What's that itchy feeling?

Well, once again I find myself in the awkward position of having to apologize to my legions of fans for the lengthy delay in updating my little corner of the internet. I know it’s no excuse, but I have been quite the busy beaver with two jobs, holiday shopping, working out and sleeping. Every once in a while I do something social which is nice. I’m beginning to forget what the New York bar scene is like, though I’m sure it’s the same botox’d faces I saw the last time I was out.

It seems we’re almost to the present day now with my blog! (It’s really not necessary to sigh in relief you know.) “But Shawn,” you’re saying, “if you’re out of Astoria adventures, what are you going to write about?” Well fear not beloved admirers, there are plenty of Shawn Stories out there. I haven’t been on this planet for thir ---, I mean twenty-five years for nothing. Besides, I’m sure Astoria will continue to provide fodder for my blog and just like the folks in line at Winn Dixie reading the National Enquirer, you’ll want to know.

Today’s story is a long one so I apologize in advance. I really need an editor who can help me focus on brevity. Less is more. (Or so countless dates have told me.) I’ll try to keep it short and sweet, like me, but you all know how long winded I can be. So shift your ass into its most comfy position and park it there.

Picture it. Astoria. Late Summer, 2006. I’ve now endured power outages, blistering heat, root canals, near fires, cable issues, phone issues, Ipod issues, the list goes on and on, as you all well know. There comes a point in ones life, you’d think, that you reach what some may call the breaking point, that special moment when you actually start listening to the voices in your head telling you to throw that plate across the kitchen or stomp on that absurdly expensive framed print of a heart wrapped in flowers your ex got you. Not that I would know, those are just examples. Late Summer, 2006 I hit that point.

I should start out by saying I love my bed. It’s been with me in 8 of my 9 apartments that I’ve had in New York, and it was given to me by a friend several years ago who was suddenly transferred by her job. She had only had it for two weeks, so I considered it new. Through thick and thin it’s been with me, a constant companion in a sea of change. Lovers come (sometimes on the bed!) and go, but this bed has been my rock. Sadly, at the end of summer, my bed fell victim to the insidious, pernicious Cimex lectularius, or as you and I know them, the household bed bug. They aren’t kidding when they say don’t let the bed bugs bite, because let me tell you, those suckers can bite.

A little history lesson for my avid readers. Bed bugs have been with man since, well, man was around. They are parasitic insects that feed off of the blood of you and me (or dogs if they absolutely have to, but they’re pretty picky eaters.) They live not only in beds but anywhere there is a crack, crevice, nook, cranny or hole. They often choose to live in beds because then they’re right at the source of their breakfast lunch and dinner, but they can travel up to seventy feet for a meal. They are nocturnal. They are flat and oval in shape until they feed, at which point their bodies engorge to four times its normal size, filled to the brim with our juicy blood. That word engorge really grosses you out doesn’t it? Me too.

Here’s where it gets scary. They can live up to a year… a YEAR… without eating. The female can lay up to 5 eggs a day, and if any of those end up being little girls, they too can lay five eggs a day. In a little over a month there can be twenty generations in your home. They are resistant to any chemical sprays that you can purchase over the counter. Spray the suckers directly with Raid and they’ll tip their hat good mornin’ to you, and saunter off with a smile on their face and a song in their heart. As far as I can tell, there’s no herbal concoction that will rid your home of these pests either. Once the bugs are there, you have entered a battle that will cost you a lot of money and countless sleepless nights.

I, of course, didn’t know I had bed bugs at first. There are a few telltale signs, like brown spots on your sheets (which is your dried blood), or a pungent odor in the room they inhabit, but I hadn’t really noticed either of those. After all, the curry pretty much covers up any other odor that might exist in my apartment. My discovery came in a much more traditional way; I had been eaten alive. I woke up one fine sunny day, anticipating the glorious work day ahead, and by the end of the evening I was a mass of itching, burning flesh. At first I thought I had contracted chicken pox because I was covered in all these little bumps, and I was actually a little happy about the possibility of missing a few days of work, but then I noticed something strange; the dots were all in neat little rows.

