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.

Well, it’s not just the mattress that’s going out, the bed’s going out with it. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I own a captain’s bed which is basically one big hunk of pressed wood with drawers and a deep storage space.

The mattress cover debate is over, at least for me. I have waited too long to do this, perhaps out of reluctance to get rid of the furniture I had enjoyed for most of my life. And now the bed bugs have truly taken over. For the last two nights I have slept in my living room because I can no longer sleep in my own bed. For the last week or so, I had been sleeping in my bed with the lights on, and that worked only for a short while. Soon the bugs came out in droves on the mattress and pillow whenever I lied down on it, regardless of the time of day or whether the lights were on or not. And if I can longer sleep in my bed, there is no reason for me to have a bed. I also have to get rid of my headboard, which I have literally had since childhood. I don’t ever remember that headboard not being in my room.

In the last few days, as I open the drawers to get socks, underwear or shorts I see bed bugs. They have laid eggs numerous times on the bed sheets, so my mattress is now bare, sans comforter, sheets or pillow. They have laid eggs inside the drawers, on my socks, on my underwear. We called an exterminator who indicated that there is a large colony of bed bugs underneath my bed and this is most likely where they hide until, of course, the minute I sit or lie on the mattress.

As I lift the mattress, I see the top of the bed is dotted with bed bug feces, and through the tiny slits between the pieces of wood, bed bugs happily travel between the surface and deep within the wooden recesses of my bed. It is truly a sad day for me.

Fortunately, I have an armoire on the other side of my room, which to my observation and inspection has not yet been infiltrated by these monsters. It has enough drawers inside to accommodate the clothes I currently keep in my bed. The only challenge is finding a place for the various items which currently occupy those drawers. I think for posterity’s sake I’ll throw a sheet over my mattress and put on some covered pillows so I can take one last picture of my room with the headboard and bed in it.

In my March 18 entry regarding spring cleaning, an anonymous poster suggested I buy a mattress cover rather than commit mattress-cide. The poster added a link to a company web page showcasing their mattress and pillowcase covers. Now I’m guessing the poster may have been an employee of the company in question. But I started reading the description of the product anyway.

I had heard of people buying mattress covers to combat their bed bug problems, but I’ve come up with a few flaws in their logic which show why mattress covers may not be so great after all.

The solution that mattress covers provide is that once you have vacuumed and scrubbed down your mattress, and encase it in a zipper-sealable cover, it will trap whatever bed bugs are living inside your mattress. Since bed bugs can live up to a year without eating, the company suggests that you wait well past one year after first encasing your mattress in this cover to remove the cover and discard the by then presumably dead bed bugs.

I have a problem with this because in many cases bed bugs also reside in nearby furniture, namely box springs and headboards. My particular case is very unique because I own a captain’s bed (which is identical to the one in the picture, sans the matching headboard, lamp, bureau and mirror), completely made out of wood. With the captain’s bed, no box spring is needed to support the mattress, as you can see. Though the bed bugs in my home primarily reside in the mattress, I’ve also seen them inside the drawers of the bed as well as the headboard.

Another problem is even if the bed bugs don’t eat for months because they’re trapped inside the mattress cover, they’ll still be alive, which means they’ll still be mating. Here comes the disgusting part: after a few months after you’ve applied the mattress cover, there will be generations of bed bugs residing within the cover itself. I can only imagine myself climbing into bed and feeling scores of bed bugs’ bodies through the cover and into my backside. It’s truly a disgusting mental image.

This brings up another issue: what if during the course of the 12-month period, the cover is ruptured in some way? Maybe you accidentally puncture it with something with a jagged or sharp edge, and then the dozens of bed bugs start pouring out, hungry for human blood? Now you have a real infestation problem on your hands!

If I had a mattress cover, I would never feel safe removing it, even after two or three years. The only way I could see myself removing a mattress cover from a bed bug-ridden mattress is if it were completely submerged in water while I was doing it. From my observations, bed bugs die almost instantly when even partially submerged in water, like when I throw them into my toilet bowl and they immediately stop moving completely.

Has anyone had any personal experiences with mattress covers? If so, if anyone has advice on this, even an anonymous post would be appreciated.

I spent the last few days engaged in a heavy-duty cleaning project, one of many I’ve had since I first discovered the bed bugs. I vacuumed the hell out of my bed and room, I mopped the floor and threw out lots and lots of newspapers and other paper products I do not need.

One thing I’ve learned about bed bugs is that they like clutter because it gives them great places to hide, and even better places to lay eggs undisturbed because most clutter just sits around in the same place for long periods of time. I am a bonifide packrat, and I am not known for being tidy. So the whole Mr. Clean transformation still takes some time getting used to.

One reason to start cleaning house is so that it wil be easier for an exterminator to manuever around your dwelling and getting to work. Besides, wouldn’t it suck if you paid a king’s ransom for some fumigation, and a small colony of bed bugs survived because they were safely hiding under some crap you left on the floor?

Probably the best reason to start doing a thorough cleaning and subsequent fumigation would be to get it done before the weather really gets warm and bed bugs really start cominig out. New York City is known for really hot, sticky weather in the summer months, even as early as June. Bed bugs hate cold temperatures, so like most other insects, warm temperatures will prompt them to do less hiding and more exploring. And more exploring means more mating. And more mating means more bugs.

My next project is going through my closet to go through my wardrobe, because the closet is right next to my bed, and I’ve seen bed bugs crawling on my shirts at least once as I was rifling through my closet in the morning. I’m going to either throw some stuff away (like my junior high school and high school graduation caps and gowns) or wash them and give them to Goodwill. See, I used to weigh 320 pounds and then I lost about 110 pounds over a few years. Problem is because I’m a slob and a packrat, I never really got rid of my ginormous size 52 clothes.

That project will be followed by a most dreaded act which I have hesitated to address and have kept telling myself I didn’t need to do it: committing mattress-cide. I know my bed is the bed bugs’ original roost. And seveal times I have examined the bottom of my mattress and found a small army of baby bed bugs scurrying in all directions. I need to wrap it up in a bag, call 311 and find a legal dumping site. I’ve seen people dumping large items (furniture, air conditioners, etc.) but I’ve always been afraid to do so, because paranoid me, I’m afraid the cops might dust for fingerprints, find mine on them, and slap me with a heavy fine which I understand can be up to $20,000.

One of the reasons I didn’t want to get rid of this mattress is because it is a very expensive, very high-quality item. How high-quality, you ask? I’ve had this mattress for about 15 years and it’s still as firm as it was the day I got it. My financial situation is worse now than in recent years, so the chances of me buying a new mattress is not too good.

I’ll probably just end up buying an inflatable mattress. Perhaps Consumer Reports can help me pick out a quality blow-up mattress, and if they do have such a report, I’ll throw it up on Bugged Out.