Bugged Out

So Thursday afternoon my brother and I threw out all three items, with all of the inner contents (clothes, reading material, etc.) stuffed into plastic bags. Since I’ve had the bed for so many years, I couldn’t remember how the deliverymen were able to maneuver it through my apartment’s narrow hallway and the sharp right turn which led to my bedroom so many years ago. After an hour of budging and grunting, we decided to use a crowbar and take the bed apart. Bugs spilled out onto the floor, scurrying around as my brother began a two-man killing spree. After an hour the bottoms of our shoes as well as the floor were covered in reddish-brownish-blackish stains of bed bug entrails, and we returned to the task at hand.

I’ve spent the last two days cleaning up, vacuuming, mopping, throwing out old unwanted stuff to make room for the items that were displaced when I threw out the bed and headboard. I’m still not finished because I needed to prepare for three midterm exams this week. Plus I went on three job interviews, so it was a busy week.

Two good things about bed bugs that most people don’t consider, they force minimalism upon their victims by forcing them to get rid of a lot of their furniture and other material possessions. The other good thing they do is force people to routinely keep their surroundings clean. I know I’m kind of a slob, and the only thing worse than seeing the bed bugs as I cleaned my bedroom this week was realizing just how absolutely filthy the room was. So the end results to having bed bugs are clean, modest surroundings, a rare concept in this town.

Maybe bed bugs are God’s little messengers, sent to America to tell us to stop being such pigs and that the acquisition of material possessions is not what life is all about. I have so many friends who immediately after getting their first apartments on their own whip out their credit cards and spend thousands of dollars on fancy furniture. Marble coffee tables, leather sofas, canopy beds, wall-to-wall carpets, all so they can show the rest of the world that they have taste and style. Once I even dated a young lady who, despite earning a measly $18,000 a year, not only bought (with her credit card) lots of beautiful furniture for her new DUMBO apartment, but even used her line of credit to hire an interior decorator to help her pick out a theme for her apartment as well as furniture and other assorted accoutrements. Have fun paying off that debt. This economy is getting worse and people are still spending as if it’s getting better.

I know it’s been a week since my last entry, and it’s because I finally decided to throw out my bed, mattress and headboard. Because so much time has passed between my last entry, and because so much has happened, I will split this entry into two. As I wrote in an earlier post, I had called an exterminator who told me of the small colony of bed bugs residing in and under my bed. I wanted a second opinion, so I asked my building manager to send up his exterminator, who was far more thorough than the one I hired on my own. When the second exterminator inspected my apartment on Wednesday, he pulled out the drawers from my captain’s bed and shone a flashlight into the bed’s shaded underbelly. There I saw scores of bed bugs of all sizes scurrying about. The drawers themselves, as I removed the articles of clothing inside and threw them into a plastic bag, were consistently dotted with black spots of bed bug feces. Each drawer (my bed had four of them) featured at least one nest of bed bug eggs and hatchlings. It was truly disgusting, and truly depressing.

Perhaps if I had attacked the problem back in January as fervently as I did this past week I might still have my bed, headboard and mattress. As the exterminator and I lifted my mattress we both saw the underside was riddled with little rips and tears, most likely made by the bugs and evidence that they were also living inside my mattress. I was a bit surprised to see this, as I had never really noticed these holes before. See all the difference a flashlight can make?

As for the headboard, the exterminator pounded the side of the headboard with his flashlight until a few bugs emerged from the board’s many cracks. The headboard was deep enough that it had two shelves inside, which I had half-filled with stacks of magazines and newspapers. He sprayed all over the apartment, but admitted that this wouldn’t do much to alleviate the problem. The only solution he saw was to get rid of the bed, mattress and headboard.

Even before Wednesday, I knew my bed would have to go. When I would go to bed last weekend, within five minutes after I laid down at night, the bed bugs would come out of their hiding places and bite the hell out of me. And this was with the lights on. They were no longer wary or cautious when seeking out their blood meal; they knew they now owned the bed. The pests knew what I didn’t know until the exterminator revealed it to me: that they had successfully colonized the place in which I’ve slept for the last 15 years. The insects even began biting my face, something they had never done before.

The whole thing reminds me of a popular lyric sung by the late Tupac Shakur: “We don’t die; we multiply.” Though he was referring to gangsters and thugs, I can easily view these insects as thugs, going wherever they please, doing whatever they want to whomever is unfortunate enough to be in their presence.