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.
