Two days, two words--bed bugs. It says it all but for the sake of a blog entry I will say more. I had become suspicious when I noticed huge red bites on my hands and wrists that itched like a motherfucker. We had had mosquitoes hanging around our apartment until Christmas so at first I thought it could be them, but I thought I had killed the last one a few weeks before. Then one morning I got out of the shower and spotted something crawling across my bed. I looked closely--it was a little bug that looked exactly like the one from the bed bug ads on the subway. Cursing I lifted up my mattress (which I had been checking daily) and there was another little asshole sitting there. Horrified I called my roommate in to see the bad news and then killed them both.
I got to work and immediately started crying in front of my coworker and the new Korean intern who was probably convinced Americans are insane. They were sympathetic though and didn't treat me like Patient Zero, which is what I felt like. I had to leave early for a dentist appointment because I had had a wisdom tooth out the week before, as if things weren't bad enough. My dentist was cute and Italian though and my plan before the bed bug discovery was to try and look cute to seduce him. This plan obviously failed--he basically pushed me out of the door after I was finished, which was probably for the best. What would I have said "Let's go on a date, I have bed bugs"? Absolutely not.
After I went to Bed Bath and Beyond and discovered the horrible racket they have on bed bug materials--because $75 for a mattress covering is totally reasonable. I had no choice though and had to purchase, along with other supplies. I stumbled down the sidewalk with my oversized bags, and got onto the subway. There was a smelly homeless man stretched out on one of the benches sleeping, which is exactly what I wanted to deal with. And I wonder where I got the bedbugs in the first place. At the first stop into Brooklyn, I noticed the man waking up. He stirred and then reached for the zipper on his pants. He began to pull it down and I knew I could see no more. I rushed to the end of the subway car and never looked back once. The people's faces around me though made it very apparent of what he was up to. I was horrified.
I was able to put this behind me quickly though as Operation Fuck These Bed Bugs was getting underway. The exterminator was scheduled to come the next morning and we needed to have everything out of our rooms. My roommate and I took our bedding and piles of clothes and dragged them to the laundromat. We were there until the wee hours of the night washing load after load. The only way we were able to tolerate it this is with the Tall Boys we purchased from the bodega across the street. Once we were finished, we returned home and shoved the rest of our laundry into garbage bags. I stopped for about 4 hours, where I slept curled up on a couch cushion on the living room floor. I called into work the next day and we continued dragging everything out of our rooms. The exterminator arrived and we were still completely unprepared, so he helped me carry bags of laundry out to my car (which I luckily had in town for my upcoming ski trip to Vermont, post soon to come). Our cat was in the process of having a heart attack and my roommate had to take her to a friends' so she wouldn't be poisoned. I spent the rest of the afternoon doing the rest of my laundry that I hadn't gotten to last night. I was haggard and so exhausted that I was almost delirious. The only positive point about the whole experience was having my car, because there was no way in hell I would've been able to carry all that laundry by myself.
We had been told not to go back to the apartment for 8 hours because of the fumes but I did not heed that warning, as I had finished my laundry and was not looking suitable to go anywhere else in public, even in my ghetto ass neighborhood. I locked myself in the bathroom for an hour, keeping the window open and tried out new makeup styles. When the smell had dissipated enough, I crept out and surveyed the damage. Our apartment looked like we had just moved in, threw everything into the middle of our living room and then a nuclear bomb hit. There were garbage bags filled with clothes lining the walls, our couch was ripped apart and all the loose ends from our rooms had been thrown haphazardly into piles. I sighed and got to work. My room was completely empty except for my Ikea bed, which had been ripped apart. I spent the rest of the night putting my life back together and trying to tell myself my headache was from stress and not from the poisonous fumes I was inhaling. I spent that night curled on the couch cushion again since I was still too traumatized to sleep in my bed.
So far thankfully there haven't been any other sightings (or bites) but I am still terrified that they will return and I have woken up scratching myself in my sleep more than a few times. To date that has been my worst experience in NYC. It's all fun and games til some bedbugs creep on in and fuck shit up.
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