What Bedbugs Taught Me About Social Infrastructure

The siege began last November. Actually, that’s giving us too much credit. The word “siege” implies we held out for some time, when in fact we didn’t even notice the enemy’s arrival until it had already breached our walls.

I had been trained against this enemy, practically from birth. My dad is an exterminator, and under his tutelage I learned to check every bed in every hotel I ever stay in for signs of the creature of every traveler and city dweller’s nightmare: the bedbug. (Skip to the end of this newsletter for the Beck family guide to checking a bed for bedbugs). Anyone who has traveled with me will tell you: I’m vigilant. But vigilance alone cannot always save you.

I thought I had failed in my vigilance when, a few days after returning home from a trip, I spotted the enemy ambling along next to my pillow, as casual as you please. I freaked out, killed it, and sprang into action washing and drying (on HIGH heat, mind you) our sheets and all the clothes I took on my trip, and vacuuming my suitcase and the entire apartment. And when our building sent an email the next day to all residents announcing the bedbug infestation, a part of me was relieved it wasn’t my fault.

The next six months sucked. We ran every piece of fabric we owned through the dryer and packed them away into garbage bags and giant tupperwares. I wore the same five or six outfits over and over. Every two weeks, the exterminators came to spray more poison in our home and we had to be out of the house with our cats for five hours at a pop. Joe, my fiance, quoted a lot of Winston Churchill (“We shall fight on the beaches,” etc.), and bought an extra-strength flashlight off of Amazon which he shone around every wall of every room each night before bed, hunting for bugs. We documented every single bug sighting on a legal pad and sent the building weekly updates. (I eventually made charts and sent them to the building manager, because journalists make the most annoying tenants.) But they just kept coming. I don’t know if the building ever got a handle on the problem, or figured out where it was coming from, because eventually, like nearly everyone else on our floor, we decided to move.

We’re on the other side of this now, happily decorating our new bug-free apartment, reintroducing our cats to all the soft textures they weren’t able to enjoy previously, replacing the rugs and furniture we threw away because they were compromised, and, best of all, having people over again. Having bedbugs really cramps your social life, it turns out.

The concept of “social infrastructure” comes from Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University and the author of Palaces for the People. The phrase “social infrastructure” refers to the physical spaces that facilitate interaction between people—public spaces like parks, pools, playgrounds, and town squares, but also private ones like bars, cafes, and gyms. Social infrastructure can be inclusive, like the public library, or exclusive, like a country club. These are the places we go to hang out, and their availability, quality, and design affects our ability to build relationships.

Social infrastructure was on my mind a lot during our bedbug era. We obviously could not ask anyone to cross the cursed threshold of our home, and visiting other people at their homes was dicey as well. So for the most part, to see our friends, we had to go to a place to do a thing. (Even then, whenever we went out, we would run our outfits through the dryer for 40 minutes first, get dressed out of the machine and leave.) D.C.’s public social infrastructure is better than many places: free public pools, great libraries, nice parks—and all the Smithsonians are free. But still, here as elsewhere, so many of the places you can go to hang out cost money. (And well, it’s hard to catch up with a friend at the library because of the whole “quiet” thing.) Reaching for the low-hanging fruit of social plans—the trusty old standbys of getting dinner, grabbing coffee or a drink, going to the movies—often means engaging in commerce.

Plus, there’s a coordination involved in modern friendship that Rosie Spinks wrote about in her essay “The Friendship Problem”. Navigating everyone’s different schedules to find overlapping time, the back and forth of getting a group of people to agree on a restaurant—in the grand scheme of things this is not that hard, but when people are already stressed and busy, Spinks writes, they may resist adding one more adminny task to the to-do list, even if it’s to facilitate time with cherished friends.

During the 6-month bedbug invasion, I realized I missed using my home, and my friends’ homes, as social infrastructure. I don’t just mean hosting parties, though I do like hosting parties, not least because when the party’s over, I’m already home. I’m referring more to the kind of hangs where you don’t put on your hosting hat. “Come over and hang out” is a nice low bar for socializing. It requires minimal coordination and next to no thought. And it’s free.

What’s more, there’s a lovely kind of casual intimacy that just bumming around the house together gives to a friendship. One of my friends sometimes comes over just so we can play our Nintendo Switches separately, side by side. I just spent a week visiting my best friend and her three-month-old baby, and we basically spent the whole time on her couch watching Singles Inferno on Netflix, eating donuts that her husband brought home after work every day, and pointing out to each other all of the many things the baby did that were cute. Activities are fun, but there’s a different register of friendship that you slip into when you just share space—being together rather than doing together. The comforts of home, I think, help to access that register.

Klinenberg is mostly concerned with public social infrastructure, and what it can do for communities writ large, and I realize I’m talking more about the smaller scale of individual friend groups and where they meet. Maybe I’m stretching the term a little too far here, and mea culpa if so. But it feels connected. If there were more of a culture in the U.S. of free public gathering spaces, where it’s expected that people will regularly hang out and linger, then maybe socializing wouldn’t feel so tied to scheduling and spending money.

As Klinenberg told me when I interviewed him for a podcast last year:

In this kind of culture, I rely on my home and my friends’ homes to be the social infrastructure of ease, to facilitate the low-effort, low-formality, unstructured, come-as-you-are kind of hangs that feel replenishing even when I’m exhausted and aren’t cognitively demanding to plan. If my home is my castle, as the saying goes, I want it to be my friends’ too. Not a place of isolation with enemies at the gate, but a retreat for collective restoration.

If you enjoy musings on friendship in Today’s Society, please remember that I am writing a book about friendship! I don’t yet know when it will be out, I’m back to working on it just as soon as I send this newsletter, but the value of you remembering from time to time “Oh yeah, Julie’s writing a book, I should keep an eye out for that” cannot be overstated.

How to Check a Bed for Bedbugs:
(Factchecked by my dad)

• When you arrive at your hotel or AirBNB or wherever, before your buttcheeks ever graze the comforter of that bed, regrettably, you will need to undo the hard work of the cleaning staff and partially unmake it.

• Peel back the sheets and the mattress protector. You don’t have to take it all the way off, but you want to at least check the edges. Check both the mattress, and the box spring if there is one. Pay particular attention to up near the headboard, where they like to hide, and what my dad says is the most common spot—the liminal space where the bottom of the mattress meets the top of the box spring. (Here it’s nice to enlist a friend—one person to lift the mattress, the other to shine a flashlight around under there).

• Get in the nooks and crannies of the mattress—fold back the edge, run your fingernail in the creases, shine your phone flashlight in the seams.

• Maybe you’ll see a bug—if you do, the good thing about bedbugs is they have a very distinctive look. They have kind of a rounded ass and they’re very flat. Here is a picture (don’t click if you can’t handle it.) Once you know what they look like, it’s hard to mistake any other bug for them. Take it from someone who’s seen enough to make charts.

• More likely though, is that you’ll see not a bug, but its… leavings. You’re looking for little brown spots, traces of (I’m sorry but it’s true) human blood that has been ingested and shat out.

Good luck, stay safe out there, and I wish you nothing but sparkling clean mattresses for all your days.