Wilbo is Bitten by Flea, Ticks and Bedbugs, But Not Beaten By Them

Who wants to check Wilbo for ticks? About three weeks ago, Wilbo was scratching his neck, and he was surprised to notice a new mole to the right of his spine. Wilbo didn't remember noticing a new mole cropping up, and he played with the mole, which he couldn't see behind his neck. And then he noticed that the mole was hanging loose, as if a sticky piece of dirt had clumped in his hair. Wilbo tugs at it, pinched in his fingers. It took a little effort to come lose, and Wilbo nearly jumped out of his office seat when he saw a tick between his fingers, a much fatter than usual tick, gorged on his blood. It took a lot of stomping to squash it to death; the tick could still crawl after six or seven stomps. The carpet and his squishy tick body absorbed most of the stomp's force.

Wilbo looked up ticks on the internet, worried that the tick's head had permanently imbedded itself in his neck, concerned that symptoms of lyme's disease were about to begin. Swelling wasn't beginning on his nape, so Wilbo decided to not worry about it unless he started to run a fever. Wilbo was happy to discover that Guinea Hens, and it is inexpensive to buy live Guinea Hens, can clear acres of land of ticks and similar pests quickly. A few days later, at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Wilbo enjoyed the faculty exhibition far more than the headline show curated by their exhibitions department. The CACV has an adult and children's school for teaching art, and the courses have waiting lists. Wilbo wondered why the museum had invested its resources so much in serious exhibits rather than scheduling more courses for people on the waiting lists. After all, Wilbo visited on a Saturday, and all the classroom doors were locked and no teaching activity seemed to be scheduled. He took an immense delight when he came face-to-face with a ceramic Guinea Hen, six feet tall, sculpted of available clay pipes by Barbara Kobylinska. If Wilbo ever became wealthy enough to require a coat of arms, he wanted to buy that ceramic Guinea Fowl and put its image on his heraldic device.

Back at his hotel, Wilbo determined where the heat-seeking bug had found him. His pillow had a drop of blood right wear his neck rested the night before. Since Wilbo had prepaid the week, he couldn't check out. He stayed in the room, and he squashed another tick scuttling across the bathroom floor, homing in like a heat seeking missile on Wilbo's warm, wet toe. He woke up one morning, and noticed one more blood spot over the point his lower back occupied the night before.

Wilbo isn't as daunted by bedbugs anymore. It's a silly saying to tell kids. "Nighty night. Don't let the bedbugs bite." DDT killed off most of the bedbugs, so it's an ironic statement. Modern homes don't have fleas, ticks or bedbugs. A bedbug is so red one can spot them and flick them. The bites are painful enough to rouse one out of sleep. In early 2007, Wilbo was staying at the least expensive quarters possible in Los Angeles, not too far from Venice Beach shorefront and close to a lobe of the Marina Del Rey. The owner was a kind Englishman who rented out bunks above an empty real estate office for the very reasonable price of 125 dollars a week. Wilbo wanted to snooze on the couch, but he was disturbed in his sleep by three or four mysterious pinches. Wilbo thought nothing more about it, and he went to his dorm to sleep on his assigned bunk. He remembered feeling similar pinches in the night when sleeping on a couch in his brother's inexpensive apartment in Corunna, Michigan, close enough to the Shiawassee River to enjoy a foot of floodwater during rainy springs.

The owner of the accommodation had sprayed for bugs one night, and that brought all the creatures hiding in the crannies out crawling looking for a less toxic spot. One morning, Wilbo awoke with seven or eight welts on his ankles, wrists and neck, and Wilbo got confirmation from a roommate that bedbugs were indeed afoot. Wilbo found that he could wrap himself tightly in a clean blanket, and this denied bedbug’s access to his skin. He didn't know that decking his room's floor with thyme could also chase the bedbugs out an open window. One night, as Wilbo was starting to drowse, he spotted a red bedbug creeping up his leg, looking for a prime point to chomp. Wilbo plucked him off his skin and flicked the curled up, rolled up bug across the room. He didn't check to see if the impact had killed the pest. Wilbo no longer dreaded bedbugs, although he would hesitate to sleep in a bedbug-infested hostel with them again. That is, unless he can carpet the floor with thyme.

When one is wandering, one sleeps in a series of beds and bedrooms. Wilbo has slept in sublime rooms. He remembers three nights of honeymoon in a suite at the Lilac Tree Hotel, new to the trade in August 1991. He remembers sleeping with a new bride on a fresh pillow-top mattress, set upon an antique frame with a polished brass headboard. In the morning, they drank coffee brewed in their suite and enjoyed views of the straits of Mackinaw and tourists arriving on the Shepler's docks.

