Bedbugs And Rotten Apartments In Tucson

The last month or two have been an adventure. No, let me revise that: the last eight months, since the first day we moved into our apartment after coming off the road, have been a lesson in outrage and desperation. We know, now, what it means to feel hopeless, only to deliver ourselves out of the mouth of despair into semi-liberation. Allow me to explain.

We hated our old apartment on Park Avenue. We had thought, when we moved in, that we had it made, in a sense. Only $350 a month, a studio we had no problems adjusting to so far as space was concerned, about a block away from a Fry's grocery. With the rent so cheap, we'd save money in no time, take care of a lot of business we'd been meaning to finish for a while (I have dental issues that still need addressing, a bachelors degree that I dropped over ten years ago with only five credits left to go, and we're planning a trip to Europe that will be similar in many ways to a lengthy trip we took through the eastern US) and try to start a new direction in our lives.

Then the problems began. A lot of them, all at once. We don't own cell phones (we're cheap) so we typically use the land line in every apartment we live in. This apartment didn't have one installed, just a blank plate where one could go. Fine, call the property manager and tell him we'd like one installed. Shouldn't be a problem, should it? Property managers are supposed to manage things for tenants—it's in the job title. “I don't handle that,” he tells us. “You'll have to work that out with the phone company.”

Oh, so it was the phone company's building? No, but it was clear he had no interest in helping us. We called the phone company and they told us that from their end, the line looked active. Possibly there was a problem with the connection in the apartment itself. We called the property manager again.

“You know, I don't see why I should have to deal with this. Why don't you just use cell phones like everybody else?”

Wow. That's what I call commitment. What's the minimal amount of effort a person has to put out and still be called a manager? All this guy had to do was be related to the landlord, who was apparently too old to do much managing himself anymore. Job security as reliable as the tides.

I don't recall the exact chain of events after that. Eventually the on-site maintenance guy came into the apartment, fiddled with the phone wires, and left. When that didn't work either, the phone company said they'd send a guy out. A couple of days later he showed up, looked at our connection, and said it looked fine, but he couldn't get a signal. He went outside and sure enough, found that there was no connection to the building itself. He set that right and we had our phone, finally, after two weeks of negotiating.

Then the seat and seat post on my bike got stolen. I've covered this before in an older post, so I won't go into very much detail here. What I'll say is that is happened within a few days of moving in. I questioned the intelligence of leaving the bike locked to the metal railing outside the door, and especially questioned the wisdom of leaving the seat on the bike while unattended. What I decided was, I'm too lazy to remove the seat when I'm not using the bike and put it back on when I am, so I'll leave it where it is and hope the fact that it's within spitting distance of our front door, inside a fenced off property, in sight of our neighbors, will keep people from trying to run off with it.

Nope. Not even a week went by and it was gone. The shitty thing is, my bike is not a recreational toy. It's my primary transportation. We don't own a car (remember, cheap) and the transit system in Tucson totally sucks, so that bike is the main way I get to and from work, how I run errands, and my preferred type of exercise. You fuck with the bike, you fuck with my life. I rode without a seat for over a week before a local bike shop could order one the right size.

We mentioned it to the maintenance guy and his wife. His wife said, without hesitation, “It was probably one of the tenants.”

Good to know. Just what kind of people were we living around? I suppose the property manager's wife, the person who went over the lease with us and was present when we signed, gave us some kind of advance warning, no matter how unintentional. “We've evicted a number of people recently. There were people selling drugs and whatnot, so we're trying to discourage that. That's why it says no drugs on the lease agreement.”

From what we could gather, this place was a favorite living space of ne'er-do-wells of every sort. Our neighbors next door were chronic alcoholics who stayed up late every night talking loudly and cranking up their stereo until the early hours of the morning. That's when they weren't screaming at their TV while a game was on. I overheard another neighbor talking about a woman who had OD'd in one of the downstairs apartments. He also mentioned the time two naked homeless men had spent a day swimming in the pool.

As annoying as those problems were, they were nothing compared to the bedbugs. It goes without saying that the property manager's wife didn't mention those when we moved in.

Less than a week after moving in, my wife woke up with a series of bites down one side of her body. What the hell? Did we have spiders? For most of the following day, that's all we could think of that would have caused such large, red welts. Then my wife recalled a hostel where she had stayed in San Francisco over a decade ago. That hostel had had a bedbug infestation that took them months to get rid of, and the bites she suffered there looked a lot like the ones she had now.

She asked someone at the Fry's pharmacy about it. They said that generally, bedbug bites are in clusters, not spaced apart. My wife's bites were not in clusters. Maybe it was a spider after all.

