It was the hottest summer on record for NYC, or so Al Roker told me in between awkward back-and-forth shout-a-logues with overenthusiastic tourists. Yet, there was no way I could walk out the door in shorts. I was deformed. Hideous. The masses would recoil in fear at the sight of my gnawed legs.
Bed bugs.
Until somewhere around the 20th bite, I was unaware that bed bugs actually existed outside of the common mantra for tucking children in at night:
"Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite!"
I'd like to know: what sick person decided that this was an appropriate part of their child's night time routine?
"Good night, sleep tight, don't let the flesh-shredding, blood-sucking parasites that are crawling all over your mattress latch onto that vulnerable, snoring bag of hemoglobin, otherwise known as your body, tonight!"
Scratching yet?
I was. My nightly routine as an intern was to come back to Brooklyn after a long workday, sweating through my jeans, strip naked in the bathroom and scratch like a flea-ridden mutt for twenty minutes while sobbing incoherently over the phone to Andrew about how I'd just have to sleep in the tub tonight because rubber-banding my socks over my pants and sleeping on an air mattress sealed with a plastic zipper bag in the middle of the kitchen was still no defense against these thirsty. mother. fucking. bugs.
The two girls who subleased the apartment to my roommates and me bragged about how they'd gotten all of their furnishings at a great price: For free! From the oh-so-sterile curbs of our Brooklyn neighborhood!
"You'd be amazed at what people throw out!" they gushed after we'd already paid and signed on the dotted line.
'Amazed' wasn't the adjective I had in mind as I piled my entire wardrobe into the dryer to burn off any existing parasites before storing it all in garbage bags, which I would live out of for the remainder of my summer internship.
It hadn't taken more than one or two google searches to find out that the apartment contained bed bugs.
During my search, I learned of the mind-fuckingly disturbing characteristics of the bed bug.
Here are a few fun facts:
- Bed bugs typically live in--you guessed it--BEDS!, but also infiltrate other furniture.
- They feast on blood, first anesthetizing their victims with their spit, then sucking out life juice to their hearts' content.
- They are dark red/ brown in color because they're full of your blood.
- They communicate to other bedbugs through the use of pheromones: "Hey guys, this twit passed out drunk and won't be waking for another 12 hours! Open bar to raid! Dibs on the aorta!"
- When temperatures are colder, some bedbugs can survive for up to a year without eating. A year. I can't survive for more than 2 hours without tossing food to my gullet monster.
- Bed bugs molt out of their skin at least 6 times before reaching fertile adult hood. Fucking. Sick.
- Shells of their bodies, as well as their iron-laden blood poop, sink into your mattress, creating a visible brown line on the side: one of the clearest indications of infestation...aside from tiny blood smears on your sheets...yum.
- Male bedbugs impregnate female bedbugs NOT by gentle woo'ing and tender love-making, but rather by stabbing them in the torso with razor sharp genitalia and depositing semen. "You want kids? I'll give you kids...
Ahhhhhhh! I. AM. SPARTACUUUUUUS!" - There has been a resurgence of bedbugs in NYC since gene mutations promoted the flourishing of pesticide-resistant bedbugs. This means that many can survive a bath of toxic chemicals as though it was nothing more than an aggressive facial.
- One of the only surefire ways to kill bedbugs is to expose them to heat that's 115°F for no shorter than 7 minutes. (Aka--putting your clothes in the dryer...hence living out of sealed garbage bags.)
- Because of international travelers from countries with less-expansive health department regulations, these little creatures are often stowaways and are making increasing visits to many Big City, USA hotels. They only ever come with one-way tickets.
In summary, bed bugs are hideous, opportunistic, impermeable assholes that make it their business to feast on the most vulnerable subjects: sleeping humans. And there's not a whole lot you can do to stop them.
That's how the psychosis sets in. By the 3rd month of being feasted on every night and waking up every morning with 20 new bites, I was losing my mind. The exterminators had been in an out with no results, pest bombs had no effect, I had spent weeks obsessively drying my clothes and thereby only having a handful that still fit, and Andrew had begun, weeks prior, to expect a phone call around the same time every day from his hyperventilating girlfriend. My body was riddled with old bite wounds and new bite marks. My legs were so ravaged, it took the better part of a year for the scars to fade.
The bedbug: a tiny creature with the immense capability of upsetting some primal balance within. It's a humbling and downright fucking miserable experience. I was lucky to escape the situation in one piece (minus a few hundred flesh nibblets), but it's instilled in me a paranoia of hotel floors, old mattresses and any piece of furniture salvaged from the curb.
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Dedicated to a co-worker of mine who recently and involuntarily embarked on a similar journey into the world of itching and twitching. Stay sane, Nik!
