So there I was at my new desk, at my new job, planning someone’s beautiful new kitchen when I hear the opening guitar riff from AC/DC’s “For Those About to Rock” (my new smartphone ringtone). I immediately flashback to all my wife’s other just-getting-home-from-work-frantic-gems. “We’re being invaded!” she said. “Red ants everywhere, millions of ‘em, and they bite!!”
I take a deep breath, “Where are they?”
“Everywhere,” she said. “The cat food in the laundry, and the bananas in the kitchen seem to be their main obsession.”
“What do you wish for me to do from here?” I asked.
“I have used up all the organic natural bug spray we had. Pick up more.”
Now let me ’splain something. My wife gets skeeved out very easily by any sort of tiny livestock. The last time anything like this happened, this ‘organic natural’ bug spray had the most god-awful smell I have ever been subjected to. I smelled it for weeks. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t enjoy eating, nothing. I was ready to set fire to the f-ing house. It eventually went away and I put the can in the garage, hopefully where she couldn’t find it.
You see how well that worked. Oh, and to put this invasion into perspective, I believe that last incident involved one cricket.
So now I have these scenes flashing through my mind. Scenes of vomiting cats. Scenes of vomiting beige gorillas. Scenes of my wife, in full hazmat regalia, with a can of shit smelling bug spray au natural in one hand and the phone in the other. As I go into a local establishment for some non-lethal to gorillas, non-smelling bug spray, I ask a guy in the department what he would recommend for small red ants. He tells me he has lived in some really bad places, and this one has always worked.
The label reads: “Works Every Time, No Odor.”
Awesome. As I enter through the laundry room, gingerly, my eyes focus in on the floor. You know those scenes of battlefields you see in movies after the fight is over, and the winner strolls through hundreds of dead bodies as the sun sets in the distance, smoke rising from the ashes of the put out fires? Yeah, well that was nothing. The floor literally crunches with the remains of ants (mostly uncles really), millions and millions of them. All gone to that big anthill in the sky. Bowls of cat food, almost totally hidden by the bodies of the vanquished. The automatic cat waterer had dead uncles raining down the little waterfall into the bowl of other floating remains. They were swirling into the mechanism swimming their little swim of the macabre, over and over again. As I crunch down the hall, I see them, dead, stuck to the floor, stuck to the molding, stuck to the walls. As I round the hall into the kitchen, I see her. My wife standing there with a look of sheer exhaustion.
“I think I got them. I think I got them all.”
“It looks like you wiped-out the whole f-ing species.”
It was just about then that the whole ‘smell’ thing started to rear its ugly nose. Oh-My-God was all I said. “Where are the cats” was my second statement. Again, not asking how she was would soon enough come back to bite me.
“The cats are in our room, no ants there.”
I told her I would change and I would start the cleanup. We both got to it. We had the whole area mopped thrice, vacuumed and the mop head and bag from the vacuum thrown in the trash. It was about 9:00 PM when we both settled down to watch some TV.
“Want anything? I’m going for a sandwich?” my wife asked, while heading to the kitchen.
“OH MY GOD!”
That was all I heard from her as she walked into the kitchen. As I rolled out of my Lazyboy and into the kitchen, I saw that our little red menace had regrouped for a last ditch effort to assume control of my home. Thousands of them now cover the stove and the countertops.
“Fuck you, you little red bastards!” I said as I get the bottle of Works Every Time, No Odor and go for it. My wife asks about its organicity, if that’s even a word. I laugh and say “Gee, I hope not” in my best Sly Stallone as I start to spray.
They all seem to die on contact, and no odor…at all. They start to try to escape, but I am just too fast. I start to make the sound of David Hedison in The Fly, when he calls out for help at the end just before that spider kills him. “Help me, heeelp, oh noooo”, in my best Hedison-like Helium voice.
Eventually I win and they all die. This should be released in installments, of course, like Lord of the Rings. I could be like in the last episode: Return of the King. If there were only one ant big enough that I could have kicked into the pool, while yelling, “This is Phoenix!”
Now, at near 10:00 PM, we get to clean up all over again. Rip apart the whole range and put all the parts in the dishwasher. Clean off the counters, disinfect, and clean again, re mop the floor… and then move out the fridge to see if any are hiding there.
All this death and no odor! What a concept!
At this point I realize that the cats have been locked in the bedroom, sans litter box, for some four hours now. I slowly open the door and they both run like hell for the litter. It was like I could almost hear them go “AAHHH…” as they relieved themselves. Cannoli looks up at me and gives me a look like, “You almost had another f-ing room to clean, beeoch.”
It is the next morning and there is no sign of the red menace. The cats look fine. We won. We defended our home. No lasting smell. As I leave for work, I look around for George W. Bush to tell me “Mission Accomplished,” or, at least “a heck of job, Cranky”.
Now, if I could just figure out why I glow in the dark…….
Don’t Crank Wit Me.
Or Especially Mrs. Crank.
