Good Things Happen to People You Hate

by Rebecca Fishbein

  I have thrown up on many a floor in my day, including that very floor at least once, and so none of this story is remarkable, save for one very important fact: I wasn’t alone in my room. Was I with the hot almost-single twin? LOL, nope. There, blinking at me from a fold in my cotton pillowcase, was a tiny brown bedbug swelled with blood. That motherfucker had just bitten me, it was watching me clean up my stomach refuse in shame, and it was going to temporarily ruin my life. “FUCK YOU, LITTLE BUG!” I screamed as I squashed it dead, but that wasn’t nearly enough revenge for what was to come.

  If you’ve never had a bedbug infestation or seen a bedbug or espied a bedbug on your pillow judging you for sullying its home with your vomit, let me assure you: bedbugs are exactly the nightmare everyone describes. Stories about unending infestations, evil little bites that leave dark marks on your body, and nights spent trying to cram every goddamn stupid piece of clothing you own into the dryer before the laundromat closes do not exist just to sell you mattress encasements. Bedbugs are real, and they are the harbingers of physical and mental destruction, a fact I can attest to because my sweet, sweet blood and I are to bedbugs what an overripe afternoon fruit basket is to a swarm of fruit flies.

  I have suffered no fewer than four bedbug infestations in the past ten years, mostly very minor, all harrowing. I got bedbugs for the first time in my very first adult apartment in New York, a beautiful, crumbling little thing located next door to a pastrami factory in Williamsburg. My room at the time consisted mainly of a bed and an impenetrable pile of clothes surrounding it, and the bugs decided to transform that clothing pile into a luxury nest. My roommate and I were moving out in two weeks at the time of the attack, so we spent our remaining tenancy lugging trash bags full of our belongings to the laundromat, hoping to spot errant quarters on the walk over. I didn’t actually see any insects during that particular escapade, so to me they seemed like invisible little mites that nibbled at my skin whenever I was still. I sensed them everywhere, even after we were out of our infested apartment and in a new, hopefully less infested one in Bushwick.

  Six months later, on Valentine’s Day, I was in my little Bushwick attic room with the bottle of Two-Buck Chuck I’d elected to spend the night with, when I decided, for some reason, to take a peek behind my bed. There, wedged between my mattress and the wall, was a rather terrifying beetle-like thing the size of an apple seed. My first round in the bedbug ring turned me into a bedbug expert, thanks to the many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many sleepless hours I spent researching the sleeping/eating/pooping/mating/migrating/Netflix-bingeing habits of these terrible little beasts, so I recognized my enemy in an instant.

  I informed my roommates, both of whom had boyfriends to spend Valentine’s Day with instead of a bottle of mutant dead bird wine and a bedbug. They told me they were unconvinced we were infested. I was too afraid of them to argue, so I relinquished several hundred dollars I had genuinely intended to give the government to an exterminator to zap the ever-loving fuck out of the critters living in my abode. A fun fact about anxiety is that it gets eighty times worse when you really do have something to be anxious about, and tiny bugs taking over your bed and brain is definitively an anxiety-inducing event. I am also very good at tricking myself into believing I have diseases and weird rashes. I became convinced every tiny red mark on my body was a by-product of bug snack time, and I kept my exterminator, a handsome man named Stephen, coming back for longer than the requisite three treatments.

  Indeed, on a biweekly basis, my new friend would spray his beautiful murder serum all over my floor and tell me how many dead bugs he found (total count in three months: one). I spent so much time with him I considered sending him sexy photos—dust balls, crumbs, a couple carpet beetles, an old fingernail, and other stuff that got me excited in the night. We didn’t find any more bugs, despite the persistent appearance of red marks on my torso, and so eventually my beloved bug wrangler, likely exhausted by my daily emails, drilled poison holes in my walls, hopped in a van, and drove out of my life forever. I still saw random red marks and I REMAIN UNCONVINCED of the mission’s success, but two months after Stephen departed, I stopped dreaming about bugs, and that was good enough for me.

