by Jasmine Moy

It started with three little red dots, an Orion’s belt on my arm. “Spider bites,” I told myself. But out of curiosity, I asked my roommate whether she had any bites too.

“Oh yeah, a bunch, actually,” she said, and proceeded to show me clusters of bites on her stomach, arms and legs.

“Why haven’t you said anything until now?!” I asked.

“They don’t itch, I didn’t think they were anything to worry about,” she said. If there’s a hall of fame for famous last words, this probably deserves a spot on the wall. What ensued were weeks of largely sleepless nights punctuated by nightmares galore, and blood, sweat, tears, public shaming and the ceaseless bagging up of everything I owned.

According to a 2009 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in half of all bedbug cases, people will not show any visible marks, which, scary. You may have them now and not know it!

For that other 50%, reactions will vary. They may or may not itch, they may be small and red or larger and blotchy. “Bites are often noted in linear groups of 3, sometimes called ‘breakfast, lunch, and dinner,’” it is often noted.

I learned if you shift slightly or breathe deeply as they’re feeding on you, they think you’ve woken up and start to head back to the mattress, but when you stop moving, they then stop to finish their meal. My Orion’s belt was a bed bug three-course meal.

Other frightening facts: they know when you’re in your deepest sleep, so often feed about 2 hours before sunrise; they can find you by your breath because they sense and hunt out carbon dioxide; you’ll almost never feel them biting you because they inject into you their saliva, which contains an anesthetic, while they withdraw the blood of their host; they can live for a full year or more without feeding, though a recent study by an entomologist out of Virginia Tech reported that newer generations of pesticide-resistant (?!) bedbugs survived only two months without feeding.

The good news? They aren’t known to spread diseases! At least not yet.

For me, it wasn’t enough to see the bites. I wanted a visual that bugs were living in my bed. I read that they hide in the corners of your mattress and box spring. You may not see the bugs but you’ll see the fecal spots they leave behind (eww), which look as if someone took a fine-tipped sharpie to the seams of your mattress.

Google Image search results inevitably show the worst possible scenarios, no matter what you’re looking up, but because I caught them early (no thanks to my roommate), mine looked like this, not like this. At this point, though I still hadn’t seen any bed bugs, I knew what they looked like. Hours and hours poring over photos on the internet and I’d become a sort of self-taught expert. They are rust colored, leaf shaped, vary in size (from 1mm up to 5mm), flat and they have visible ridges across their backs.

If you have no bites and you see nothing on your mattress, you’re probably in good shape. If you’re still worried, don’t call in the beagles yet. Try this cheap, do-it-yourself test that lures bedbugs with the carbon dioxide that dry ice emits.

So, I realized that my apartment was infested. Because never breathing again is not an option, I sought a solution.

Here is a short list of things that you should absolutely not do. Not only do these things not solve your problem, they’re expensive and time consuming.

1. DO NOT PANIC. Panicking leads to doing all of the things on this list.

2. Do not throw away your mattress. Even if you put a sign that says, “bedbugs!” on it, you never know who might pick it up, including someone else in your building, which means you’re making the problem bigger for yourself.

3. Do not buy a new mattress. If you haven’t thoroughly attended to the rest of your belongings, they’ll find your new mattress in no time.

4. Do not move. You’ll probably move them with you.

5. Do not bring all your clothes to the dry cleaner. It’s pointless, see above.

There are however a number of cheap ways to start combating the problem.

1. Get carpet tape (that’s the thick, double-sided stuff) and roll a line of it in your apartment doorways, which will keep them from getting in or out of your room/apartment. (Some have suggested outlining your bed with it, which seems extreme and is not aesthetically pleasing but would work as a preventive measure.)

2. Put the legs of your bed in small plastic containers and put ½ an inch of baby oil in the containers, which will keep bugs from getting into or out of your bed (they’re not good climbers).

