To the Moon Daffeny!

I wanted to name her Sigourney but as she was my sisters dog and she named her Daffeny Moon after the maid from Fraiser. I always knew that Daffers hated being named after the help but she stuck her whiskered chin up in the air and moved on. My Sister picked Daffney out at the pound.  She was a tiny little bean of a thing, a Jack-Russel mix, wire haired cutie patootie and you never saw such a quite dog. In fact you never saw her at all. For the first 2 weeks of her life with us she hid under anything she could find and sat quietly biding her time till she felt comfortable enough to join the family. This would be the last time in Daffeny's life that she ever sat quietly through anything.

My Sister and Daffeny did not get along at all I suspect this is because their personalities were to similar. So she quickly became the family pet who was especially attached to my Mom.  Jim, one of my Mother's co-workers called Daffney my Mom's little buddy which was so true. Daffney liked my Dad and I, she even loved us but my Mom was her whole world.  Daffney's one constant (to put in in LOST terms) in her crazy world was my Mom.  I left for college and my parents split up shortly after that so Daffney's world was in turmoil, but my Mom was always there.

Most people thought she was a mean dog but I am sure she came from an abusive background and once she spent some time with us and discovered we weren't going to hurt her she became fiercely protective of us. Her bark was an earth shattering Piercing high pitched explosion of sound, and the smallest thing would trigger it. Cars driving by, people coming and going, the wind blowing, any small disturbance and she would loudly disapprove.  The funny thing was even after you finally got in the door and she knew it was you she would keep letting out little yips and barks almost as if to say, well I know who you are but I am still the boss, all while trying not to pee with excitement that you were home.

Daffers would have loved a life where she only dealt with my Mom, my Dad and Me. Unfortunately Mom ran a day care out of our house so there was a constant stream of people in and out all the time causing Daffeny to explode with pure puppy protective anger every time a parent was there to drop off or pick up a kid. Even after she would realize she knew the person coming in she would run to the top of the stairs and continue her tirade. Amazingly she was great with the kids, never once getting aggressive with any of them (obviously she did not take after me on that one). I have a feeling she tolerated the daycare kids because at lunch or snack time more food ended up on the floor than in the kids mouths. Just like any dog she lived her life for the possibility of table scraps.

She was a notorious shoe thief. I don't think my mom has had a complete pair in the last 17 years. Daffney would take one of my Mom's shoes and sit on her bed awaiting my Mother's return. Nose tucked firmly inside, or resting right on top.  If you even walked in the vicinity of she and her shoe you would hear a low rumbling growl like the first sounds of an avalanche. God forbid you had to go into my Mom's room you would be met with a ferocious onslaught of growling, barking terror never before seen or heard since.

And then there was the puppy kisses. I know most people think it's gross but I have never minded puppy kisses and Daffney LOVED to give em'. And I could take it longer than most. Sometimes I would just let her lick and lick to see if she would ever stop and honestly I don't think she would have.  Even at 105 years old (in dog years of course) she could still raise her head and lick a face almost right up to the end. 

Daffney was a weirdo. She was her own little person with her own little personality and her own little set of routines and oddities. Which a lot of people mistook for mental illness. It was easier for people to assume that she was a crazy bitch rather than face the possibility that this cute little puppy hated them. Sometimes she would change her mind about out a person. For instance my dear friend Julie D.  It only took Daffeny 12 years to get used to her and stop nipping at her heals when she came over.  I think Julie D. put it best in a Facebook condolence she left Daffeny "Oh daffers, after many years we put aside our differences and quietly tolerated each other, it was lovely. Perhaps you are now hating on Katie Sue (Julie D's Dog) in dog heaven." I bet she is, I bet she is.

