"La Cucaracha Humana," A Story from My Recently Published Novel in Stories, Shot
Wherein We Meet My Favorite Geekster, Barney Roth
A Preamble, Which Will Be Repeated Every Week, Just in Case You Didn’t Read Last Week’s Post
If I have any weaknesses as a writer, and of course I do, my biggest flaw is that I am lousy at self-promotion. I was taught by my WWII-hardass father that any time you are praising your accomplishments, you are in fact diminishing them. In short, you should let your work stand for itself and shut the “F” up. The problem with this approach is that in a literary world where there are more writers than cockroaches, if you don’t promote your work in some way, it will end up being read only by your immediate family, and maybe even they may be too busy to take the time.
Why am I sharing this with this with you?
Over the next few months because I will be on vacation frequently, I am going to take the time to promote my latest two books in poetry and fiction: Shot: A Novel in Stories (MadHat Press, 2021) and While the Undertaker Sleeps Collected and New Prose Poems (just released this May of 2023, again by MadHat).
During one week, I will provide a sampling from my books of prose poems collected in While the Undertaker Sleeps; the following week, I will include a short story from Shot. Hopefully, this generous sampling will encourage you to buy the books, and to tell others about them.
In the below story, “La Cucaracha Humana,” we meet one of my favorite characters, Barney Roth, who is a likeable wise guy. He appeared in my previous post on bullies (May 29) in the short story called “Muscle,” where we also meet a tough kid named Adam Igoe, who is an unlikely hero in this story. I would suggest you go back and read that one, though you don’t need to do that to make sense of “La Cucaracha Humana.”
Shot includes thirteen stories, all beginning with the sound of a shot and describing how twelve different characters experience that sound, characters whose lives will overlap with the lives of other characters in the book, who themselves have their own stories. In the literary world, we call this kind of book a short-story sequence. Famous ones are James Joyce’s The Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. An example of this kind of story can also be seen in movies like the insanely cool coming-of-age flick, Dazed and Confused, which you must see if you haven’t.
Shot, in a sense, in a very serious book. I mean it’s about a rape and a shooting and the threat of a possible mass shooting. In spite of these events, it is also a comic novel, mostly because of characters like Barney. He’s one of those characters we can’t help but root for, and, ultimately, he appears again at the end of the book when he inadvertently foils a mass murder. Unfortunately, you will have to buy Shot to see how all of that transpires.
Enough said.
La Cucaracha Humana
Barney Roth was so lost in photographs of cockroaches that he barely heard the shot that woke up half his neighborhood—a sound that wouldn’t break through his cockroach thoughts until ten minutes later, when he’d say to himself, “What the fuck was that?”
That’s what it was like to be inside Barney Roth’s head.
There was something wrong with his La Cucaracha. He had wanted to create a symbol to tick off the fashionably contented, mindless occupants of his town. The Pilates moms pecking one another on the cheek while sipping Very Berry Hibiscus Refreshers at Starbucks. The Episcopalian do-gooders distributing hand-me-down Brooks Brothers polos to homeless families that their banker husbands had put out onto the streets. And especially his nitwit classmates, both rich and poor, who, like lobotomized zombies, embraced their antiseptic, safe lives.
Yeah, Barney was feeling particularly alienated lately, so what better symbol to choose than La Cucaracha, The Cockroach—to most decent people, a dirty scavenger, a night stalker who could frustrate even the most determined exterminator. Just the thought of a cockroach could make girls squeal and grown men run for brooms. But that wasn’t the only reason Barney chose it for his alter ego. The cockroach was also persistent. It could adapt and thus survive, and Barney prided himself on those traits.
So what started as a joke became a passion, and he spent many nights envisaging the creature he would eventually draw or paint all over town. At first, his canvases were the walls of structures no one cared about, like the abandoned brick building at the cove where kids went to drink and make out. But then he moved on to bridges and supermarkets and convenience stores before finally getting the nerve to paint La Cucaracha on the high tan wooden fences of the rich while they escaped to their weekend beachfront houses.