3. Invest in mattress covers to cover your mattress and box spring.

4. Buy a gallon or so of rubbing alcohol and some spray bottles. Rubbing alcohol is your new best friend. It not only kills bed bug eggs, but also works as a repellent to keep them from laying new ones, and keeps them from biting you at night.

However, whatever the Internet says about being able to conquer the bugs all by yourself, I wouldn’t try it. Just as it’s unwise to get cut-rate Lasik, or fly to Mexico for plastic surgery, the risks outweigh the cost of paying a good professional.

My roommate had been working at a restaurant and the owner there recommended Mario to us. He was no-nonsense and comforting. He assured us that we weren’t dirty people and that we had nothing to be ashamed of. Just last week he’d seen a bedbug crawling on a guy’s shirt on the subway (oof) so really, you can get them any place! This somehow managed to make me feel both better and not-at-all better at the same exact time.

Before he could come and spray (fumigating almost never works in one shot, he said, and heating/freezing all your things costs a fortune and requires days in extreme temperatures, either below 10 degrees or above 115 degrees Fahrenheit), we had to take every object we owned, spray it thoroughly with rubbing alcohol, and bag it. Electronics could be given a once over with alcohol wipes. All clothes had to be put in the dryer for 10 minutes and bagged.

“When I get there,” he informed us, “I want all the bags in the center of each room, leave suitcases out, mattresses uncovered, all shelves and dressers empty. I will not touch your apartment unless this is done.” Yes, sir!

Over the course of the next week, as I carried load after load of laundry up and down my 5th floor walkup to the corner laundromat, I couldn’t think of anything worse that could happen to a person, short of terminal illness or loss of a limb. Even then, I assumed this had a silver lining: “Hey! Less body area to feast on!”

I sprayed myself head to toe in rubbing alcohol each night. I slept without covers and kept a flashlight next to my bed so that when I woke up in the middle of the night (I was being startled awake by nightmares several times an evening, go figure), I could try to catch them in the act. Why? I don’t know. Too afraid to kill a bug with my bare hands, I’d probably have just flicked it onto something else to burrow in.

Every morning I’d spend fifteen minutes inspecting every inch of my body to see whether a bite I had was a new one or not (some people mark them with pens, but that seems, to me, to call more attention to them than necessary).

You start looking for bedbugs on strangers on the train. You start imagining what kind of people let them get to the point at which piles of them are found in corners, and mattresses are covered like beehives. I was afraid to tell people I had bedbugs, afraid that if they knew, they wouldn’t want me in their houses. I wouldn’t blame them.

Bedbugs are, in a word, traumatic. But little by little, the bags started to accumulate. It turned out to be a great excuse to clean house. Any clothes that weren’t worth carrying up the four flights of stairs after their cleansing trip in the dryer went straight into a Salvation Army bin outside the laundromat. I invested in those vacuum seal bags, which conveniently also saved me a ton of storage space! I felt good knowing that all the clothes I was wearing were sealed in bags that no bug could penetrate.

Vintage, delicates and things with sequins went to the dry cleaner-but even then, you have to tell them you have bedbugs and then they may request you take your business elsewhere, which is humiliating.

But guess what? There are worse things than being humiliated at the dry cleaner. Like, say, getting bed bugs.

Mario showed up a week later and nodded his approval. He surveyed the place with eyes that rivaled your average predatory bird. From the doorway he’d spot something across the room, walk briskly to a random spot of floorboard, and with his index finger would swipe up a bug no bigger than the head of a pin. He’d show it to me and then crush it between his fingers, leaving nothing but a spot of blood between them.

He was a machine. And the problem was worse than I’d thought. Though all small, there were bugs in rooms that nobody slept in, in places we never saw them. He tore the cheap fabric from the bottom of my boxspring and I saw, for the first time, the bugs in my bed. They had managed to climb through the goddamn seams!

Mario sprayed like crazy, every inch, up and down the walls, drenched my suitcase, drenched my mattress-and in the end, he said he was fairly confident he got them all.

We were instructed to let the mattress dry for 24 hours, to sleep somewhere else for the night and to cover them the minute we got back. We weren’t allowed to wash the floor or walls for at least two months and were advised to keep our stuff in bags for same amount of time.