Have Another on Me

I would rather deal with a Republican than a drunk, and I hate Republicans.  Republicans are idiots but drunks are a special breed of idiot, the kind of person who when you tell them "no" they still stick their finger in your butt.  And then they stagger to the bathroom to vomit in a sink or poop on the floor (yes drunk people poop on floors, I've seen it).  I know exactly what they think when they walk into the men's room of the PIECES bar "WHAT?!?  Two urinals???  Well I guess I'll just poop on the floor".  I think it's an inhuman choice to deficate on a floor unless you are doing it for a Jackass style show or movie but in the mind of a drunk it's a solution to a problem.  Sometimes they poop in a urinal which makes more sense than the floor but still seems like more work that its worth.  Most of the time they just spray the seat with a fine mist of poop like a can of glade. Drunks are able to do this because they are actually trying to hover above the seat so as not to touch it.  That combined with a fine meal of hot dogs from Grey's Papaya and rot-gut liquor is the desired combination to form truly runny poop.

A drunk is a person who knows everything about every subject, as if each consumed beverage were a year at Yale.  And whether they are right or wrong they will argue their point of view with a fire they don't have in their sober life.  I remember saying once to an inebriated friend that I was feeling dehydrated and needed some water.  At this statement my friend who was 6 Dewars and waters into his night grabbed my arm and pulled it away from my glass as if I were about to stick it into Oprah's mouth.  "Water" he said "Is the worst thing you can drink to re-hydrate yourself!  You could overhydrate and die!"  It sounds like he was afraid I might drown, but throwing caution to the wind I downed that water bottle and later on that night laughed as I watched I a drunk fish out a urinal cake walk out into the bar and set it on my friends face.  And because I was drunk I didn't take it off his face, I just stole his drink and laughed at his misfortune.

Drunk people lose things like its their job.  Whole bags full of important and expensive things.  Ipod's, phones, wallets, diabetes testing kits, medication, money, drugs you name it!   You would think someone who loses their passport might come back and claim it.  But a lot of the time people are too drunk to know the name of the bar they in.  So their personal items remain lost in a vortex of the blackout they have caused from a night of binge drinking.  A bag is one thing, small compact and easy to forget like a banana's at the grocery store or a child at a mall, but I will never understand when I find a pair of pants or one shoe or my personal favorite an eye patch.  It draws the most amusing mental image of a shoeless, pant-less pirate covering his right eye with one hand while hailing a cab with his hook.

Fights are the worst when you are drunk.  The smallest thing can escalate into a full scale battle with anything from another bar fly or perhaps if you are drunk enough, a bar stool.   The booze gives you super human strength and makes it impossible to feel pain turning you into the perfect weapon.

My dealings with drunks have become the stuff of lengends probably because I have the Patience and kindness of a Nazi.  Recently I was hosting Too Ugly For Tv with my dearest friend Tallulah de Bayous (Coming up on November 15th at 11pm.)  We both knew instantly who the problems were going to be.  A fat lesbian and her also fat friend, both had just moved to NYC and decided to spend their first night out in the big Apple at the PIECES bar.  By 8pm they were both so drunk their eyes were rolling in the backs of their fat heads, and in a bar full of almost 7 people they were grinding on each other and anyone who passed them by like it was 1998 and we were dancing the night away at Kerfew.

By the end of the show they had yelled and screamed over the top of us which was a feat because we had microphones, and grinded on us both while we hosted said show.  They ordered drinks by hollering across the room to the bar tender, while also correcting the way he was pouring his hooch (she used to be a bar tender so she knows everything about how to sling a drink).  She gave me makeup tips which I never asked for, never tipped the waiter or the bar tender, peed with the bathroom door not just un-locked but open, in short they were the kind of drunks this blog is all about.  The kind who are totally unaware of just how rube and obnoxious they really are.

By the end of the night the fat lesbian and her fat friend were so trashed they were openly mocking Tallulah and myself.  So when I saw them stumbling back to the bathroom, presumably to piss with the door open again, I had to stop them.  I have a bad temper and I was trashed so she is lucky she lived through the event. I don't have a clear memory of what was said, I do know I grabbed fatty, fatty two by four by her thick earlobe and dragged her through the bar like 300 pounds of cheap meat.  As I handed it off to the doorman her serial killer in the making looking friend grabbed me from behind.  Word of warning never touch a drag queen especially when she is obviously in a blind rage.  I flip turned around and through my drink right into his stupid marshmellow face.  A look that is forever burned into my memory, his face said "what is going on?  Why are you doing this??  What have we done??"  Honestly they hadn't done anything that hasn't happened a 1000 times before, they just caught me when I was drunk and unreasonable, and fed up with stupid behavior.  The explanation point on my rage was smashing my glass on the floor in true Susan Lucci form.  After my explosion I turned and looked at the bar tender who laughed and said, well I guess you need another drink. 