  And thus I entered a multiyear period of blissful bedbuglessness. Not that the little fuckers hadn’t left their mark on my psyche. Bedbugs infest your brain far worse than they do your living quarters, and you see them everywhere eons after they’re gone. And so, in my respite from bedbuggery, I still threw every thrift store purchase in the dryer before letting it cross my threshold. I inspected every single mosquito bite and hive rash. I checked my mattress for telltale bloodstains and fecal matter. A roommate once brought home a wooden shelf she found on the street and I considered calling the police.

  Travel was the stuff of horror. The same year I suffered the second unending “infestation,” I went on a three-week backpacking trip through Europe. I’d been pro-hostel on previous trips, but now that I was scarred by bugs, I imagined tiny Euro-parasites crawling on my skin, into my bag, and onto the plane headed back to my American bed.

  Still, all stayed silent on the bedbug front. Then one August a new roommate moved into my apartment, inadvertently bringing with her a few dozen more new, decidedly less welcome roommates. The infestation was limited to her room, but the exterminators our landlord chose made all three of us living in the apartment run every goddamn piece of clothing we owned through a dryer, an exhausting, time-consuming task that cost me a surprising amount of money and a couple good dresses. And once again I was left feeling violated, though at least I was comforted that MY bed was safe. OR SO I THOUGHT.

  Context for this particular pillowcase bug spotting: I hadn’t had sex in five months, I was regularly bleeding money, and I finished all the seasons of The Great British Bake Off available on Netflix at that time, so things were not going well. Did I have time to heat all my shit up? Did I have the brain space to lie awake and imagine tiny beetles nibbling at my flesh? Did I have the energy to fear leaving bug bodies in my wake every time I walked into the living room? NO, SIR, I DID NOT.

  Bedbugs are bad for a lot of reasons—the bites, the cost, having to explain to the dry cleaner that there might be eggs in your sweaters—but the worst thing about them is that they make you feel like you’re doing something wrong. In a bedbug battle, nothing you do seems like it is ever enough. There’s at least one bag full of clean clothes with a popped seal, one un-vacuumed crevice serving as a bedbug hideout, one errant book into whose pages a pregnant bug has escaped, prepared to launch a bedbug kingdom anew the minute you think you’re safe. Internet forums are full of bedbug horror stories about people who live out of sterile bags for months, then finally return their clothing to their closets and drawers, only to find a plump little bastard hunkered down in a picture frame.

  This sense that there’s always more to do is difficult for perfectionists and people with OCD; it’s also difficult for people who are ever cluttered and incomplete. I somehow simultaneously fall into all these camps, and so I am constantly punished. I want each crevice of my apartment dusted and poisoned and caulked into oblivion, but I can’t be bothered to make the effort to do it until it’s too late. I might go so far as to vacuum my room in an attempt to wrest eggs from my baseboards, but there’s a good chance I’ll fail to dispose of the bag with the utmost precaution. I remembered to put plastic around a throw pillow I tossed in the trash, but I forgot to seal it. I am a menace to my roommates, my neighbors, the entire borough of Brooklyn, and to myself.

  When my Greenpoint apartment caught fire, people often asked me how I managed to handle that kind of devastating loss. Here’s a fun fact: it was easier to deal with losing all my stuff in a fire than with bedbugs. When my apartment caught fire, it was like a death. It couldn’t be helped or solved. There was nothing to treat. I had to accept that things were lost and briefly mourn them, then move on. Bedbugs are like an illness you have to test and treat and agonize over to fix. There
is always a new medication to try, a new experimental treatment to undertake, a new tube to stick in your arm to see if it helps.

  Then, of course, there’s the fact that the fire was something that happened to me; I can’t help but think that bedbugs are something I bring on myself. If you happen to be a friend of mine who is horrified to discover I’m secretly Brooklyn’s Bedbug Mary, please note that (1) many exterminators have assured me that it is extremely unlikely I ever brought bedbugs to your house, so please do not send me any angry emails, and (2) I have probably been too ashamed to tell you about my several bedbug pets, because people who have bedbugs are dirty and messy and careless, and I feared even before I had bedbugs that you might think I am all of those things.