It’s four years later, and I’ve lived to tell the tale. Looking back, despite the unbelievable hassle and the nightmares and all, I think I got off easy. I had some 12 bites in total, with no severe allergic reaction to them. We caught the problem fairly early. I live in a neighborhood where 10 minutes in a dryer only costs a quarter. What’s more, I’ve been bedbug-free ever since.

Even now though, I keep the legs of my bed in little containers with oil in them. Sounds crazy, right? Well, it’s a small price to pay for some peace of mind.

Jasmine Moy lives in New York City and suggests you use extreme caution before Google Image searching the subject at hand.

Previously: Bedbugs: Is No One Safe? One Woman’s Story.

Top photo by pbump, from Flickr.
Second mattress photo by Commodore Gandalf Cunningham, from Flickr.
Photos of bagged clothes by proud bedbug survivor cuttlefish, from Flickr.

Um, yeah, I think I will go back to bed

: Over half of the Republican respondents in an Economist poll answered “no” to the question, “Whether or not you think the Islamic cultural centre and mosque should be built near the World Trade Center site, do you think that Muslims have a constitutional right to build a mosque there?” I mean, JESUS. Even Rudy Giuliani is still making the effort to use the bullshit dodge about believing that they should be allowed to but suggesting that they really shouldn’t. How flat-out bigoted do you have to be to not even LIE about your bigotry?

“During his heyday, rapper Cam’ron dressed like the wife of a Russian oligarch. His lyrics were equally flamboyant: he made up cutesy little words (‘that rooty, tooty, fruity, louie, what I usually do’-Crunk Muzik) and broke into french when complimenting his fellow crew-members (‘Jim Jones c’est c’est bon, Santana magnifique’-I’m Ready). It didn’t take long for rumors to abound that Cam’ron and his Diplomats were a gang of homosexuals…. But what could he do? He could hardly issue heterosexual clarifications after every suspicious statement. Or could he? His eureka moment came in a bubble bath. ‘No homo!’ he cried triumphantly, drowning out (diagetic) orchestral music. It was so short, so wieldy, so catchy, so musical. ‘No homo’ left no room for misunderstanding.”
–A short and important history of “no homo.”

“We all believe we live in an exceptional time, perhaps even a critical moment in the history of the species. Technology appears to have given us power over the atom, our genomes, the planet-with potentially dire consequences. This attitude may stem from nothing more than our desire to place ourselves at the center of the universe. “It’s part of the fundamental limited perspective of our species to believe that this moment is the critical one and critical in every way-for good, for bad, for the final end of humanity,” says Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego. Imagining the end of the world is nigh makes us feel special.”
–Oooh! The new issue of Scientific American is about The End. Michael Moyer writes a nice essay about a subject that has indeed been on my mind lately.

I made bucatini carbonara last night-someday I’ll share the recipe!-so I was a little freaked out this morning to hear about the absolutely massive recall of salmonella-tainted eggs. Then I remembered I’m bulletproof, and the gypsy woman told me the only way I would ever die was being run down by a bike delivery guy. The rest of you might want to watch out, though.

“It was definitely a landmark for the underground movement of the ’90s. Young people who’ve never touched wax probably don’t know what the closing of a store like this means… It just means that we’re heading to a place where music won’t exist in a physical form anymore.”
–Rap producer DJ Spinna on the news that Fat Beats, a store on the corner of 6th Ave. and 8th Street in Manhattan that specialized in vinyl records and served a hip-hop community that might best be described as the opposite of this, will close its doors next month after 16 years in operation. (The LA outpost will also shutter.) It will be a sad day for many old people. I always appreciated that they spelled “fat” with an F. And if it can in fact be said that music ever existed in a physical form, it was at Fat Beats.