That’s when he graduated from being an oddity to a public nuisance, though no one, not even his friends, knew that he was the artist behind La Cucaracha. In fact, only a few art teachers from middle school were aware of Barney’s talent. Although he had a lot of ideas he’d spout to anyone who’d listen—ideas on politics, history, rap music, even on the existence of God—he was pretty insecure about his artistic abilities.
His early graffiti was realistic, just a giant bug about a foot long and a foot wide with La Cucaracha scrawled below it in a simple, basic font. Nothing flashy, but still pretty offensive, because he’d added some serious puke-green tints to La Cucaracha’s thorax, then painted a poisonous yellow line down its back. Purists, kids who knew Spanish, suggested the unknown insect artist didn’t know what a cockroach looked like. Others, who had no idea what cucaracha meant, thought the creature was a beetle. Still, everyone, including the cops, wasn’t very happy about its presence, and that was, after all, what Barney had wanted.
At least for a while.
But it didn’t take long until everyone got used to La Cucaracha, proving Barney’s theory that in our “current stupefied me-obsessed culture” (his words), people were by nature ADHD and constantly needed something new. And that’s when—and this was a real killer—some punk who called himself La Rata, The Rat, started to deface Barney’s suburban canvases. Right next to Barney’s La Cucaracha, a large black rat suddenly appeared. It was twice the size of Barney’s cockroach, its huge jaws about to munch on Barney’s poor unsuspecting pest. What made the violation worse was that La Rata was not only a damn good artist but kids liked his sense of humor, the town’s newspaper running a headline that read Cockroach Eaten by Rat. When even Barney found himself laughing at the paper’s comic description of La Rata’s graffiti, he knew something had to be done.
That’s why, on the night of that unexpected gunshot, he was looking at hundreds of fonts and scouring the Internet for images of cockroaches.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t find a depiction of a cockroach that was really shocking, something that would make La Rata’s rat look like a first-grade art project. So he just began to doodle, starting with a bug whose head and belly faced the viewer. He penciled in big blue eyes that were trapped in oversize black tortoiseshell glasses. Then he added some wavy black hair, a somewhat demonic smile, and a large nose, made more conspicuous by an M&M-size bump on its bridge.
By the time he was done, the insect looked like a cross between a computer geek and a prizefighter, with a pissed-off expression that Barney exaggerated by painting tiny beads of blood dripping from its teeth.
He scrutinized his new creation, then walked to the window. Sirens were wailing and he hoped the cops had finally caught La Rata. Not seeing anything outside, he returned to his drawing. Truth be told, this revised La Cucaracha creeped him out, reminding him that there were nooks and crannies in the basement of his unconscious that shouldn’t be visited. And yet there was something eerily familiar about this new, improved cockroach.
What was it?
“Jesus,” he said out loud, though Barney was an avowed atheist.
What Barney saw was himself: his big bug eyes and black glasses, his slightly deformed nose (though a few girls thought it was cute).
It was then that La Cucaracha became La Cucaracha Humana.
The Human Cockroach.
That night, in spite of the shot and sirens, at about 2 a.m., after three Red Bulls, he snuck out of the house and painted his creation next to where La Rata’s first rat had appeared. Underneath it he wrote La Cucaracha Humana in a spooky font he stole from a New York City gangbanger: large red letters that seemed to melt like warm wax before his eyes.
“Take that, you asshole,” he said, finishing up his last brushstroke and nervously glancing around.
He didn’t sleep well that night, either because of the Red Bulls or because of the anxiety hangover from constantly looking over his shoulder for cop cars. About every half hour he woke to the sensation of creepy-crawly things feasting on his body. He flipped on a light and examined his skinny white torso. He even shook out his comforter and was surprised that no six-legged creatures tumbled onto the floor.
The next day he expected everyone to be talking about La Cucaracha Humana, but no one mentioned it. How could they have missed it on their way to school? None of it made sense until he heard, along with everyone else, that a classmate, Alex Youngblood, had been gunned down on the bike path, which explained the shot he’d heard the night before. In Barney’s town, Martians landing and impregnating able-bodied sixteen-year-old girls would’ve have been less upsetting than a murder like this, even though most kids hadn’t liked Alex. He was a bully and what Barney called a “downsized person.” Barney figured that he’d probably slept with the wrong girl this time and the outraged dad had taken him out, though most kids thought wangstas from Riverside jumped him and things had gotten out of hand.
