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Sleeping Is Giving In
I discovered bedbugs and modafinil on the same eventful night a little over a year ago in San Francisco. I had just moved back from China and was staying in a dingy Travelodge on the corner of Valencia and Market streets. I had a song in my throat, a dream in my heart, and - thanks to a pharmacologically more adventurous friend - four 100mg Provigil tablets in my wallet. I was about to discover that I also had a sizable bedbug colony under my mattress.
Modafinil, of course, is the wonder drug that lets you remain awake for many hours in a row without any of the unpleasantness or fun of amphetamines. The closest it comes to being a good time is making your urine smell like banana pudding. No one really knows how it works, but after feeding large doses to narcoleptics for years, the medical community has decided any negative effects are probably subtle. For such a strong CNS stimulant, modafinil has weird properties. Eating a double handful of pills, for example, will make you jittery where a similar overdose of any other alertness drug (caffeine included) would kill you. In addition to keeping you awake, modafinil tends to give you a sense of heightened mental clarity and focus, making it the perfect programmer's drug.
Bedbugs, of course, are the retro parasites now proving that there are second acts in American lives. They started their comeback in the provinces before hitting the big time in New York City a couple of years ago, with feature articles in the Times, the Village Voice, and the hipster press. Even after receiving the kind of saturation coverage you'd think would inspire a backlash, bedbugs are still going strong two years later, expanding into new media markets across the US, Canada and Europe. Their formula for success is as simple as it is effective: hide in tiny cracks and crevices, travel easily, be practically impossible to eradicate, and feast on the blood of sleeping children.
In that happy portion of my life before I knew what bedbugs looked like, I had always assumed they were tiny and nearly transparent insects like mites or aphids. So in the morning, when I found what appeared to be a tick lying on his back next to the coffee maker, feebly waving his legs, I was not alarmed. "Ah, California" I thought, scratching my arms. "Wild kingdom".
"Bedbugs," said a friend on IRC, and after belittling him for his ignorance I ran a Google image search to show him just how wrong his conjecture was.
The next few minutes were not spent in that positive, happy frame of mind that I like to think has come to be the hallmark of this website, and I will draw a veil over them. By early afternoon I was sitting in a public laundry, watching most of my worldly possessions spiral around in very hot water, with the captured bedbug secreted away between two plastic-wrapped plastic hotel cups now stuck in my rolling suitcase.
I cannot explain why I took the bedbug along. He seemed like a valuable piece of forensic evidence, except that after my rapid online education on bedbugs I had no intention of trying to get my money back from the hotel. I had slept, been bitten, and knew already from panicky study of the internet there was nothing the hotel could usefully do. I think I wanted to take him along to keep my options open - his kin had eaten me, but he was going to learn a lesson about messing with primates. The bug and his crew had incredible stamina and the ability to stay hidden in the tiniest of crevices for months at a time without eating; I had a brain the size of a cauliflower and a high-speed internet connection. It was on.
Upstairs from the laundry was the Hotel Mithila, which turned out to be a wonderful family run hotel just on the edge of the Tenderloin in San Francisco, close enough to the crappy part of town to be cheap and far enough to be clean, calm and wonderful. The rooms had thick, bedbug-patterned carpets and immaculate sheets, which I would check each night before going to bed like a jeweler looking for flaws in a diamond.
Modafinil keeps you from feeling sleepy, but it does not remove fatigue or mask any of the other symptoms of staying up too long. This means that by four in the morning of your third consecutive day of little sleep you see a constant crawling in your peripheral vision and feel a prickling on your skin. This certainly livens up the paranoid late-night vigil for bedbugs. Each night I also took care to check on my prisoner, who was waving his legs in his plastic prison.