He remembers bailing on a plan to stay up all night long in downtown Miami in December 1999, and he checked into the Everglades Hotel near the Bayside Marketplace and the Hotel Intercontinental, at a rate of almost 100 dollars a night. He stepped into the first room and he almost stepped into a puddle of everglades in the bathroom. Wilbo had paid too much money to stay in a room with an environmental hazard.

The man at the front desk said at first he had no other room. Wilbo threw raised his voice. The front desk manager answered him in a latin accent: "Do not raise your voice at me." The much younger than him woman stepped in, and she asked the manager to place Wilbo in an unused suite for the evening. Wilbo accepted the key, and he opened a door to a two-room suite with understated velveteen burgundy curtains that matched the bedspread. The curtains concealed floor to ceiling windows, yet it didn't seem like any one had opened them for years. The faded curtains didn't seem dusty, but the curtains didn't seem crisp either. No one had made curtains like these since the late 1950s. On January 23, 2005, the Everglades Hotel imploded with the help of a demolition crew, making way for a high-rise condominium tower. Wilbo made a point of taking the elevator up to the Everglade's roof and taking a dip in the heated pool. There's nothing that can help a hotel, even a historical hotel, when a building is outmoded and the land is worth so much more than the building.

Wilbo regrets bailing on the all-night plan in Miami. He had gained admittance to Bongos, not even paying cover. When he arrived at Bongos's door, the doorman pointed at his white tennis shoes and declared, "I can't let you in wearing those". Wilbo cast down his eyes and looked at his dorky white shoes purchased at Kmart and agreed, "You're right, you can't let me in wearing these". The doorman lifted the velveteen rope that blocked the gate, waved him in, waved him to follow, and after dancing all the way to the ticket counter, sang, "comp, comp, comp" to the cashier woman. It was never Wilbo's good looks that lifted the Velveteen gate rope for Wilbo. It was his brief moments of character.

Wilbo didn't know that all the elements of an all nighter were in the cards at Bongo's. The club didn't close until 6:00 in the morning. And he found it easy to bang on a bongo as he watched Miami night clubbers dance before him; a line of bongos had been installed along the dance floor's railing. Every few songs, a crew of sexy dancers would mount elevated stages and dance with happy abandon in various legal forms of undress. And he had struck up a conversation with a tall, lovely latin woman who was free with conversation and whom didn't seem to be in a hurry to finish their chat.

The following year, Wilbo returned for two weeks in Miami. He booked a hotel on the west side of Collins Boulevard, not far from sugary sand beach and kitty corner to the Delano. Wilbo's hotel room had retro tile in the washroom, but the carpet had grown worn and coarse and the bed was too rundown to even squeak. Next door to Wilbo's Hotel, one of the rundown Art Deco hotels had dumpsters full of gutted plaster and discarded beds. So in the morning, Wilbo woke up and swam in the sea. After washing up in his tiled bathroom, Wilbo then scooted over to the Delano for drinks on the patio or the beachfront bar. Wilbo liked chess, but he didn't love it as much as Miami Beach loved chess. On the beach, chess tutors offered lessons to Cabana dwellers. On Lincoln, men waited in the coffeehouses behind chess boards, waiting for a challenge or a woodpusher. Near the Delano pool, a chessboard with black and white marble squares, set with foot high pieces, fascinated Wilbo. Wilbo started to play out the first five moves of the Ruy Lopez, playing white and black's typical moves.

A Russian named Alexei noticed Wilbo playing chess against himself, and he challenged Wilbo to a game, which Alexei won. During the game, a man claiming to be a bank president introduced himself to Alexei and Wilbo; he had to meet them because in ten years of walking past the Delano chess set, he had never noticed anyone playing chess with the outdoor set of pieces. Alexei and the bank president kept turning up during Wilbo's two weeks in Miami Beach, and the two were pretty successful at getting Wilbo into the better clubs.

One night Alexei met Wilbo at the Delano, and they took a cab ride down to Nikki Beach. Alexei knew the owners, French businessmen, and Alexei could speak French to them over lunch, dinner or drinks. So Alexei dropped their names to the doorpeople, and neither Alexei nor Wilbo paid cover. They were sitting at an outdoor table as evening was falling, and a waitress gave them a menu for dinner and drinks. The menu covered some delicious dinner entrees, but it only advertised bottle service, bottles of champagne and vodka at 300 dollars a bottle. Wilbo was always grateful for good, quick and expensive road service, but bottle service strikes him as an oxymoron just as Internal Revenue Service strikes him as an oxymoron. The waitress waited as Alexei and Will reviewed the menu, and suddenly Alexei flipped the page out of the menu and held the hind side up to his waitresses gaze. It covered a wide variety of reasonably priced bottles of red and white. "And why are you keeping this a secret?" Andrei demanded. Wilbo ordered a nice bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from this hidden list.