When bed bugs bite you, they do it three or four times in each feeding. First, they stick you with a numbing coagulant so that you don’t feel anything, and then they stick a tube in and commence their meal. When they’re full from that tap, they pause for a bit so that their bodies can expand to accommodate its new bounty and then they take a few steps and start the process again. By the fourth bite, their feast is over and they plop into an easy chair to watch the big game. It’s only the next day you discover you’ve been bitten.

I googled “bites in a row” or something like that, and came up with a website about bed bugs and how to identify them. I scanned my sheets and there were a few brown spots here and there, but they were pretty old sheets so I wasn’t sure if those were new brown spots or old brown spots. (Who knew how many brown spots there were on my sheets. Gross.) The website also said they molt, so you should look around for skins. I pulled my bed from against the wall, and my fears were confirmed. There on the floor were three or four dried up bed bug skins. Rather than freaking out, I calmly scooted the bed back in place and started my research on how to combat this little problem. The freaking out came soon after.

As noted before, these buggers can live just about anywhere. What that meant in terms of my apartment was that the hardwood floors, the dresser, the desk, the laundry hamper, the couch, the chair, the tv stand, the bookstand, the books, the cds, the clothes, the alarm clock, the radio, everything I owned had become a Hotel 6 for these nasty creatures. Commence the freaking out. It’s very difficult to look around you and consider that everything you own is now the domain of an insect that wants to suck your blood in your sleep. (I would imagine its about how Bill feels around Hillary.) The website I consulted recommended cleaning out anything under your bed and focusing on your room first.

Like many New Yorkers, the area under my bed is an extra closet. I had three of those nifty under the bed containers, shoe boxes of receipts, photo albums and other sundry items not worth mentioning here. With much gusto I dove into the “extra closet” to determine the extent of my infestation. As it turns out, this area of my apartment was Club Med for my bed bugs. I found them in my receipts. I found them in my Christmas ornaments. I found them in old greeting cards. In magazines. In old headshots. Basically, everywhere. They like really dark, dry places, which I had unwittingly supplied for them in abundance. I tossed a lot of stuff that day, and much of it was of great sentimental value.

I then bagged up every item of clothing I own and dropped it all off at the laundry mat. I figured I had to tell the people working there why I was washing a few large bags of clothing all at once, and they were very kind and said they would be careful with it all because they didn’t want any bedbugs getting to other people’s clothes. At least they had some common sense about it. I came back home, and got out the vacuum. Bed bugs hate vacuums. The website recommended vacuuming once, throwing out the bag, then vacuuming every day for a week because the eggs are covered in a sticky substance that prevents them from being sucked up; you have to wait until they’ve hatched to catch them..

I vacuumed every square inch of my room seven times in as many days. Take a moment and look around your room. Now imaging vacuuming everything. Everything. Seven times. I then went to bed bath and beyond and bought 20 gigantic ziploc bags to put my clothes in so that if the buggies ever came back, I wouldn’t have to spend the money to wash all my clothes again. I bought new sheets, new pillowcases and pillow protectors. Rather than throwing out the bed and bringing a new one into the apartment, the website recommended wrapping your current bed in plastic so that the ones in it will die (after a year) and so that no more can get in. Yes, like a child who can’t stop wetting his bed, my mattresses are now covered in plastic. Nothing says hot times like plastic mattress covers. “Uh, we can play slip’n’slide?”

Unfortunately for me, the plastic they provide for keeping mattresses dry isn’t really made to be air tight. It’s made to be a basic barrier, not a condom. I’d get the plastic on one side of the mattress, and it would rip on the other. I’d patch that hole with packing tape, and another would appear an inch away. The website also said that the plastic shouldn’t touch the floor, because the bugs can then just climb right up on it and into bed with you. The mattress covers made today are made to fit beds with those fluffy mattress pads. My bed does not have said pad. Thus, the mattress cover was far too big, and the extra plastic ended up on the floor. I had to stand my bed up on end and put shipping tape all around it so that the extra plastic wouldn’t fall to the floor. Of course in doing so, I ripped it about twenty times. What should have taken twenty minutes was a several hour process, because every time I moved, lifted, or shifted the bed, the plastic would rip.

This was about the time I hit the aforementioned breaking point. And that half of the story is saved for next week. Until then, don’t worry; that itchy sensation you feel is probably just psychosomatic. Probably.

