3. Bed Bugs
I didn't choose this.
Sometimes new experiences happen to you without any effort at all. This year, for me, a new experience happened while I was staying at a hostel as the only person over the age of 30, perched precariously on an upper bunk. The first morning I woke up with red welts on my arm, I didn’t think much of it. We are all made of organic material and other creatures are always trying to steal some little part of us to keep their own biological engines running. I wish I could just fill a ramekin with blood for mosquitoes and skip the bites, but they have their way of doing things. Over the next few days, however, as more bites appeared, I knew mosquitoes had absolutely nothing to do with this. Delightful!
No one else in the room complained, though some of them may have been secretly scratching as we lined up for breakfast. I did show my mess of oozing bumps to one girl who had become by hostel buddy, and she called it what I think is the Spanish word for impetigo. I insisted that I’d been bathing constantly, but she shrugged noncommittally.
The worst bites were on my feet, around my ankles and on my toes. They itched so horribly I ceased to be a person. I was only intolerable sensation. The color spread out in shaded tiers, like a stain of poison just under the skin. Those shadow ripples lasted for weeks afterwards, even once the itching finally subsided, as though the cells had been permanently damaged from the inflammation. I went from pharmacy to pharmacy trying to find something that could soothe them. I’ll say this about American pharmacies: because our official healthcare is so horrible, there are far more over-the-counter medications you can buy for non-emergency aches and pains. I’d gone through this once before when a filling fell out of my mouth in Paris. No, of course the pharmacy didn’t have temporary concrete puddy to fill in your tooth hole! Go to the dentist! And there, the dentist cost 40 euro.
I suppose I could have gone to the doctor somehow, but there are ailments that kind of need to work themselves out and a doctor won’t do much besides high five you. I wanted to be shot full of cortisone or rolled around a kiddie pool filled with a skin numbing agent and didn’t think they’d agree to either. The best I could find was some gel that did less than nothing and a rolling stick that promised to have a minuscule amount of calamine in it. If I’d been near the woods, I would have wandered into the forest, chewing up plantain leaves, then spitting them on my wounds, rolling in dirt and scratching my back against tree bark. Instead, I went into the freezing ocean which was the only real relief I found. It was so cold I couldn’t feel my body, which was fantastic. The effect only last a few minutes after exiting the water, unfortunately, so I scuttled in and out like a crab.
Anyone who has had bed bugs or witnessed someone else go through the process of fighting bed bugs has a healthy terror around the situation. I was grateful to be far from home and had a plan in place for keeping them from returning with me. I knew what to do, because I’d lived in places with bed bug outbreaks before, though they’d never reached my bed. In my twenties, I lived in a communal housing situation where 14 people slept in a single row house, some of the bedrooms cut in half with an amateur drywall build. When the bed bugs started in one room, panic spread faster than they did. It was a dark time. Everyone was running to the laundromat to use the dryer and looking at one another with haunted expressions.
“I read a woman died because of bed bug treatments in her house,” one of my roommates told me, before adding, “Well, she filled a shower cap with bed bug poison and put it on and then saran wrapped herself.”
“I think we can avoid that then,” I said. Despite never receiving a bite, I saw piles of stuff go into the trash, money poured into mattress covers, plastic containers, and yes, canned bed bug poison, bought for the crevices of furniture that couldn’t be left out in the yard over the winter. There were black garbage bags of untainted belongings everywhere, and I’d open one of the freezers of our two fridges to find sentimental items tenderly wrapped in ziplock baggies next to the frozen tofurkey.
One of my other roommates had gone through this before in a different communal housing situation, and I asked him, “How did you guys get rid of them?”
“The building was condemned.”
The bed bugs splintered the group and soon people were moving out, myself included. I left behind a captain’s bed frame and a dart board in a nice wooden cabinet my dad gave me for my 21st birthday. Bed bugs changed my life without every laying a mandible on me. That is how delicate human relationships can be, how easily community is dispatched. Pests change all of our lives all the time, shaping the course of human events. There were bed bugs plaguing the Roman Empire. Some species of bed bugs existed 5 to 10 million years before our genus did, simply waiting until the perfect storm of evolution would create us, humans, an animal that lays like a buffet in the same spot for hours at a time on cozy stuffed bedding, which looks like a luxury high-rise to the average bloodsucker. This is the triumph of patience.
As I’ve aged, I’ve become increasingly bourgeois and accustomed to comfort. We should receive more comfort as we age and we also need more to maintain functionality. But I have always thought that I never want to be so fancy I can’t sleep in a hostel bed or eat dumpster dived food or pee in an open hole in a train station, because discomfort if a huge part of change. Change is good, even if it’s only teaching you the ways you want to stay the same. Also, the cost of even minor comforts is rising higher than wages can keep up with. You have to pay extra to bring more than a handbag on airplanes now, for god’s sake. Look, I’m an old man yelling at clouds already! And as that old man, I want somehow to afford the comfort of never fearing a bite again.
But I have been humbled by the mighty bed bug, which ultimately can’t be kept out of even the most high end hotels in the world. This fall, everyone started talking about how bed bugs were infiltrating major cities across Europe, popping up on the train seats and traveling home with influencers from Fashion Week. Health experts ominously suggested that the common bed bug has become immune to our most reliable chemicals for killing them. Yes, I got bitten by bed bugs in a hostel, but I could have been bitten anywhere. Now that I have been, I am truly afraid of what they can do. And I have no solutions, except to keep your friends close and your enemies in the dryer for at least 40 minutes on high heat.
One of the reasons that people are especially afraid of bed bugs is that they know having them will turn them into a social outcast, so before anyone reading this deletes my number, I stopped showing new bites within a few days of leaving my bunk bed. I put everything I wore, including my sneakers, through high heat treatment or into a trash can. It’s been three months, and I still have anxiety about it. But they stayed behind and I moved forward. They could return at any time, intersecting with my life again to disrupt it in a way that is completely out of my control. That’s the joke—control is an illusion. It always has been. You can only enjoy the momentary security you feel, a sweet dream before waking with the hint of an itch.
Here’s an episode of Isabella Rossellini’s bizarre Green Porno series about how bugs make love, specifically the bed bug. The series is worth watching in full for the costumes alone.
If you have the stomach for it, the history of the bed bugs in general is cool.
Don’t live in fear! Live in joy because you don’t yet have bed bugs!