hold out against air conditioning for as long as I can stand
it, in some sick effort to prove to myself that I’m not a weenie, but instead a
Texan, goddamnit! With doors and windows flung wide open, I hear them
grow louder every day, tinnitus with legs, those screeching bugs. I believe
that on summer nights, generations of bugs that have messed with me get
together in the yard to hold a pep rally. By August, the mosquitoes and the
roaches and the spiders and the flies and all their kith and kin are beginning
to believe that they will overcome, and drive me back to Ireland or Germany or
wherever the insects are less boisterous. (They don’t know that I hold the
trump card – winter.) On summer nights, when I’m locked in my sterile,
air-conditioned bunker, the bugs are optimistic, and, possession being
nine-tenths and all, they know they’re the real Texans.
This article appears in May 19 • 1995 and May 19 • 1995 (Cover).