If you will skip to the 2:17 mark on the video below, this is how i felt.


I think that sums it up nicely

Obviously I am no angel when I drink either. But something has happened over the last couple years in the NYC gay bar scene. People are leaning more and more towards acting like assholes.  Homos need to unite and remember we are all on the same team (me included).  It didn't used to be so confrontational. Drinking was something we all did together and actually had a good time, nowadays a night rarely goes by where a fight doesn't break out, or someone is escorted from the bar for stealing money off the bar, or refusing to pay for a drink, or god forbid pooping on the bathroom floor.

Anal Sex and a Side of Bacon

Being a gay man means your opinion is a very sought after thing.  This is especially true of straight girls.  They crave our views on fashion and the arts, our taste in cooking, which brand of vacuum we prefer, or what the up and coming pocket dog is going to be.  They call us to make sure the poncho is still in, and express their desire for us to see them in said poncho before they buy it lest they look fat.  Without the gays pop music would be nothing and Lady GagGa would still be shucking her jive at the Bitter End.  Don’t get us wrong,  the gays love to convey their opinions to the world loud and proud whether asked for or not.  So it’s no surprise that straight girls go to gay men when they have questions about sex…well not just any sex, anal sex.  I have had a number of my straight girlfriends confide that their gentlemen friends would like to enter their back doors…girls you know who you are.
This weekend was my boyfriends 27th birthday and our neighbor across the hall took us out for brunch on Sunday morning.  Rather than go to the gorgeous little bar on the corner for an upscale brunch we decided to hit the always glamorous and always tacky Neptune Diner.  A place so Greek that they have a giant stained glass portrait of King Neptune himself proudly sitting on what looks like a toilet holding his mighty Triton…its epic.  They also have 2 dining rooms.  One i like to think of as the drunk tank, a place they can sit Guido club kids on Friday and Saturday nights.  And the classy upscale dining room reserved for the large Greek families, the elderly, and what appear to be Dungeons and Dragons nerds.
Surrounded by families in desperate need of fitted clothes and some serious eyebrow threading we stuck out like the cast of Too Wong Foo.  That combined with some necessary gay sassafras which I served our waitress when she showed up at our table seconds after being seated, is no doubt what clued her into our homosexuality, and no doubt is what led her to ask the most inappropriate thing a server can ever ask someone who is un-caffinated.  We ordered and ate what I sure amounted to over 10,000 calories worth of East Coast Diner goodness when suddenly my morning Bowel Movement was upon me.  I made haste to the restroom and when I returned found my friend from across the hall saying to the waitress ” well just get drunk, or get some anal ease and some poppers” to which I thought I’d actually settle for another cup of coffee.
Turns out while I was dropping the Cosby kids off at the pool our Lebanese waitress had approached the table, stood in front of them for about a minute, and finally mustered the courage to ask if they were partners, and if they had any advice on how to make anal sex more comfortable.   This is exactly the kind of conversation I would expect from a waitress at the Waverly at 3am on a Friday night after about 10 martini’s.  But at the Neptune Diner at noon surrounded by the cast of My Big Fat Greek Wedding it was just too much too early and too near children.  I have no idea what was going through this lunatic woman’s head but I bet she’s the kind of girl who has no problem changing her bra-less body in front of someone without warning them first that her saggy bags were coming.  But I admire her gusto and lucky for her my friends were more than happy to oblige though they hated her for it.  They went into great detail on what to do and how to do it which I’ll not put here as my mom reads this, but she just kept coming back for more.  Over and over, about every five minutes she was back again with another set of questions.  What if I do this??  What if I take a hot shower upside down??  My friends told me Mountain Dew makes a good enema? More than anything she worried about being clean which is funny cause she apparently didn’t care at all about being a good waitress.  We told her if he is going in there he deserves what he gets. She then showed us a picture of her husband who sounded like a real stand up guy.  She said “If I don’t do it he’ll just find it somewhere else.”  Or maybe that was something her girlfriends told her, either way I officially know entirely to much about what was going to happen to this woman’s butt hole later that night.  I asked for another cup of coffee, I figured at this point I wanted to stick it out and see is she asked for a live demonstration from us.  The questions kept coming, but my coffee never did.
My good graces finally worn thin I suggest wrapping our little brunch up,  we grab the check and head to the front desk to pay.  I said I would leave the tip so I head back towards the table only to find myself face to uni-brow with the newest inducty to the world of anal sex.  She grabbed the 5 dollar bill outta my hand and said “thanks babe” turned on that hoof she calls a foot and disappeared into the kitchen leaving me to wonder just what makes a women like that tick.  I know one thing for sure… she definitely would look fat in a poncho.