It began to rain as dinner was served, and Wilbo's red snapper was going to go soggy if kept out in a cloudburst. At Alexei’s request, the manager placed them under pavilion dining area, with room for a long, single table with twelve high back chairs. The waitress who waited on them was nice enough; however, the waitress who was assigned to wait upon a dinner party in that pavilion hurried them along. If twelve people were seated, and four bottles were ordered from bottle service, one for each three people, the waitress was looking at a 240 dollar tip just for serving up the chilled bottles. Or course she wanted Alexei and Wilbo out of the way as soon as possible so she could finish her preparations.

Alexei couldn't stay for the evening. He was staying long term at the Delano and he had scheduled an masseuse to come to his room for 7:00 PM. Alexei claimed to have made his money in financial services in California during the last boom prior to December 2000. He claimed that people in California had handed him money right and left to buy into a market that ultimately crashed. Alexei didn't want to leave Wilbo alone at the bar, and he was scanning the crowd looking for someone he knew. Alexei spotted the guy who had popped in on the chess game a few days ago; Wilbo and Alexei waved him on over, and Alexei left to taxi back to the Delano for his massage. For reasons not clear to Wilbo, Wilbo never called Alexei to head out on the town again. The alleged banker introduced Wilbo to table after table of men dining on clams and escargot, drinking bottle service champagne, all of whom the banker claimed were planning on building condominium towers on the islands of Biscayne Bay. When the banker wanted to leave Nikki Beach and go to China Beach for a steak, nothing gay about the invitation, Wilbo declined. He wanted to see nightfall at the beach, the lighting of the tiki torches and the arrival of the evening crowd. And Wilbo was uncertain that he could return to Nikki Beach once he left there.

Wilbo had chosen to sit in a line of low, African birthing chairs along a tiki torch lined path in the sand. It was excellent people watching, and it was easy to strike up conversations with people who sat down to the right and left of him. Models were walking through the beautiful men and women, passing out peach colored arm bracelets to a number of people, but not to Wilbo. These allowed admittance into Pearl, the ultra lounge that was a stairway up from Nikki Beach. A woman who sat down to Wilbo's right liked the idea that she was sitting in an African birthing chair. She and her friend had put the peach arm bracelet on their right wrists. One woman must have had some acting training, and she spread her legs wide and pretended to scream and moan with contractions, giving birth to an invisible, imaginary child. Since the Pearl had opened, and we all could see people milling towards the stairway, the new mother and her friend got up, said goodbye and joined the line. When Wilbo felt the need to get up, he noticed a wallet in the sand by her birth chair. He opened it to see a Harvard student identification, plenty of platinum plastic and about three hundred dollars in cash. He had to give it back in person.

All the line had been admitted to Pearl's private chamber, and Wilbo made his case to the doorman. The doorman agreed, and thanked Wilbo for his honesty. However, as much as he searched the low-slung couches and the bar stools, he didn't see either woman. So he demanded to see the manager, who took the wallet into safekeeping, and Wilbo tried to strike up conversation with two women he had met at the Delano. One didn't want to dance or talk. The second woman encouraged him to keep trying with the first. Now that the wallet had been delivered to safe hands, Wilbo felt no urgency to leave. Wilbo didn’t make much progress with the first woman, and he enjoyed a pleasant northward walk on Collins to his second-rate hotel. He noticed that the some women walked the streets alone from club to club, talking constantly on a cellphone because that was like not walking alone. One woman named Gia hung up her cellphone to talk to him, but she made contact with Wilbo only to explain her offerings. Wilbo kept on walking.

As for fleas, Wilbo brought them into his own home seventeen years ago. There's no such thing as a free cat. Wilbo picked up a free kitten at a home that had advertised "free kittens". When Wilbo took the cat home, the kitten rapidly infested his newly built apartment with fleas. And so Wilbo made arrangements to take his live-in girlfriend to a bed and breakfast, and he sealed shut all the food cupboards with tape, and he set off a flea bomb just before departing for the bed and breakfast. We had flea dipped the kitten, and the kitten was accepted overnight at the live-in girlfriend's mother. Wilbo didn't leave the kitten at home for the flea bombing. Before the bombing, Wilbo had woken up in the morning with tiny welts on my ankles and knees. After the bombing, he noticed no welting, although Wilbo worried what low level poison was slowly entering his system.