Alvin Garfinkle fought the problem---any problem---and if there weren’t one, he’d beat the bushes until he scared one up. Beginning each morning with lox and cream cheese on a Brillo pad, a glass of imported Hudson River water, and fists raised against the world, this feisty Brooklyn graduate student wasn’t about to let anyone, in a little Midwestern college town, put something over on him.
Alvin’s first problem was the telephone company, and he often fired letters off threatening to disconnect them from his apartment. Sadly, they just didn’t seem to care at all. However, as much as he disliked the telephone company, he despised the student housing authority more, and for awhile, things got pretty personal when he told them what he was going to do to their plumbing with his handy-dandy plunger. Bureaucracy, however, has a way of waiting you out. In this case, all they had to do was to placate Alvin until graduation.
Since Alvin wasn’t a drinking man, W.S. and I knew the situation was serious the day we received his desperate call to come over to witness roaches, which he claimed were swaying across his kitchen counters following the vibrating sound of a North Indian Shehnai.
This woodwind instrument, capable of producing a sound similar to the human voice, with a pitch range of two octaves, played 24 hours a day, and drifted in through the vents from the apartment next door. Alvin swore that no one lived there (he’d never seen anyone) and that the housing authority was conspiring to drive him out. Admittedly, 24 hours of someone else’s music takes some getting used to, but neither W.S. nor I witnessed the dance of the roaches, because we refused to look.
Shehnai music in constancy didn’t seem to bother Alvin’s wife, Bunny at all. She was a librarian from South Dakota who would smile and nod a lot. They seemed extremely well matched. Some would say, “Bunny is attractively quiet.” That was because Bunny never talked---not even a little bit. However, being married to Alvin made her one heck of a good listener.
Finally, North India and the cockroaches won the battle, and the Garfinkles decided to move. It was a monumental decision, because now they became the movingest, unpackingest people in town as they began the great apartment odyssey. It wasn’t that they disliked all of their apartments, but their dancing roaches had become attached to them, and Alvin, in spite of all of his innovative ideas, for the first time in his life, couldn’t come up with a single way to get rid of them. The Garfinkles finally settled for an old stone house with a root cellar handy for storing boxes filled with household pests.
In the ensuing years, we never saw a single roach anywhere---probably because the Garfinkles had all of them. After graduation, they moved to New Jersey. We figure they did it just to spite the bugs.
Esther Blumenfeld
CROSSING WITH THE BLUE LIGHT, Blumenfeld c. 2006