Tis a Flesh Wound

I am 32 years old and have never been on a proper vacation.  Not one that didn’t in some way involve my family or worse someone elses  family.  I am talking about one of those magical getaways you can only win on the Price is Right or Wheel of Fortune.  YOU HAVE WON A TRIP TO ARUBA!!!!  I have no idea where Aruba is, but I know I want to go there.  I long for a beach an umbrella a cocktail a Kitty Kelly novel and a half naked native waiting on me hand and foot.  Sounds pretty simple, a goal anyone could accomplish.  Two problems stand in my way.  Number one I hate to travel, number two being a proud member of the upper lower class I can’t really afford a fabulous vacation.  So a local getaway it must be.   Somewhere close,  and cheap,  and accessible by train as I don’t drive and my rickshaw is in the shop.  So I decide after 11 years in New York to break down and go to Fire Island.  Fire Island is like Coney Island to me.  Neither of these places evoke the island images in my mind like Gilligan’s or that stupid Island from Lost, and I am always looking for that elusive Island in the Stream.
The normally useless MTA offers a day package for 30 bucks which covers the train the taxi and the ferry there and back which is great cause I made a big pitcher of booze and have every intention of coming home drunk .  Taking my cue from the Barefoot Contessa herself I put together a wonderful picnic of salmon salad, roasted chicken thighs, fresh strawberries, and blueberry’s, a pitcher of white grape and lemonade with a pint of Vodka, who wouldn’t want that?  Here is where my inner Jew sprung forth and I decided rather than buy a beach umbrella I would fashion one out of a lost and found umbrella from the PIECES Bar and a shoot of bamboo from Fire Island and a little tape thus saving 5′s and 10′s of dollars.  This was to be my perfect little trips downfall.  In order to fit the umbrella in the bag I snapped off the handle creating a perfect jagged, rusty, spear like implement.
If you live on the east coast you understand that it’s the most inconvenient place on earth and something that would only take 20minutes by car can take up to 2 hours on the train.  So we were up at 7:30 to make sure we were on the 9:15 train to Sayville Long island which got in at 11:00 so we could catch the 11:30 ferry.  So from wake up to the Isle of Fire its 4 and a half hours of humid nyc commuting misery.
Once we get to Sayeville its beautiful breezy and stunning and reminds me of Amity Island from Jaws.  In fact everything feels so much like the movie Jaws right now I want to throw the loud asian gay with no chin sitting next to me off the ferry in hopes a great white shark will eat him and shut his damn trap.  Instead I cue up the Jaws Soundtrack (I have many film scores on my IPOD cause I am a dork) and listen to Promenade as the ferry pulls out and crosses the channel to the Fire Island.  We are surrounded by a flock of gays that would make Jerry Fallwell cry,  tan with popped collars and every single one of them is carrying a pure bred dog which they treat like Zsa Zsa on her death bed.  Gay people give gay people a bad name.