Whatever, it was hard for Barney to care much about it, since Alex and the other cool kids were as unreal to him as characters in a book or a movie. Still, a few nights later he decided to go to an outdoor vigil for Alex, thinking that if he were around a large group of kids, his La Cucaracha Humana might finally come up. But everyone just stood around holding lit candles and pretending they were best friends with Alex. By the time the vigil ended, Barney hoped that Alex was put to rest for good and that La Cucaracha Humana might rise from his ashes. For that to happen, though, he knew he’d have to paint a few more giant cockroaches around town.
So the next night he gathered his paint and brushes and threaded his way through a wooded path that led to the public library. Two weeks ago, after whitewashing a No Littering sign that had been planted between the library and a playground, La Rata had painted an image of his nasty rodent on it. The next morning a few toddlers got freaked out by the giant rat as they stumbled innocently toward a jungle gym. Outraged parents quickly yanked the sign from the ground and tossed it into the woods. Barney planned to find the sign, leave his mark next to La Rata, and then replant the sign near a bus stop on Route 114, the main drag that ran in front of the town hall. That way, as early-morning commuters drove by, they’d be greeted by La Cucaracha Humana about to nibble on La Rata’s ugly snout.
“Let’s see what the paper’ll say about that,” Barney mumbled, as he made his way through the woods. It was warmer than usual, with a full moon just beginning to lose its perfect shape. Considering what had happened to Alex, he shouldn’t have been wandering alone in the woods at night, but, as he surmised, that shooting had occurred on the other side of town.
Right before he reached the library he heard laughter. He slowed his pace, then crouched behind a nearby tree. From there he saw someone by a tall concrete backstop the town had constructed so that kids could practice lacrosse. The intruder was talking to himself, splashing and spreading big globs of white paint on the wall with a large house-painting brush.
Barney decided to let him finish priming the wall and then burst in before the kid could start painting a new La Rata. It was a good plan until the kid turned and said, “I can hear you, La Cucaracha. I know you’re there. Barney Roth, right?”
It was Tyler Whitney.
“Can’t say I expected this,” Barney said, after stepping out from the shadows.
Tyler laughed. He was a big guy, a jock, though pretty smart and popular, and as far as Barney remembered, he wasn’t a jerk like most of his friends.
“What I meant was . . .”
“What you meant was that you didn’t think someone like me could draw.”
“How did you know it was me?” Barney asked.
Tyler stood there, paint dripping from his brush. “I knew we’d eventually cross paths,” he said, “and your paint-supply bag gave you away.”
“It’s a satchel.”
Tyler laughed again. Barney had been laughed at by jocks before, but not by one who was smart, a damn good artist, and infuriatingly good-looking, even with his buzz cut. It was like being a half-starved, bald Buddhist monk and finding out that Brad Pitt was into meditation and did it better than you.
“So what happens now?” Barney said. “We duel to the death with our brushes?”
Tyler seemed to be considering that possibility. “A better question is, Do we have to be enemies? I mean, we’re doing the same thing, right?”
“In a way, but your rat was very aggressive, dude. He wanted to eat my La Cucaracha.”
“It was a joke.”
“Yeah, and everyone got it.”
“I’m surprised you’re pissed. I mean, you’re always busting kids at school, so I thought you’d appreciate an epic battle between La Rata and La Cucaracha.”
“How did you know La Cucaracha was mine?” Barney asked. “Not even my friends know that.”
“One hint, Barney. If you wanna keep something like that secret, don’t always be scribbling on an artist’s pad when the teacher’s back is turned. I mean, I draw, so I noticed.”
“So when did you decide to draw La Rata?”
“When I saw La Cucaracha on the dumpster at the Little League field. A stroke of genius, dude.”
“Thanks.”
“No, really, you’re good.”
Barney’s head was spinning. He was flattered but also confused by where the flattery was coming from. “Better watch what you say, dude,” he said. “You don’t want your friends to hear you.”