“My mayorships have been whittled away to meaningless 7-Elevens and gas stations.”
-Maybe I’m a little chemically “off” today but for some reason that strikes me as the most melancholy, maybe even heart-breaking thing I’ve heard in a while. And it’s about fucking Foursquare!

by Nate Freeman

Last Tuesday, two toddlers were found dead in a car that had sunk to the bottom of a river. The scenario had an eerie parallel to the Susan Smith episode of 1994: both incidents occurred in South Carolina, and in both cases the mother was charged with murder.

The details have emerged over the last few days. Shaquan Duley, an unemployed single mother, allegedly suffocated each of her two sons-aged two years and 18 months-and rolled their bodies into the Edisto River in Orangeburg, South Carolina. The car, with the kids buckled up in their seats, was found Tuesday, and Duley is going before a judge for an arraignment hearing today.

The comparison to the Smith story is hard to miss. Tommy Pope, the prosecutor in that case, told CNN that upon hearing about the car, his first words were, “Here we go again.”

Susan Smith has been serving a life sentence since she rolled her car, with her 3-year-old and 14-month-old sons inside, into a river in South Carolina’s Union County. The story made headlines the world over, and became a talking point for politicians and pundits. (Smith initially claimed that the car was stolen by an African-American man; she later confessed that she had killed the children in hopes that it would improve her relationship with her current boyfriend.)

In perhaps the most famous reaction, House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich pointed to the tragedy as the reason why the country needed a return to conservative values. It was November 1994, and the election that would make Gingrich Speaker of the House was three days away.

“I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things,” Gingrich told the Associated Press in a story that ran November 7, 1994. “How a mother can kill her two children, 14 months and 3 years, in hopes that her boyfriend would like her, is just a sign of how sick the system is and I think people want to change. The only way you get change is to vote Republican. That’s the message for the last three days.”

Those comments came under fire from Vice President Al Gore-who called them “outrageous” in the same AP story-as well as people involved with the Susan Smith case.

So now that we have an almost analogous scenario that happened in the same state, is this South Carolina toddler murder case also indicative of “how sick the system is,” and therefore a reason to vote Republican in the fast-approaching elections?

I reached Joseph DeSantis-who has the title of “Communications Director for Gingrich Communications”-on the phone Tuesday afternoon, in hopes of getting Gringrich on the line.

“Mr. Gingrich is overseas and will not be back for a few weeks,” DeSantis said.

Where overseas?

“Rome,” he said.

Still, even if he’s currently ensconced in the Eternal City with his family, does he have lesson to impart from the Shaquan Duley incident?

“I haven’t heard him comment on that,” DeSantis said. “I don’t think he would. He has no comment.”

So for the time being Newt Gingrich does not, in fact, equate all submerged-car murders with the urgent need to vote Republican.

When I was a naive young lad in second grade one of the more experienced boys taught me this ditty, the tune to which begins similarly to that of the “Batman” TV show theme song but then goes slightly off-course to address the weight of the extended lyrics before returning to the original theme for the big conclusion. It goes like this.

Batman
Batman
Batman, Batman, Batman
Batman
Swinging on a rubber band
Batman
Along came Superman
Thought he was the Booger Man
Threw him in the garbage can
Batman
Da da da da da da da da da da da da da
Batman

I, of course, having not yet been introduced to the sophisticated wordplay of a Cole Porter or Noel Coward, thought this was one of the most delightful musical variations ever invented. Later that evening, however, I was informed by my mother that it was, in fact, quite coarse and unworthy, and I believe I was not allowed to watch TV for the rest of the night which, when you’re 8, is pretty much 25-to-life. So I’ve always had mixed feelings about Batman. But if this video is any indication, it turns out my mom was correct: the dude is a scumbag. I mean, who eats at Taco Bell? [Via]

Some days you just want to go back to bed and pretend it’s not happening: “When asked how they learned about Obama’s religion in an open-ended question, 60% of those who say Obama is a Muslim cite the media. Among specific media sources, television (at 16%) is mentioned most frequently. About one-in-ten (11%) of those who say Obama is a Muslim say they learned of this through Obama’s own words and behavior.”