I am told by my boyfriend we have a mouse in our house which by New York standards is both common and disgusting. He has named her Beatrice the Asshole a rather grand title for something that could easily carry the next bubonic plague. But pests in New York are part of the territory. Last summer we went through the living hell that was bed bugs and though we couldn’t afford Roscoe the bed bug sniffing dog from TV, or instafreeze technology we were lucky to get rid of them pretty easily. Looking back nothing about last summer seems fun or easy. Bed Bugs are as much a mental pest as they are a physical presence in your home and life. They creep into your bed, your dresser, your clothes, the cracks in the floorboards, and your brain. They can live anywhere and not feed for a year. How i wish I had their stamina.
After a month of Dan scratching hives that we attributed to a dust allergy from MACY’S he finally caught one of the little blood sucking fuckers crawling away from a recent feast on Dan’s upper arm. He opened his eyes just in time to see the bed bug, drunk on blood, totter away in a beam of morning sunlight. An image that would almost be romantic if it weren’t so disgusting. This is when the true hell begins. In order to kill the tenacious little shits you basically have to move and leave everything behind, burn your building to the ground, or pray your situation hasn’t turned into a full blown infestation and get a damn good exterminator.
Our exterminator was a giant hulking man with a hooked nose and a gut that spoke of many years of persistent drinking, and when he breathed it sounded like a death rattle…or Liza Minnelli on HSN. He loved the decor in our apartment, especially my taxidermy bird and topless picture of Bea Arthur we have hanging in the living room, telling me “those are a nice set of tits” and the asking the question on everybody’s mind “is she your Mom?”
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I love this bizarre exterminator world he lives in where one can show up in food stained clothes and laugh about how much money he makes off of New York City’s latest pest problem, all the while ogling naked photos of his clients mothers. Once he leaves the job is far from over. Now you have to buy a $150.00 bed bug proof mattress cover (trust me spend the money on the expensive one or else you will feel like you are homeless person sleeping in a pile of news paper) and you have to wash everything you own. Clothes, towels, sheets, blankets which added up to some 30 bags of laundry.
But the real kicker of the bed bugs is the way the creep into your every thought. If you are me and already suffer from insomnia then at least you finally have a reason to be losing sleep. In fact after the first visit from our gut busting exterminator I couldn’t bare the thought of sleeping in our room, so i moved to the couch. Dan followed a week later when the bites didn’t stop. A trip that lasted for almost 3 months. After the first week sleeping in the living room I started to get delirious, you feel them crawling on you everywhere you go. On the train, at work, waiting at a gloryhole. At movies theaters you see them, crawling across the screen, at restaurants you catch them out of the corner of your eye crawling back under your gyro platter. By the second month I started looking for DDT online. This being the only known pesticide to actually kill bed bugs, trouble is it also kills plant life, and animal life, as well as causing birth defects. Three things I can totally live with. Trouble being DDT is banned in the USA. I considered a trip to Canada, but how would I get my poison back over the border? Thanks again terrorists.
By the third month Dan moved back into our bedroom, I still slept in the living room anxiously awaiting the results. Bed bugs also pick one host and only feed off of them. My blood being nearly toxic from a daily cocktail of weed, Clariton, Tylenol PM, a gallon of milk, and vodka they wisely chose Dan for their nightly feasts. Once the coast was clear I moved back into our room as well, and after a year of bed bug free living we finally bought a new bed and all traces of our nightmare are gone.
Now Dan has a new enemy. A mouse he calls Beatrice the Asshole. He wakes up everyday and scours the house for evidence of her existence. I’ll get a text from him warning me not to use the butter in the butter dish as Beatrice the Asshole was up on the microwave the night before dining on our Land-o-lakes leaving behind 2 tiny mouse poops as her calling card. I read the text as i am polishing off my morning toast with butter but for some reason it doesn’t much phase me. I am not allowed to have my feet on the couch as he claims I walk around barefoot willy nilly through Beatrice’s most notorious pooping spots. She has managed to evade our sticky traps, and the conventional mouse traps leaving me to believe she is probably a relation of one of the mice from The Rescuers. It seems almost a shame to poison her as she has lasted for almost a month in and amongst a cavalcade of traps that would make the obstacle courses on Wipe Out look like a day at the beach. But in the end she is a filthy mouse and I always win.