You can fall asleep on modafinil, but after three hours or so you will wake up with the false feeling of being fully rested. A practiced hand knows to ignore this and go back to bed, but in those early days I would get out of bed at seven and go about my day, which consisted of moving from cafe to cafe, trying to stay one step ahead of my other nemesis - the Norah Jones Christmas CD, which was spreading across the cafes of the city even faster than the bloodsucking bugs were invading its hotels. Feeling unfocused (because like an idiot I was sleeping three hours a night) I tried as an experiment drinking coffee on top of the Modafinil, but this turned even my briefest emails into sixty paragraph stream-of-consciousness rants, and I found myself writing object factories just to turn a string into lower case. It seemed wiser to stick to overpriced orange juice.
One evening I got home from my rounds to find my prisoner had gone. I had carelessly left him for dead on top of the armoire, covering him with the plastic cup without weighing it down. Now I was going to pay for my complacency: the bug was gone. In a room with a million crevices and cracks I had let escape an insect whose specialty was hiding.
I knew the bedbug was not long for this world, but I had no idea whether he might not be a she, brimming with eggs, and I felt terrible for introducing this pest into a hotel that had been so good to me in a time of need. Clearly it had to have fallen from the armoire, but where did it go? The top of the armoire was perfectly smooth and overhanging; the escapee had to have dropped somewhere on that bedbug-patterned carpet.
Two long hours later, I conceded defeat. I had officially introduced my worst enemy into the very hotel that had rescued me; I was the viper that the Mithila family had warmed on its breast. I decided it was time to gather what thoughts I still had and go drink beer. I took down a dress shirt hanging from the rack next to the armoire, and as I began to put it on the bedbug dropped out of the rolled-up cuff. Twenty more minutes of hard staring at the carpet and I had found him, on his back again, waving his legs in frustration.
This time I settled the matter out into the alley, gangland style, before throwing the shirt in the hot cycle of the downstairs washing machine.
I spent that week (and about another half-sheet of pills) setting up the Bedbug Registry. I figured no hotel or apartment owner in his right mind would ever admit to a bug problem they were powerless to treat. I also recalled my own reaction after encountering bedbugs, which was to search online and try to find every particle of information possible about what to do next. There were excellent sites like bedbugger with lots of useful advice, but there was nowhere I could angrily report an encounter and vent.
The registry turned out to be a valuable form of closure. It transformed bedbugs from archnemesis into valued business partner. All I had to do was take charge of the technical end, and the bugs took care of the viral marketing across a valuable urban demographic. Man and bug could work together! The only sour note in our arrangement was the very real distress of the people submitting the bug reports. For those who came across them in a hotel (and the most unexpected hotels turned out to have bedbugs!) the episode was traumatic but at least limited in time; for people who had to try to eradicate bedbugs from their home, it could mean months of suffering, moving house, and lasting trauma.
For the rest of my time in San Francisco, I would pass the Valencia Travelodge every other morning on my way to go running, and the parking lot was nearly always full. This always gave me a strange feeling - I knew people were being eaten there at night, but I wasn't at all sure what to do about it. Knowing that most victims would never notice that they had been bitten at all, it would have been as cruel as it was pointless to warn them. And I certainly missed the days of being able to stay in a hotel room without having to meticulously inspect every mattress and stay up half the night with an imaginary itch; I wasn't about to inflict that on anyone else. I just hoped they were keeping their suitcases well away from the walls.
[link]The Second World
The defining characteristic of a Second World country is the non-absorbent napkin. From Moscow to Valparaiso, if your café napkin is a square of waxed paper that takes grease from your lips and spreads it to the rest of your face, you can be certain of encountering the whole constellation of other traits common to those industrialized countries where people make less than $20,000 a year (specifically: clean but strong-tasting running water, the Ford Fiesta or its local equivalent, new trains on old tracks, pavement as an ongoing process rather than an accomplished fact, metal buckets on dirty ropes, dogs of uncertain provenance, merchants hosing down their section of sidewalk, manhole covers left open, sixty-eight satellite dishes on one roof, cheap plastic washing machines that fit in a bathtub, paper currency that rapidly gets filthy, a complete absence of vending machines, streets that don't drain, iron fences around suburban homes, good but watery beer, kiosks full of cheap plastic toys, sidewalks with little square lakes where tiles are missing, affordable cigarettes, escalators with wooden steps, the cinder block as the unit of construction, toilet attendants who sell grey toilet paper by the square and receive tips in a little plate, train stations and theatres with fifty glass doors but only one of them open, rectangular buses that belch black smoke, elevators with little inner doors that have to be closed by hand, the complete inability to ever make change). [link]
Rosario
The best bus ride in my life was in Argentina. I needed to cross Patagonia, from Trelew to the town of Esquel in the foothills of the Andes, on an overnight bus over gravel roads. My only point of reference was a backbreaking Greyhound bus trip across the United States taken when I was nine years old, and I was ready for the worst.
