It began with itching. David was itching. I wasn’t too worried about it because we had been though this once before when he had been secretly using my shower gel. Eventually hives broke out all over his legs and torso and we discovered that he was allergic to vanilla. So, I thought we just had to figure out what David was allergic to this time.
Maybe the laundry detergent—but we hadn’t changed brands or anything. No new soaps or bath foams. Still, allergies can develop. We switched to hypo-allergenic everything. But he was still scratching. And then I started itching too. Surely it was just sympathetic allergies, or the power of suggestion getting the better of me. But no, there were little red bumps on my body and on his.
Fleas! Somehow our indoor cat must have gotten fleas. I gave the cat a bath, always a fun activity anyway. No fleas, just several new scratches on my hands and arms. Mosquitos? But it was early Spring.
One night we were lying next to each other in the loft bed that he had built and that we shared. We were trying to sleep, but David, who is by nature a squirmy/twitchy kind of person was squirming and twitching way beyond what was normal for him--and I was getting itchier by the second. A little rhyme started going through my head: “ ‘Night ‘night, sleep tight…”
“David? Is there really such a thing as bedbugs?”
He sat up and turned on the light. “I think so.” He said.
We looked at each other for a moment and then immediately descended the ladder from the loft. We had always been able to think and act in unison. He went straight to the computer; I fixed us a drink and started pacing the floor.
“Go look and see if there are small black smears on the mattress,” he said after a few minutes of reading. I did. There were.
“We’ve got bedbugs.” He said.
Oh the shame and horror of that realization! Both of us came from homes where cleanliness is next to Godliness and a person could literally eat off the floor in either of our mothers’ kitchens. While we knew our home was nowhere near those standards—bedbugs! We’d both be disowned if anyone ever found out. We slept fitfully on the pull-out couch that night.
The next day we bought pesticides: sprays, bombs, powders, and a bottle of witch hazel for the itching and set to work treating our apartment according to instructions we found online. It didn’t work. A week later we were still being eaten alive.
“We’re going to have to call an exterminator,” I said. But we were so broke at the time. It was right after 9/11 and the newspaper that we published had taken a huge hit financially. I called a few places and was quoted prices of up to $600! But I also started to get some information.
“Last year, I did maybe five bedbug jobs,” one exterminator told me. “This year, I’ve already done 100. It’s an epidemic.”
That was somewhat comforting in a weird way—at least my housekeeping wasn’t completely to blame. Still, I thought surely we could solve this problem without spending $600.
“Let’s bomb again,” I said, and David, the cheapest man I have ever known, eagerly agreed.
Then one night we noticed that someone in our building had thrown out a mattress—and it had the same telling black smears that ours did. We asked our super, Jerry, if he knew who it belonged to.
“I think it is de guy on de 5th floor. Teacher guy.” He told us.
We knocked on the teacher guy’s door and he answered. It was an awkward question, but we asked it: “Do you have bedbugs?” His face turned a deep shade of red. “Because,” I continued quickly, “We do.”
It was like an AA meeting! Instantly, we bonded. We learned that we were not alone and that we were not to blame. We told him our story and he told us his: He had bought a brand new mattress and box springs, in an ill-fated effort to improve his sleep. That was where the bugs had come from. The same trucks that deliver new mattresses also haul away old infested ones. He said he had seen hundreds of them (many more than we had seen!) and had finally thrown away the mattress in desperation. But the bugs had already spread throughout the entire building.
“If the bugs are in the whole building—“ David started. I finished his sentence:
“Then the landlord has to send an exterminator!” We did a little victory dance fantasizing about a full night’s sleep. It would prove to be premature.
Knowing our landlord and his history of negligence, we should have known he would refuse to treat and he did. We ended up having to take him court to get him to do so. In the meantime, we hired, not the $600 exterminator that sounded like he knew what he was doing, but the same company the landlord usually employed. They agreed to do it for $290 and David, always penny-wise and pound foolish, insisted. We paid them. It didn’t work. The bugs came back.
Eventually, we got rid of every piece of upholstered furniture in the house and all of our linens—nice things that I had scrimped and saved in order to buy slowly over the years. I washed every single piece of clothing we owned and sent the nice stuff to the cleaners. After about a year, we won our court battle (David found the NYC Housing Code that plainly states landlords must provide extermination services for "vermin"; bedbugs are vermin.) and the landlord had to send the exterminator at his expense, but still, the bugs kept coming back. We were sleeping on the floor by this time and still unable to get any rest. We were also still keeping all of this a secret from our families and most of our friends, giving strange vague answers to questions about our lack of furniture. “Umm, yeah, we needed some space.” Our relationship, already suffering from unrelated problems began to sag under the strain of the added burden. David started not coming home at night. We were fighting a lot.
It was obvious the bugs were coming into the apartment through the cracks in the floors and the walls and so I spent an entire week by myself on my hands and knees sealing cracks in the wooden planks with caulk. That helped for awhile, but still the bastards still got back in.
When David and I broke up for good in 2004 I thought the bugs were vanquished and I bought a few pieces of furniture, a mattress for the loft bed and a new couch. I picked up sheets and things at street fairs, about all I could afford at the time. Eventually, I thought, I could replace my nice things. Turns out it was still premature and the bugs came back again. This time I hired the exterminator that sounded like he knew what he was doing and he did. He treated my apartment from top to bottom and brought his caulk gun to seal all the tiny cracks that I had not even dreamed existed.
By this time, the nasty little creatures had gotten a lot of press in New York, as they were apparently tormenting the well-heeled and affluent folks on Park Avenue as well as those of us on Amsterdam. The New Yorker ran a very funny piece about some pristine apartments being torn apart in an attempt to rid them of the vermin.
After all the public exposure, the shame of the whole situation went away and I was able to tell my friends and most of my family about what had happened. I still haven’t told my mother. Please, don’t tell my mother.
All told, I’d say the bedbug fiasco cost me about $7,000 and also dealt the final death blow to my marriage. I am certain I will always be hyper-vigilant about inspecting every mattress I ever sleep on and I still tend to overreact to the slightest itch on my body. After all, it all began with itching.
Liza Case
Copyright 2007
All Rights Reserved
