Bedbug diaries

Jesus had bedbugs, and other thoughts

When it comes to bugs, I’ve always been proud to say – with an air of superiority – that I’m “not like other girls.” While others shrieked and smashed spiders, I showed off fearlessness and compassion with a cup and a piece of paper. “It won’t do anything to you,” I said. “It’s scared of you.” I was dubious of supposed arachnophobia. Surely all my classmates didn’t share a serious psychological aversion to bugs and spiders. Though some might’ve been “authentically” afflicted, I suspected that the majority were showing off their femininity. It was about gender, and the Abject: Revulsion toward dirty, untouchable things.

At college, I was still the go-to girl for bug-catching. I extracted house centipedes and ladybugs from dorm rooms, pleased to be the crunchy country girl because it set me apart. When I realized that many people were less comfortable among the critters or out in the woods of New England, I felt good about my skills. I could identify stinging nettles and poison ivy, and I could assure my friends that ladybugs would not bite.

Years later, my first bedbug bites were a series of pink welts along the curve of my side, rising from my hip toward my ribs. They did not come as a surprise. When I moved into the Catholic Worker house, I was given a membership card to the “Third Floor Bedbug Club.” The card had a dead bedbug taped to it. I knew it was only a matter of time. The bedbugs were endemic at the house. Each person was left to fend for themselves, fortifying their own rooms and their own beds as best they could.

I am a twitchy, impulsive person, and I scratch bedbug bites down to scabs. They spread across my pale torso and onto my arms. I wore professional clothes - as best as I could approximate them - for my job as a hospital chaplain, but the bites trailed out from under my sleeves, a brash rash that made me self-conscious.

So I bought bedbug repellant at the bodega, and a tube of anti-itch cream. I roasted my sheets in the dryer, put the feet of my bed in tiny tubs of water, and always changed into clean clothes or pajamas before sitting on the bed. While brushing my teeth, I plucked bedbugs from the walls and chucked them in the toilet. Gradually the bites faded and no new bites appeared.

Bedbugs, therefore, joined my list of Manageable Bugs. Rather than shriek and panic at the mention of them, I made a point to shrug and say, “I’ve been there. I know what to do.” Again I felt proud of my knowledge, my equanimity. Besides, I enjoy showing off my sensational life to an audience. Yeah, I watched Love Island with a nun. Yeah, I got detained by Italian police for protesting at the Vatican. Yeah, I lived in a bedbug-infested house and lived to tell the tale.

My partner and I got bedbugs on the Camino de Santiago. Badly. He allegedly saw one in his bed one night, but I only half-believed him until he showed me some welts on his waist. And then my flesh erupted in tell-tale lines. This time they were even worse than my summer at the Catholic Worker house. The bites covered my neck, fifteen or more, a pimply pink patchwork.

Pilgrims on the Camino stay at albergues, rudimentary hostels along the road. They sleep in bunkbeds, share bathrooms and kitchens, and often enjoy meals and fellowship, relishing the company and the solidarity of one another. It was at an albergue that we’d picked up the bedbugs. A day or two later, we dumped out our bags and sorted our belongings to wash and dry - or to put in black plastic trash bags that would roast in the sun. The hospitalero (albergue staff) took pity on us and started waiving our laundry costs after the first load.

Albergue bunks. No bedbugs spotted here.

Bedbugs are manageable, I reminded myself, bitterly. I had to learn the word in Spanish: Chinches. The bites on my neck made me feel like a leper - or a plague victim. Hospitaleros noticed right away with the trained, worried eye of a professional. Other pilgrims joked about steering clear of me. And they weren’t that bad - not really - just unpleasant. I felt itchy and ugly, but it was manageable.

Bedbugs are what you get for getting close to people, I thought, not maliciously. I had the idea in a personalist, Catholic Worker vein: what more fitting way to be marked by true proximity to the stranger? It’s like how Jesus touched the leper. It is wrong to avoid the afflicted ones. When we share our bedding and our clothes, sometimes we come away scratching at our skin. Surely Jesus got bedbugs.

But then my partner commented that during his dad’s childhood in the Global South, bedbugs were everywhere to the point that they were completely unremarkable. I felt chagrined for my theologizing about bedbugs as an interruption rather than a routine.

And then I saw headlines about how Greta Thunberg and other pro-Palestine activists had been captured by Israel and detained in cells full of bedbugs. Suddenly bedbugs felt like the opposite of a shared human experience; instead, they seemed viciously inhumane. Humans had the option to reduce another’s suffering in these prisons, and they chose not to. As one hospitalero gave us trash bags to bag our clothes, I commented on his pro-Palestine rubber bracelet. “Pilgrims don’t like to talk about politics,” he said, and I agreed. Most pilgrims are white and come from the Global North. Many walk the Camino and disconnect from the demoralizing grind of bad news. Removing oneself from the world becomes part of the spiritual experience.

And yet – suffering is also part of the spiritual experience. Individual suffering from the road, that is: Blisters and knees and bedbug bites. Pilgrims compare their scars with pride. They are connected to their own bodies and to the earth – rocky paths, steep slopes, bitey bugs – in new and unfamiliar ways. If others suffer far away, in bombed-out buildings or asleep with the bedbugs, we can’t hear them from here.

“No pain, no glory”

When I returned to the US, I went to a beautiful wedding at a fancy hotel. My bedbug bites had faded to faint splotches. Bedbugs were Manageable Bugs once more. At the wedding, I delighted in telling old friends with finance jobs about my bedbug travails. The gross-out factor made me gleeful. I’m not like other girls, not like you: I got bit.

It’s not the bedbugs’ fault that they evolved to drink our blood, I write now, bedbug-free, lounging in a clean hammock. They are no more malicious than the sun that burns our skin as we walk along the road. But where two or more are gathered, so they may gather also. And if I’m honest, I don’t know what to do with them any more than you do.