I must say that Fire Island is a beautiful calm and relaxing place, probably more relaxing if you are lucky enough to afford a share and stay most of the summer.  Much less relaxing when you know you have to head back on the 7:30 ferry.  You walk through a bamboo forest on elevated decks, and I can’t help but thank God I’m not tripping on mushrooms right now cause i would surely get lost and end up crying by the side of the road chewing on a stick of bamboo as if it were a sugar cane.  It’s a straight shot to the beach and on our way we each grab a stick of the aforementioned bamboo to fashion our beach umbrella’s.  We stroll down to the water and find a spot a with no children and lay out our spoils.
As Dan runs down to the water to pee in the ocean I start setting up our things.  First things first I take out my mangled umbrella and open it up plunging the ragged end into the fleshy part of the palm of my hand.  I can handle pain, pain is nothing to me.  I had an intense gall stone experience which was said to be more painful than childbirth and I took that pain like a pro.  Blood however makes me pass out almost instantly, not movie blood, real blood oozing (or in this case pumping) from my own body or the bodies of those around me.  I knew it was a deep cut because the fat in my hand is spilling out the sides like brains or tapioca pudding.
I yelled for Dan knowing I was seconds from losing conciseness.  He thought I was pointing out the little brown skittering birds darting this way and that.  I was not.  I passed out cold face first into the sand which tasted like shit, well actually i t tasted like sand, but was unpleasant none the less.  I threw up a couple of times when i regained consciousness and thought I bet Ina Garten and Jeffery have a much better time at the beach.  With an arm drenched in blood, fat oozing out of my hand, laden down with 50 pounds worth of beach gear we headed off to find a first aid kit.  Turns out there is no first aid available on the Isle of Fire.  The doctor’s hours are 1-2 and 4-5, this is the kind of job I dream of,  and we were told by everyone we ran into they’d be happy to contact the mainland and have me air lifted off.  Fun as that sounded, and believe meI wanted was a happy medium some hydrogen peroxide and some gauze, but a ride in a helicopter did sound fun.  I settled for a 10 dollar bottle of Rubbing Alcohol and an 8 dollar roll of gauze.  I looked around at the Island full of pretty much naked men, and looked at my bloody hand and decided I couldn’t stay at this place any longer.  We took the ferry back, and this is the song I listened to going back across the water…and I cried.  Cause my hand really fucking hurt.

Fire and Brimstone on a Wednesday Morning

It’s always when I am afflicted with a particularity bad hangover that the worst of the homeless beggars seem to attack.  As New Yorkers we have heard all their tales about not getting to the shelter on time or their house burning down leaving them and their families homeless and destitute.   Their families being a pipe filled with crystal meth no doubt.  I get it, its all part of the circle of life in NYC.  They grift us we occasionally feel bad and give them change, they make 50 bucks a day they get high and leave us alone for a week and everyone is happy.
I admit it takes balls to get on a train and ask for money, or sometimes just an unfortunate amputation.  But missing a limb or moving your legless torso from car to car is a great way to score some serious cash.   Then there are the ones with no discernible injuries these guys are smart enough sing for their supper.  These are the homeless who make more money than I do in a year and the ones I hate and dread the most.  My heart sinks when I see that mariachi band coming between cars, or the black quartet singing Down on the Boardwalk.  They plague my commute between 59th and Lex and 34th street, praying on the out of towners who just love to be entertained on their way back to times square,  probably because they were too stupid to bring an Ipod or a book like all the real New Yorkers.  Investing in a good pair of noise canceling headphones and turning up the volume of my Ipod usually drowns them out but i still seethe in anger at the sheer audacity of these America’s Got Talent rejects and how they dare to interrupt my quiet time.  The absolute worst are the ethnic dancers, or the drum circle.  If they show up on my car I just leave.
Today I spotted the interruption to my commute before I even got on the train.  He was standing on the platform in a dress shirt, tie, and a sporty pair of dockers.  Bible in hand ready to spread fire and brimstone to the people of the N train.  I ran to the next car and he followed almost as if knew I sinned and that I sinned often.  The doors shut and he began his diatribe, I rolled my eyes and could hear him telling us we were all going to hell.  Now I love telling people to go to hell as much as the next guy, but I’d never stand up on a crowded train to do so…well not unless provoked.  So I turned my headphones up and closed my eyes.  I opened them again at 5th ave and fire and brimstone was still at it, “burn in hell” this, and “repent” that, all the usual religious malarkey.  When almost on Que from either side of the train the doors flew open in a hot gusty gale, and there were two more homeless!  A woman with soiled pants (good gimmick) and a black man with no teeth and yeasty swollen feet!  A good yeasty foot is sure to grab a few sheckles, but i am telling you loss of limb is the ticket to that refrigerator box in the sky!
All three of them stopped, like a cosmic coming together of craziness and despair, like the three moons in a Dark Crystal aligning so the Skexies and the Mystics could become one again.  Fire and Brimstone stopped his ranting, and looked at yeasty feet and soiled pants and then beckoned them forth.  Since he wasn’t asking for money, just our eternal souls, he did a little cross promotion.  Using yeasty and soiled as examples of the very lifestyle he wanted us to avoid while at the same time telling all of us this was a great time this might be to turn over a new leaf and help his two new stinky gross looking friends while we were finding the path to eternal salvation.  How I longed for the mariachi band and the blind accoridian man to get on at the next stop, hopefully ending in a West Side Story style brawl over territory.  Instead i got off the train and went to work where I sat on stage for 4 hours and delivered my own kind of sermon to the happy hour Bingo crowd at PIECES.  Telling all of them how Lindsey Lohan is a tramp ruining her life with booze and hotpants, complaining about the cost of a metro card and asking for a gratuity to help with my newly injured hand…look out yeasty and stinky pants I may need to work your territory sometime soon.

