Bugged Page 11
“We’ve had women open up the door buck naked,” Cesar says, making Orlando laugh. “I’m like, ‘Girl, do you really think I wanna flirt with you?’”
“You probably don’t want to jump into that bed,” I add.
“Egg-xactly,” he says, explaining how they’ll show bites all over. “They go, ‘Look. Look!’ And she’s bit right on her nipple.” His Brooklyn tongue pronounces it nibble. “I’m like, ‘Madam’”—exasperated—“‘do you really think I wanna see your nibble?’”
According to Orlando, this can happen up to twice a month.
Back to the job at hand: the tip of the Cryonite pipe gun bends like a dental saliva ejector and makes a similar hollow noise as it moves against the crannies on the lilac wall. On the door paneling are two penguin stickers. Piñata streamers dangle off the ceiling like an indoor festival. They brush against Cesar’s pipe gun as he shoots frost into the molding above the ceiling, a plume of snow falling past him. If you take the word bug for its ghoulish origins, Cesar Soto DeLeon is a ghostbuster. His gun outlines the corners and bases of the room and encircles family photos hung on the wall.
The same procedure is repeated in 4H and then 5H—a dwelling with a light Miami zest, a velvet painting of Venice, and, behind window curtain number one: a mass of bedbugs. “Oh, pay dirt!” He lifts a dog-ear fold of the valance to unveil a cozy orgy of dandruff-colored baby nymphs huddled with dozens of scab-flakey adults. (The physiological drive that compels them to wedge between surfaces is known as positive thigmotaxis.) “I shoulda brought a video camera to video all this shit,” Cesar says, disappointed.
It’s close to 5:00 p.m. and he’s tired. A bandage on his stomach sweats off. Last week he had another surgery related to an old scar from a past life, before his time on Rikers Island, when he was robbed at gunpoint and shot with a .45 caliber in 1989. The bullet, which hit the area where his spleen used to be, made holes in his intestines—it was found 10 years later in his knee. “I was dying of self-contamination,” he says when he talks about the surgery. But he’s taken everything as a wake-up call to drop the smoking and to exercise more. The reason is inked in Spanish on his arm—the spot for his now two-year-old son which reads: Me vida Logan. Today he focuses his time on the business, his family, and the talks he gives to youth groups.
Following behind him, Orlando puts down a residual layer of insecticide with a B&G spray can filled with EcoVia—a natural product with a pungent dose of thyme. Next he hits the tenants’ possessions with a bottle of Cesar’s own citrusy mix. To demonstrate its safety, Orlando spritzes Cesar’s hands and I watch him smear the liquid on his face and mouth.6 As it drips off his chin, he says, “It’s EPA exempt.”
But even as Cesar and Orlando lay down a residual chemical to kill any bedbugs limping away from the frost treatment, I question the methods of PCOs and wonder if this is simply an internecine war with no clear victory in sight. Efficacy versus gimmick. For instance, the product EcoVia is classified as 25b, code for “minimum risk,” and thus EPA approved as the ingredients in 25b mixtures may even be harmless to insects unless sprayed directly on them. Still, EcoVia and similar products have been found to be effective if applied properly by PCOs like Cesar.
You might ask then: isn’t there a “magic bullet” for all bugs? The answer has confounded entomologists and pushed chemistry and ecology into an unforeseen and complex world.
* * *
Last year, the Bed Bug Genome Consortium’s champagne-popping moment came in the form of 14,220 protein-coding genes—a “blueprint” of C. lectularius. The Nature Communications paper with its 80-plus authors details the sequenced bedbug genome, analyzing some of the driving forces behind traumatic insemination (recall from chapter 3), how certain bedbug lineages favor humans over bats, and, most important, the pesticide-detoxifying enzymes that paved the way for the bedbug resurgence over the last two decades.
To figure out how insecticide resistance works, let’s take a quick look at one chemical commonly used on bedbugs: pyrethroids. Derived from crushed chrysanthemum flowers, synthetic pyrethroid is an axonic poison. That means it paralyzes the insect’s nerve fibers. It does so by unblocking sodium channel proteins, keeping them open to flood the nervous system with overstimulation and, in the process, killing the pest. However, given insects’ renowned ability to rapidly reproduce, genetic mutations occur. This “knockdown resistance” spreads so rampantly that in Australia, for example, one strain of common bedbugs was 1.4 million times more resistant to permethrin than bedbugs in Germany. Elsewhere, such resistance is “10,000-fold higher.” According to the paper, the relevant mutations are V419L and L925I. Through this genome sequencing—part of Baylor College’s i5k pilot project—it’s now possible to find the molecular markers responsible for the resurgence.
