KATHERINE GUTTMAN

Tragically hungover, I made it as far as the bathroom and took a rest. I sat on the toilet with my head on my knees, my knuckles touching the cool tile floor. I became Rodin's lesser-known follow-up to The Thinker entitled The Morning After. Peach Schnapps, though tasty in small doses, is not an advisable beverage for a whole evening, which had become painfully clear. And then I saw it--a roach. It was skipping across the bathroom threshold. I snatched up a religious pamphlet that had been slipped under my door and beat the living daylights out of the monster.

Roaches are unacceptable to me. They mean disease and a complete lack of cleanliness. I take pride in the cleanliness of my apartment. I'm like an Austrian. You could eat off of my floors--and sometimes I do, just to prove the point.

Actually, I hail from Florida, where bugs are a constant threat, and like any Floridian, I keep my sugar in the refrigerator (to prevent enticement for ants) and I dust my house religiously (to keep from wooing spiders). In Florida, we have palmetto bugs: These are creatures that nightmares are made of. Picture a roach as long as your thumb and twice as wide--with wings. They fly at you, and they have no fear. They know that they alone will survive a nuclear holocaust (along with Twinkies). I hate them. I celebrated when I moved north. No more palmetto bugs.

"You live in an old building," my friend Cliff patiently explained to me on the phone. "Roaches can crawl in through the pipes if one of your neighbors has them. Or if there's construction around. I wouldn't worry about it."

Worry about it? I was at war. I spent over $60 at K-Mart on cleaning supplies. I planned my attack carefully. I moved all the furniture out of my kitchen into the other room, vacuumed, dusted, and then mopped the floors. I took everything out of the cabinets and cleaned inside. I strategically placed new roach traps in the backs of the cabinets, on top of the cabinets, behind the fridge. I cleaned the rest of the apartment the same way. I changed my shower curtain liner, moved the couch, cleaned the air conditioner filter, vacuumed the radiator, and laced the apartment with egg stoppers.

I had won. I did a victory dance. Abschied, Sie kleine Bastard!

Tuesday, two days later, watching All My Children, satiated from a vegetable burrito, I'm laying on the couch sipping tea, still pleased with my clean apartment.

On the wall behind my lamp a dark shape passes. It can't be! Enraged, I leap across the room wielding the New York Press. With one precise fwack I kill the roach. I am stunned. I scoop the roach into the toilet and look around wildly. Where can they be coming from? I have 22 roach traps and egg stoppers scattered around my apartment. No food is left out unsealed. But there is construction going on upstairs, and maybe my neighbor's place is a roach haven. What if the monsters are crawling into my apartment underneath my front door?

I run to the bodega on the corner and buy the dreaded Raid spray. A longtime pet owner, I abhor sprays and pesticides, but being furry-friendless at the moment, I proceed with the extermination. I spray along the outside of my door. I lean out my windows at a heart-stopping angle and spray around the seals.

Leafing through a vegetarian magazine, I find an article on natural insect repellants. Cayenne pepper kills ants, for example. There's a recipe for non-toxic but perfectly lethal roach poison. All I need to buy is boric acid, which sounds delightfully evil; everything else I have in my kitchen. Better safe than sorry, I figure, so I'm out the door again. As I run down the stairs, I notice a small roach on the wall on the second floor. I resist the urge to kill it, and hurry out of the building.

Boric acid is surprisingly difficult to find, and an hour later I return. As I bound up the stairs two steps at a time, I see a little black body on the third floor, just one floor below me. I shake the box of boric acid at its beady head and giggle to myself.

It's 2 a.m. I have followed the instructions in the magazine and there are 20 little balls of sugar, baking soda, water, and boric acid of Play-Doh like consistency placed around the apartment--under my bed, behind my couch, in corners. I wait. I rub lotion on my hands because they are dried out from all the washing I've done. I can wait as long as these filthy creatures can. Longer. And I am bigger. I am stronger. I have thumbs and my skeleton is on the inside. I will win.