YPG Bitchbox Article

By Tracy Kaufman

According to The Bug Clinic, a company that teaches you how to cast a suspicious stinkeye on every corner of your home, bedbugs are “an ancient insect whose roots are thought to go back to the times of the cave dwellers.” They are tiny and red, courtesy of YOUR blood, and they live a comfortable existence, courtesy of YOUR mattress, bed frame, baseboards, and moldings. Thanks, moldings. Thanks for giving an apartment Old World ambiance and a mammoth colony of bugs.

When I think of bedbugs, I think of families living in Victorian squalor. Twelve children, their heads shaved to keep lice away, wearing barrels held up by suspenders, all sharing one twin-sized mattress stuffed with cotton balls, with only their old slumbering hound Ralph to use as a blanket. I do not think of my modern-day Brooklyn apartment, expertly Swiffered weekly by myself and my roommate. But alas, this is the dark secret of New York. When they cleaned up Times Square, plopped Chanel and Burberry in the middle of Soho, and turned all the Hell’s Kitchen peep shows into Olive Gardens, the seedy underbelly had to pop up somewhere, somehow, to express the true spirit of the city. And that medium appears to be bedbugs, who are not content to ravage only the occasional seedy block or dark alley! Oh, most certainly not – they are on the Upper East Side! And the Upper West Side, and the East Village, and the West Village, and in Queens, and in Brooklyn! It’s true, they are everywhere, including my poor suffering home and my poor suffering walls.

It wasn’t until halfway through the summer that I began to notice itchy red bumps all over my ankles. I assumed they were mosquito bites, since I admittedly live in a terrible neighborhood where the sidewalks are encroached upon by tall weeds on all sides during the hot weather. So I assumed that once the fall hit, the bug bites would go away. But they didn’t! And then one day I looked upward at the skylightesque feature at the top of my wall for what may have been the first time ever (due to my short stature), and recoiled with a scream at what I saw crawling around up there. I ran, I fell, I stumbled through the living room in search of the bug spray. Clutching it in my teeth and running back to the bedroom, I climbed up on the bed, reached up as close to the ceiling as I could get, and sprayed with everything I had. “Demons!” I called out into the night. “Heinous beasts! You’ll rue the day you ever came to this cursed town!”

Where did they come from? I do not know. How long were they really there before they were discovered? It is one of the great mysteries of our time. All I know is that from that moment on, my and my roommate’s lives have been governed by misery and paranoia. O rebels of gentrification, must you prey upon the innocents? One of our weekend guests left covered in red welts after her visit!

When the exterminator came, we had to have all of our clothing, towels, and sheets stored in plastic bags, and had to clear out of the apartment for four hours after he sprayed. The next morning, I bought a new mattress just in case the old one was housing any suspects. But as we moved furniture around the room, my moving companion announced that his foot was itching. When we looked, it was a brand new bedbug bite. What had that exterminator been doing during his four-hour visit? Watching Gilmore Girls DVDs? Reading our old issues of Entertainment Weekly? He certainly wasn’t killing bedbugs, that’s for sure!

Now, whenever we feel an itch, we become convinced that it’s a bedbug bite. We even experience phantom bites, in which we’re itchy all over inside the apartment, but are magically cured as soon as we go outside. When we see a piece of lint, we’re absolutely positive that it’s a bug until after we’ve sprayed it with a whole can of Raid. All of our friends have been candidates for the gallows after we’ve accused each and every one of them of bringing the bugs into the apartment. And what of the other apartments in our building? Could bedbugs have spread from any of them?

It’s true; we now live a life of fear and of witch hunts. While most of the bugs seem to be gone now, I still occasionally glimpse a lone outlaw crawling up the living room wall, daring me to commit a brutal slaughter. The exterminator will return for a second spraying, and this time he’s not leaving until every bug is dead, even if it means he has to patrol the apartment all night with a flashlight and a can of pesticide. Even if it means he has to circle the neighborhood with a cannon full of bug powder. Even if it means he must scour every street and home of New York, day in, day out, armed with only a wheelbarrow full of DDT and a vision for an insect-free world.