Instead I found myself in bus heaven. The seats were giant mattresses spaced so far apart that the seat back in front of me was shrouded in a blue haze. They didn't just recline flat - I'm pretty sure they reclined past flat. I felt like the pajamaed man on one of those late night commercials targeted at seniors, perched on a thick armchair that slowly unbends into a comfortable bed as he presses a button on a hand controller. Except that the commercials never showed a steward coming around to serve the man a steak dinner. A few seconds with the armrest and I had un-reclined; another moment and the armrest itself had transformed, like an autobot, into a lap tray. Soon I was eating hot beef in the dark, looking out the window at the arbitrary set of four stars I thought was Southern Cross, trying to get the Crosby, Stills and Nash song out of my head.
When I had finished the steak, the same steward floated by to find out what I would like to drink. ¿Whisky? Right away, sir!
It was a Platonic bus trip that I would never quite repeat. On later buses the seat might only tilt to one hundred seventy seven degrees, or the air conditioning would be on too high, or there would be a limp ham croissant instead of steak. But even though I have never re-summited this peak of transportation bliss, bus travel in Argentina remains better than anywhere else I've been. And with each new trip comes the hope that I will eat reclining steak again.
Buses serving Buenos Aires leave from a bus terminal in Retiro, a long snake of a building hidden behind three train stations. Everyone with a van and a dream has set up shop here. Downstairs, where the buses pull in, the hall is packed with kiosks, snack courts, and the giant striped plastic suitcases that signal long-distance travel in the Second World. People in the waiting areas sit watching little LCD screens showing Los Simpsons.
Rosario is a city 300km northwest of Buenos Aires, up the coffee-colored Paraná river. The bus ride is steak-free, of course, but otherwise quite comfortable, a straight shot across a giant lawn. The most amazing thing about Rosario is that you can spend the day there without ever seeing a Che Guevara t-shirt, maté gourd, poster or tattoo. Given that Rosario is his birthplace, this shows an unusual restraint, and makes the city instantly lovable.
Rosario's other claim to fame is the amazing Monument to the Argentine Flag near the river, which looks like it was built by someone who forgot to uncheck the extras on the monument order form:
The monument also appears to be made out of that special monument-grade concrete, pioneered by the nations of the Eastern Bloc, that is guaranteed to get instantly dirty and develop mysterious black vertical stripes.
What makes this immensity especially wonderful is the fact that Argentina has such a gentle, feel-good flag, a flag that does not bloodstain well and is completely incompatible with any kind of martial tradition. You could easily be excused for thinking it had been designed by gay hippies.
"We're going to have a field of ivory white, with two bold stripes of sky blue along the top and bottom. That way, when the sun shines through it, it will look just like the summer sky!"
"Ooh, I love it - but what if we put Mr. Sun right on the flag itself!"
"FABULOUS"
And yet the Nuremberg-class monument doesn't give an inch. The eternal flame burns, bored military guards rove around, a tiny gift shop controls access to the observation deck. And just when you think the monument can't get any better, they turn the lights on:
The rest of Rosario completely ignores the monument and is instead a leafy, pretty city full of plane trees. Their branches thwack against the roof of the bus as it meanders in from the highway, zigzagging through the outer neighborhoods to let passengers off at a variety of unscheduled stops. Students of South American urban planning will be shocked to learn that the city is laid out on a grid, with a pleasant mix of old buildings and glitzy little pedestrian shopping arcades around a kind of central park. The streets are full of cafés and tired dogs sleeping the day away so they can go barking after taxis once the sun has gone down.