“Hey, they’re not all assholes,” Tyler said. “You really gotta lose that jocks-versus-geeks stuff. You’re the guys who think you’re smarter than everyone.”
“I dunno, everyone thinks La Rata is a fucking genius, but that’s because they haven’t seen this.” Barney reached into his satchel and took out his sketch of La Cucaracha Humana. He handed it to Tyler, who burst into laughter.
“You won’t be too anonymous after kids see this,” Tyler said, then paused thoughtfully before adding, “Don’t you think every La Cucaracha Humana deserves a La Rata Humana?”
And so Barney watched as Tyler let his house-painting brush drop to the ground, grabbed a sketchpad from his supply bag, and began working on a large rat that, as promised, looked a little like Tyler Whitney. As Tyler drew, Barney noticed a two-inch slash over his left eyebrow. “How did you get that scar? Football?”
Tyler continued to scratch away as he spoke. “No, I fell down the basement stairs when I was about three.”
“You gotta include that,” Barney said, pleased when Tyler not only sketched the scar but enlarged and transformed it by adding a Frankenstein cross-stitch. When he was finished, Barney could only offer admiration. “Very cool,” he said.
A smile of satisfaction spread over Tyler’s face. “Believe it or not, Barney, that means something to me.”
Barney waited for an obligatory chest bump that never arrived, though he and Tyler did decide to collaborate on a new project. It would’ve been easier to use the concrete backstop as their canvas, but the paint Tyler had spread earlier hadn’t dried, so they decided on the white concrete back wall of Froyo, a local yogurt place. During the day, the wall was clearly visible to anyone biking, walking, or jogging on the bike path, which was about half the people in their town.
It took Barney and Tyler about ten minutes to reach Froyo, where they unpacked their paint and brushes and worked feverishly on their collaboration, their arms flailing like two manic orchestra conductors. They painted separately and together, moonlight casting their shadows against the wall, so that it appeared that four people instead of two were at work. Their vermin acquired more and more personality as human features were added and movements suggested. The mural now had a narrative, because next to La Humana Cucaracha and La Humana Rata, Barney and Tyler had drawn a few naked, terrified kids―their mouths frozen in screams―fleeing from two creepy predators about to feast on their pale teenage asses. It had been Barney’s idea to make them naked.
When they finished, they collapsed at the base of a nearby tree.
“You think the cops will figure out who did it?” Tyler asked.
“You care?” Barney replied.
“In a way, yeah. Last year the Providence cops put a graffiti artist in jail. They wanted to make an example of him.”
“That won’t happen here,” Barney said as he admired the mural, realizing that he and Tyler would never be able to do something so cool again. “Might be best to put La Cucaracha Humana and La Rata Humana to rest after tonight,” he said. “We made our point. People will be pissed off for a few days, then go back to living with their heads up their asses.”
Tyler grudgingly agreed, and they gathered their supplies and headed toward the bike path.
“Which way?” Tyler said.
Barney pointed toward Echo Pond.
“Me, too,” Tyler said.
It didn’t take long until they reached a faintly lit stretch of the path. They walked about a quarter of a mile before being surprised by a kid sitting on a huge boulder that faced the pond.
“Just keep moving,” Tyler whispered.
Just as they were about to pass the kid, he turned and said, “Hey, what’s all the whispering about?” He stood and walked toward them, his hands stuffed in the rear pockets of his jeans. He was big, with long shaggy dark hair that fell over his shoulders like clumps of wet seaweed. He wore dark shorts, a black Hurley T-shirt, and beat-up black Vans. He was smiling as if he knew something they didn’t.
At least it was two to one, Barney thought.
“I don’t like whispering,” the kid said.
Barney had never been in this situation before. His heart was racing, and his feet seemed frozen to the ground. In contrast, Tyler was calm. “We’re cool here,” Tyler said to the kid. “So you can go back to whatever the fuck you were doing.”
Barney waited for the kid to respond, but a different voice came from somewhere behind them. “Yeah, Eddie,” the voice said, “go back to whatever the fuck you were doing.”
When Barney and Tyler turned, four kids emerged from the woods, laughing and shoving each other.