The consortium wasn’t alone in their genetic sequencing. Published congruently in the journal was a comparison map of varied bedbug strains throughout New York’s five boroughs: Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Whereas the strain studied by the consortium researchers was a pure form unmarred by insecticide overuse, collected first by Harold Harlan at Fort Dix in 1973, the map charted the RNA variations of the C. lectularius found in the 465 interconnecting Metro subway stations. The work, done in part by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), revealed how different insecticides made certain bedbugs of the same species evolve differently. An urban phylogeographic map, for example, traces how one Manhattan strain living in subway benches migrated to Brooklyn and branched into different strains.
“Look at people,” says Lou Sorkin, an AMNH senior scientific assistant and one of the paper’s coauthors. “People don’t all look alike. Bedbugs look alike. Species look alike. But biologically they have different genes that are turned on or off in that population. Some [bedbugs] have a resistance issue with pyrethroids. Some have a thicker cuticle. Some have different enzymes that are turned on so they can render a pesticide application unusable on them.”
That’s why manufacturers enjoy testing assays on the Harlan strain of bedbugs—named after the original pest-obsessive Harold Harlan—which is susceptible to almost any poison you douse it with. But to adequately analyze them, Sorkin encourages his network of PCOs—he occasionally teaches classes to recertify them—to collect as many of the wild urban pest as possible. In fact, for a while he’d become the talking head for the bedbug craze. One article proclaimed Sorkin the “Bedbug King of New York.” To wit, it’s a title he’s earned. He’s infamous, like Harold Harlan, for feeding thousands of these pests his own blood, positioning them on his hand with a size zero paintbrush, and letting them graze like dairy cows.
“My wife was a bit trepidatious at first,” Sorkin comments about releasing them on their kitchen table. “But it’s fine … They’re not trying to make a jailbreak, but if a vial drops while it’s open, do they all get back in the vial?” he says with a shoulder shrug and a smile. “I don’t know.” Cesar Soto DeLeon also learned to feed bedbugs his own blood; like Sorkin, he raises bedbugs both to study and to sell to accredited researchers. (And not into the hands of sly PCOs who might plant them in homes, bombarding potential clients with an infestation.)
So when Cesar invited me to his Bronx apartment for a “meal,” I couldn’t say no. That’s why I find myself in his office command center at home this evening, blowing into a Mason jar full of bedbugs. The brown wood floor matches the brown of Cesar’s curtains, permitting jagged slivers of light to enter his office. The bedbugs in the jars, lined on bookshelves, might otherwise shrivel under the sun. Papers and binders are strewn about. And his wife, brother-in-law, and son Logan are in the family room watching TV. Like the rest of the apartment building, components of his kitchen are in the middle of renovation.
The carbon dioxide allure of my breath, which is what summons them to you at night, excites them. (A technique Sorkin occasionally uses to suss out bugs during home inspections is to employ a bendy straw.) Nymphs and adults crawl over
a square of graph paper bespeckled with black frass. “You see the guys moving around in there?” Cesar asks me. Logan staggers into his office, playing on the floor with a toy truck that embodies Las Vegas lights. Cesar shows him the jar and asks, “What’s this, Poppa? What’s this?”
“Beh-bugs,” answers Logan.
“Yeah, that’s bedbugs,” Cesar says, elated, turning proudly to me. “My two-year-old.”
“Okay.” He scoots Logan to the door. “Get your butt outta here because Daddy’s gotta work. We don’t want you causing another accident like you did two months ago.” In that case, a very curious Logan unscrewed a jar, and Cesar got a frantic call from his wife to get home immediately.
But tonight is a controlled experiment to test my threshold for the freaky. Cesar has fed the bedbugs so often, he says, that his “burn mark”–like bites disappear after a day. With trepidation, I tip the Mason jar upside down over my inner arm. I can feel the bugs move slightly through the translucent nylon stocking thin enough for their piercing mouthparts to get through to my skin. My host goes into another room, giving me privacy. I place my recorder on the desk. Regrettably, I keep it rolling.
