BUG-KILL PHILOSOPHY: Director’s Cut (with 324 additional words never before seen!) — by Steve Nadis
I live in an intellectual town: Beneath every rock, as the saying goes, you’ll find an aspiring novelist, philosopher, or poet crawling around. When I ask a salesperson about futons, somehow the conversation invariably comes around to Proust. The gardeners I meet tend to be frustrated writers, though none more frustrated than me. Our main contractor is an artist, bumper-sticker maker, and political pamphleter, who just does carpentry on the side. Even my drain-cleaning guy dispenses life lessons as handily as he wields a snake. “We could learn a lot from tree roots,” he tells me as he reams the insides of our drain pipe. “Like John Paul Jones [or Rocky Balboa, for that matter], they never give up. If there’s an opening, or a weak point, they find it. If not, they keep poking around until they create one.”
No one looks forward to having bed bugs. For my money, it’s the best cure for sleep yet devised. Nevertheless, when we came down with this affliction last year, when it was all the rage, I thought that this time I was finally going to get the straight dope–as in firebombing our home with an arsenal of deadly toxins–rather than yet more discourse on the latest epistemological quandary. The first professional I discussed the matter with came straight to the point, asking me where my tenants were from. When I said Peru, which was the case at the time, he said: “Oh boy, have you ever got ‘em! So here’s what we can do for you…” He laid out the full battle plan, starting with his brand of “shock and awe” and proceeding to the occupation and nation-building phases.
“Don’t you want to look first, just to be sure?” I asked.
“What’s the point?” he replied. “These critters are hard to see. And in the end, we’re still going to do the same thing. So why not save some time and money?
Though his argument made perfect sense, I sought a second opinion to be safe. After some digging, I found the “exterminator of the stars”–a man reportedly with “Cambridge ties,” though the way he put it made it sound like “mob ties.” The Harvard School of Public Health may have written the book on bed bugs, but when they have bug infestation problems, who they gonna’ call? This bugbuster, that’s who. I called him too. He promised to “get to the root of my problem.”
A few days later, he arrived at my doorstep with a notebook in hand. On our tour of the premises, he looked under beds, mattresses, pillows, and linen, chuckling to himself as he took notes. Finally we arrived in the master bedroom. After a cursory glance, he asked,
“Does your wife sleep on this side of the bed?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Why do you ask?”
“Men always sleep by the door,” he said. “It’s been that way since the Stone Age. Women and children slept in back of the cave, while men guarded the entrance.”
“Fine,” I said,” but what does this have to do with bed bugs?”
He looked at me incredulously, as if bed bugs were the farthest thing from his mind. “I have no idea what’s making you itch, but I promise you it’s not bed bugs.” My problems were deeper, he added. Much deeper. Although my girls were still young, he warned me what I’d be facing a decade from now. “The way I see it, all your troubles have to do with men,” he explained. “You’ll have three women, all of them menstruating. Plus your wife will be dealing with menopause. Then you’ll have your own mental health to deal with. So eventually, all your women problems will actually revolve around men, at which point you won’t be worrying about bugs at all.”
And then, 50 minutes after his arrival, our session was over as quickly as it began, with the bug situation apparently solved. I wrote out the check for $125, suggesting that perhaps we’d do the next “inspection” while I lay down on the couch. The way I see it, we all could use a good “debugging” every now and then.
