Breaking Point

When Lola and I bought our nearly 100-year-old home, we realized we were becoming caretakers of a piece of history. After a year and a half under our stewardship, the building is in the same condition as the day it was built, only with significantly higher concentration of vermin swarms and vomit stains. Through only some fault of our own, our decorating theme has degraded from “stately Victorian manor” to “college dorm room / partially incinerated outhouse.” I use the slash only because it’s possible to be both, as was demonstrated by my former apartment and its perpetual stench of burning human waste. Between our recent battle with a flea infestation and a brief visit from my high school friends after a night of consuming large quantities of alcoholic beverages, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Lola and I are about as well suited to maintain this house as paraplegic dwarf is to play linebacker in the NFL.

Not all of the damage that’s befallen our home has been entirely our fault. I also blame our dogs. When I wrote about our flea problems last month, we saw one or two fleas a day, usually somewhere in the immediate proximity of the dogs. About two hours after I posted that article, our insect situation suddenly transitioned from “a flea here or there” to “one big, writhing mat of vermin interrupted only by the occasional bare patch of carpet.” This may come as a surprise to some of my readers, but I occasionally exaggerate on this website. But please disregard my life of beautifully crafted lies to understand this: I couldn’t walk from one room to another in this house without at least ten fleas jumping on my socks. The numerous store-bought flea treatments we tried proved to be useless, and Lola flatly refused to let me burn down the house and start over. Realizing the floor was a lost cause, I pondered installing monkey bars on the ceiling so that Lola and I could avoid the ground entirely. It wouldn’t have been the quickest way to get around the house, but it was a perfectly functionally solution to our predicament as long as Lola and I could learn to sleep upside down like bats.

There was one minor but nonetheless noteworthy detail I left out of my last sprawling rant about the fleas: Lola is pregnant. Given the fact that I’m the oldest of seventy-five kids, you should probably just assume that women in my family are pregnant until proven otherwise. Predictably, Lola’s baby-saturated state limited out options for dealing with the fleas. She worried the chemicals would cause birth defects; I hoped they’d cause super powers. I guess I’m just a glass-half-full kind of guy. Despite Lola’s best attempt to kill the fleas and all other living creatures in this house with her violent mood swings and odd food choices, we finally had to resort to an exterminator. The bug-killing man assured us the specialized blend of poisons he used would be safe as long as Lola didn’t lick the floor. Lola resisted, if only barely. Paying some guy a bunch of money to fill our house with hazardous chemicals was only part of the solution. We also had to vacuum every other day for two weeks. Vacuuming didn’t actually kill fleas. All it did was stimulate their eggs so they’d hatch faster, preferably while the insecticides were still on the ground. It took a full two hours to vacuum our house each time, and for our efforts we were rewarded with a rapidly increasing parasite population We weren’t really killing the fleas; we were just kind of farming them. It’s a special kind of hell when you spend half your evening vigorously cleaning your house for the express purpose of making it more disgusting.

After a full two weeks of laughing at our futile attempts to clean, the fleas disappeared as suddenly as they arrived. I’m sure part of the reason is that we finally interrupted their life cycle by hatching millions of their eggs into the slaughtering grounds that were our insecticide-laced carpets. The other part was that I have more in common with Joseph Stalin than a sexy mustache and an intense hatred for the bourgeoisie. Like my long dead communist comrade, I knew the coming of winter could change the course of the battle. The first frost of the year killed the remaining fleas in our yard, preventing them from reinforcing their collapsing bridgehead in our house. But even as the Battle of the Fleas entered its finally stages, a new household threat was already emerging.

For some reason, evolution stopped working when it came to pregnant women. Rather than punishing with natural selection those females who deprived their developing offspring of food, those pregnant women who violently expelled any and all forms of nourishment were the one who were deemed to be the most fit to survive. During our flea battle, when Lola wasn’t vacuuming with me, she was vomiting by herself. Our after-work conversations were depressingly predictable:

Me: How was your day?

Lola: (walks to the bathroom without saying a word and throws up for twenty-five minutes) I’ve been doing better lately. I swear.

We had this exact conversation every day for about a month. Evidently pregnant women have short-term memory problems or are chronic liars.

At least Lola made it to the toilet. The same can’t be said for my friends, who came over for a visit two weeks ago. Due to a previous incident of drunken debauchery involving an upside-down pizza and lots of smoke on the lower floor of our home, Lola had already banned all of my friends from partying at our house. This time, however, the party was at somebody else’s house. My crew was just going to spend the night here afterward. All my friends had to do was walk into my home and fall asleep to gain back some trust from my hormonal and dangerous wife. Instead, one of them decided to earn a nickname.

This particular individual, who here shall be called Vomitron the Magnificent because that’s his legal name given to him by his parents, went to bed when the rest of us did. Unfortunately, he didn’t stay there. He managed to throw up in his sleep for what must have been a considerable amount of time because he woke up with vomit covering his pillow and the floor (In hindsight, there’s probably a reason we didn’t let him sleep in a bed). He then stood up and walked to the bathroom, where he proceeded to walk past the toilet to throw up in the sink. My conversation with him immediately after he violated my bathroom went something like this:

Me: Vomitron, you have puke on the side of your face.

Vomitron: (blank stare)

Me: Seriously, there’s vomit on that whole side of your head. It’s in your hair.

Vomitron: (even blanker stare)

Me: Dude, you need to clean off the side of your face.

Vomitron: Stop making fun of me!

For all I know, his head is still covered in puke. I can’t be sure because moments after we finished talking he went downstairs. Hoping he was dead, I went back to bed. I awoke to the sound of retching, or more accurately to the sound of Lola yelling at me about the sound of someone retching. I went to check on Vomitron, who was laying downstairs on our white love seat. Or at least it used to be white. Even in the dim light it was clear the piece of furniture and a large swath of flooring under it had morphed into a new shade of brown. The garbage can six inches from Vomitron’s head, however, was completely untouched. Lola bought that love seat second-hand six years ago for $75, making it one of the most expensive pieces of furniture we own. At least two-thirds of what we own came from a dumpster, which is probably where that love seat will end up after that fateful Friday.

By every law of science, Vomitron’s stomach should have been empty, but big night wasn’t over just yet. He next made his way to our kitchen sink, where he continued to perfect his craft. Finally, sensing he might have missed a few spots in his wide-ranging purge, he picked up the trash can he left unblemished the first time around and carried it with him throughout the house, pausing occasionally to eject bodily organs and whatever else it was he had left to throw up by that point.

It’s been a pretty destructive month for our house thanks to fleas and my friends. According to Lola, neither is welcome back. But then again, who needs friends. We’re going to have a baby.