THE BUG MAN AND THE SCRAPPER

1. THE BUG MAN

Drain flies aren’t bad.  Roaches aren’t bad. Mice are nothing.

Two-hundred dead flies in an apartment — that’s bad. I saw 20 in the bathtub alone.  The building manager said, “I killed them with spray.”

I said, “Where are you hiding the body?”  I meant the dead body.

Swarma

Another 50 dead flies were by the window in the living room. The apartment was vacant.

I called
the pro exterminator. The bug man’s secretary said, “Are they metallic – the flies?”

“What do you mean by metallic?”

“Blue or green?”

“They’re big flies,” I said “You see them all the time, like on horses.”

“Oh, excuse the expression — they’re shit flies.”

“Yes. My manager says he has 500 dead ones in his vacuum cleaner. I need you over here.”

The flies were officially called blow flies, and are attracted to carrion and excrement.  The bug man found a nook above the drop ceiling in the bathroom that we had missed.  He hit it.

The flies are gone now.  I wonder what was up there.  I didn’t look.

2. THE SCRAPPER

I was looking for a scrapper to take a dilapidated, nonfunctioning boiler out of an apartment-building basement. The boiler was sitting in the basement, minding its own business, but the city inspector said it had to go.

I called a heating company, which suggested I hire them and an asbestos-removal company to remove the old unit.

Instead, I contacted Charles the scrapper and said,  “What are the chances of you doing this job and just taking the good stuff — the metal — and leaving behind a mess?”

“I don’t do it that way.  I’ve been doing this all day — all my life – and I do it right,” he said.

The boiler consisted of eight cast-iron sections, each about 200 pounds.  And it was down a flight of steps.  The boiler was the size of a VW bus.

“That’s what I do,” Charles said.  “Get rid of it.”

But I didn’t use Charles.  I used Daryl, another freelance scrapper. Daryl got to the job site long before Charles and gave me a good price: free. “I’m here and I’m ready,” Daryl said.  That counted for something.

—
I wrote this one,  “The Nostalgia Vortex,” for today’s CoolCleveland.com.  I was raised by a village — Norge Village.

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