  I am a perfectionist in that I will happily spend hours analyzing my two front teeth to measure exactly how much they’ve shifted in the last month (and will text photos of said teeth to my friends, family members, and you, dear stranger reading this essay, if you are unfortunate enough to provide me with your phone number). I will obsess over a mishung painting. I will count every gray hair. I will scrub at a single small clothing stain until I wear the fabric thin, making the mark even more obvious, because I am as much an idiot as a lunatic. Despite my best attempts, I’m imperfect all the time.

  My friends own blow-dryers, clothing irons, and Tide to Go pens. They organize their books by color. They wipe down their laptop keyboards. They did not just purchase a brand-new tube of deodorant and promptly lose it in their bedroom. They don’t forget to dump out the coffee filter for a week, then open it to discover it’s cultivated a new ecosystem made of mold. They live in homes that are clean, either because they themselves are pristine or because they can afford to pay someone to do the dusting and vacuuming for them. They say things like, “Don’t you think it’s time to wash that tote bag, Rebecca?”

  My friends can open a bag of chips without finishing the whole thing. My friends can eat half their sandwich and save the rest for tomorrow. My friends can cook. My friends can budget. My friends can go to a party and have one drink and go home. My friends would never drink too much and try to home-wreck a half-dead relationship. My friends can get others to tell them they love them and mean it. My friends are fully formed, fully functional human beings, and I am the Tasmanian devil, a frantic ball of insects and romantic disasters ready to whirl into your life and screw it up. My friends would never wake up at two a.m. and throw up on their bedroom floor.

  I told all my friends when I had bedbugs the first time, and they looked at me sadly, because who else but me could contract this menace? People like me, who fling their clothes and problems and romantic pitfalls all over everything, don’t just get bedbugs, they deserve them, and so my repetitive outbreaks are my fate, not just bad luck.

  Of course, bedbugs don’t discriminate—in theory, they infest the rich and put-together as much as they do the messy and penny-pinching. But that’s hard to remember when you’re once again living out of plastic bags and dropping books on pieces of lint that startle you in your living room. Indeed, here I am, sitting in my room in Brooklyn, wondering if the exterminators have managed to lay waste to the bloodsuckers in my box spring or if I’m doomed to live with these monsters until the end of time. I have been assured that they’re mostly gone now and will be gone forever in two weeks, and that the only way to survive this is to give up control and “trust the process,” which is hard to do when you can’t even trust yourself to unplug the space heater before leaving the house.

  Why Be Kind to Yourself When You Can Torture Your Mind Quietly?

  Some experts say sports are a good way for children to build confidence. For me, sports—like forcing a comb through my hair for picture day or using scissors—were just another way to prove to myself how much shittier I was than all the other kids. I was scared of all the balls, even the soft foam ones they give toddlers to play with in day care. I ran too slow. I dribbled on my feet. I kicked to the wrong person. In an entire season of Jewish Community Center baseball, my bat made contact with the ball exactly once (it then hit one of the parents behind the foul line). I was the kid other kids groaned about when I ended up on their team. I was the player coaches tried to bench at crucial points in the game. Luckily, I liked the bench, where I could eat all the Oreos the soccer moms brought for halftime.

  However, sport and exercise are not the same thing, and even though you’d have to threaten the members of my family I care about to get me to play soccer again, I do like to exercise. My father ran about a dozen marathons in his day, and when I was a wee tween he started taking me running with him, I assume because I was not good at Sport and therefore transforming into a dreaded sloth child. Though I loved sitting, it turned out I also loved running. I could run at my own pace, listen to my own music, and get lost in my own daydreams about finally Frenching eighth grade cutie Alex B. I wouldn’t let down any teammates or subject myself to ridicule. I could just move and be without anyone bothering me or yelling at me to keep my eye on that hurling sphere of death called a ball.

