BUG MEMORIES

My father's father, Romeo D. Erdie, ran a pest control company for forty-five years. For a time, in the fifties, Ace Exterminators became a sort of pesticidal empire with branch offices all over West Virginia, and into Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. One branch of the company made giant models of insects using molds, papier mache, paint, and wire legs, and sold gargantuan rats, or termites you could fasten to the top of a sedan, to places as far off as China.

R.D., as my grandfather was commonly known, was at one point worth seven million dollars, owned the Fairmont Hotel and Cabaret nightclub, served as a Democrat in the House of Delegates, and hobnobbed with bigshots like Jay Rockefeller. West Virginia magazine did a feature story on him. They had a photo of him seated on a throne, wearing a tinfoil crown, a regal cape, and holding a stagey sceptre. He was surrounded by a horde of giant roaches, rats, spiders, termites, and ants. The title of the article was The Termite King.My childhood is inextricably entwined with insects.

My first job, other than shoveling sidewalks on snowy mornings, was making insect models for my grandfather. My younger brother, Donnie, and I spent many Saturdays working in a little cement room in the basement of Ace Exterminators, making insect models. We spent most of our time drinking tall cokes from the old glass bottles, and gawking at the multi-legged, rodent, and serpent curiosities stored in the next room, all preserved in formaldehyde. We didn't know the insect model co. was defunct, and I don't think we ever finished a single model. But we lubed the molds, made glue from a recipe, dipped strips of newspaper into that to make the papier mache, and fashioned a lot of bug torsoes with headlines. And we were paid the princely sum of two dollars an hour to do it.I was nine, Donnie seven.

My other job was to refill the chemical trucks before they went out in the morning. I still remember the formula: two gallons of Chlordane and a hundred of water. Chlordane is now so infamous, you can get arrested simply for blogging its name. It goes right to the water table and festers there like a restless, aquatic Mr. Yuck. Back then, the crews were spraying it all over creation. If somebody complained of yellowjackets in the yard, we'd douse their lawn with Chlordane. Fleas? Spritz the rugs with Chlordane. Lice? Dip them head first in a vat of Chlordane.

But aside from arming the termite crews with poison ammo, my first jobs at Ace were more about bug construction that destruction. When I was a bit older, after Donnie had died and we'd returned from my father's prodigal son excursion to Virginia, I worked alone for a few hours after school, in another little room where my grandfather stored glass encased exotic insects from around the world. Gargantuan Hercules and rhinoceros beetles, scarab beetles, scorpion spiders -- which had the best features of both creatures -- tarantulas, luna moths, walking sticks, all manner of gorgeous butterflies and mantises. My job was to reattached their age-brittle and broken legs and wings with patience, tweezers, and glue.

These might seem to you like morbid occupations for a child. Far from it. These tasks were like a magic springboard for my hyperactive and hungry imagination. I would imagine the lives that the insects had had before they'd been run through with their mounting pins. I was pretty sure that the needles had pierced their pituitary glands, since I had no idea in which region of the body this gland resided, and that, since many pseudo-scientific mystics believed the pituitary to be the seat of the soul, that their souls had been pinioned in place, and that, were I to disimpale them, they would return to life and whisk me away on exoskeleton-armored backs, and via luminous wings, to realms of beauty and adventure.

I frequently dipped into R.D.'s stash of Old American Straight Bourbon. This didn't really heighten my imagination, but it slowed my working progress and left my mind more time to wander. R.D. drank a fifth of bourbon every day, all throughout his sixteen hour shifts, mixing it in paper cone cups with R.C. Cola. I never saw him drunk. It just kept him at an even keel.
There's no point to this foray into my yesteryear. It's just a glimpse into one of the bizarre elements of my childhood that helped to shape the person I am now.

Bugs remain a source of fascination and I never find them repellant. People, on the other hand, often seem to me to personify certain insects. There was creepy fellow who used to hang around Ace. He was sort of like a lascivious trap-door spider. He'd come in where I was working, start giving me a backrub, then try to kiss my neck. I was appalled, sickened. And I was terrified of anybody finding out.

Eventually, he tried something on my little sister. She went straight into the office and told my grandfather. R.D. took his opened a drawer of his desk and fished among the fascinating curiosities -- harmonicas, magnifying glasses, turkey calls, tobacco pipes -- until he drew out his famous little Smith & Wesson thirty-eight. He hid it under his shirt, pulled the creepy fellow into the freight elevator, and with the barrel of the gun scraping the fellow's tonsils, warned him that the next time he saw him, he would kill him.

The tactics of exterminators may not be universally applicable, but were very effective in this instance. After that episode, the creepy fellow could usually be found in the Fairmont Public Library. He became a mythic cross between a minotaur and a slug, who would mesmerize children with his endless prattle about Hemingway, the greatest American author who ever lived.

Link: Proof of The Termite King (www.interesting.vaty.net/2006_08_01_vatyinteresting_archive.html)