I love my new apartment. I love the brick walls and hand sanded moldings. I love that the bathroom sinks are huge glass bowls and that the showers are chocolate tile.

Last week, we had sewage water and entire turds floating in both the showers for
days. the toilets weren’t flushing and there was water all over the bathroom floors.
Eventually the landlord came, snaked the drains and announced that he is leaving for France for as long as it takes him to renew his passport and that we aren’t to flush any toilet paper down the toilet until he returns, digs up the cement in the back alley and completes construction on the pipes underground.

During all of this, I had chemical injections in my leg because I have blood clotting in the veins near my groin..if that’s the name of that the place where your leg connects to your torso.. I know there were rumors that I had had a nose job but sadly my procedure wasn’t nearly as glamorous as that. It would have been ironic though. My nose is the only part of my body that I am not critical about. At any rate, it was my leg…
I was black and blue from hips to knees and crippled for days and covered in medical tape/glue and moaning like a whale but still proud of myself for not
crying in front of the doctors.
When I got home, all I wanted was a shower, but as i began to undress, remembered the remnant microscopic particles of fecal matter waiting in the cracks between the tiles of my shower, waiting to poison me and bring on a long and painful death that even Dr. House himself couldn’t uncover in time to save me.
I scrubbed my shower with 3 different cleaning agents and wondered, too late, whether any of them had bleach in them and whether or not I was creating a chemical gas chamber to then accidentally kill myself in.

After my heartbeat regulated and I started to breath normally again, I showered and scrubbed off the remainder of
the glue from my bruised and veiny thighs with a burlap loofah mitt. Subsequently, my thighs turned fire engine red and I wondered if I had scrubbed bleach into them and whether or not I would bleed to death in the shower before suffocating on the fumes.

I lived.

My favorite client at work tried to kill herself a couple of days ago. I know we aren’t supposed to have “favorites” but we do.. or I do at least. I spoke to her calmly afterwards, as though it was merely a mood swing or something but after she went up to the showers, I locked myself in the bathroom and completely fell apart. Maybe I’m not so cut out for this job after all.
It didn’t get any better, just one thing after another and it felt like the longest night ever that night. When I got home, I collapsed in my bed, and immediately broke in to hives, or so I thought. I couldn’t even muster up the energy to scare myself into the usual frenzy about all the possibly life threatening causes. I fell into a deep deep deeeeep sleep.
The next morning I was lumpy and itchy as all hell. Chloe came in to great me, after waking up and after I assured her that I was in fact her mother, and not the elephant woman, she sat on the edge of my bed and was instantly attacked by the same heartless BED BUGS that had been feasting on me all night. I caught one on her foot, inspected it and looked it up on the handy dandy internet. I thought bed bugs were a myth, meant to scare small children in to cleaning their rooms.

We picked up my mattress and box spring and dragged them out of the house, down the street and into an alley.

I started bagging up all my clothes and bedding and Chloe spent the day applying after bite to both our bodies religiously. Did you know that there is ammonia in that stuff?
It’s really gross.

The next night, we made a barrier of upside down tape, on the ceramic tiles of our entrance way and laid both Chloe and Annika’s mattresses in the center. We slept through the night…. but by early morning, the bed bugs had found and devoured us both.

I spent yesterday researching on the internet, drinking old wine that had been opened and left in the fridge weeks ago, scratching and crying.
I learned that the entire house and all of the furniture needs to be vacuumed religiously, if not steam cleaned. That all the bedding and clothing and curtains need to be washed and dried. That every single drawer, magazine, hair dryer, dog toy etc.. must be inspected thoroughly and that after washing, bagging and saran wrapping the house, it must be dusted with something that will kill the little f@$%ers.
I have no washer or dryer or vacuum and I don’t get paid until Thursday…next Thursday.
I cried some more and finally, at 2:30 I pulled myself together, poured the rest of the wine (vinegar) into a coffee thermos and marched down to the exterminators to beg them to come exterminate even though I would have to pay with a post dated check. I was 12 minutes too late, it was closed.They are also closed all day Friday Saturday and Sunday.
I stood there in front of the giant neon rat, blinking in the window, and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

Finally I dragged myself to the hardware store and found that they sell a lovely canister vacuum for $79.99 and bottles Diatomaceous Earth
at 10 dollars a piece. I have no idea how many bottles it would take to exterminate a 5 1/2 apartment but it has to be cheaper than hiring exterminators and I don’t really have a choice.

Last night François invited us to sleep at his house. We walked in, marched directly to the bathroom, disrobed, threw our clothes directly into the washing machine and stood under the scalding hot shower, like the inmates in the made for TV movie that I watched a few nights ago.
We changed in to his T-shirts and Pajamas and ate supper and scratched. We watched French movies and scratched. Went to bed and slept…scratched…slept…scratched and felt relief knowing that we would wake up only with the swarm of bites we went to bed with and no more.

I love my new apartment, I love the brick walls and the original hand sanded moldings. I love that the bathroom sinks are giant glass bowls and that the showers are chocolate brown tile. I just really could have done without the hundreds of roommates it came equipped with.

Now, I’m going to go post this letter on MySpace and Facebook…

Love Jen.
p.s. I would love to see your new house and I appreciate the invitation but I think I’m going to take a rain check on that one until my “roommates” have all been evicted.
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