  Another thing I liked about running was that I could pretend I was good at it. I’ve never been a fast runner, but I was the only kid in my middle school doing it regularly, so while everyone else ran short sprints at basketball practice, I built up endurance. In high school, I started going on seven- or eight-mile runs in Central Park; in college, I ran endless loops around the fitness center’s indoor track. Boys in school used to tell me they were “very impressed” by my dedication to the track, though they took back some of that praise as soon as they saw me try to lift a five-pound weight. In their adult years, a lot of my former non-running friends have started running half and full marathons while I rarely crack the five-mile mark, but I still like to run, and I don’t care if they can all pass me now as long as I can do loops and daydream about Chris Pine uninterrupted.

  One of the best things about running is that it’s a pretty cheap form of exercise. All you need are a pair of running sneakers and a relatively carless, dogshit-less stretch of street or sidewalk. Runners don’t need fancy equipment or a gym membership, except maybe in the winter, and even then you can usually get in a run as long as there’s no ice on the ground and you set your alarm to EXTRA LOUD. When I was so addicted to running I’d get palpitations if I went a few days without it, I brought sneakers with me when I traveled and snuck in runs when I could. I learned a lot about running culture outside the United States, like that in Paris they don’t have it, and in Italy they also don’t have it and don’t understand why you run when you could stand on the street and yell at someone for exercise instead.

  So for a long time I prided myself on being my own gym, unbeholden to class schedules, hidden annual fees, and roaches that hide in the sauna. This self-sustaining smugness amplified when I moved back to New York after college. As a woman living in North Brooklyn in the early 2010s, I discovered that yoga was inescapable. Bodegas transformed into yoga studios overnight. I got hit in the face with a rolled-up yoga mat every goddamn time I went to the grocery store. Half the conversations I’d overhear at bars were about “chaturanga-ing” and unfortunate physical ailments incurred during something called the camel pose.

  Soon some of my best friends became yoga disciples, and they tried to get me into it, too. But I was, and still am, committed to the belief that yoga in the West is a scam, and I was not going to be taken in. My yogi pals spent upwards of $15 per class. I ran for free. They dropped mad bucks on henna yoga mats and swanky butterfly bras from Lululemon. I worked out in threadbare shorts I bought in middle school and a sports bra someone once mistook for my grandmother’s.

  Yoga and all its accoutrements were silly expenditures. And then, of course, there was the fact that I was bad at yoga. Once in college I ended up in an “advanced” class and could barely hold myself up in downward-facing dog, let alone manage a handstand. A few years later, a friend dragged me to an open level class in Bushwick, and I toppled on my face in half moon pose. Running wa
s an exercise I could do without judgment, but yoga happened in a room full of strangers, all of whom would certainly see me tumble in a standing split and hear me fart in a squat. I’d spent my adult life avoiding my lack of athletic prowess, and I wasn’t about to pay for a class that showcased it. So I stuck with running, while my friends went on to earn yoga instructor certifications and learn to enjoy kombucha.

  When life is good and full of promise, a long run is the perfect thing. Runs give you time to let your mind wander unfettered. That kind of freedom lends itself well to, say, an exciting job prospect or an upcoming vacation or a flirty Gchat conversation with the coworker you’ve been secretly lusting after for months. Flush with adrenaline, you’re much more enthusiastic about logging several uphill miles in the heat. And all that time alone with your music and your brain is a breeding ground for your imagination, giving you space to map out whatever scenario of the future is currently spiking your heart rate.

  My brain cares less about my career than it does about hot dudes, probably because I’ve occasionally experienced at least moderate success with the former. And so for me, running has always been at its best at the start of a crush, when the bad stuff hasn’t happened yet and there’s nothing but blue sky and daydreams. I reached the zenith of this phenomenon the spring I was twenty-four, when I developed a weird but niggling thing for a coworker.

  Max was an adult—he was twenty-eight and had lived with two former girlfriends, and he probably knew how to kiss without banging teeth. He also paid about 23 percent attention to me—i.e., smiled at me sometimes, let me smoke his weed, and Gchatted me links to pictures of cute dogs—which was just enough to suggest my fantasies about our making out in every corner of our Brooklyn office could come true, without forcing me to confront the horrible possibility that they would.