There is apparently a string of these cities all the way up the Paraná, places in no way remarkable but very pleasant to be in. Siting them was a haphazard process - settlers would get off the boat, lay out a street grid, and then see if the local Indians came and massacred anyone. If they did, they moved the city a few dozen kilometers up or downriver and tried again.
In the evenings, some kind of cooling breeze comes off the water and it is a good time to walk and eat ice cream. Two and a half pesos at any supermarket buys a bottle of "Dark Eyes" dulce de leche liqueur, which looks like Paraná river water but tastes like a caramel sundae. People eat early in this provincial town - ten thirty or so - so by midnight there is the feeling of having the city mostly to yourself, which given the massive migration to Mar del Plata and the Patagonian vacationlands may not be far from the truth. The dogs start to wake up and make trial runs at the remaining cars. You can see a pillar of light on the horizon, in the direction of the flag memorial. For hundreds of miles in every direction, cows are grazing in the dark, waiting to become steak. Rosario is a wonderful place to be.
[link]
Nuevo Año
Porteños greeted the new year by fleeing the city as fast as gridlocked roads could take them. January is the month Buenos Aires takes its summer vacation, and the destination of choice is Mar del Plata, a seaside resort I have never visited. Given my love for crowds, heat and strangers' children it sounds it would be my own personal Mordor. "You can't even see the sand for all the people! It's an absolute madhouse!" Argentine friends tell me in horror, as they pack up their cars to head down there.
Buenos Aires itself is technically on the water, at the mouth of the River Plate, but access to the river is blocked by a fairly new riverfront park called the Reserva Ecológica. The reserva helps provide the city with the copious amounts of wetland acreage required to breed sufficient mosquitoes for a population of fiften million. As a side effect, the park is also home to numerous wading birds on bright-colored stick legs, as well as legions of young Argentine couples who have mastered the art of making out while walking. Pajeras y pájaros.
On New Year's Eve the city was as empty as I had ever seen it. I spent most of the evening with my new best friend, the three-speed fan (set on level two to create the illusion that I could hadle more heat), before heading out into the vacant streets a half hour before midnight. The city doesn't really have a central meeting point, but the Plaza de Mayo is home to the Argentine presidential residence and the locus of all protests in the city, and I figured something might be happening there.
The only people I could see in twenty minutes of walking were other tourists heading skeptically towards the plaza or the waterfront, along with a few bored cops. To my surprise, the plaza itself was completely deserted. The only people there were the striking riverboat casino workers who had chained themselves there over the holidays to protest their inability to earn an honest wage by seizing the means of consumption.
The casino workers had been demanding an audience with Cristina Kirchner, but the new President, fatigued by a simple misunderstanding involving a Hugo Chávez bagman who had been caught in Miami bringing her an $800,000 campaign contribution in a suitcase, had begun her term by going on a long vacation. The former senator and First Lady had drawn many comparisons to Hillary Clinton during her campaign, but as she flew the presidential plane (Tango 01) down to the scrubland of El Calafaté it was clear the better comparison was going to be with George W. Bush, another enemy of overwork. The casino workers were left to rattle their chains alone.
Most of the Casa Rosada was cordoned off by the usual set of riot barriers, their intimidating aspect undercut a little by the fact that they were covered in six layers of graffiti. But I noticed what seemed to be a big gap between the left side of the barriers and the edge of the street. Walking closer I saw three armored riot tanks and a group of about a dozen police officers in a festive mood, setting off flash grenades and drinking beer. They were standing in a semicircle around their riot tanks, in the best of spirits, and they paid no attention to the trickle of tourists creeping by as they pulled their pins.
Somewhere along the way to the waterfront it turned midnight and the taxicabs began merrily honking, even turning their lights on for brief, expensive seconds to celebrate the New Year. There was a hum coming from Puerto Madero, the revitalized waterfront district that looks like every other revitalized waterfront district in every other city in the world. The dique was packed with tourists, many of whom had brought large Chinese fiesta boxes of fireworks of the kind that could be set off with a simple car battery and would emit rockets in whatever direction they happened to be pointing. There was a splendid hour of drinking champagne nacionál, skittering out of the way of weaving groups of Mexican men and watching explosives fly back and forth over the narrow canal. There was even a little festive breeze to take the edge off the heat. It was 2008, everyone was happy, and you didn't need a suitcase full of dollars to know that it was going to be a very good year.
[link]A Very Porteño Christmas
At christmastime the streets of Buenos Aires are full of fruitcake. Eternal, inedible, weighing as much as a thousand suns, this is a scary pastry even in countries that lack the Argentine anti-talent for baking. But in Buenos Aires it becomes something I don't have the courage to buy, even for kicks. How is it that on all the numberless ships that brought Italian immigrants to Argentina the bakers were either thrown over the side or forced at stilettopoint to convert to making pasta? The porteños of today have kept the Italian taste for bread and cakes, and have even re-created a deceptive infrastructure of neighborhood bakeries, but when you bring one of these loaves home you invariably find it can do double duty as a kitchen sponge. There is an element of tragedy in watching a great people play a losing culinary hand like this, just as there is watching the Chinese attempt vodka or the Swedes try to pickle herring.
Strange things happen when deeply Catholic Europeans switch hemispheres without enough time to adapt their traditions. The little stores selling fruitcake are surrounded on all sides by greengrocers selling actual fruit, the preservation of which into midwinter was probably the whole point of the fruitcakes to begin with. It is possible to eat an Argentine Christmas dinner consisting solely of mangoes, cherries, watermelon and strawberries that are all in season; it might even make a pleasant break from the heat. And yet the fruitcake lives on, sprigs of holly are painted onto the windows, and Santa Claus, despite the proximity of a polar continent (belonging to Argentina, no less!), continues to make the long trip here all the way from the Arctic.
My childhood patience would have been stretched to the limit by the old tradition that presents had to wait until the first star was visible on Christmas Eve, since dusk at this time of year isn't until nearly ten o'clock. But I suppose the fact that Santa had to make the trip from the northern pole would have made the late start more credible.
It may say a lot about the Argentine national character that two of the three life-size Santa figures along my route into the city are statues of Homer Simpson. Argentines seize the holiday as another opportunity to express their profound love for this national archetype, second only to Maradona in popular affection, and it's true that after a few weeks in Argentina it has become difficult to picture Homero without a mate gourd in hand, sipping blithely away.
The traditional Argentine Christmas dinner is, of course, asado, preferably prepared somewhere outside of town. The day before Christmas every one who can leaves the city to spend a day filling up the family charcoal grill with the mixture of steaks, sausages, innards and chicken quarters that are the country's (perfectly reasonable) answer to the exigigencies of any holiday dinner. The news on Christmas Eve is full of alarming reports about the level of congestion on highways leading out of Buenos Aires, especially those pointing towards the southern beaches, and though the capital remains full of pedestrians there are so few cars left you can walk across practically any street without regard for the traffic lights, a rare luxury. The cafes and restaurants hang out big signs warning that they will be closing at five o'clock, and there is an air of rushed anxiety to the last-minute shopping, as if a hurricane or some Panzer divisions were about to come barreling through.
Towards eleven the first firecrackers start going off, and there are ranging shots to calibrate the cheap Chinese fireworks that everyone within staggering distance has dragged to the park across from my apartment. At midnight the fuses are lit, every ship in the harbor begins blowing its foghorn, and Buenos Aires transforms into a very festive Beirut. Quilmes is not a strong beer but even it will have an effect if you drink enough, and the rockets that do achieve flight describe trajectories suspiciously far from the vertical. Many of them just sputter around on the ground, tracing graceful red and green spirals of fire as they scatter the crowd, who return undaunted in wary zigzags. On the rooftops, people are still grilling meat, pausing every few minutes to light a rocket fuse with a hot coal. Somewhere overhead Santa Claus - or Homer Simpson - weaves among the flak, bringing presents.
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