What A Turkey

Man, what a crazy time of year this is! Everyone has been so busy lately; the parties, the get togethers and reunions, the huge meals and the gallons of cocktails, not to mention the nationwide celebration of thanks. And that was just my birthday! I had a pretty delightful birthday this year. A very low key dinner, a few drinks and then home with my new Xbox. Relax possums, I didn’t buy the $400 Xbox 360, so those of you who are video game geeks can put it back in your pants. It’ll be some time before I can afford the 360, thus I settled on a gently used original Xbox for a mere $100.

I think this was money well spent, and quite the birthday present to myself. (One of two. If you have to ask what the other one was, you’re too young to be reading this.) I also picked up two new used games that have completely captivated me, which may also explain my lack of updating what USAToday will soon be calling The Best Blog of 2006. In the meantime, grab a cup of your favorite guilty pleasure, kick your feet up and read on.

Tonight I was going to write about the most recent, and most disturbing apartment story, but as so often happens, fate decided to intervene. When Thanksgiving was approaching I thought it would be nice to write an entry about all the things I’m thankful for, despite what a challenging year it’s been for me and so many people I know. (Seriously, 2006 sucked and I for one am glad it’s nearly over.) I woke up Thanksgiving morning and that plan was shot to shit.

Like most of America’s youth, I went to bed Thanksgiving-eve with visions of cranberry sauce and turkey breasts dancing in my head, which may very well be the first time I lay in bed thinking of breasts. See, if there’s one thing I cook well, it’s Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t know what it is, but I turn that shit out! My mashed potatoes, with their secret ingredient, are creamy and smooth, my turkey with its special basting cocktail melts in the mouth and we won’t even TALK about my pecan pie. I call it the Happy Ending.

I thought it would be a good idea to cook the pecan pie on Wednesday so I plopped in my cheesy holiday music cd, and dove in. All in all, it was a pretty normal pie baking experience, with one significant exception that would prove to be very important on Thursday. My oven is nowhere near true to temperature. I don’t know what temperature it thinks it is when I’ve set it to 350, but it was pretty far off because it took about 20 minutes longer to cook the pie than it should have. One would think that I would make a mental note of that for the next day when I had to time an entire meal based around how long it would take to cook a turkey breast, but one would be wrong.

On Wednesday night I had the most horrible case of insomnia. I figured it was either the nerves about all the work that had to happen the next day, all the caffeine I’d had, or just the excitement of good friends coming over to partake in my Thanksgiving blowout. At about 3:00 I’d had enough of tossing and turning in bed and dragged my pillows and blankie to the couch. Along the way, something registered deep in the bowels of my brain, but it wasn’t until much later that the import of this transient bit of information hit me. When I hopped off the bed, my feet landed on the floor and turned into blocks of ice. When I walked into the living room, I had to wrap my blankie around me to ward off the chill in the air. I should have thought, “Self, this is not good,” but I didn’t. I thought “the couch looks so good,” and promptly threw myself into its welcoming cushions, hoping for at least three or four hours of decent slumber.

At about 9 in the morning, I plied my eyes open to a new day, thought about all the work ahead of me and decided to go ahead and get started. First, and most important, was a shower to wash the cobwebs from my head. I plodded over to the closet, grabbed my cutest holiday-ish outfit and went into the bathroom. I always keep the window in the bathroom cracked to get a little fresh air in the apartment (you know, because of the curry) so I’m used to it being chilly. Chilly. Not arctic.

Still, I was so groggy, this didn’t really register and I opened the shower curtain, took my clothes off (calm yourselves) and turned on the water. I was so tired, though, I decided to bring out the big guns; it may have been 9 in the morning, but it was time for a diet coke. Something about the walk from the bathroom to the kitchen was… not right. I may have been in my birthday suit (not Prada), but judging by the amount of shrinkage taking place it was freezing in my living room. Yes ladies, shrinkage is not just a Seinfeld episode, it exists. I grabbed a diet coke and scurried back into the bathroom where a steamy shower was about to envelop me. Or so I thought.

