My lack of fly-swatting weapons is a chief reason why my younger self would be disgusted by the man I am today.
Fly swatting was one of my earliest passions. Having mastered the basics at an early age, I knew all the techniques: fly swatter, rolled up newspaper, magazine, the bottom of a shoe, or with my own bare hands.
My father (who served as a fly-swatting mercenary during his younger years with a penny-per-body bounty) taught me the devastating impact of the clap-attack, where you anticipate the fly’s speed and movement by clapping your hands above his perch catching him mid-escape.
One of Mom’s favorite stories to tell about me involved a meal at Friendly’s when a fly kept buzzing around our table. I rolled up my kid’s menu/coloring sheet and lunged for the fly every time it landed within arm’s reach of our booth.
As an exhausted single mother of three boys, Mom knew she couldn’t coerce us into good behavior so settled for containing it.
We were permitted to hunt any fly who entered our air space but prohibited from getting out of the booth, which was not an easy compromise for me.
Mom realized the error of her deal when she caught me with my arm cocked and raised and with a look of pure determination on my face about to deliver a fatal blow to the fly perched on top of a bald man’s head in the booth behind us.
She stopped me at the last second and I’ve resented her ever since. That was the depth of my commitment to the art.
It was my fly-swatter pistol (called The Swat Shot), however, that really elevated me to fly swatting’s top tier.
My Swat Shot was a spring-loaded pistol with a red handle. It shot a hard-plastic circular spider web with enough velocity to either kill a fly or knock a stuffed animal off the back of a couch.
I got my Swat Shot from a roadside tourist trap in Cape Cod. It was the sort of store that had air-brushed tank tops next to discounted college sports sweatshirts, a mountain of salt-water taffy, and the words “Cape Cod” screen printed onto every product you can imagine.
In the back of these stores is always a shelf filled with whoopie cushions, Chinese finger traps, itching powder, and all the things that make life worth living. I could sense this aisle’s location immediately upon entering the store.
We stopped at the store while coming back from a family church camp we used to attend for bunker-style lodging close to the beach.
Even a week surrounded by holy people couldn’t convince me there was anything cooler than being able to shoot my own spider web.
Sure, Jesus walked on water, but Spiderman punched bad guys in the face. If Yester-Chris had to choose one, he’d go with Spiderman every time.
I imagined the Swat Shot pistol would give me super-precise fly-swatting powers. It actually complicated matters considerably because the web needed to hit at a perfectly level angle to avoid ricocheting off any corners or contours near where the fly was sitting.
Still, it excited me considerably and I reveled in every opportunity to use it.
In a house with three boys, screen windows, and claw-happy cats, the opportunities were plentiful.
The Swat Shot wasn’t my only red plastic fly-hunting accessory. I also had an eyepiece you could look through that would show you the world as a fly saw it, with everything fish-eyed and fractured into tiny little hexagons.
My technique, upon seeing a fly, was to go to use my “fly eye” to get his lay of the land. Then, set up near a likely perch with my Swat Shot as a warrior in waiting.
Despite all of this training, I was woefully unprepared to combat the housefly that terrorized my house this week.
Here’s what happened:
The fly got in on Sunday night while I was carrying in groceries. I shrugged it off because I thought, “houseflies die after 24 hours,” so I figured I had already won.
When I still saw him flying around on Monday, I admired his persistence.
On Tuesday, I realized that mayflies die within 24 hours, not house flies. Houseflies, says Google, can live up to 30 days.
So I got up from where I was playing with my daughter and swatted him with a board book relishing my one-swat victory. I even texted my wife to let her know our home was now secure.
Then, on Wednesday, the fly was back and my wife told me there had always been two of them.
I was horrified. One fly, I’m willing to live with, but two is an infestation. “How,” I wondered, “did I let this happen on my watch?”
This was the first time in my life that I’ve ever felt inferior to a frog. I resolved to make that fly pay for its transgressions.
I lunged at him wildly the first few times he passed, hoping for a first-round knockout, but he saw me coming.
I waited for him to find a perch and tried a clap attack but to no avail.
I grabbed an alumni magazine but cursed it for its stiff cover. The best fly-swatting magazines have soft covers like TIME.
But I don’t have any TIME Magazines because this is 2020 and I don’t live in a periodontist’s waiting room.
I silenced all devices in the house and tuned my ear to focus only on the frequency of his wings’ buzz. “Great,” I thought, “I’m living in the one episode of Breaking Bad that everyone hates.”
Though I made a few glancing blows, none were fatal.
I woke up Thursday morning with an overwhelming feeling of shame.
I asked my wife if she would prefer that I was a frog. She answered “no,” but she hesitated.
Seething with resentment, I turned on the house itself shaking my fists at the corners of each room asking, “Where are all the spiders!? Why am I forced to fight alone?”
By Saturday, he was gone. Where? I don’t know. Out the door perhaps or lying dead somewhere on a windowsill or in a corner on the floor.
As I searched for his corpse, I immediately regretted having once sung my daughter the story about the old lady who swallowed a fly.
I don’t know why my seventeen-month-old daughter would swallow a fly, but I know that she would. And if the song is right, we’ll need a lot more than just a Swat Shot to handle that mess.
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