Brendan BernhardToday on The Local East Village, it’s all about cleaning house. First, from Brendan Bernhard, the second and final chapter of his harrowing tale about fighting bed bugs. And later, a professional organizer tells how you, too, can make a clean sweep.
If you thought bed bugs were bad enough (I certainly did), wait until you deal with exterminators – bed bug exterminators, that is. Let me tell you, they (or their bosses) are a demanding lot.
Evil sneaky blood-sucking nocturnal mattress-and-sofa infesting predatory vamps-without-glamour they may be, but bed bugs, unlike exterminators, don’t make you wash, dry, and dry clean every article of clothing in your possession. They don’t insist you empty your closets, drawers, file cabinets, and bookshelves, clean the contents therein, and then box them up in airtight containers before they will deign to submit your apartment (which must also be spick and span) to blasts of steam followed by potent doses of poison. In short, those foul vampiric insects that have infested New York do not force you to upend your life and take a good hard look at all the stuff you have accumulated despite spending half your time throwing things out in the interminable war against clutter. Read more…
Brendan BernhardIt is said, on one of the many Web sites dealing with the subject, that bed bugs, when they attack their sleeping victims, leave a trail of “dark fecal spots (which are partly digested blood) on their host, mattresses, clothes, bedding, walls, ceiling, and every place you can imagine in a room.”
Except, it seems, when they don’t. Except when you are preyed upon by bed bugs who come equipped with their own federally funded clean-up crew — bugs which don’t feed but tidy up after the other bugs — ensuring that the dawn will reveal absolutely no sign of their vampiric brethren except for the clusters of hideous, madly itching welts on your legs and arms and torso.
This is the situation as I lie awake in bed at three in the morning, a copy of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” propped up on a small cushion in front of me. I’m about 420 pages in, with about 420 pages to go, but it’s a challenge to concentrate. I keep swiveling around thinking I’ll catch a bug scooting purposefully toward me on the pristine sheet. I turn a flashlight on the curls of peeling paint behind the heating pipe and under the window sill, looking for anything that scurries…. Surely there must be something moving somewhere. After all, it’s feeding time.
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