After a month of Dan scratching hives that we attributed to a dust allergy from MACY’S he finally caught one of the little blood sucking fuckers crawling away from a recent feast on Dan’s upper arm. He opened his eyes just in time to see the bed bug, drunk on blood, totter away in a beam of morning sunlight. An image that would almost be romantic if it weren’t so disgusting. This is when the true hell begins. In order to kill the tenacious little shits you basically have to move and leave everything behind, burn your building to the ground, or pray your situation hasn’t turned into a full blown infestation and get a damn good exterminator.
Our exterminator was a giant hulking man with a hooked nose and a gut that spoke of many years of persistent drinking, and when he breathed it sounded like a death rattle…or Liza Minnelli on HSN. He loved the decor in our apartment, especially my taxidermy bird and topless picture of Bea Arthur we have hanging in the living room, telling me “those are a nice set of tits” and the asking the question on everybody’s mind “is she your Mom?”
<table border=”0″ width=”360″ style=”border: none; font-family: Myriad, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif;”><tr><td colspan=”2″ style=”border: none;”><embed type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” allowNetworking=”all” src=”http://w83.photobucket.com/flash/tagWidget.swf?mediaURL=aHR0cDovL2k4My5waG90b2J1Y2tldC5jb20vYWxidW1zL2oyODIvdm9ka2FzdGluZ2VyL2JlYS1hcnRodXItam9obi1jdXJyaW4xLmpwZw%3D%3D” width=”360″ height=”463″/></td></tr></table>
I love this bizarre exterminator world he lives in where one can show up in food stained clothes and laugh about how much money he makes off of New York City’s latest pest problem, all the while ogling naked photos of his clients mothers. Once he leaves the job is far from over. Now you have to buy a $150.00 bed bug proof mattress cover (trust me spend the money on the expensive one or else you will feel like you are homeless person sleeping in a pile of news paper) and you have to wash everything you own. Clothes, towels, sheets, blankets which added up to some 30 bags of laundry.
But the real kicker of the bed bugs is the way the creep into your every thought. If you are me and already suffer from insomnia then at least you finally have a reason to be losing sleep. In fact after the first visit from our gut busting exterminator I couldn’t bare the thought of sleeping in our room, so i moved to the couch. Dan followed a week later when the bites didn’t stop. A trip that lasted for almost 3 months. After the first week sleeping in the living room I started to get delirious, you feel them crawling on you everywhere you go. On the train, at work, waiting at a gloryhole. At movies theaters you see them, crawling across the screen, at restaurants you catch them out of the corner of your eye crawling back under your gyro platter. By the second month I started looking for DDT online. This being the only known pesticide to actually kill bed bugs, trouble is it also kills plant life, and animal life, as well as causing birth defects. Three things I can totally live with. Trouble being DDT is banned in the USA. I considered a trip to Canada, but how would I get my poison back over the border? Thanks again terrorists.
By the third month Dan moved back into our bedroom, I still slept in the living room anxiously awaiting the results. Bed bugs also pick one host and only feed off of them. My blood being nearly toxic from a daily cocktail of weed, Clariton, Tylenol PM, a gallon of milk, and vodka they wisely chose Dan for their nightly feasts. Once the coast was clear I moved back into our room as well, and after a year of bed bug free living we finally bought a new bed and all traces of our nightmare are gone.
Now Dan has a new enemy. A mouse he calls Beatrice the Asshole. He wakes up everyday and scours the house for evidence of her existence. I’ll get a text from him warning me not to use the butter in the butter dish as Beatrice the Asshole was up on the microwave the night before dining on our Land-o-lakes leaving behind 2 tiny mouse poops as her calling card. I read the text as i am polishing off my morning toast with butter but for some reason it doesn’t much phase me. I am not allowed to have my feet on the couch as he claims I walk around barefoot willy nilly through Beatrice’s most notorious pooping spots. She has managed to evade our sticky traps, and the conventional mouse traps leaving me to believe she is probably a relation of one of the mice from The Rescuers. It seems almost a shame to poison her as she has lasted for almost a month in and amongst a cavalcade of traps that would make the obstacle courses on Wipe Out look like a day at the beach. But in the end she is a filthy mouse and I always win.
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