The Apartment Food Chain

Gentile Reader,

Let me take a moment to bring you back to this summer, and tell you a touch about where I live without revealing too much. I choose to live in the Ghetto, and there are good reasons for this; I can have what ever animals I wish as long as the rent is paid on time (I always pay early), that and no one asks any questions despite construction sounds coming from my apartment at 0300. There is one tactic to Ghetto survival, if you can properly intimidate the populous around you; you are never freer than in the Ghetto. No one looks you in the eye, and as long as you act rather violent, and display yourself as larger than life you’re reasonably safe. I did this quite easily when I first moved in by sitting outside on the porch cleaning my hand gun, wearing a wife-beater while drinking a ’40 with a Dumerils Boa around my neck. I am the only white male in my apartment complex, intimidation of the drug dealers is a top priority; oh and I am friends with some of them, a strategic alliance. In the above display I combined a couple things that the racist African Americans in my apartment complex are scared of, guns, white people drinking, and snakes into one very open display. It worked like a charm, to reinforce there ideas about me I have been known to wear a snake around my shoulders while taking out the trash, or checking the mail. Now that the human part of the food chain is out of the way lets talk about the vermin that infest the apartments.
I keep snakes, lots of snakes and have many mouse traps set out to catch any stray rodents, so there’s not really any problem with the rodents in the apartments that are next to me or below me, further than that I have no idea. There is however a great nemesis that I attempted to defeat, and fought a glorious battle against this summer. Roaches, and not just the little Mexican kids that steal and destroy things in the apartment complex, I’m talking about the 6 legged type. There was a massive surge in the roach populations during this last summer, evident by the many droppings and seeing them everywhere a little roach could hide, having killed many females developing egg sacks, it was on. I tried traps for them, including honey in a bowl with slick sides (worked very well, like a tar pit for roaches.) I tried poison for a brief period but I was afraid one would ingest the poison and crawl its happy ass into one of my animal cages and be eaten therefore killing a bird, or gecko inadvertently. The idea struck me one day that I needed to use military tactics against the little bastards; I was going to build an army. I spent a couple days figuring out what sort of army it was that I needed, and did a little research online. Spiders would have worked very well, but there is no fucking way I am going to intentionally release massive amounts of spiders into my house. Sarge does NOT like spiders. I am more of a reptile person; I needed an animal that wasn’t going to crap everywhere, and could survive in a harsh house like environment, and perhaps even reproduce and populate indoors, free range style. I settled on the Mediterranean House Gecko. I had my army picked out, feral geckos.
Ahh yes Gentile Reader, that’s right a horde of the cute little geckos that hitchhiked there way to this part of Texas on trucks following the I-20, and I-10 corridor, from somewhere near Huston. They got to Huston via a ship coming from Africa, and set up shop in Texas quite happily, there population is some what dense but no one is complaining, sometimes I get animal rescue calls from people that find them in there house, but I let them know it’s a good thing.
I set about collecting a good amount of them, I visited a couple trash piles at an illegal dumping site across from a post office, I flipped boards, and soon had a nice sized Critter Keeper full of the magnificent little beasts. The war was on. On the drive home I gave a speech that would make Patton proud, and at the same time, perhaps even Hitler. I spoke about Eugenics to them, told them all the good little female geckos needed to do there best to find and mate with only the best roach killing males, and become a super race of mutant geckos. Gentile Reader, these are very small geckos, the largest one I have seen is 3 inches long, maybe a bit wider than a standard sized Sharpie, and dang near flat most are much smaller. They are also almost clear in appearance, and faster than lightning. I had my army; it was time for the roaches to die. After capturing a couple enemy combatants and subjecting them to a Thunder Dome death match in the Critter Keeper (I had to test the geckos roach munching ability) I found that the roaches where the perfect feeder size for the largest of the geckos, and the baby roaches where perfect for the smallest of my army. I strategically released the geckos in the kitchen, my bed room got 3 of them, the bathroom got 5 of them, the front room got 5, and the rest where set in random places on the walls, 22 geckos against an unimaginably large force of roaches. Visions of epic battles, resembling a cross between the movie Ants, and Lord of the Rings danced happily in my head.
Let me say Gentile Reader that I have yet to see more than 1 gecko per week to this day, if I am lucky. I leave a small bowl of water near the sink for them to drink from, and that is generally where I see one on a weekly basis, mostly late a night and only for a moment in the soft glow of the fridge door light. I will however say that the roaches appear to be losing; the Roach sightings have dropped from nearly 20 a day, to somewhere near 5 per month. God bless Mother Nature. If only I could properly train Zombies to eat the annoying human roaches in my apartment complex, but that’s another story, for another day.

Eternally yours,

Sarge.