The kid who spoke was short but muscled, his white T-shirt fitting like a second skin. He flashed an evil grin that he’d probably spent most of high school perfecting in his bathroom mirror. Barney’s head was spinning so fast he couldn’t focus on the other three kids. “That’s no way to talk to Eddie,” the short kid said.
Tyler smiled and let his supply bag fall to the ground.
“Why the fuck you guys have paint all over you?” the short kid asked.
“We were working on a mural,” Barney said.
“A what?”
“It’s like a painting.”
“Just drop it, Barney,” Tyler said. “He’s not interested.”
But Barney was nervous, and when he got that way he jabbered. “You the guys who killed Alex?”
“Who’s Alex?” the kid said.
“He’s talking about the punk who got capped a few nights ago, Paulie,” the kid named Eddie said.
“No way,” Paulie said. “We don’t do that shit. We’re Riverside boys.”
“We know where you’re from,” Tyler said, the expression on his face never changing.
“You play football?” Paulie asked. “Shit, look at the size of his neck. I used to play, but the coach had too many rules.” Then he surprised everyone by stepping into Tyler’s space and jabbing both palms into his chest. “You know,” he said, “for a quarter, we might just let you guys go.” He shoved Tyler again, this time harder.
And that’s when Tyler struck back.
Barney hoped that Tyler would knock the guy out, so they could run to the closest house for help. But instead, something extraordinary happened. Well, two things, really, and to understand them you had to know another of Barney’s secrets.
Just this year Barney had become a Bruce Lee freak, his favorite movie being Enter the Dragon, his favorite scene the one where Lee fights his archrival’s bodyguard. Lee prances around like a prizefighter on speed while the bodyguard tries to stab him with a broken bottle, which, in the world of martial arts, is a very uncool thing to do. In response, Lee knocks the guy down with an acrobatic kick to the jaw, leaps about three feet into the air, then comes down on the guy’s throat, apparently crushing his windpipe. The camera never shows the maiming. Instead, it focuses on Lee’s face as he lets out a creepy banshee wail.
Barney must’ve have practiced that fight scene a few hundred times on his father’s punching bag, which hung from a thick metal hook in his basement. He may have been tall and skinny, but he had developed one powerful kick, which, much to his surprise, he unleashed into the solar plexus of an unsuspecting Paulie, who went down in a heap. Then he went into his Bruce Lee jig before taking out another guy with a kick to the groin, while Tyler and Eddie wrestled each other to the ground. All of this would’ve have been heroic, the stuff kids would’ve talked about for a very long time, but even Bruce Lee moves weren’t going to offset the odds.
And that’s when the second extraordinary thing happened.
Out of nowhere a huge kid appeared, swinging a tree limb the size of a baseball bat. Barney heard a few oofs and ughs before Paulie and his gang scrambled away, grasping various parts of their bodies. The huge kid, with his back to Barney and still holding the branch, laughed and taunted the punks as they ran off. Then he turned and faced Barney and Tyler, saying, “If it ain’t my homeboy, Tyler.”
Tyler wiped blood from the side of his mouth and managed a smile. “Adam,” he said. “Why aren’t I surprised?”
Barney knew this Adam well. In fact, he had recently contacted him when a friend of his had needed help. Adam was a loner, a football player, a kid no one messed with, who looked like he’d been constructed from blocks of flesh, all lines and angles. It was rumored that he and a few other demented guys had started a hit squad called Muscle, and for a price they’d intimidate just about anyone, which was why Barney had spoken with him.
“Do we have to pay for this?” Tyler said.
“Nah, this is for the team.” He sized up Barney, then turned to Tyler. “You guys lovers?”
“Don’t push it, Adam,” Tyler said.
“Well, it’s pretty late to be wandering around, especially with a geek.”
“Fuck you,” Barney said, the adrenaline talking for him.
“Normally,” Adam said, “I’d shove this branch up your ass for saying that, but you were an impressive little prick in that fight. What was that squeal about? You sounded like your balls were on fire.”
“It’s from Enter the Dragon. It’s a Bruce Lee movie,” Barney said.
“You mean the Chink?”