Listening to it later, I can’t tell if that’s me blowing in the jar or sighing in frustration in anticipation of the tiny pricks or in self-loathing for being this curious. A bedbug’s mouthpart syringe is called a rostrum. Piercing mandibles protrude from this inverted cone-shaped device to do the sucking, while anticoagulants in the bugs’ saliva travels down another tubule to keep the blood flowing. “I maybe feel a slight—ugh—crawling around,” I blurt aloud to myself, senses heightened, “but I don’t feel pinching or anything. Let’s see…” I huff in dread. “I’m a little freaked out.”
The rest is too embarrassing to share.
Cesar returns. After he briefly taunts me as a “chicken,” your correspondent musters whatever mettle there may be left in him and lets the bedbugs bite … for 12 minutes. Examining the jar afterward, I notice a couple of plump, ruby adults satiated from the session.
Cesar’s wife Maria pops in to say hello. “Oh, my god, you’re feeding bedbugs—ooooh, brave you! Buh-raaaave you.”
“Have you ever done it before?” I ask.
“I did involuntarily in my sleep.”
Cesar grins. “She was sleeping and I put a bottle up on her. And they ate. Her. Up! She had the biggest welt.” The perks of living with a PCO. Additionally, the family’s pet beagle, Tre, works part-time sniffing out7 bedbugs, which carry an identifiable, herbal scent that Lou Sorkin compares to “cilantro, coriander, [and] citronella.”
In two weeks, an inflammation appears on my arm. Just a few marks at first, gradually more. The red constellation of bites mutates into a galaxy. Mottled swellings condense into well-defined dots. Bedbugs tend to follow the road map of our arteries and veins. Though I now know what it feels like to be bitten, the recurring nightmares others have lamented will hopefully remain a mystery to me. I now understand how an industry can make billions in an arms race to combat an invasion and how some exterminators can achieve sainthood.
* * *
“May The Destroyers Of Peace Be Destroyed By Us.” So proclaimed the “gas-lit sign,” writes entomologist Michael F. Potter, above the shop of London’s very own Tiffin & Son, “Bug-Destroyers to Her Majesty,” in 1690. By the seventeenth century, nobility desired total comfort, Potter notes in his paper “The History of Bed Bug Management.” The wealthy simply refused to put up with the nasties shared by their servants, who were, as Tiffin said, “apt to bring bugs in their boxes.” And so came the birth of the pest management trade. At this time, kidney bean leaves placed under the bed trapped C. lectularius with their prickly fibers, ensnaring their legs like bear traps, while other would-be exterminators practiced foolhardy endeavors, like sprinkling gunpowder on the bed and igniting it.8 A couple of decades later, Englishman John Southall—whom Insect Lives editors Erich Hoyt and Ted Schultz consider the “patron saint of exterminators”—began a trend that grew exponentially in the 1900s: the insecticide market. It began in 1730 with a 44-page pamphlet entitled A Treatise of Buggs.
Holding it now in the AMNH library research room, I have to admit I’m a little agog. First, I love the smell of books from centuries past (like an old spice cupboard). Second, printmakers still used the long s, which looks like an f, to start words like “furprized”—a surprise party with furs? And third, the language is comparatively more pompous than some of the most braggart writers of the twentieth century. John Southall does not disappoint in the retelling of how he discovered a bedbug insecticide in the West Indies in 1726 to later eliminate that “nauseous venomous insect” that had been terrorizing the sleep of Londoners for centuries. He met an old man who’d formerly been enslaved who was kind enough to share his personal solution for stopping bedbugs. Southall then stole the recipe for a few pennies, “one piece of beef, some biscuits and a bottle of beer.” That beer was then replaced with the tincture by the old Jamaican himself:
On my arrival at London in August 1727, I made some Liquor to compare with his, (which I found exactly the same) whereupon I set about destroying of Buggs, and found to my Satisfaction, that wherever I apply’ed it, it brought out and kill’d ’em all. At length I advertise’d, had great business, and pleased everybody, then apprehending no return of the Vermin. But yet, to my surprise, tho’ I had kill’d all the old ones, young ones sometimes, in some places, would appear.