A couple of nights later, I started getting bit on the feet and ankles, and those bites were without a doubt in clusters. They also itched like hell. I looked and felt like I had chicken pox from the ankles down. Every night brought new bites for both of us. This was the beginning of an ordeal that didn't end for seven months.

Neither of us had ever seen a bedbug before. We assumed they must be incredibly small, like fleas. That would explain why we weren't seeing them. At the time we had no idea that bedbugs hide in small crevices, outlets, under furniture, anywhere they can go and escape detection during the day. They also leave a telltale sign on your sheets, small streaks of blood from full bedbugs getting squished by accident as you move about in your sleep. As time went on and we realized that not only could we see them plainly but there were actually far more than we could physically deal with on our own, our sheets and pillowcases became covered in bloody skid marks, blotches, specks and dribbles, like a rusty-brown Jackson Pollack spattered on the canvas in slow motion. Most of these came from desperately squishing the little devils as we discovered them hunting for our warm human blood in the middle of the night. Even after they had already fed, there was something deeply satisfying about popping one between your fingers like an undercooked pea. Anyone who has lived through a bedbug infestation can probably sympathize—after weeks and months of being covered in itchy bites every bit as bad as those of mosquitoes, bad enough to wake you up from a deep sleep, going through life on little more than three hours of decent sleep a night, you'll be happy with even the smallest grain of revenge.

We contacted the property managers multiple times over the course of the seven months we lived in the building. Each time it took them days to get back to us, and each time the response was something along the lines of “Gee, bedbugs? Spray some poison, I guess. What do you expect us to do about it?”

It was clear they couldn't care less. It was also becoming clear that they had known about the infestation for some time, but had neglected to tell us about it when we signed a year lease. I gathered intelligence slowly, overhearing conversations between our neighbors and Richard, the on-site maintenance guy. He wanted Richard to talk to the property managers about the bedbugs, the cockroaches (I forgot to mention the hordes of roaches that paraded through our apartment at all hours of the day and night), and the leaky roof, which had apparently led to damp living spaces during the last rain storm. 

The only consolation I took away after hearing them talk was that we weren't the only ones suffering from the problem. Big deal, it was still awful, and we couldn't see any way out. A year lease meant we were stuck there for months, enduring an issue that was steadily getting worse. If we broke the lease, we knew the possible consequences: the landlord could hold us liable for the remaining rent owed. That would mean that, in addition to paying rent on whatever new place we moved to, we'd have to pay close to two grand to our previous landlord. We're not rich, and such a circumstance could very well have bled us dry financially. We decided, against our better judgment, to wait the situation out and see if there was any improvement.

I took heart when we found a note on our door one afternoon stating that the managers were finally hiring an exterminator. About fucking time, I thought. Now, at least, they were taking some kind of positive action. Maybe we didn't have to break the lease after all. Maybe things would improve.

When the exterminator did eventually show up, it was only to deal with the roaches. We put a little roach poison here and there in the apartment and left.

Richard was there. “Isn't he going to do anything about the bedbugs?” I asked.

“They're going to try to take care of the different bugs one at a time. First the roaches, and then when those are gone, they're going to work on the bedbugs.” He couldn't have helped but notice my frustrated expression. “Don't worry, though,” he said, weakly trying to placate me, “I'll give you some of the bug poison I use. I spray it around my place all the time, and I don't have any bedbugs. We'll take care of this problem, don't worry.”

At no point did he consider the absurdity of expecting other people to be happy living in a place drenched in poison. Good for him if he was fine with it. We weren't. About this time I began to feel incredibly depressed. The situation grew more and more hopeless, both my wife and I were working long days on virtually no sleep, and we had almost no way to relieve ourselves from the stress.

Things reached a point of no return in the last couple of weeks before we moved. The neighbor next to us, the one who complained to Richard about his own bedbug problem? He moved to another apartment in the building. Evidently he was such a slob that his old apartment was pretty much trashed, necessitating a remodel. Richard and some other guy, maybe his son-in-law, busied themselves tearing out sheetrock and linoleum. Hidden everywhere were thousands and thousands of bedbugs that had been breeding for years, unimpeded. Had he really done nothing in all this time to deal with them? Had he simply endured bites and bloodstains without taking any steps to alleviate his suffering? There could be no other explanation. He let their numbers grow, and now that he had left and their hiding places were being disturbed, they needed to find somewhere else to feed.

Guess where they went? We became inundated with swarm upon swarm of bedbugs, dozens of them a night, biting us with such frequency that sleep became next to impossible. We could no longer look at our bed as a place to lay down and relax—it was the place you were guaranteed to be bitten repeatedly as soon as you climbed in.