“Yeah,” Barney said, shaking his head in disgust. “The Chink.”
“You making fun of me?”
“Yeah, I guess I am,” Barney said, surprising himself again with his bravado.
Tyler seemed annoyed by their banter. He grabbed his supply bag and slung it over his shoulder. “Why did you wait so long, Adam?” he said. “We could’ve gotten our asses kicked.”
Adam smiled, a thick crease disfiguring his forehead. “I wanted to see how you’d do first.”
Barney had calmed down by now, though the rush of his first fight since second grade (he’d lost that one) had wasted him, and he felt, strangely, like crying. He wondered how guys like Adam did this all the time, and he longed for a few peaceful moments with his sketchpad.
“You want me to chill with you guys for a while?” Adam said. “Those wangstas might come back.”
“We’ll be okay,” Tyler said.
“How about you, Roth? You okay?”
“Fucking peachy,” Barney said. “And thanks for letting us almost get killed.”
“You know, Roth,” Adam said, “the problem with you geeks is that you don’t know when to shut up. That’s why you guys’ve been beat on since kindygarten.”
“Kindygarten?”
“Let it go, Barney,” Tyler said.
And for once Barney did, watching silently as Adam dropped his club and faded into the woods like some yet-to-be-discovered Sasquatch.
After Adam left, he and Tyler sat on the bike path. Barney fingered the line painted down the middle of the pavement, while Tyler pulled out a pack of gum and offered him a stick. “That was some weird shit you did tonight,” Tyler said. “I mean, I gotta watch that movie.”
“Can I ask you something, Tyler?” he said.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Why didn’t we just give the kid a quarter? Maybe he would’ve left.”
“You’ve got a lot to learn about assholes, Barney,” Tyler said. Then he stood up and walked toward the boulder Eddie had earlier occupied, leaning his ass against it. “Come on, there’s room for two.”
“You sure no one will think we’re lovers?”
“You’re a funny guy, Barney. After school ends, we should hang out, maybe have a few beers to toast the beginning and end of La Cucaracha Humana and La Rata Humana.”
Barney agreed, and then they sat silently next to each other, staring out across Echo Pond, which the moon had transformed into a giant watery mirror. After a few minutes Barney broke the silence. “I gotta go, Tyler.”
“Yeah,” Tyler said. “Probably a good idea.”
So they grabbed their supply bags and walked for about a half mile before splitting off—Tyler toward the country club, Barney toward his middle-class neighborhood.
Barney reached his house way after his curfew. He wedged open the screen on the basement window and slid through its opening. Then he climbed the stairs into the kitchen, poured a glass of orange juice, and sat at the kitchen table in semi-darkness until a light came on. Before him stood his father in nothing but plain white boxer shorts. He looked half asleep, his hair tousled, the bags under his eyes fatter and darker than usual, gray hairs sprouting from his ears and nose. Barney felt a twinge of pity for his mother having this hairy, paunchy man for a bedmate, and he hoped there wasn’t any truth to the saying “Like father, like son.”
“What’re you doing up, Barn?” his father mumbled, wiping something crusty from his right eye.
“Couldn’t sleep, Dad,” Barney said.
“Why’re you dressed?”
“Never got undressed.”
“Well, clean up after yourself so your mom doesn’t have a shit conniption.”
“Sure, Dad, just go back to your beauty sleep.”
His father laughed. “You’re a card, Barney.”
“That’s the rumor.”
Fifteen minutes later Barney was stretched out on his bed, staring up at a ceiling fan that spun so fast he couldn’t distinguish the blades.
He felt anxious, so he sat up, grabbed his sketchpad from the bed stand, and started to draw. Human figures tramping down the bike path materialized before his eyes. They were Paulie and his friends, frozen in exaggerated gangsta walks. Behind them, a massive serpentine head appeared, its tongue flicking between two menacing fangs, its long, thick body lagging behind like a piece of severed intestine.
“La Cobra Humana,” Barney said, imagining Tyler howling at the sketch the next day at school. And at that thought, he felt a hard-on poking its way through the open fly of his boxer shorts.
“What the fuck?” was about the only response he could muster.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories