Fleas

On the site of my first job as an independent contractor dealing with foreclosed properties yesterday, I ran into an old enemy. Fleas. Chris- the guy who's going to be feeding me jobs- and I drove to Mountain Lake, MN in the wee hours of the morning. We found the address, met with the sheriff to make things legal, then went to work. The house was abandoned, it's front door missing. There was detritus strewn about both inside and outside. After about twenty minutes of poking about to ensure the property was void of people and structural stable, a vaguely familiar itch began around my ankles. I ignored it at first, but it became steadily more insistent. Finally, I pulled up my pants legs, where fleas were swarming my socks. “God!” I said, “I've got fleas all over my ankles.” Chris frowned, “Really?” “Yeah, really,” I said, and began frantically picking them off. I muttered, “I haven't seen one of these damn things in years.” In fact, it had been over 16 years.

In the summer of 1993, Manhattan, KS flooded. Badly. National news badly. Half the town was under water. My family lived in what was once a vehicle service shop located right in the flood plane. We inhabited the office area, while the family business- a wood-working shop- occupied the garage area. By artists' standards of today, we were set up pretty cool. Great working space with a place to crash for you and 20 of your closest friends after a studio party. A rigged up kitchen, commercial grade bathroom with a rigged up shower, and two big garage doors providing fantastic access for moving large works in and out. At the time, it just felt ghetto to me. That's probably because we never had any over-the-top studio parties with 20 of our closest friends crashing after a night of wild artistic excess. Or, it could have been because we just didn't have enough money to have a real house and a business at the same time.

Either way, I hated it and wasn't there when folks seriously started to consider building arks. I was in OK, from whence we had moved directly after school ended that year. The family business had folded rather quickly when our biggest client backed out, so there was no longer sanding, cutting, and finishing to be done there. As I had no friends in my new hometown, hated my living situation with an impressive amount of teenage angst, and had a 1978 Toyota pick-up that could almost manage 55 MPH on the highway, I bailed out.

Which worked out best for everyone involved, since my whole family ended up living in somebody else's place for the rest of the summer. Somehow, the former garage we lived in had a basement, which filled to the top of the stairs with water. The water table had risen so high that nothing could be done about it until the floods receded.

I'm sure my family was in an uncomfortable state, but I couldn't have cared less. I was hanging out with my friends, making money cleaning a gynecologist's office, and reading comic books. I had new clothes, lived in a real house, and got to keep the money I made. Honestly, it was a great time. Then I had to come home.

I got back just as the flooding ended. Everyone in Manhattan was patting one another on the back for a great community effort. T-shirts were printed with sandbags and clever remarks on them (I can see the words in my memory, but cannot read them). The finer side of human nature had prevailed.

I was miserable. No friends. No money. No comics. Back to living in a garage. And, worst of all, fleas. While my family was away, the flood waters in the basement had bred a completely unrealistic number of the blood sucking parasites. We did not have fleas before the flood and I have no idea what the actual connection was. What did the fuckers eat before we got back? Fish? I didn't know, but this kind of infestation was almost supernatural in it's magnitude. Bombs didn't work. Spraying didn't work. Nothing worked. And we just lived in it.

I slept in the top portion of a bunk bed at the time. I created a world apart up there, replete with books, drawing pads, and a portable stereo. My time at home was spent there, in the company of Radio Head, Iron Maiden, and drawings of werewolves. Honestly, I don't have many memories of events happening outside that bed during this period of my life.

Whenever I had to come down, it was like descending into hell from purgatory. My legs would immediately become dotted with fleas and the itching would become maniacal. A typical bathroom run went like this: hop down off of bunk-bed, landing on feet; run in huge strides to the bathroom; use bathroom while resisting the urge to piss on my legs to stop the burning; run back to the bunk-bed; hop back onto bunk-bed; immediately begin picking fleas off of my legs; squash fleas one by one between my fingernails (those buggers are harder to kill than you'd think). I kept the bodies in a pile and counted them after every excursion. Following particularly bad runs, I would pick over 30 fleas from my legs. For about the next hour I'd kill off stragglers as they bit me.

At no time was it OK to scratch. If I did not scratch the bites, the itching would subside in about 20 minutes. Otherwise, I'd end up with huge welts that would torture me even in my sleep. I got good at resisting the urge to scratch, a skill I have thankfully retained to this day.

The flea epidemic of 1993 was never resolved. We simply moved. There was no heat in that building, so I truly hope that when winter arrived the fleas all froze to death. It brings me pleasure to think of the ones in Mountain Lake once the MN freezer turns on. We winterized that house, so it will go without heat for the duration. They don't have a chance.