For many years, I lived with thousands and thousands of cockroaches. Eventually, I moved and left the roaches behind, and now I haven’t seen one scurry across my counters in a long time. This report is from memory, then, but also from serious experience.

Cleaning is the most obvious defensive strategy against roaches. Have you seen them on the floor, where you dropped a frankfurter and didn’t clean it up very well? Clean it up. Roaches on the shelf, on the counter? Wipe the area with soap and water or something stronger. You’ll see fewer roaches if you don’t offer them a buffet.

Being a slob, though, I’ve always found cleaning the most difficult defense.

POISON

Forget the store-bought stuff; this secret recipe works better:

Ingredients:
• ¼ cup of sugar
• ½ cup of shortening
• 1 cup of flour
• 1 pound of boric acid

Warning: Boric acid can cause nausea, vomiting, stomach aches, diarrhea, and probably death. Don’t eat it. Maybe wear gloves. Obviously, don’t use this recipe if you have pets or small children. Engage your brain and you’ll be OK.

Mix the sugar and shortening in a small bowl. Then mix the flour and boric acid in a larger bowl. Next, add the mixed-up contents from the small bowl to the mixed-up contents of the large bowl, and mix it all together with enough water to make it a doughy consistency, as if you’re making cookies.

But don’t bake it. Instead, roll the toxic dough into tiny balls, the size of olive pits or dry pet food, and stash the balls wherever you’ve seen or suspect roaches. If that includes any place where food might be prepped or eaten, I’d suggest putting the poison doughballs on a paper plate.

Roaches love eating these doughballs, and you’ll soon be sweeping up roach corpses. Even the boric doughballs won’t kill all the roaches, though.

SO HOW DO YOU DEFEAT ALL THE ROACHES?

Let’s face facts: You probably won’t defeat all the roaches, unless you pay big bucks for a professional exterminator. Moving out also works, if you’re careful to heat-bomb all your possessions and shake out all your clothes as you leave.

If you can’t afford a professional bug samurai, or you can’t move, my advice is to get used to the roaches. Change your perspective. They’re sickening and disgusting, yes, but they can also be amusing.

ROACHES AS ENTERTAINMENT

If you’ve lived with roaches, you know that they’ll be there when you turn the light on, so be prepared. Never enter an unlit room, especially the kitchen, without arming yourself with bug spray, or with yesterday’s junk mail to squish a few. Think of it as sport. Leisure. Everyone needs a hobby.

For a while I lived in an old building that had concrete walls, and roaches, roaches, more roaches. Believe it or not, it became relaxing, almost zen, to smack roaches with a hammer. If your walls aren’t concrete, use a book instead of a hammer. I left hundreds of roach corpses to dry on the wall, as decoration — an artistic statement.

Obviously, yes, I was single at the time, and never had ladyfriends visit the premises.

ROACH TRAPS

Manufactured roach traps will catch some roaches, but not enough to make much difference. Being a numbers geek, in my roach-hunting days I kept a running tally of corpses collected, and compared the store-bought traps to my homemade traps. Nowadays, I’d keep an Excel spreadsheet.

I don’t have the data all these years later, but 5-10 roaches was an ordinary catch overnight, in my homemade traps, which was easily double what the store-bought traps produced. So doing-it-yourself is cheaper, more effective, and guess what? It’s also more fun.

Here’s how to make a genuine Doug Holland Roach Trap:

Take an almost empty jar of peanut butter, with enough PB remaining that you could make maybe two more sandwiches if you scraped the sides. But don’t scrape the sides. Instead, discard the lid, and wrap duct-tape around the jar, starting at the midsection and extending beyond the top, until you’ve made a short duct-tape tunnel leading to the peanut-butter.

And with that, your work here is done. Set your trap on the floor, anywhere in roach territory.

Roaches love peanut butter, and they’re drawn to it, but roaches do not love duct-tape. They’ll smell the PB, walk onto the duct tape, and die there.

When you’ve collected enough dead and dying roaches, you can just toss your peanut-butter-trap into the trash, but why? It’s reusable — all the peanut butter is still there.

Cut off and discard the duct tape and roaches, and microwave the jar of peanut butter. Microwaving will refresh the peanut-butter scent, so the same jar can be re-taped and re-used as a trap several times.

You have to redo the duct tape, because dust and roach bits will make it unsticky and ineffective.

Being young and stupid and obnoxious, sometimes I microwaved the jar before cutting off the tape and cockroaches. The roaches are alive, and you’re microwaving them to death, which seemed fun in my 20s but it’s something I wouldn’t do these days. I’ve become a better man.

Feeding roaches poison? Sure. Splattering roaches with a hammer? Delightful! But microwaving them when they’re trapped and can’t escape? Nah, that seems unnecessarily mean to me now. Unsporting.

And there you have it — cockroach coaching from a certified expert. You cannot win this battle without an exterminator, but you can make progress, and enjoy the battles.