My best friend, Dan Wiggins, and I rode our bikes aimlessly around the trailer park. It was a blank, do-nothing summer day. The sky was blue with just a trace of clouds. The occasional airplane streaked by high overhead. Neither of us had ever flown anywhere or seen the ocean except on television.

We encountered this new boy who said his name was Paris. He looked to be a couple years younger by his size, but he seemed tough and confident, worth talking to at least. His wavy black hair was styled back in a slick mullet. This was South Dakota in the 1980’s.

“Where ya from?” asked Dan.

“I just moved here from Milwaukee,” he said.

He smirked at us and shielded his eyes from the sun. He didn’t have a bike, at least not with him. There was a long dead pause.

“My mom’s at work. We got cockroaches in our kitchen. Do you want to come over and see them?”

Dan looked at me. I shrugged and nodded as if to say, why not?

“Sure,” Dan said. “I never even seen a cockroach before.”

I hadn’t either. It was an unusual invitation. My thought, at the time, was that having cockroaches was kind of like having crabs, something you kept to yourself if you wanted anyone to like you.

The kid turned and we followed him to a drab green-and-white trailer half a block away. He didn’t bother turning on the lights when we got inside and, with all the curtains drawn, the place seemed dismal. There was an ugly brown couch facing a TV on the floor. Cardboard moving boxes were stacked on a coffee table and along the wall. The place didn’t look lived in, no magazines lying around or anything. He led us to the kitchen which was brighter from a window over the sink. I looked around carefully, not seeing any roaches on the counters or on the linoleum floor. A box full of pots rested on a red Formica table. The place seemed creepy and I wanted to leave.

“Where these damn roaches at?” demanded Dan impatiently like we he had paid money and the kid had ripped us off.

“They in the cupboards,” said Paris. “They all over in there. Dirty, little fuckers.”

I took a deep breath and opened a cupboard, instantly rearing back in revulsion. Our tour guide wasn’t lying. Exposed to the sunlight, the roaches scurried for the crevices like panic-stricken vampires. They moved so fast you almost saw them in memory. Good luck catching them, not that you’d want to. They were brown and about an inch long with slender antennae, short legs and translucent veined wings. The cupboards were nearly bare except for a box of Fruit Loops and some open packages of saltine crackers that were polka-dotted with roach shit. The entomology lesson left Dan and I rather speechless.

“Well, Paris,” Dan said after an awkwardly long pause. “It was cool meeting you, but we got to be going.”

We left Paris inside his trailer and straddled our bikes.

“That was pretty fucking gross,” I said. I wanted to wash my hands even though I hadn’t touched anything other than the cabinet handle.

“No shit.”

“They should throw away the crackers away at least,” I said.

“I wouldn’t eat them,” said Dan.

 “Or the Fruit Loops.”

We rode away together, eager for the next adventure. The cockroaches lingered in my mind like an infestation. I could feel their little legs skittering over the folds of my brain. You couldn’t easily forget something like that. We might have seen Paris once or twice after that, then he moved away. I remember feeling sorry for the kid. His cool license got revoked when he said he lived with cockroaches.

Before the reckless freedom afforded by our first cars, we had our bikes. Nothing to do? We rode our bikes around the neighborhood until something happened. Some days we killed some brain cells, but we had plenty to spare.