Southall sold copies of his Treatise to Londoners for one shilling and the nameless Jamaican’s “Nonpareil Liquor” for two. The secret recipe may have been a derivative of quassia wood. “I have determined by all means possible,” he wrote, “to make their destruction my Profession.” Unlike Southall, his pest-killing elders, the Tiffin & Son exterminators believed that “bug poisons ain’t worth much, for all depends upon the application of them.” A sentiment echoed by many PCOs worried about an industry dictated and perpetuated by our fears.9
Anti-pest methods developed in England. In Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, the Victorian journalist documents his 1840s run-in with “Catch-’em-Alive” sellers. Boys on the street selling flypaper—an admixture, Mayhew states, of boiled oil, resin, and turpentine—called to the passersby, crying in a singsongy way: “Fly-papers, ketch ’em all alive, the nasty flies, tormenting the baby’s eyes. Who’d be fly-blow’d, by all the nasty blue-bottles, beetles, and flies?” Modern flypaper didn’t “uncoil,” tells one Milwaukee Journal article, till 1863 when German baker and inventor Frederick Kaiser was frustrated with those cake-loving pests. Originally he used wallpaper dipped in molasses, hung by the window’s cake displays. The family-operated Aeroxon business tweaked the invention for a century and a half, resulting in today’s cutesy butterfly sticker traps.
Pesticidal inventions of the early 1900s moved us beyond Black Flag’s Quick Loader—a tin dust blower used to apply pyrethrum powder to bedsheets. Indoor vapor treatments with coal tar–derived fumigants became popular. And like the toxins percolating in the atmosphere, US government health departments scared homeowners into daily pesticide use in the early twentieth century as news reports of typhoid spread. In her book Pests in the City, Dawn Day Biehler writes: “In the 1910s, health departments” promoted the use of tools and traps to “emphasize private responsibility for fly-borne diseases … Household fly control became one element of domestic science taught in classrooms and by in-home educators.” The typhoid death rate in the United States was then 15 out of 100,000. (Down from 31 in 1900.) L. O. Howard, chief of the Bureau of Entomology from 1894 to 1927, tried a little experiment in 1908 with his employees, whom he asked to hang flypapers in their Washington, DC, homes. Although 2,700 flies were caught, it’s hard to say if the experiment affected the number of typhoid cases. During World War I, posters depicted a swarm of flies invading a home from the garbage. “Our greatest menace is domestic, not foreign!” it read. Hydrocyanic acid gas (HCN) fumigation was encouraged by government ent
omologists at the time. By World War II, typhoid had declined due to improved sanitization. However, by the early 1900s, we were already hooked on insecticides. “Clever advertising” played a significant part in creating a market for various weapons, writes organic farming authority Will Allen. And some of the best came from a young, imaginative artist named Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss.
Before the days of green eggs and ham, Standard Oil sought out the cartoonist to create ads for Flit, a petroleum solvent meant for residential insecticide use. For 15 years Dr. Seuss drew up inventive depictions of the Flit spray gun’s use, including a plane reminiscent of the bicycle pump design. I stumbled upon one such illustration in San Diego’s Geisel Library. It depicted a dive-bombing “Bug-Buzz” airplane. In other ads, you can see the sinister mosquito-like doppelgänger of Mr. Grinch. But the success of Flit’s campaign had devastating consequences.
On April 23, 1940, the use of the petroleum solvent led to the deaths of 209 nightclub goers. Sprayed over the Spanish moss decorating the Rhythm Club in Natchez, Mississippi,10 methane gas from the petroleum permeated the venue. Wooden boards had been nailed over the windows to keep the affairs inside private. When the methane ignited and a fire broke out, the 700 attendees were left few options but to suffocate and trample over each other in the ensuing panic.
Death, disgust, and disease seemingly follow insects.
Cockroaches are some of the most unloved bugs. Specialists cite the diseases and bacteria, like Salmonella, roaches can carry, but that’s more of an issue in restaurants. Hopefully. On a domestic level, roaches are symptomatic of other problems like nearby rotting food, filth, or feces. But they themselves are obsessive-compulsive about their cleanliness. (They constantly lick their dirty feet clean.) For all the disgust they evoke, cockroaches ain’t half bad. If anything, rashes and respiratory issues result from allergens (tropomyosin) on their exoskeletons. But since one 15-millimeter female breeds up to 300 eggs capable of making four generations per year, each enjoying, like us, warm places with food, it’s no wonder they make awful pets and excellent targets for extermination.