Nothing brings a pair of roommates together quite like the frantic killing of bugs.

My roommate Reggie and I have shared in quite a bit over the years, from traveling mishaps and a cross-country drive to in-group drama and accidental secret-spilling (sorry, again). Yet we've still managed to maintain a wonderful friendship. That bond was only strength ened last week when we went head-to-head with a buzzing, seething pile of weird-looking bugs that had infiltrated our apartment.

I came home one day to find Reggie standing in the living room, staring slackjawed at the sliding glass door. Thinking he had finally lost every last one of his frag ile little marbles, I tried to tip-toe past him down the hall way. I jumped in fright when he suddenly raised his arm and pointed.

`` Look,'' he said, rendered monosyllabic with shock. `` Bugs.''

I followed his gaze and saw, to my horror, hundreds of tiny winged insects crawling around at the base of the sliding door. `` Gross,'' he said.

After several moments of stunned immobility, we sum moned our courage and sprang into action. Neither of us were adept at bug-fighting, and our individual strategies differed. I went straight for the cleaning products, bring ing out armfuls of sponges, Scrub Free, Pine Sol, and -- oddly enough -- a toilet brush. Reggie brought out the heavy artillery in the form of our noisy black vacuum cleaner. While he struggled to figure out how to connect the attach ment hose to the vacuum, I let fly a war cry and hurled myself towards the bugs with fistfuls of Lysol-soaked paper towels.

The result was not pretty. I swatted at the herd and fran tically threw crumpled paper towels teeming with bugs into a plastic bag, only to watch the half-dead critters crawl and fly their way out. Having finally figured out the vacuum cleaner, Reggie sucked up large quantities of bugs before becoming concerned that the vacuum cleaner now had these evil insects flying around inside. The vacuum was promptly banished from the apartment, leaving our neighbors to wonder why we kept our household appliances outside the front door.

It was a hard-fought battle but we finally prevailed. I'd expected to find stray cookie crumbs or last week's chicken salad at the bottom of the mound of bugs, but no such bait existed. I doused the remaining survivors in a flood of liquid laundry detergent, which somehow seemed the most logical course of action. Reggie and I stood and admired our work for a moment, bonded by having survived such terrible trauma together. Then he went to take an hour-long shower, leaving me to wonder what had brought the bugs in the first place -- and more importantly, who to blame.

My advice is that if you ever want to bond with your roommate, go hide a halfeaten candy bar in the corner of the living room and wait for the bugs to come. Just make sure you have plenty of laundry detergent and toilet brushes on hand.

BILL ZUCK thinks his vacuum might be missing. If you spot someone running off with a vacuum cleaner filled with angry bugs, e-mail wcz78(at)(at)yahoo.com.