Bedbugs Uptown (and All Over)

Yesterday, I wrote about reliving the 1970s in the service of my Rolling Stones book. In fact, for the past two years, many New Yorkers have lived in fear of doing just that: reliving the seventies.  Ever since the economic downturn began in late 2008, New Yorkers have been petrified that the city would revisit the bad old days of the mid-1970s when New York had a brush with near-bankruptcy. (Remember: “Ford to City: Drop Dead”?)

Well here’s an unexpected way in which we seem to be reliving the 1970s. What was it the Stones sang in “Shattered”?

We got rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown …

Now I grew up on the West Side and uptown. Yes, there were some rats, but the bugs I remember are cockroaches. Every morning, when I turned on the light in the kitchen of our prewar apartment on Riverside Drive, the little buggers would go scurrying. No amount of visits by the official exterminator seemed to help. And then my mother discovered boric acid, and the roach problem was solved.

Bedbugs, we never had. They did not loom in my imagination as I was growing up in the city in the 1970s. Not like muggers or “dog-doo” (pre-poop scoop New York, it was). But apparently the city had them. And it does again.

This time around, even the upper East Side has got ‘em, according to NBC News and New York magazine.

Bedbugs freak me out. When I heard about this article in the New York Daily News, which noted that movie theaters were a good place to pick up the critters, well, let’s just say I haven’t seen too many movies this summer.

And then, in Sunday’s New York Times, I learned this disgusting fact about bedbugs:

their sexual practices are bizarre even by insect standards: Because the female bedbug has no genital opening, the male inseminates her by using his hardened, sharpened genitalia to punch a hole through her abdomen. With no elaborate courtship ritual, males in a frenzied pursuit of sexual congress often blunder into and puncture the bodies of other males, occasionally inflicting fatal wounds.

Gross. This town’s in tatters. Uh-huh.

[Photo credit: New York magazine]