Cricket

I was saved today from a cricket. It was Saturday and I live in low rent quarters in West LA, surrounded by a chainlink and barbwire fence, without even a shared yard but an option to rent a unit that shares a bathroom (I passed on that). Still, the building handidude drove back from downtown to expel an animal from my walls.

My building manager could barely hear the sound; she’s in her 70s and her hearing's iffy. Her son, "Lenny", couldn’t stop talking long enough to hear it at first. He tried turning off my refrigerator to end the disturbing noise, but it persisted. Finally, he took a breath between telling me about his gallbladder and his 300 lb girlfriend and he heard it. Isabel heard it all along and barked at it, till she moved on to licking her paw and contemplating peeing the ugly wall to wall carpet.

Behind Edgar Allan Poe's walls.

I was certain something cute was trapped in my wall, something Edgar Allan Poe-ish but more kawaii. It was my building manager's fault for suggesting it might be a baby bat. I pictured the baby bat chirping for a week till it starved behind my walls. I couldn’t cope with being witness to its demise. I went through my iPhone contacts and messaged a guy who had already had me, so I could deal if he thought it was a booty call, but he didn’t reply. So I put museum wax (used to hang tiny shit in a dollhouse) in my ears and fell asleep.

Cute bat.

Late, about 5pm, but by all appearances the dead of night, Isabel and I were awoken by a knock at my door. It was the handidude returned from downtown. He listened for a zen moment. “Cricket”, he pronounced. That’s what it had sounded like, but that didn’t seem slummy enough for being freeway adjacent. We had them in my backyard when I was little.

The handidude moved my Victorian era TV trays and wrenched my mini refrigerator away from the wall, handing me along the way the stray dollhouse furniture he recovered. Then he saw and killed it. I was complicit in its death, because I'd directed him to a paper towel when he went for my pink featherduster.

"How long had it been singing?" he asked. And 'singing' was an upsettingly joyful choice of word.
"Since this morning."
"It was a baby cricket", he said. I started to cry and the handyman wrapped me in his arms.

I was attracted to him, as I'd suspected, along with the lab supervisor who gave me rides home from classes at SMC without hitting on me, and the elevator operator when I lived in the fancy condo in Pasadena, and every nice, competent Hispanic man who's labored on my behalf since I’ve lived in LA.

Hispanic dudes assembling my bed when I first moved in.