One night I went around the apartment with a flashlight, armed with a spray bottle of rubbing alcohol, which I knew from experience could kill bedbugs more or less on contact. They were everywhere, on the drapes and on the walls, crawling around on the floor looking for a source of blood, outside the window searching for openings in the screen, in the bathroom. I don't know how many I killed, but it didn't come close to being all of them. I spent the night doing this instead of sleeping, and in the morning had to work a full shift at my job.

It got bad enough that I rode my bike to the nearest Target after work and bought a two-person tent. I had left a note on the kitchen table for my wife stating my intentions. She called me at work as I was closing up the shop.

“Don't buy a tent. That's crazy.”

“Honey, I'm literally on the verge of a nervous breakdown. If I don't get some sleep I'm going to lose my mind. I don't know what else to do.”

“Do you really think it's going to work?”

Good question. I got the idea from an internet search that turned up “bedbug tents” as an item sold to keep them off you while you sleep. The tent retailed for over a hundred dollars at Ace Hardware. Hell with that, I thought, crestfallen. Then I asked myself, Why wouldn't a regular tent work just as well? As long as there are no large openings, bugs shouldn't be able to get in, and a basic two-person tent goes for about thirty bucks at a big box store.

That's how we spent the last week before we moved, sleeping in a tent set up inside our apartment. I wish I had a picture of this, but the relevant photograph was lost when our laptop died (what can I say, I'm lazy about backing up files). And it worked beautifully. We weren't bitten once, and for the first time in months we slept through the night undisturbed.

The bedbugs, denied a source of food, took to biting us during the day whenever they could.

Around this time, I visited the legal aid office downtown. I should have done that months earlier. The lawyer I spoke with confirmed my suspicions, namely that we were justified for the most part in breaking our lease over bedbugs, but there was still a danger of our landlord chasing us down for the remaining rent. It would go to collections if they chose to pursue it, and we were on our own at that point, having to go to court in order to prove our case. As much as we hated the idea, we were prepared to take it that far if we had to. She also told me that we needed a paper trail indicating that we had complained about the bedbugs over a period of time with nothing being done about it. The emails we'd sent were, to some degree, somewhat sufficient, but we'd need to also send a hard copy letter to our landlords declaring our intentions and the reasons why before moving.

Strictly speaking, that's what we did. It's just that we sent the letter the same day we moved.

Our biggest fear was that if we told the property managers outright that it was our intention to break our lease, they might decide to evict us in retaliation, meaning we'd have an eviction on our record and would have to find a new place to live in a very short period of time. Better for us to find a new place first, which we did, and move out as quickly as we could without anyone noticing.

We picked a day we'd both have off, packed our stuff in such a hurry that we had no idea what had been packed where (a big inconvenience when it came time to unpack), and I went to the closest U-Haul to rent a pickup. We spent the entire day packing and loading the truck, going back and forth between the old apartment and the new one, moving our stuff like thieves, constantly checking to make sure no one noticed what we were doing. My greatest fear was that Richard would see us and figure out what was going on, then call the property managers, who would then show up to harass and bully us. A part of me felt they were exactly the kind of people to pull that kind of shit if they felt someone was trying to screw them out of money. It was their love of money over common decency and human compassion that had led them to be the proud managers of the shithole we were trying to escape from in the first place. Along with calling all the different utility companies to get our services transferred, I had spent the previous three or four days preparing myself for a wild and dramatic confrontation that would stack even more stress on top of what we were already about to go through.

As it turns out, no one noticed or cared what we were doing. Save for one person, who asked if we were moving out as we carried the very last box down to the truck, nobody said anything to us. We'd cleaned the place from top to bottom, wiped and mopped it down to the point where it was likely cleaner than the day we moved in, and left nothing but an empty space that our lives used to occupy. I walked up to Richard's wife outside their apartment (Richard not being home at the time) and handed her the keys. She looked pretty bowled over when I told her we'd just moved out. “Does Richard know?” she asked, almost as if to say, “Are you sure you should be doing this?” At the time, we didn't care about proper procedure. We didn't care what anyone living in that building thought. Looking back, I really hope we didn't get Richard in trouble. It's not like any of it was his fault.

There was a new problem of course, one that we knew we'd have to conquer if we were going to get our life back in shape. It was inevitable that bedbugs would stow away in our stuff—there were far too many of them at the time of the move for a few of them (more like a few dozen) not to hitch a ride in our hastily-packed boxes. We panicked at the thought of being at fault for infesting an apartment. I thought of all the things that could happen to us: eviction, blacklisting, bankruptcy, homelessness. Our lives could be ruined. I saw us having to call our folks for money so we could fly back to Washington state in disgrace, moving in with our parents and trying to start our lives over from nothing (at least we had the option of reaching out to people, should the worst occur).

