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Professor Exterminator

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Micah Mattix, exterminator.
Ten years ago when I was a lowly lecturer in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I took a summer job to help fill the perpetually empty stomachs of our four young children. It was the dirtiest work I had ever done—and no, it wasn’t for a political campaign. It was termite work for my brother-in-law’s pest control company in Raleigh.
If you’ve ever done termite work, you know what I’m talking about. To treat a home for termites, you have to dig a six-inch trench around the exterior of a house’s foundation, fill it with chemicals, and cover it up. Then, if the house has a crawl space—and most houses in North Carolina do—you do the same thing along the interior of the foundation.
It’s trenching the interior wall that’s messy. While some homes have a spacious crawl space rising cathedral-like to three or four feet above ground, most are two feet high or less. Some were so low, I had to turn my head sideways to avoid eating dirt.
Crawl spaces are also home to all sorts of critters . and other things. I’ll never forget one home we did—a double-wide outside Fuquay-Varina. Things started badly when we opened the crawl space door to find two black widows hanging in the corner of the entry. Scott—my partner on these jobs and co-owner of the company—sprayed them with some aerosol insecticide and laughed his isn’t-this-going-to-be-fun laugh. The space stunk, and as I was making my way around the inconceivably tight interior, I discovered why—or one reason why—as I came nose to pelt with a partially decomposed possum or cat (I didn’t check). The other reason for the smell? The sewage line was leaking.
Other than the work, the job was great. Scott and I would sometimes go out for sushi afterwards—me partially caked in dirt—and talk about our kids or the books we were reading. He played in a couple of bands after high school and worked at various pest control companies before joining his brother, Kevin, at Innovative Pest Solutions. He was—and still is—a voracious reader, and we would sometimes stop to browse the shelves of used bookstores on our way back to the office.
Scott liked to tell homeowners that I taught English at Chapel Hill. The occasional surprise at the apparent incongruity of a university lecturer crawling under their house in overalls with a pickax was too delicious to pass up. Though it seemed to me that the simpler the house, the less surprised the owner (or renter) was. It was unremarkable to them that one had to do whatever was needed to make ends meet.
For those that were surprised, it was, perhaps, a reminder that you can’t judge a book by its cover or a man’s interests by his job. Two guys who show up in a truck to work on your house might care about little else besides football and beer—and thank God for football and beer—but they also might be Dostoyevsky aficionados. Who can tell? Blue-collar workers might cling to their “guns and religion,” as one former president put it, but some also hold on to their Tobias Wolff and Theodore Roethke.
Only once did it backfire. We worked occasionally with the Department of Entomology at NC State. When a homeowner didn’t have the money for a termite job, Kevin and Scott would see if they wanted to try an experimental treatment gratis. The university would pick up the tab. A professor in the department—let’s call him Dr. Verner O’Sullivan—would meet us at the house to drop off the chemicals and give instructions. The first time this happened, Scott introduced us (“Dr. O’Sullivan, Micah; Micah, Dr. O’Sullivan”) and mentioned my regular job. “Call me Verner,” he says as we shake hands. In the five years that Scott had worked with Dr. O’Sullivan, he’d never once told him to call him Verner. Scott tells me this with a smile, though he’s a little baffled.
Of course, there is still such a thing as a “community of scholars” and small privileges that come with belonging to the club, and rightly so. But titles do not make a man, nor does the work one does or the places one lives tell us much that really matters about a person.
My time with Scott that summer was a case in point. Our conversations were more wide-ranging and interesting than many I had on campus during the academic year. There was no performance—no practiced bons mots or five-minute summaries of research that even the speaker didn’t believe in—just a genuine interest in life in all its strangeness and complexity.

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