Well, I probably have you all beat on sheer numbers. You have to remember, we were just a bunch of inner-city Yuffies (Young Urban Failures) enjoying a protracted adolescence.

Back in the early 80’s, I ended up with a terrific cockroach problem. We’d shot this feature film in the basement of the house I was living in, and for the effect of dust in the air, we used flour. Better than 20 pound of flour went into the air over the 6 months of shooting. By Christmas, I had the best herd of grain-fed roaches in the county.

I tried everything– sprays, traps, bombs. At best it would knock ’em back for a few weeks, but the flour had been carried into every crevice in the house. I couldn’t afford an exterminator.

Before I discovered the magic of Boric Acid, we got into roach hunting. We’d turn off the lights and sit in the dark and watch TV. At the commercials, we’d throw a spotlight on the wall and jacklight the critters. The walls were going to be re-hab’d eventually, so making holes was no problem. However, we found that 177 pellets made too much of a divot and BB’s made for some dangerous richochets.

Blowgun. That’s right: blowgun. You could send a needle into one from across the room and pin it to the wall. We’d just leave them up there as a warning to the others. Later, the cat would come along and pull it off and eat it. At one point I had twenty pinned on the wall at once. Forget all other game animals– for shear fun there’s nothing like watching Johnny Carson on the tube and hunting roaches on the commercials. We killed hundreds. It also requires far more skill than bowhunting deer. Try hitting a moving dime-sized target with a blowgun at 20 feet sometime.

Then there was the pigeons. I lived up by the University of Cincinnati. There were hundreds of pigeons around my house. Again, I tried BB’s and found the richochets were a problem. I tried .177 pellet and found they were travelling clear through the bird without effect and I was loosing them. I finally switched to a Crossman .22 pump air rifle. The larger caliber pellet would knock them out of the sky. I’d go upstairs to the attic after work and plug pigeons until sunset. We’d have shooting parties up on the roof– maybe five of us, nailing pigeons on the neighboring roofs. I had some light surf tackle and a snag hook handy. If they didn’t fall in the yard, I could cast over and snag them and drag them off the roof. Retrieval was no problem– the cats helped out.

One of the regulars went as far as documenting the whole thing in a performance art piece that he used in his senior art show. Somewhere, I still have the stills. It included interviews, tips, and a commentary somewhat like Kurt Gowdy on the American Sportsman. I wrote the copy for him.

The cockroach derby lasted less than a year. By the next summer I’d spread a 50 lb sack of Boric Acid everywhere. The critters picked it up on their feet and carried it back into the walls to die. I never had a roach problem again. Eventually the plaster was spackled over and re-painted.

The pigeon shoots lasted for years. I bought countless containers of 22 air rifle pellets. We’d sometimes have a half a dozen pigeons in the garbage can in less than a half hour shoot. The cats got everything we couldn’t get to. It got so just shooting pigeons sitting on a gutter line wasn’t enough. We did pigeons on the wing, pigeons having sex (you get the male first; the female stays on the perch and wonders what happened) . At one point we found a tree in a local park that had fermented berries in mid September. The pigeons would get drunk on the berries. With a spotter looking for the park police, we’d take turns off a picnic table. The drunken pigeon shoot was a special annual treat.

Before it was all over, I’d started including the hunting results in my column in the local underground newspaper, and in my stand-up routines at the local clubs. Few folks believed the stories, but it always got laughs.

All this fun went away when I grew up, joined the NRA and a local gun club and started hunting deer, turkey, and engaging in regular sport.

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