When I was an attendant at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, a co-worker introduced me to a book. I was already an avid consumer of books and had previously spent four years as a page in the closed stacks of the University of Pittsburgh’s library. But this book, according to the pitch to me by the university student, was about a roach.
One of my early memories of childhood is of being in bed with my brother, waiting for Santa Claus, and hearing my mother alerting my drunken father to the presence of a roach in the caboose of the train set they were trying to assemble that Christmas Eve. Curled beneath the covers, I listened to explosive exhalations as my father tried to blow the roach from the caboose. The one room that my parents occupied with the first three of their children was in a brick building that resembled a castle. The families who lived on the second two floors shared a kitchen and bath; the owner lived on the first floor. On the third floor, where we lived, there were three one-room apartments, and the one next to ours was overrun by roaches.
When the occupants of the “roach room” went out of town, my parents would watch the apartment. When I was sent into the dark place on some errand, I would turn on the lights and recoil at the sudden surge of a sea of roaches, foaming across the floors and counters. My parents had hidden our Christmas presents in that infested space, which is how the roach got in the caboose. That roach-ridden residence gave me a lifelong abhorrence of the creatures, which is why my fascination with “Archy and Mehitabel” is ironic.
Don Marquis was a newspaper columnist for the New York Sun and later, the Herald Tribune; his need to fill space was often satisfied by introducing fictional characters who would express Marquis’ opinions about the doings of the day. He introduced Archy the Cockroach and Mehitabel the Alley Cat in March 1916; they continued to appear in his columns through the 1930s. Archy was discovered when the writer left a sheet of paper in his typewriter and came into his room to find a huge cockroach throwing itself headfirst onto the keys, one at a time. It could not operate the shift to capital letters and had difficulty advancing the sheet of paper. The cockroach introduced itself as “Archy,” and asked that paper be left in the carriage, to facilitate communication.
Given my shuddering shivers about roaches, Archy, the former free-verse poet transmigrated into the body of that insect, would seem an unlikely hero for me. He was a constant source of inspiration for me, along with his “soul-mate” Mehitabel (who claimed to have been Cleopatra in a previous life.) I taught my children to call roaches “Archy’s.” I didn’t want them to publicly point out that there were cockroaches anywhere in our lives. But in a recent conversation with my ornithologist friend, Wes Homoya, I told him that my son used to raise Praying Mantises and had been gifted with Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches by Dr. Alan York, of the Purdue University Entomology department. “Yeah,” said Wes. “Ask my mom about my hissing cockroaches.” Just the conversation you want to hear at the bar of the cider house, right?
Archy’s adventures were often expressed in poetic form, and Mehitabel’s shenanigans were hilarious. Her classic verse about there being “a dance in the old girl yet” still resonates, but I shudder when I think:
Here comes Archy.
cjon3acd@att.net