it’s a mitzvah!

I’m not exactly proud of this, but bugs freak me out.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve dealt with them in some capacity for most of my life. Growing up, I lived in a house that was perennially occupied by spiders, ants, and cursed millipedes. (Or were they centipedes? Whatever.) We even had a barrel in the garage that ostensibly served no purpose, and when I was four or five, I made the mistake of loosening the lid out of curiosity and thought nothing of it; hours later, an entire outside wall of the house was covered in earwigs. Sweet holy fuck, I still have no explanation for that.

When I was 18, my mom and Brian, my step-dad, moved to a suburb of Toronto called Newmarket. My brothers and I stayed in the city with my dad, but I visited often enough. In the old house on Roberta Drive, Brian had kept a few snakes and lizards as pets (among other animals), but once he had more space to work with, the operation expanded exponentially. The majority of the new place’s basement became devoted to housing all manner of reptiles, which I could handle. The lizards ate crickets though, and as is common, they managed to escape and, as a result, were all over the house. These things happen, I suppose.

My history with them aside, I still don’t like bugs. Living in Mexico, having to deal with giant fucking cockroaches just about ruined my life. I couldn’t bring myself to get close enough to actually kill them, and so I often found myself snapping a belt or a wet towel at them on the wall, hoping they’d get the message and flee my room in terror. I’m pretty sure I didn’t kill a single roach that year, but hey, at least my roommates thought I was a total pussy.

I don’t like bugs for the same reason I don’t like mushrooms or wearing shoes without socks: The general feeling of dirtiness that’s produced. I really feel like we as a species have evolved past the point where we should have to deal with vermin in our day-to-day lives. At the risk of sounding like a complete drama queen, if I were living in a place that was seriously infested by insects, I would feel like an absolute failure as a human being.

Which was precisely my state of mind when I found maggots in my room when I was 16.

We were still living in the Roberta house, and I had what I thought was a pretty typical 16-year-old’s room. Messy, sure, but not exactly brimming with disease. Most of my time in there was spent in the dark, sitting in front of my computer and developing a vitamin deficiency. In the darkness one evening though, I noticed something moving across my desk near a slice of pizza that may or may not have been sitting on a plate there for a few days. I switched on the light, and there it was.

This disgusting, slimy, wormy little shit, inching across my desk.

My first thought? I’m a terrible person. How could I have let this happen? Where could it have possibly come from? It looked pretty big; how long had it been there? Had it been on me while I’d been asleep? Had it been in me while I’d been asleep? What the hell was wrong with me?

Once I finished dry-heaving, a second, more urgent thought came to mind: Maggots don’t generally show up one at a time. Fuck fuck fuck.

I scanned my room, and yes, there were more. Under clothes on my floor. On my bookshelf. In my dresser. Behind my bed. How? Why? Guhhh.

Suicide seemed like a pretty good option. Not terribly confident in my knot-tying capabilities though, I did the next best thing: Tucked my tail between my legs and called for Brian to help. After a hearty gut laugh at my expense, he agreed.

“On one condition,” he said. “You clean your room, and I’ll get rid of the critters.”

It was a deal. I tore that place apart, and he periodically poked his head in when my girlish shrieks became more frequent. Over the course of two days, I scoured every inch of that room, coming upon an absolutely embarrassing, demoralizing number of these vile creatures. It was official: I lost at life.

I tried to reconcile my keen sense of humor with being a horny teenager. As mortifying as this had been, I would have to tell people. That said, it did seem like the sort of thing that might stop girls from ever, ever wanting to have sex with me. A predicament, to be sure.

As it turned out, most other people didn’t find my maggot saga quite as noteworthy as I did. In fact, the majority of people to whom I told the story ended up looking at me like I was crawling with the little bastards, close to vomiting and slowly moving away from me. Philistines.

And really, as disastrous as the whole event had been, I did feel like I’d learned something. Granted, that “something” was just how thin the line was between being a civilized person and being some filthy ditchpig, but regardless. A lesson is a lesson.

Then, six months later, it happened again.

I was apoplectic. This was now the worst thing I’d ever done in my life. Again? Fucking AGAIN? My room hadn’t even been that dirty! Were they in the carpets? The walls? Was I secreting them in my sleep?

So I destroyed my room again. After a full-scale bedroom enema and three nights of sleeping on the couch, I felt like I had expunged them. I was apprehensive, but Christ, my little room was not getting any cleaner than it was at that moment. You could see yourself in the drywall. It was a palace. It was majestic.

And sure enough, they never came back.

* * *

A few years later, I had just finished high school, and my friend Shannon and I were about to move into an apartment together. Prior to the move, she came up to Newmarket for dinner with Brian and my mom. My mom made mention of making sure that I kept up with my end of the chores, and Shannon laughed, saying that I’d better, because the hell if she was going to put up with maggots in the house.

Brian and my mom looked at teach other, and were suddenly doubled over in laughter. Oh really.

“What’s so funny?” I asked. They shot each other a quick succession of you-tell-him-no-you-tell-him glances, trying to stifle their giggles.

“No, seriously. What is so funny?” And that’s when Brian laid it on me.

“Those weren’t maggots. Those were mealworms that I fed to the lizards. We put those there so you would clean your room.”

It was approximately that moment when my entire world came crashing down around me.

“NO.”

“Sorry sweetie,” my mom said, choking on her food from laughing so hard. Shannon had joined in on the fun.

“You don’t understand! I thought I was a disgusting pig for years of my life! I thought I was actually capable of creating an environment hospitable to vermin! And it was you! You! Both of you! Just to get me to clean my room! Could you have just grounded me like normal people! Shit! Fuck!”

“Well, yeah,” Brian said. “It worked though, didn’t it?”

And that is how I got punked by my parents.