Astute readers may have deduced by now that Apartment 21 had no heat or hot water, but this had not really occurred to me yet. Until I stuck my hand in the running water to test the temperature, the thought had never even crossed my mind. When my hand shot back in agony, it was clear; I was about to host four people in an apartment with no heat or hot water. Cursing, I dragged my sorry ass back into my bedroom and began the grueling process of getting dressed. There is nothing worse than feeling grimy and having to put clothes on without showering.

Then I picked up the phone and started dialing. First I called my super. Voicemail. Then I called my landlord. Voicemail. Then emergency voicemail. This was at 9:30 in the morning. It would be 7:30 that night before I heard from either of them. That emergency voicemail works very well obviously. Next, I called my friends to tell them the sorry news. I was seriously considering canceling the whole affair, but nothing could be more depressing, so I told them to bundle up and come on out. My friend Anthony came over right away so that I could run to the gym and shower.

Freshly showered, I ran home to start the cooking. Now I was behind schedule and we were going to have to push dinner back about an hour. When I got to my apartment the rest of the crew had arrived, and I greeted them all with apologies about the cold, and decided to go ahead and turn the oven on. It was way too soon to start cooking Judy (the name I gave to my turkey breast) but at least it would take the chill out of the air. And honestly, once we started seriously cooking, it was blazing hot in the apartment anyway.

As I only do any real cooking about once a year, my apartment is not really outfitted for big meals. Anthony had to bring over knives because, well, I don’t have any. Why spend $100 on a set of knives I’ll use once a year? My plan was to wash dishes as we went along, but clearly that was not going to work, so we kicked it old school and kept pots of water warming on the stove to wash dishes with. That worked surprisingly well, until such time as we actually needed the pots to cook with. All we could do at that point was pile them in the sink.

The hour before the turkey is ready, as I’m sure you know, is when things go nutso. The chef, in this case me, has to be the conductor of a carefully orchestrated machine. Things have to go on the stove and come off the stove, drinks have to start flowing and the table has to be set (because in New York your table is your counter space). In those fifty or so minutes, if you’re not helping, you’re in the way, so I put everyone to work. Some may call it bossy, I call it efficient.

At about 5:00, the last of the side dishes was done, Judy had been resting comfortably in her pan on the counter and the biscuits were golden brown. You can smell it can’t you. I grabbed one of the borrowed knives, picked a spot, and starting the carving. I’m not by any means a carving kind of person, but the knife slid in easily enough and I didn’t seem to do any major damage, so I went a little further. When the juices started pouring out, my stomach growled and I declared that Judy was a success.

But like her namesake Ms Garland, Judy was half-baked. It’s fine for a person to be half-baked. A turkey? Not so much. My heart sank, and I turned to the wide eyed crew of four, with their forks in hand, and said “Uh oh.” Imagine if you will for a moment you have chosen the best gift in the world for your boyfriend/girlfriend/
transgender domestic partner. They open it. They scream in joy. They cry. They laugh. And then, out of nowhere, a vulture flies into your house, snatches the present out of their hands and bolts out the window. Now imagine your loved one’s face. That is how my crew of friends appeared to me. Stricken. Shocked. Saddened. Bereft. “Fear not, this is fixable” I said. I pieced poor Judy back together as best I could, cranked up the oven and put her back in.

An hour and twenty minutes later my gang and I dug into a perfect turkey, and a bevy of lukewarm side dishes. Sure, we microwaved them, but mashies just aren’t the same when they’re not fresh out of the pot. The biscuits we won’t even discuss. My friends were great sports, and we all had second helpings, but I couldn’t help thinking that my meal was kind of like Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes; something was just not right. At least we all had a Happy Ending to look forward to, and it did not disappoint. The matter of the dishes was left until the hot water came back on, which was mercifully about 9:00 that night.

So that’s Thanksgiving 2006. Pretty damn apropos if you ask me. I hope that you and yours all had the most fantastic Thanksgiving ever. And because I think it’s important, I’m thankful for: my friends, my family, the health of those who are still healthy and the strength of those who aren’t so much, that there are only 777 days left of George W. Bush’s presidency and that I still live in a country where saying that won’t get me killed. So far.

Until next time, be well, and stop thinking of me naked scurrying around my apartment.