I remember mornings in Los Angeles when bugs took over my bed. It happened three or four times when I lived there. The first time was a smaller issue. My landlord called all the tenants to a meeting in the middle of the day and announced we had a bedbug infestation throughout the entire building. A friend of mine who lived on the third floor wore a bug costume for the occasion. The landlord didn’t find it the least bit funny. She said we had to bag up everything in our rooms, from clothes to books, before the exterminator came. We had to wash all of our clothes in the hottest water and dry them in the hottest temperature.

The bugs hid everywhere, even in the books on my shelf, so I had to wrap all those books up in a trash bag and tie it shut for the exterminator to turn on the heat lamps in each room to kill the bugs.

I never got bitten that first time, but the bugs returned many years later at the same apartment. And that time, they’d infested my mattress, although I never saw them. I itched everywhere and discovered the bites all on my hands and ankles. The itching was most intense in the mornings and went away after I took a hot shower. The bites would scab up and disappear in about a week, only for new ones to appear. I was in denial that they were bed bug bites because of how much of an ordeal it was to prepare for the exterminator and his heat lamp.

So I went to the doctor to have the bites checked out.

“Those are bed bug bites,” he said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because there are three of them together,” he said. He pointed at each one. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

So I knew I had to tell my landlord. I was getting bitten every night but never saw them. It got to a point where I had to move out after seventeen years in Hollywood. I moved to Culver City, and the bugs followed me there. When I discovered a single bug on my comforter, I knew then that they looked like apple seeds with legs, and they were slow. I could crush one with my fingers, and blood would squirt out. I smelled my fingers and smelled my own blood. The fatter they were, the more blood they’d swallowed.

I told my new landlord, and he sent their exterminator over to spray the apartment. That was in 2020.

I thought the problem was solved, but the bugs came back three years later. And this time it was its worst. No wonder the apartment was available for me. No one wanted to live in a place where there had been an infestation. The landlord had to warn me before I moved in, but I thought it wouldn’t be a problem.

The third time around, I actually saw them crawling throughout my apartment, all over my bed, beneath the mattress, along the boxspring where they’d dug a hole for a place to live and hatch eggs. I saw the bloody eggs and the blood stains all along the mattress. They were biting me every night and giving me nightmares. I would wake up itching all over. I thought I could handle it, in other words live with it without telling the landlord because I feared that I would get in trouble. But I was supposed to report it and I finally did after waiting too long.

The bugs had made it to my couch and my floor. It’s hard to believe that I had such a problem with them. They would crawl onto my hand, and I would quickly crush them. It was something from a horror film. The same exterminator showed up and sprayed the place, but he was cheap and used cheap equipment.

The bedbugs remained and hatched more eggs. I saw them along the floorboards and had to call a better company to spray the place down. They made me do more than what I did in the first apartment. I had to take out all my clothes and wash them, including the comforter, which I brought to a coin-op and spent over twenty dollars to wash and dry. I had to remove all furniture from the walls so the exterminator could spray along the floorboard all across the apartment.

I look back and think what hell to endure. It’s hard to imagine that I lived in such dire conditions that I had to sleep with a can of bedbug spray next to my bed, and that they crawled on my hands and along my legs for so many months.