Come Fly With Me....or something like that

I was invited to see the Twyla Tharp, Frank Sinatra Dance Spectacular at the Marquis Theater this Thursday and to call it a complete waste of time isn’t fair because we left at intermission.  To start with I had less than no interest in seeing a dance show.  I hate dancing.  In fact i should move to the tiny town from Footloose so I never have to deal with dancing again.  I am certainly a Sinatra fan (I prefer later Sinatra when you could here the tar in his lungs rattle with every note) but I am a bigger fan of LIVE singing and dialogue to further the plot of a “musical”.  This stupid show which I truthfully can’t even remember the title of, had none of that.  You see the point of a musical is getting the characters to a point where they can no longer talk about what is going on onstage, the emotion is so great that they have to sing and dance about it!.  Here the dancers come off looking like a bunch of jackass mimes, mugging, and smiling so big the sides of their mouths might crack and bleed.  Also the dancing looked pedestrian.  It looked like everything I have seen in any production of any community theater show ever done.  Is this the right place to say shame on you Twyla Tharp?
Now to be fair to the show i was asleep within the first 5 minutes only to be wakened by the brief bits of lame applause.  So i drifted in and out, but what I saw I hated.  I’ll tell you what though.  The Jersey crowd (who was heavily in attendance) loved every fucking second.  They loved it so much that they all talked through the whole thing.  Amazed by the free sippy cups you could get at concessions, letting everyone around them know when one of their personal Sinatra favorites was blaring from the speakers, and stinking to high heaven of Brute and GPC’s.  I was happy for them, this was a tailor made Broadway show for the stupid and uncultured.  Unlike that Jersey Boys which had that pesky plot to pay attention to this was stripped down to the bare essentials of what Broadway has become.  A place for special event shows that can be thrown together on the CHEAP!  Everything about Come Sing With Me (or whatever its called) looked cheap.  The weird lampshades hanging all over the theater, the Christmas lights all over the set, the set,  the costumes, the choreography, cheap, cheap, cheap.
I could not help but think what Sinatra would have thought of the flaming bag of shit on that stage.  A Broadway show conceived around his music, starring “colored” people and “orientals”, the shock would have killed him again.  He would have loved the band,  the only thing worth a damn in the whole theater.  Finally the finale of Act One happened.  And it was the weirdest part yet.  I guess the production crew knew there was no actual excitement on stage so they devised a way for the lamp shapes and the ceiling the spastically  move up and down thus simulating a finale.  When the lights came up I didn’t run out of the theater as I didn’t want to cause a panic.  I allowed myself a moment to wake back up, and recycled my Playbill as I left.  I was just glad to go home and sit in my backyard and enjoy a well earned glass of cheap sangria and a cigarette.  The only thing that Sinatra would have enjoyed about the whole night.

Beatrice the Asshole

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.