The first night didn't help. I was bitten at least half a dozen times by bedbugs that hadn't fed in over a week. I can't adequately describe the despair I felt the first week or so after moving in. I was sure we were doomed. My wife tried her best to calm me, let me know we could only do what we could. We did laundry constantly, put sheets and pillows in the dryer on an almost daily basis. We borrowed a steamer from her job at a thrift store/boutique, and steamed all of our furniture, all the clothes we'd packed away that couldn't go in the laundry, around the perimeters of all the rooms. I bought poison and sprayed it everywhere I thought bugs would hide. We bought a new vacuum cleaner (did I mention this move cost us over a thousand dollars in deposits, truck rental, new furniture, and other odds and ends? That was our whole tax return, something we hadn't planned to blow on a desperate escape—and a thousand dollars is a shit-ton of money for us) and used it throughout the entire apartment in the hope of vacuuming up any eggs they might have laid.

We kept all that up for three weeks, and at the end, after occasional bites that led to a renewed sense of dread every time, we beat them. I can say, without reservations, that there are no bedbugs in our apartment. We had to throw out furniture, including a hope chest of my wife's that was a gift from her father when she was sixteen, and we lived on the edge of pure hysteria for weeks, but we did it and it is done for good. We won that battle, and the last remnants of that awful place are gone. It is behind us.

Just in case you think I'm exaggerating how bad the old building was, here's another anecdote. One morning we awoke to someone banging on our window. The fuck is going on? We step outside to see black smoke raging from a downstairs apartment. Richard hurriedly unlocked the large back gate in the fence bordering the rear of the property to let in the fire trucks that were even then pulling up the alley. Within minutes a fire fighter told us to evacuate the building. We stood around in the parking lot as fire crews brought in hoses and dealt with the blaze.

Good thing the building's mostly made out of brick, I thought. That could have been bad.

A week or so later I come to find out (through a notice left on our door by the fire department) that the cause of the fire was a badly wired water heater. So I had to wonder: just how well-wired is our heater? Is it going to burst into flames on us one day while we're not at home?

A little later, my wife spoke with our neighbor two doors down. Generally we'd been avoiding this guy as he was one of the ones who partied loudly late into the night, and seemed a little clueless about neighborly behavior. But she happened to get into a conversation with him, the subject got around to budbugs, water heaters and the all around shittiness of the building, and he mentioned that his own water heater had exploded some time before while he was at work, damaging several square feet of carpet. He complained about it to the managers and they told him they'd just cut out the damaged section of carpet and leave it at that, no replacement necessary. He told them no way, you're replacing the carpet, and by the way there are a few other things wrong that I might bring up with the right people, and before long they put in a whole new carpet.

I wasn't surprised they had to be pushed to take care of the problem, and that was the least of my worries. What bothered me was the idea that our own water heater might do the same thing while we were out, pretty much destroying everything we had. That poor kid lost I don't know how much, I just hope he had rich parents (probably not, if that apartment was the only place he could afford). If it had happened to us, we would have been totally fucked.

Whatever, it's over. The managers probably even now commit acts of evil that set the karmic ledger more and more heavily against them. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd let myself think that they might come back as bedbugs themselves, or roaches, and mine would be the foot that steps on them. Unfortunately, that isn't the way life works. Bad people commit rotten acts against others all the time and get away with it—it has always been thus and it always will be, I'm afraid.

What gets to me is that there are still people living in that building who, for whatever reason, can't get away. Most of the other tenants were poor, elderly, screwed up on drugs or booze, crazy, living on SSI. One guy downstairs had no legs, presumably no job, and say around sometimes outside his apartment looking forlorn and desperate. There was someone else (or maybe it was him) who screamed his head off all night, hollering words that made no sense, were just meaningless syllables of rage spit into the night to vent a fury brought on by the fact that his life was hell and he was trapped in it for good. It was depressing to hear, and depressing to see the way neighbors never smiled, never said hello, didn't seem to want anything to do with anyone else. There was a constant haze of anger hovering over the place. Most tellingly, there were no families, no one with children, which was probably for the best—I can't imagine what it would be like for a child to have to live in such an environment.

So I think about those people sometimes, who couldn't get away. I didn't speak with any of them, really, because they were often surly and unresponsive (so was I, after a while), but I get why they were pissed. Their lives have little hope of getting better, and the fact they have to settle for living in a bug-infested nightmare is just one more example for them of the way things are probably going to go for a long time to come. There is something very educational about living among the impoverished, in that it doesn't allow you the luxury of looking away, or pretending that the suffering of people whose poverty is destined to follow them all the way to the grave doesn't exist. In a city like Tuscon, in the poorest county in the state of Arizona, the desperate and the wretched are a common site. I'll always try to remember a little bit of what we went through whenever I see them.